(from 2001)

Mahlen Morris's weblog from 2001, in newer-items-at-the-top style. (All the links to places on the site are broken and just being kept for history.)

Not unlike a lot of people, yesterday I exchanged gifts with my relatives in some semblance of Christmas activity. The crew this time was Diane and I, Clark/Jill/Kyle, my parents, Diane's Aunt Minnie, and a special guest appearance by Rick, Clark's best man and longtime friend. All of this was at my parents' house in Orinda.

Diane gave me a new Technics reciever, which replaces the ailing one i got for a song at a Whole Earth Access warehouse sale in 1988. I am very much eagerly anticipating setting that up. My brother, who has convinced me of the wisdom of Amazon.com wish lists (hint: there are still a few items left on mine! Ahem!), sort of like all-purpose wedding registries, got me two CD's from my list, and I got him two from his (I'm listening to Tranceport 2 now, and there seems to be just no way to stop the thumping beats therein; thanks bro!). I did get another box from Amazon today, and Diane did inform me that two CD's and the video game System Shock 2 might be inside, which would be a grave error on her part if she intended to see me much in January.

Of course it doesn't stop there: we're going to Oregon this weekend to visit with Diane's sister and family. I'm told that they the Christmas thing as well :).

This weekend I bought something on Amazon, but didn't have to wait for shipping, because Amazon said I could pick it up at Circuit City. It went quite smoothly, and, surprisingly, we weren't even drawn into the temptation of looking around Circuit City while we were there. Of course, I could have just gone to CC in the first place, but I didn't know what price they would have, what they had in stock, and so forth. So pretty cool, if the nuances of ecommerce experiences are interesting to you.

I am working today on Christmas Eve, mainly because our engineering group is making it's final push to a release. Since my parents live just over the bay, it's not a sacrifice really. But what a strange day. No traffic on the way in, hardly anybody else at the office (apart from engineering, the office is closed), and I parked in a spot that I can actually see from my window, as opposed to 4 blocks away. Such small thrills my life is made of. I'd be more thrilled if I didn't have this cold, but at least my brain isn't as fuzzy as it was last week.

A really fascinating inside history of the intense political machinations within Microsoft while it tried to wrestle with the reality of the wave of software development that followed the growth of the Internet, and how Microsoft stumbled when that development didn't use Microsoft software or follow their desires. It was at around that time that i stopped developing software that only worked on Windows, and it's a good feeling not being at Microsoft's mercy. This book certainly didn't make me trust what Microsoft is doing with .NET either. I'd like to thank my dear friend Marcel at work for loaning me this book (he became my dear friend when he used my Amazon link for buying stuff).

A strangely violent art-house film from Vietnam and France, about a rickshaw driver in the busy streets of Vietnam and his sister, who both end up dragged into the very seemy criminal underbelly of Ho Chi Minh City. While visually arresting at points, the shots-of-children-standing-with-eyes-closed-while-poetry-is-read artiness and Diane's-stomach-curdling violence made this a hard film to like. Interesting, but hard to read.

This is a quite good computer-animated movie that Diane and I only just got around to seeing. The story has lots of cultural references for the adults to enjoy and lots of one-off visual jokes, making it feel like the filmed is packed with details to enjoy. Fun.

Google has recently unearthed and revealed 20 years of Internet news group postings, and like many people, I've searched for my oldest postings. The oldest one I've found is this one, from April 25, 1986, which would have been only a couple months after writing my first email (and first Unix experience, etc.). I'm pretty sure i sent it using my Atari 800 from Barrington, using a 1200 baud modem. That means I've been using email for 15 years, although there were some pretty lean years between UC Berkeley and working at Advent. I actually wrote the first internal email system we had at Datalex. So be careful waving your old-school creds around me, babe!

The first book in the highly acclaimed series of books about a British Navy sea captain and a physician in the early 1800's. Full of sea terms (usually sort of explained, via the device of the non-sailor physician) and naval battles and ruminations on life at sea, I would have been happy to enjoy the book enough to want to pursue the series, and it was a pleasant enough read, but honestly I didn't think it was all that compelling. Plus the arc of the plot was very unformed; it was just a sequence of events with little to motivate them.

I just counted, and since this site's inception in October 1999 I have so far reviewed 48 films and 61 books. Where do i get the time? Dang, that's a lot.

I've loved everything that Pixar has done since the little 2 minute films it started with in the 1980's. So yes, I really enjoyed this film. Clever, arch inside jokes at times, stunning new effects work (Sulley's hair waving in the breeze), and very clever use of limitations (you try working a variety of facial expressions into a single eye). Heartily recommended.

This morning Diane and I went to the optometrist. Diane was getting glasses for the first time in quite a while (she thinks the contacts are not so ideal for everyday), and i just hadn't had an exam in at least 25 years, and just figured i was due. I've noticed that far away things are getting a little fuzzy. Well, i do have a slight astigmatism in the right eye, and my left eye is perfect. Overall, nothing to worry about or correct now (it rarely bothers me), though something to keep an eye on (yuck yuck). Given that i spend more than 8 hours a day at a computer and that when I'm not doing that I'm reading, I'd say that was surprisingly good news.

I can't believe I've gone this long without mentioning The Onion. It is bar none the funniest thing on the web, updated almost every Wednesday. It's just insanely funny and I can't even pick out a quote to use. From wickedly funny Herbert Kornfield to the horoscope to oddly familiar pieces, the Onion is something I look forward to every week.

I think in every Mamet film I'm hoping for work of the stellar quality that Glengarry Glen Ross had. While Heist is a tight little thriller, with constant turns of plot, some great taut dialog, and ruminations on a life dependant on deception, the series of 'gotchas' the film presents becomes too reliable to really surprise. But despite that reservation, it has been a film i find myself ruminating on, much like Memento.

Whereas his previous City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles was about the political and economic history of Los Angeles, Ecology of Fear is about the intersection of Angelenos and the natural world, and covers the history and causes behind Los Angeles's plagues of earthquakes, firestorms, tornadoes, rat invasions, floods, and urban riots. As always, Davis is entertainingly dismal about the future of L.A., and yet cheerfully explains how Angelenos put themselves directly into harm's way and then are surprised when they are harmed. He caps off the book with an analysis and reading of the many times in prose and movies that L.A. has been destroyed. Witty, chilling, and makes me glad i don't live there.

We had several people over for Thanksgiving dinner last night. My parents, Diane's Aunt Minnie, and Diane's friend Cyndi, who introduced Diane and me so many years ago. Having this party "forced" us to do many things, including buy a new sofa, folding screen for the entrance way, chenets (like an andiron) for the fireplace, a Metro baker's rack, and a rug for the office, all of which arrived this week. So the house looks much more put-together than it did before; Diane has done a great job of making the house look good and feel comfortable.

Then we had to make food for this ravenous hoard, including the aforementioned pumpkin pie (with homemade whipped cream), turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, Diane's yummy cornbread and chestnuts stuffing, gravy, green beans with almond slivers, and the newly christened "Go Figure" salad, with GOat cheese, FIGs, and carmelized pecans, which I've been eating like candy. Mom brought her cranberry chutney, which people seemed to eat more as a side dish than as a garnish for the turkey. (Side note: I had gone to Boston Market to get a pint of cranberry sauce, and I know they had to ask this, but when she asked me, "For here or to go?", the image of me grabbing a spoon and tucking into the big container of sauce was quite nauseating to contemplate.) We also had Joseph Schmidt truffles, shaped like turkeys.

All went quite well. House and food were properly appreciated by all.

I used this free service for a couple years, and i find it to be quite valuable. Basically it allows you to set up "Spies" on a particular web page and have it email you when the page changes. As I got used to having this ability, it enabled me to not have to check sites constantly to see if there's anything new. Other uses are that it will tell me if this site (mahlen.org) stops working, or if someone links to it (no one ever has :(. Also, there are pages that interest me, but that don't add new stuff but once a week or so; now i can put a spy on them so that when they do change, i'll know to read it, instead of going back every day or so and being disappointed. Very useful.

While better known for his comic book work (the wildly well acclaimed Sandman series), this is a full length novel about the notion that gods followed their believers to America, that they have largely lost their power due to their lack of believers, and that there are new gods in the U.S. (for example, Media) that are itching for a fight. I really thought this was a wonderful work, very approachable and yet transportive, revealing a different way to see the world we exist in.

This is Ellroy's follow-up to American Tabloid, his version of the Kennedy assassination. This picks up the events right afterward, a whirlwind of dirty dealing, taped conversations with J. Edgar Hoover, and nasty tactics. I love Ellroy's other works (he's really the only mystery/thriller writer i read anymore, now that Andrew Vachss has become quite the broken record), and this is a great example of his stuff boiled down to it's essence. In fact, it's so terse that it makes Hemingway seem like George Sterling. Here's a taste:
The house was drab. The lawn was brown. The house had peeled paint and chipped stucco.
Moore walked to the porch. Moore rang the bell. A man opened up. Moore badged him. Moore shoved him inside. Moore kicked the door shut.

Almost like the notes for a much longer novel. Very enjoyable.

Given my unpleasant past experiences, it's somewhat surprising to me that I am now driving every day to work at Harmonic. But with the company move, I am forced to take two different buses each way, usually pushing the commute time to an hour each way. I was just getting home dog-tired. So now I'm driving to work, which takes maybe 20-30 minutes, and the good news is that parking is free and fairly easy to find. Of course, in San Francisco, that means it's several blocks away, but that's fine with me. I don't like polluting, etc., but the alternative wasn't working. Just one of the things I give up for living where we can afford a house.

This is the "Chocolat" about a woman who opens a chocolate shop in a small French town during Lent, and how the stuffy townspeople are slowly won over by her generous soul and sinfully delicious treats. That description sounds trite and simplistic, but the basically isn't very complicated. I wasn't really impressed; Diane seemed to like it more, but the smart money is betting large that she liked it because Johnny Depp was in it.

We had been eagerly anticipating the release of this movie, and even our high expectations were exceeded. This movie rocked the house on every frame, from killer fight scenes to delightfully silly bits of humor (though it's no Jackie Chan movie on the humor); I think this is the first time Diane has ever said, even in jest, "let's see the next showing". It was an awesome action flick, no holds barred.

While looking for the IMDB record for the link, i was very surprised to find out that this movie was made in 1993, and that there's already a sequel. We'll have to go hunt that down, no question.

As I mentioned earlier, I have been spending some time lately trying to teach myself a computer language called Haskell. While there are a variety of online resources, there's nothing like a long book on a subject to clear up the foggy grey areas of a new and perplexing topic. I found this book at Cody's in Berkeley, and it's pretty damn good. In fact (and somewhat annoyingly), it was more entertaining to read the book than to sit down and bang my head against the machine until I learned something, which is really what would need to happen for me to get beyond the simplest programs. But I'm sure I'll be dog-earing the pages of this book when I get the time to start doing that.

This was a weekend of cats for us. First on Saturday morning we took Wanfu into the vet for a puncture wound on the side of his head. It was actually healing OK, but since it probably happened on the barbed wire that tops the fence around our backyard, so we felt we better take him in. He'll be fine, but he gets a week of anti-biotics, which he loves. We may have to do something about the barbed wire.

Then on Sunday we went to the San Francisco SPCA to find some cats for my parents, who recently lost the last of the cats they had when i was growing up there. Diane and I were there most of the day, and ended up with a pair of six-year-old tortiseshell girls that seem to be mellow enough for my folks. We took them over to Mom and Dad's house in Orinda and they seemed to take to the new house like they owned the joint, which doubtless they will someday. That SPCA is an amazing place; due to a huge donation, they have no cages, but two floors of cat condos with cat trees and TV's playing bird videos. The staff there are constantly working with the animals to make them more adoptable, and they are really only concerned with making successful adoptions and happy, well-treated cats.

After we got home and cleaned the house for while, we just could not find Lucy. We realized we hadn't seen her all night. We looked in every nook and cranny of the house, we called for her everywhere and waved a crinkly bag of treats, we walked around the block calling for her, but nothing. We went to sleep quite late, really not looking forward to a likely futile morning of posting Cat Missing signs and knocking on doors, but then Lucy jumped on the bed and tried to get under the covers as usual. We still have no idea where in the house she could have been hiding or why she was hiding, but we're really really glad she's back. Of course, we still kicked her out of bed, since she and Pooky still hog it, the wee brats.

On Saturday we had some furniture delivered, including a sofa, a chair and ottoman, and a little end table. Very fortunately for us, Diane had realized beforehand that the sofa was not going to fit through the little doors of our office, so instead we had to have them pass the sofa over a fence "door" (it's so old that the metal knob just crumbles in your hand, so there's no opening that door). That door has barbed wire on it, so that morning we had to cover it and tape the cover down. Then we had to remove the window, which was just large enough to get the sofa through. Said window did not really want to be removed easily, so we were faced with the familiar "trash the exterior wood to get the frame out/break the window" choice. Since i had a hammer in my hand, we chose breaking the window.

Diane picked up the hammer and was ready to start pounding, but just couldn't bring herself to break a perfectly piece of glass. So i duct taped up the window (so that the pieces wouldn't slice us to ribbons) and started hammering. I admit, it took several tries before i could make the first crack, but once i had, i hacked at that thing till it was dust. It was strangely satisfying when the last edge was broken and the taped-together pieces haltingly pulled themselves out of the frame and onto the ground outside. Then i hacked at the middle piece of metal till it broke off, and after breaking off the glass on the edges and taping the edges, we now had a sofa portal.

After convincing the movers that, yes, the window is really the only way inside, we got the furniture in very nicely, and gosh it sure looks nice in there. It'll look a bit better when we can pull off the plywood that's covering up the empty window, but I'm told it'll take 6-8 weeks to get the new window that Diane has picked out. And yes, this window will open all the way, so that we don't have to destroy it whenever we decide to move the sofa out. Darn.

We watched this on the VCR last night. The original was not exactly a complicated movie, just a bunch of dazzling effects around a silly plot. This sequel is exactly the same deal, and fortunately the movie knows how silly it is. The computer effects are even more over-the-top and impressive this time, Diane and I both concluded that I would look way bitchin' with these tattoos on my face. Hmmmmm...

Speaking of rap, this is one of my favorite artist sites ever. What, you didn't know that British physicist Stephen Hawking is also a gifted rapper? Oh yeah, at this site you can find out all about his career, his troubled history with the law, and best of all, hear great songs like F*ck the Creationists, E=mc Hawking, and my favorite, QuakeMaster. The man is dope!

OK, for the humor impaired, this is a joke, but the songs are real and funny as hell, and the rest of the site is really well done. It's the best rap-with-a-computerized-voice-about-nerd-topics site ever. For example:


Straight out of Oxford a crazy motherfucker named Hawking.
When I be rocking the mic you be gawking,
at me 'cause I'm a bad mama-jamma,
you wanna lock me up put my ass in the slamma.
But fuck that shit 'cause no jail can hold me,
you can't even catch me much less control me.
So if you see me coming you better duck,
'cause Stephen Hawking is crazy as fuck.


The Hawkman Cometh!

Ever wonder what a rap song is talking about? Maybe they're just extolling the virtues of flowers and butterscotch in a really aggressive way. This is a pretty comprehensive list of terms and their origins. But I'd be careful about thinking you should be using them; I know that if i start using a phrase, it's passe.

Also of interest is the College Slang Research Project, which also has some nice links to a variety of specialized slang collections. Later Daze!

A history of how people have thought about and started calculating risk as a factor in life. The first half of the book is mainly about the history of the mathematicians who've figured out probability theory, while the second half is largely about people who've applied that theory to the action on Wall Street (and those who shown why theory on Wall Street behavior is usually wrong). While a fairly pedestrian book, Bernstein does drive home many of the important and tempting-to-ignore lessons that probabilty and statistics reveal, such as "regression to the mean", whereby in the long run, things stay pretty much the same; certainly a lesson to heed in these "oh the world is so different now" seeming times.

A strange 1959 movie that Diane and i saw this weekend on PBS. It's starts off as an office drama in NYC, as we follow three new secretaries in their quest for love or office success. But the film is so over-the-top cliched (all men are dogs who want nothing but sex, all women are love-starved and fall for men's lies, a women who pursues a career for any length of time will become a haridan) and reactionary that it turns into a moralistic high school film strip of a film, with so much attention to dire consequences that the plot and characters become cartoons. A really odd and silly movie; the "'50's cool" art work and period set designs are really the only saving graces.

Yesterday marked the two year anniversary of the creation of mahlen.org. It's been an interesting experiment for me, and one i have no intention of ending. Although often this site feels like a burden ("Oh hell, I'm three books, one set of photos, and two movies behind!"), and sometimes it feels like I'm automating my social life out of existance, it's nice for me to look back and see more or less exactly what I've been doing the last couple years.

I'm glad that some people enjoy reading this; I know that my parents read it fairly faithfully, and they occasionally tell me that my web-connected relatives read it (my mom even made a printed up version of this news page for my non-online relatives). I have no idea if anyone other than people who already know me ever read it regularly, but I know people stumble on it. It's fun for me to mess around with the technology that runs the site (I suspect a version of the site written in Haskell may crawl down out of my brain at some point), and I'm glad to be able to share and recommend the books, movies and web sites that I enjoy (by the way, you can help me (at no cost to you) feed my habit and buy more things to read by going here and buying something through Amazon, hint hint).

So anyway, while the site has become less diary and more review center, I hope that you, my largely silent audience, are enjoying it.

So for the last week or so Diane has been working occasionally for friends of hers, helping out with interior designing jobs and faux finishing work. I think she likes being back out in the world (it's a bit crazy-making being at home talking to the cats all the time), and we both like having a bit more spending money in our pockets.

Got the call yesterday from our mortgage broker, Leon Huntting, that the 30-year rate we'd been looking for finally came in, so we not only are saving a bit of money each month of our 5/1 that we got in January, but also lock down the rate for while, since it doesn't seem that likely that we'd be moving soon, and it's hard to imagine 30-year rates getting much lower. So that's all good.

I've been spending a lot of my free time trying to teach myself a relatively unknown computer language called Haskell, which is very different from the computer languages (C, C++, Java) I've used in my work for the last, um, many years. For one thing, it's a functional language, which means that instead of telling the computer exactly what to do, you tell it what you want, sort of (OK, that was really vague and inaccurate in a hand-wavy way). It seems to be best suited for situations where you want to write a program quickly. Anyway, the concepts and idioms are very different from what I'm used to, so it's a bit like when i was nine years old and teaching myself to program in BASIC. I had no one to ask questions, so I'd just read the BASIC book i had over and over again until what a, say, "buffer" is just popped into my head. Now, thankfully, I have the web to consult. Not likely to lead to work writing Haskell, but interesting to me to think about coding differently.

Another odd book from Sterling, this one a look at a band whose sole purpose is to peddle merchandise before the year 2000. While at most times a conventional if well-informed novel (Sterling shows off his legitimate global street cred by name dropping great and unknown authors and musicians throughout the text), every now and then blatantly surreal things happen and no one seems to think much of them. Plus the notion of a character's life as a narrative keeps popping into the book, which is quite delightfully unnerving, since of course these people's lives are merely part of a narrative.

A sort-of remake of The Three Musketeers (quite different plot) with some decent fight scenes (the ladder sequence is pretty cool) some pretty midling acting and a howler of a script (really, some of the worst lines I've heard in ages) was not really worth seeing. Diane liked it more than me, but take it from me, you would do better with a evening making hand shadows on the wall. The ebst moment for me was when I wondered, "Hey, why do the Musketeers always fight with swords in the movies when they're named after a gun (a musket)?"

A brilliantly disturbing and funny film about the very, erm, odd romantic lives of three sisters. The film's humor comes from the very implausibility of the events being portrayed being in a film, and from the banality of the events. I don't want to say too much about the plot, because there's no way to describe the film with out it sounding like a family drama. It is strong material; a film I can highly recommend to very few people.

This is NOT, in fact, the French film made last year about a woman who opens a Chocolate shop during Lent, although that was the film I intended to rent. Rather, this is a 1988 film about a white colonialist's family living in the African nation of Cameroon in the 1950's, and about the complex subtleties of racial relations during that time.

While a pleasant film (despite not being the film I had intended to rent), it was somewhat hard for me to fathom what this slow, family drama was about.

A strange wonderful little movie about two cynical, hip, and very funny women who've just graduated from high school. One not only has to take a pretentious summer school art class to graduate, but is also having a difficult time imagining a life on her own (I remember people like this from my high school, and have long wondered how they made their way into the less-protective outside world). Very funny and hip, but bittersweet as well. I had much the same problem finding a place for myself in the world, and count myself quite fortunate to have found Barrington Hall at UC Berkeley as a sort of halfway house to the cold, dark 1980's.

Yup, it's belt-tighening time here. Since Diane quit her job at the end of June, and we got nice and house-poor, we knew that the money should not flow out as easily as before. But actually getting onto a budget and making us stick to it is a Herculean task for us. But Diane, bless her, started tracking what we'd spent starting September 1st, and now we know exactly how much we can spend each day. But how to keep us honest? Simple, we only spend cash, which gets alloted to us each day.

Well, it's not pleasant (or rather, it forces us to face some unpleasant realities), it does seem to be working.

I'm still finding this page of searches that led someone to the site very interesting, but i realized that a positive feedback loop was taking place. Because so many popular search terms were getting placed on the page itself (since it just lists search phrases), many of the searches were just pointing to that page, and more and more searches every day were hitting that page. Since my point is not to try and generate lots of pointless hits for things that people aren't looking for, I've now modified the robots.txt file, which tells Google not to list the search page the next time it sweeps through, which should, eventually slow the erroneous flow. Nonetheless, the page is an interesting window into the psyche of some web surfers.

Wondering how close to a power emergency California actually is today? This page graphs current usage against expected usage and expected supply; it's updated every 10 minutes or so. This is one of those useless but weirdly interesting chunks of information that makes me love the web.

One of the co-founders of the company I work at loaned me this. It's a relatively gentle introduction to "string theory", which basically posits that there are 10 dimensions, but that we only sense three plus time. Apparently having 10 dimensions allows physicists to explain the huge number of elementary particles and relativity fairly cleanly. A really good introduction to these ideas, along with some of the colorful history of physics.

I read this some time ago, but apparently forgot to review it until i ran across it today at the bookstore in the Japan Center. A Pulitzer-winning collection of short stories from an Indian writer whose stories range from familiar American university towns to a most alien backwater apartment house in India. Her stories are often bittersweet with notes of longing for a sign that all is well, but things usually are not. Quite good.

A short book from a twenty-year veteran programmer about life as a programmer. From the fun and joy of communicating with your peers in a kind of mind-meld, where no sentence needs to be completed, to the palpable dread of no longer being cutting-edge in your technical prowess, Ullman autobiographicaly covers some of the ways that the computer shapes a programmer's life.

Since I've been programming off-and-on since i was nine years old (for those keeping score, that was 28 years ago), it's nearly impossible for me to realistically imagine what my mind would be like without the shaping force of computer languages. While Ullman's career is markedly different from my own (she's been doing a lot more contracting, and since those tend to be shorter term projects, they would create a more disconnected sense of self), she still hits many of the coder tribe's personality markings dead-on.

I read this on Monday, while I was out sick from work with a mild flu.

While this novel is chock full of interesting ideas (what if the Chinese just posted all U.S. intellectual property on the web?), as a novel it is almost great. It has a lot of action and stuff going on and yet more ideas, but it almost feels like part of a trilogy, and not a full novel. It sort of kareens around until it stops, but the story doesn't quite feel over yet.

A really fascinating and very readable book on the multitude of ways that one is subjected to coercion, generally for political ends or to convince you to buy something. From car dealers to Gap employees, from corporate PR events to Promise Keeper rallys and Amway, all are trying to convince you to do something, and this book is an eye-widening survey of the techniques used. If you've ever been startled when a salesperson asks you, "Can you see yourself owning this?", now you'll know why.

While this is billed as a travel book, it actually is a collection of all manner of short non-fiction pieces, from a first-hand account of the aftermath of the mass suicide of Jim Jones' cult in Guyana to a story about what appears to be the first paintball game. Included are Cahill's ill-thought-out attempt to infiltrate a Christian cult in L.A., a look at the work that Dian Fossey did with gorillas, to what a solar eclipse is like. Cahill has a seemingly lackadaisical approach to his subjects for a journalist, so that he rides the edge between being involved in his topic and not really even being interested. Quite interesting and enjoyable.

This is another wonderfully weird and twisted book from the author of Fight Club. The story is told by a young female model who has been shot and is horribly disfigured (but she seems awfully blasé about this), and the drag queen whose charm, verve, and lust for life changes her life is uncounted ways. But that description makes this book sound heartwarming and touching, when it is, in fact, wickedly laugh-out-loud funny. A strange and mind-bending road trip book, told in a completely non-narrative way, but it'll grab you from the first page and shake you around like the bell inside a puppy's chew toy.

I finally fixed up the program that generates the mahlen.org hit counter, so that it takes into account the page hits generated in the last few months. But I didn't have an access log being created for a while after switching the web server to Resin, so the stats for April, May, and June of 2001 are completely off, and you should ignore them, as if you even cared about them in the first place.

It was Diane's 46th birthday yesterday, but we didn't do anything outlandishly different. My co-worker Rom came by in his snazzy new BMW and dropped off some Navarro Vineyards Gewurztraminer Grape Juice, which, since we're not really wine drinkers (or really even committed drinkers of alcohol), is just dandy, so we couldn't resist opening one bottle right then. Mmmmm, that's fine drinking.

The items that a 'news' site like this misses are the facts that creep up on you, the emergent phenomena, things that aren't events, that aren't "new", and yet have great effects on one's life.

For example, what am I found doing every day, at almost any spare moment? Playing Backgammon on my Palm IIIxe. In the bathroom, while watching TV, on the bus, during dull meetings, there I am, tapping away at my Palm, rolling dice and hitting blots. This has been the case for almost as long as I've had a Palm organizer.

For most of that time i was playing the Backgammon from Stand Alone, which I eventually learned to beat even on the Expert level on a regular basis, especially the most recent version of the program. But then I made the mistake of playing SlapGammon from Neko Software, and, oh, do I rue that day. The "Competant" player has been winning two games out of three, and has a fiendish ability to offer a double just when he's insulted me with his luck, so I'm likely to accept the double in annoyance. The game has so thrown my cockiness regarding this game that there's been times when i had to resist the urge to "tap" the screen hard enough to break it, especially when I'm tapping the screen to indicate that, yes, once again, I can't move.

Previously unknown to me, Diane and my email addresses have both changed. The current correct address for me is mahlen at sbcglobal.net, and Diane's is now platelady at sbcglobal.net. I assume you're all tech savvy enough to translate the 'bla at sbcglobal.net' to bla@sbcglobal.net, so I'm hoping that writing it that way will prevent automated email address locators from finding us.

This happened rather suddenly (as far as I can dimly remember, we weren't informed beforehand), so if you sent us anything at either of the pacbell.net addresses after last Thursday, we probably didn't get it, so hit that resend if you think I'm just being rude.

I just saw this documentary today. It's the filmed story of the quite real govworks.com, from the day one of its founders quit his job to start the company, to the day it was all over. While there's no great theme and the filming is, not surprisingly, catch-what-shots-they-could, the compelling stories make this work. The most chilling moment (apart from when close friends are consulting attorneys about how to deal with each other), is when they visit the very esteemed Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who advise them that the name isn't good, they don't have enough startup or engineering experience, that they ought to be on the West coast; a lot of things they didn't want to hear, and so they shrug it off.

The most interesting thing to me was how, at no point (shown in the film, at least), does anyone admit to a mistake or error, or apologize, or in any way efface themselves. Painful but fascinating to watch all the joys and heartbreaks of two years in the space of a film. It really wasn't just foosball games, easy money, and Aeron chairs.

A surprising page-turner of a book for a history of a government agency. This is a front-line history of the National Security Agency (NSA), a secretive U.S. government department larger than the C.I.A. and responsible for "signals intelligence"; that is, listening in and decoding messages and other electronic communications around the world. There's some fascinating new material here, from how Eisenhower ordered his staff to lie about his involvement in the U-2 planes spying on the USSR, to the Israeli coverup of the slaughter of Egyptian POW's (by attacking an NSA ship that was overhearing it), to how the Viet Cong used signal analysis against U.S. troops in Vietnam. The book covers the highs (providing the real intelligence during the Cuban missle crises, the bravery and brilliance of individual NSA workers) and the lows (the NSA's eagerness to spy on U.S. citizens during the Nixon era, it's loss of purpose and effectiveness in the 1990's) of this almost invisible government agency. Good stuff.

A collection of wickedly funny stories about bleak people in a just slightly off version of our world. The title story is a parable about modern work life; it's about a guy who pretends to be a Stone Age man all day in a cave at a slowly failing theme park. Another is about a ineffectual man attending a You-Can-Succeed!-type seminar, and his attempts to rid himself of his wildly strange sister.

As an example, here's a portion of a memo that the Stone Age man receives in the title story:

"Regarding the rumors you may have lately been hearing, please be advised that they are false. They are so false that we considered not even bothering to deny them. Because denying them would imply that we have actually heard them. Which we haven't. We don't waste our time on such nonsense. And yet we know that if we don't deny the rumors we haven't heard, you will assume they are true. And they are so false! So let us just categorically state that all the rumors you've been hearing are false. Not only the rumors you've heard, but also those you haven't heard, and even those that haven't yet been spread, are false. However, there is one exception to this, and that is if the rumor is good. That is, if the rumor presents us, us up here, in a positive light, and our mission, and our accomplishments, in that case, and in that case only, we will have to admit that the rumor you've been hearing is right on target, and congratulate you on your fabulous powers of snooping, to have found out that super secret thing! In summary, we simply ask you to ask yourself, upon hearing a rumor: Does this rumor cast the organization in a negative light? If so, that rumor is false, please disregard. If positive, super, thanks you very much for caring so deeply about your organization that you knelt with your ear to the track, and also, please spread the truth far and wide, that is, get down on all fours and put your lips to the track. Tell your friends. Tell friends who are thinking of buying stock. Do you have friends who are journalists? Put your lips to their tracks."

I'd heard Saunders read on This American Life, and I suspect there's more Saunders in my future.

So today my since-college-and-you-know-that's-been-a-while friend James Dashe IM'd me and mentioned this little page of his, which seems to consist of brief lines or stories that at one point or another invoke the word "tomorrow". You can see the bottom of his page to see why. It reads like a long-form poem, mixing seemingly profound insight "tomorrow is a whisper drowned out by sirens of the now" with the banal of the everyday. Worth keeping an eye on.

It wasn't a Mamet play or anything, but it is a better than decent action flick. The fight scenes were better in Kiss of the Dragon, but this is funnier. As always, the outakes at the end of the film may be the best part. Because my work took the staff out to see it on Friday, and then i went with Diane to see it on Saturday, this is certainly the only time since I worked in a movie theatre that I've seen a movie twice on opening weekend.

We had a fairly normal weekend. On Friday night, Diane picked me up at work to go meet our friends Jen and Ken in Oakland. On the way, we followed a Porsche Boxster making a left turn, only to discover (by being pulled over by a cop)that left turns weren't legal there (I think we fairly blindly assumed they were OK, since the Boxster was doing it). But the cop let us off with a lecture. Dinner at Oaktown was otherwise uninterrupted by law-enforcement.

On Saturday we went to the new place in Daly City where Aunt Minnie is now staying, which is much nicer than the other places we'd seen and is only a short drive from our house. She seems to improving quite a bit, after 6 months with many setbacks. Then Diane and I went to see Rush Hour 2, which i had also seen on Friday at some team-spirit work outing. We both really liked it.

Today (Sunday) we went to the beach to enjoy a quite sunny day (I'm a bit sunburned, actually), and then went to 7th and Irving a went to a hip housewares place called Wishbone, and then I bought a bunch of books at Black Oak Books.

Banal, perhaps, but a nice weekend nonetheless. They're all pretty nice when Diane and I can do it together.

I'm currently typing this on Diane's laptop while lying in bed next to a sleeping Diane (and a cat or two). I know have arranged a wireless connection between the laptop and our DSL line, using a wireless transmitter/router/firewall and a card in the laptop, both from D-Link. Both were relatively straightforward to set up; I did the whole thing in an evening, including moving the DSL modem and the transmitter to a more central location to improve reception. Unfortunately, the worst reception in the house is right where Diane's desk is, but it's much better than no connection at all, and even small movements of the tranmitter base seem to help, so I may move it again. I'll just say that for myself, it's a lot nicer to browse the web from the bed than locked away in the office. But no loud gaming in bed; the games won't work on the laptop. Can't wait to have a patio chair...

Ever since I switched the software I use to serve this site to Resin, it's been adding what's known as the referer page to my web logs, meaning that it records what page was linking to this page when you clicked that link, if clicking a link is how you got here. So I was quite surprised to see how many referals I'm getting from Google and Yahoo! searches that are turning up mahlen.org. And what are these people searching for when they find this site? Why, "just my imagination paltrow mp3", "we make fake id's NYC", "spanish transexuals", and my favorite, "christmas web sites where backgrounds have snow falling down the whole page". I think these searches are mainly pointing to the all news page, which is so long and has so many different topics on it, that it's not surprising that they hit such unusual topics (by the way, our New York fake ID service has shut down :P).

So, as a public service, I've rigged up a page that displays all of these wayward queries, and it gets updated every hour with whatever new ones happen (it's also on the menu as "How other people found this site"). Enjoy!

About a month ago a friend mentioned that he was going to acquire a bunch of Aeron chairs, and did i want to buy one for way cheap? I jumped on the chance, as my current office chair at home was just a dining room chair, and while fine for dining, it was less than ideal for typing and gaming. Plus, Aeron's were the quintessential symbol of dot-com perks and style, and I'd never had one, so for less than half the list price, I was a goner. Plus, I'm a opportunistic vulture; if I had more disposable income, I'd be buying stuff from failing dot-coms all the time.

So on Tuesday someone else who was in on the deal emails and tells me that the company that currently has them is about to move on Thursday, and that everyone else involved is out of town, and that these nice chairs tend to "acquire legs" during times like that, so could maybe I go get them before the move? Well, I wasn't thrilled with the prospect of moving stuff around from San Mateo, but it turned out to only be one car load (with Diane's wonderful and clever help), so now I'm lounging in my Aeron as I type this, just fractionally hipper than i was before. You dig?

Oh, man, now I know why everyone was telling me to see this. Absolutely amazing film about a man who's lost the ability to form new memories, and his hunt, aided by Polaroids, notes, and tattoos, for the man who raped and killed his wife. Told in reverse chronological order (so that, at each step of the way, we only know as much as he would have), this thriller's suspense lies not in what will happen (we know that from the beginning), but how he got there. Just wickedly brilliant, it is so compelling that I'm still turning it over in my head. But be warned, one needs to pay close attention to detail here; as Diane put it, "This movie is an SAT test."

Diane and I rented this last week. The followup film from the director of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable shares that film's sense of gloom and dread, loss and sorrow, with long static camera shots. I think I actually liked this better that Sixth Sense, but that may have been because I already knew the "big secret" of Sixth Sense when I saw it, and because there was more character development in Unbreakable. Not a superb film, but a solidly well made one.

A wonderful, very funny, spooky, and yet touching documentary about those among us who love Star Trek. A. Bit. Too. Much. Fascinating stories of the depths that fandom can touch someone (the dentist with a Star Trek-themed office), the depths that one can take it (the Whitewater juror who always showed up to court in costume, because she felt, as Commander of the local fan club, that it was a chance to do "community outreach"), and, well, just how nerdy this stuff can make you (just about every interview makes that clear). Even Leonard Nimoy eventually has to admit, "My God, this is going to go on forever." Really worth checking out. Here's the IMDB record.

Diane and I are now sitting at my office on a Friday night, because we're waiting for the movie we're going to see at the Embarcadero to start, so I thought I'd try, try, try to catch up on my film reviews. So this is for Moulin Rouge, which we saw on a very hot day up in Fairfield with Kathy Green after going to an air show up there. This is a weird melange of french period film with modern musical (with songs like The Police's "Roxanne", and Elton John's "Your Song", modified to fit the plot of the film) with MTV-style editing and depth of character. Diane complained that the camera moved too fast to let you see the costumes or interiors or dancing, but I suspect that may have been on purpose, as film editors are probably cheaper than choreographers and great dancers. While I admired the visual style of the film and the risks the film takes, it was sort of a glorious mess, like eating fabulous food that the chef has inexplicably set on fire.

On Wednesday, July 4th, while most people were celebrating our nations birth (to the extent that one can), Diane and I were reveling in our 3rd wedding anniversary, as well as the 5th anniversary of our first date, also on a July 4th. We had a delightfully lazy day, but we did make the effort to go and see the fireworks, although we saw them from near the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, so it was kinda far away. But a lovely day, nonetheless, and I do honestly love her more than ever. We've got a good thing going on here, and we're both working hard to make sure it stays that way. I love ya, babe!

As I mentioned earlier, I really enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. But what i didn't know is that Gladwell is a writer for The New Yorker, and that all his past essays for that fine publication are available on Gladwell's site in the Archive section (don't look for anything on the New Yorker's site; it's useless). Some of the essays here are priceless examinations and musings on the people who make T-shirts, the deep psychology of the job interview, and how hair color ads affected post-war feminism. Really great stuff here; I've read every single piece there, and they are worth reading.

Another book on mountain climbing loaned to me by Rob Dickinson, this one a series of short pieces by Jon Krakauer, the author of Into Thin Air. Eiger Dreams is a really interesting glimpse into the culture and folklore of climbing in all it's forms, from climbing frozen rivers to boulders (with no equipment) to the men who fly people to the base of Mount McKinley in Alaska. I still, I should mention, have no interest in climbing myself, but climbing and the desire to climb clearly pushes people into interesting contortions of the human condition, which makes for some fine literature.

Since buying the new house, we've gone on a not-unexpected appliance buying spree, including a new stack washer and dryer, a new TV, and (soon to arrive) some exercise equipment. So naturally, we turn to the source for unbiased review information, and we do it online. The subscription fee for using the site has been well worth the price, if nothing else than for the peace of mind that I, the putative man of the house, has completed his sacred "let me do some research and find out what's best" duty. Plus, there's the ever-goofy Vintage Photo Gallery, with strange black and white photos of their old testing equipment.

See, this is the kind of site that makes me wish I had much more time to read online. This MIT project is a source for some very well-written and cutting-edge technology articles. For instance, this article on military lasers was amazing stuff; I couldn't dream their results were already possible. If you're a technology fiend, you should be checking out this site often (Dad, this means you).

Yesterday was Diane's last day at Ralph Johnson and Associates. She finally quit after being pretty unhappy there for (it seems to me) a long time. While we're not certain on this, it may even be the last time she pursues full-time work. There's just a lot of things here at the house, errands, and decisions with Aunt Minnie that need to get done, and we were paying a lot of money to other people to get them done. Things tend to be cheaper when you have the time to shop around, and it would free up our weekends from the errand runaround. While it may be a bit of a squeeze on the finances, I'm hoping that Diane will be gainfully unemployed for at least a couple months, cause I think she'd be a lot happier, and a happy Diane means a happy Mahlen, ya know. But stay tuned; perhaps the lack of scripted activity will drive Diane bonkers!

A fairly well done action movie, with John Travolta as the all-too-clever criminal mastermind. While there are some fairly interesting plot twists and surprises, I spent much of the film snickering at the completely incorrect computer-related dialog. Oh, they go to the trouble to insert gratuitous references to hip topics in the computer world (a Finnish cracker named Torvalds, the U.S. goverment's Carnivore eavesdroppping project, and a cool "you are the data" Steadicam run down some networking cable. But then there's insanely pointless lines like, "We have a DS-3 line, so we can attack 7 networks at once" and a spinning 3D interface for creating viruses. I spent a lot of time laughing at this stuff, just eagerly waiting for the next groaner.

May 15th [this is an old post i forgot to put up] was quite a day for us at Harmonic. We actually went Beta, meaning that all of the critical bugs that we could find have been fixed, and so we now try it with the real users (the business side of our company) to let them pound on it and see what they manage to break. Also, the engineering group got a chance to go over to the famous advertising firm of Goodby, Silverstein, and Associates, to meet Jeff Goodby and get some of his perspective on the advertising biz, as well as get a closer view of how a real, successfull advertising company works. It's a nice open space, with cubicles full of stuff, and samples of their work (including the 'got milk' campaign, Hewlett-Packard, the TNT network, and the Golden Gate Recreational Parks, to name just a few). They had so many awards in their reception area that it looked like a trophy shop. Goodby himself walked around 20 of us around, then we saw some video editing rooms (big Avid's, just like what my brother Clark works on), and then saw some demo reels of Goodby's stuff and then peppered the man with questions. I was taken back quite a ways to find out that Jeff Goodby got his start on the original late-1970's Electronic Arts campaigns, which were remarkably original at the time (Clark and I saw lots of these ads in Antic magazine, which was devoted to the Atari line of computers). A too-brief look at the interior of what Harmonic is shooting for, but thought provoking nonetheless.

I really liked this film when I saw it the week of my birthday, which I took off from work back in May. This is a vague re-telling of The Odyssey in 1930's Mississippi, a old-timey/folk music musical, and really visually interesting the way that filmmakers like the Coen Brothers can be. Definitely worth seeing, even though it's a little tough to sum up the plot in a single line. And the soundtrack album is really great as well, and I'm saying that as someone who usually listens to dance music. You can see the official film site here and the IMDB page here.

This is not-terribly-original Johnny Depp film about the true story of the man who brought cocaine to America, George Jung. While Diane and I largely enjoyed the film, I do ahve to admit that it wasn't terribly original or anything. Actually, for a "drug lord" movie, what's remarkable about it is how little violence there is; it was, in many respects, a more innocent time in American drug history, when the risk of prison were really much smaller.

This is the only online comic I read on any regular basis (Monday, Wednesday, Friday). Here's a few reasons why:

• It's about video games and video gamers.
• It's funny as hell, especially the news updates that accompany each new strip. Even in my dreams I don't write as well as they do.
• One of the two people involved uses the name Tycho Brahe, like the Dutch astronomer. Like, how cool is that?
• I laugh when i read they're site, implying there is humor there.

My former manager Rob Dickinson recently took 33 days to climb to the base camp of Everest and trekked around there quite a bit, and as a side effect he's been loaning me books of adventure travel non-fiction. This is one book that'll make you never want to climb a snow-covered mountain. It's a real page-turner, as well.

Simpson and a friend are climbing a mountain in South America, but after they reach the peak, everything is going wrong. About as wrong as it can get. You know that Simpson lives through it, because he's obviously written the book you're reading, but the main suspense is, how the hell did they get through this? I figure that there is a continuum from mountain accidents one doen't survive to those one easily does; this book is right on the edge, just over on the side of lived. Gripping stuff, and a glimpse of the limits of the will to live.

These are some essays from the squeaky-voiced commentator on This American Life, most of which she has read versions of on that show. That last point kind of spoiled the book for me, since I knew the jist of all these pieces. They're still quite funny, but I think they actually sound better than they read. Still, if you don't quite have the patience to listen to every last TAL, then the book might not be the worst way to get some of the best essays on it.

While a few years old, this is still a no-holds-barred rumage through the dirty laundry of the Public Relations industry. Fake grass roots campaigns! Spying on activist groups! Illegal work for foreign govornments! It's all here, it's all sleazy, it's all good. Put's the "distrust" back in "corporation". Warning: may remind you why you were once (and still should be) into progressive politics.

Can you say "Path to Profitability"? How about "Monetizing my Assets"? Or maybe "Whoring my Site"! I'm all about the eyeballs, baby!

Yup, I've now become an Amazon.com Associate, meaning that if you click on any of the review links or graphics that go to Amazon.com and then immediately buy stuff on Amazon, then a small fraction of the price that you pay goes to feed my book and CD habit, and thus sorta kinda paying for this site. In a way. So, if you want to buy one of the books I've reviewed here, click on the link for it and grab it! Or, if you want to buy things other than what I mention, go ahead and hit the Amazon graphic on the programs behind the curtain link.

(OK, despite the fact that I work in advertising, that's as much shilling as i can stand to do. But I do appreciate whatever you do or don't do. It's not like I actually care, not as if I'll get concerned or annoyed or framboozalified if you just go to regular stores. Just to make sure I'm crystal clear on this.)

This Booker Prize-winning novel is a tale of being 10 years old in 1960's Ireland. Admittedly, "Poor Irish Childhood" is lately an entire section of most bookstores these days, this volume manages to capture the strangeness and self-centeredness of childhood quite well. Certainly not as bleak as "Angela's Ashes", and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is more transportive, less trying to tell an adult's memories of youth than a boy's experiences at the time they occur.

NPR's Marketplace is certainly the most enjoyable business show on the air, and it also has some of the hippest music anywhere on NPR. This book by the host of Marketplace is eleven explorations into what one can do with a little extra cash, including buy real estate (ahem), play the market, spend it on stuff, or give it away. It's an interesting look at our relationship with money, and while I didn't come away with a strong message to guide me the next time that might happen (should I be so fortunate), it did flesh out the advantages and pitfalls of each path.

The Library of Congress has this amazing exhibit of beautiful full-color photographs of Russia from 1909-1915. Since there was no color film then, the photographer invented a way to take three photographs with colored filters in front, and then had a special projector to show them at exhibits in full color. But now the Library of Congress has pieced them back into stunning color images of a faraway place nearly a century ago. Worth checking out.

This marks the start of a new feature here at mahlen.org, wherein I finally get around to mentioning some of the web sites I keep coming back to. Since a huge percentage of my interaction with media is through the web, it's only fair that I give the Web it's due attention. I start off the notion with Exploding Dog, which meither explodes or has any dogs in it. Rather, it is a series of crude drawings from one Sam Brown, who makes the drawings based on picture titles that people send to him. But Sam always twists the expected interpretation around, and infuses them with his constant iconography of sad stick figures, blocky red robots, and the close proximity of disaster. View a dozen or so of the images, and they become a small closed universe, showing all of life's grandeur in a few simple lines and colors.

Both this book, along with Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories, are collections of Ben Katchor wonderful comic strip, which I've enjoying in the SF Weekly for a long time. But taken in large doses, these strips cohere together as true art, and I found myself slowly savoring and rereading each cartoon, loving the strange background details (the Sun Burn While-U-Wait storefront) and slightly askew urban sights (a store called "Analgesia"). He's really brilliant, and just very enjoyable, especially for someone like myself who loves quirky city people (the successful real estate agent whose cramped office is an illegally converted coal bin) and pointless attention to the transcendant deatials of life (the map of all the puddles in the Metropolitan area, accurate to 1/16th of an inch). Highly, highly recommended. You can find more Katchor marginallia here.

The hard-working folks here at Harmonic have produced a brand spanking new website to tell the world who we are and what we do. While I had nothing to do with the site, it is kind of fun. If you have the choice, I'd advise reading this on a high-bandwith line, since there's a big honking Flash animation at the beginning.

On Saturday night Diane and I went to see a late show of "Blow" at the AMC 1000 (I'll review it later), but when we got back to the car, all was not well. Now we had parked on the corner, and I had wondered, "Maybe we should back up a little", but we had a movie to catch, and I'm trying to micromanage life a little less. According to some men who seemed to have been there the entire time and apparently had no better place to go, right after we parked a 19 bus had turned that corner and it's back bumper had caught the front bumper of Diane's car from work, pulling it off in a single piece. So, this involved flagging done some police, making a police report, and then the bus that did it came by, and so we knew the number now, and then the transit inspector came by, and more nefarious acts were reported to the cops by passersby, and, well, we were up pretty late that night. It was all fairly cordial and all, but a odd view of street-level life downtown. We certainly miss a lot living way out in the fringes of S.F. We also might take the bus next time.

A nice little Bogart/Bacall film noir from 1947, dark and wierd with hairpin plot twists and coincidences. Worth renting, pal, and don't let nobody tell you different, see?

Lethem is an interesting author; his first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, is just flat out wonderfully funny and yet movingly sad. But some of of his other work is sort of "ehh", interesting but not very complete. But Motherless Brooklyn is an excellent book, indeed, the story of a group of orphans tutled by a mysterious small-time hood, Frank Minna. Frank is killed at the start of the book, but even on his deathbed, won't say who killed him. So one of the orphans, even though he's got Tourette's Syndrome something terrible, tries to track down the killer. It's a perfect device for marrying a detective novel with the ingenious wordlplay Lethem excels at. I'm now reading the book out loud to Diane. Highly recommended.

A really engrossing novel about a doctor and a teen prostitute confronting the beginnings of England's first cholera epidemic. Given that there was no germ theory at the time, so no one actually knew what cholera was, how it was transmitted, or whether it was just a scheme to kill off the poor, it's a portrait of a very different time, confronting not just how little medical knowledge there was, but also the often nefarious ways needed to acquire it. Good stuff.

Yup, yesterday was my birthday, again. I turned 37, meaning that I'm officially transitioning out of my mid-thirties and into my Late Thirties. But I still (mostly) kick ass at video games (that I play every week)! Diane would love for me to be forty and all, so that I wouldn't seem so much younger than her, but 40 is just gonna have to sharpen it's claws for a few more years before it can sink them into me.

I've been taking all this week off from work for my birthday, and because I haven't had a do-nothing vacation since July. So yesterday I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to see their exhibition "010101: Art in Technological Times", which i really, really enjoyed. From the automated sculpture maker to the quiet Brian Eno environment, it was all good.

Just six months ago the demand for technically adept people, be they system administators, programmers or QA folks, was still white hot, with most people able to find new positions quickly and enjoyably. My best friend James found a Web QA position at a company three years ago by walking in off the street, having only the computer experience he had acquired at his home (admittedly, James is very bright, and i certainly believe in hiring intelligence over experience).

My how times have changed. Now a multitude of companies have closed in the Bay Area in the last six months. People I know looking for work are having a much rougher time of it. Whereas before the emails you'd get from acquaintances were, "Hey, do you know of any people looking for work? We really need some!", now it's "Do you know anyone who's hiring?"

Harmonic is doing unusually well for this environment, having just gotten a bunch of money, but even we layed off 5 people last week, just to keep costs down and try to make this latest cash infusion last till we become profitable. Everyone complained before about the local boom and it's effect on city life; well, it's over now.

So the case I was called for on Monday was a civil asbestos case, specifically four men who were admitted smokers who claim that workplace asbestos exposure participated in the lung cancer all four have. It was thought to possibly go for as long as 10 to 12 weeks, 5 days a week, from 8:30AM t0 1:30PM each day. My application for a hardship deferment was turned down, so I filled out a four page form of questions about how I felt about lawsuits, corporations, asbestos, etc., and was told to return on Thursday morning. I figured I was too opinionated to be allowed on.

On Thursday I was not kicked out, it turns out, and in fact I'm in the first group to be questioned. This takes a long time. There is one prosecuting attorney (representing the four men and their wives) and about a dozen lawyers representing the vast array of corporations that were being sued. The attorneys and judge were very good at asking about your feelings and preconcieved notions about all these topics in such a way that you would feel like a failure to say you couldn't put aside these feelings and judge the case on it's facts. So, it was looking like I might get picked to stay, although I don't know what the attorneys were thinking. But generally, the more questions they ask you, the more likely they'll ask you to leave, I suspect.

At lunch I call my office and find out that after 5 days, my work probably won't pay for jury duty. Whoa! This could cost us thousands of dollars! "Diane, I did my civic duty, so no new kitchen this year." I'm starting to get a little panicky. So when the attorney for Exxon/Mobil did her question about "Could you really be objective when one of the largest corporations in the world, the one responsible for one of the worst ecological diasters in history, is one of the defendants?", I did slowly raise my hand. I pointed out that i did have a history in Anarchist politics (like Processed World magazine), and while I now work for corporations, there is still a shadow of those feelings in the back of my mind. So the judge asked me, "If a corporation you worked for was a defendant, would you want someone like you in the jury?", I said no, which got me immediately excused, breathless with gratitude for this non-lying-under-oath path to getting out of this ordeal. Phew!

But I did gain respect for attorneys, as that was a spectacularly dull process, and they had to sit through the whole thing. I know they're billing those hours, but still, I couldn't do it.

...but this time as a potential juror. I'm writing this from Room 007 at 400 McAllister, the Superior Court of San Francisco. After living in San Francisco for almost 12 years, this is the first time I've been called. Room 007 is a rather fancy waiting room, with padded movie-theatre style seats, some wood tables with chairs, and two rows of side benches, like the one I'm at now, that actually have modem ports for laptop users, which is way cool if you ask me (OK, an Ethernet connection would be cooler, but way harder to do securely, so points for doing things correctly). I have no idea if I'll be serving or not, although I suspect there's a myriad reasons not to take me, particularly from the prosecution's point of view. Like having been arrested during the 1992 Rodney King verdict protest marches and a history of anarchist politics, just off the top of my head. But maybe they won't get to that; it's nice to have the day off work at least.

(Note: Get to Jury Duty a half-hour early to avoid some seriously long lines. I'm now really glad I was paranoid about how long the bus would take.)

Diane & I painted the shelves in the garage this past weekend, freshening it up for probably the only time before we move. But once the shelves dry we can really use them to put stuff on. I've always used the phrase "I'm gonna go paint the garage" as a joke to indicate one has a bit too much energy, but I know that really it implies I'd like to get covered in paint, raw chapped hands, pull spiders from the brush, and come face to face with the fact that, when you come right down to it, I'm a really crappy painter.

Gosh, what is there to say about this movie. I think it was kind of funny. It wasn't totally predictable. I didn't flee the theater in terror. That's about as positive as I can afford to be without opening myself up to legal charges of delibrate deception. The things you do when you're married...

It's a Friday night and Diane's in Buffalo, NY on business. I've managed to escape my near-obsessive video game playing. I'm sitting in a cafe (Simple Pleasures, on Balboa between 35th and 36th Ave.), trying to mostly not listen to the folk duo that's playing here, and it's putting me into a contemplative mood.

So work at Harmonic Communications (that's the official name, apparently) is proceeding apace, mostly cranking through the last bugs; we could be less than a week away from our first actual honest-to-gosh release. Back in July 2000, when the company was just squatting in some office space that Sequoia (our lead VC) wasn't using, there was a little courtyard with a table, where i would sit in the gorgeous Silicon Valley sun and write out ideas about what the system could be like. In truth, the system we've written probably bears little resemblance to what I described then, but those notes scribbled into a yellow pad may, at least, have helped people to define what it was they really did want. We'll find out soon, because once we release, we're anxiously and somewhat nervously awaiting the reactions of our users (who are also our co-workers).

Diane and I are well. We've both been busy, which is hardly an original way to be these days, I admit, but that's what we are. So we haven't really unpacked as much as we should have. We are tired, tired, tired. The thing with Aunt Minnie is by no means done (she's in a bed and care home for now), so the opportunity for us to just cocoon and work on our stuff isn't really here yet. But we're together, and we try to focus on each other to the extent that our responsibilities allow us to. I'd have a lot more time if I could knock off the video game playing (that immediate gratification is hard to lick, though), and I plan on taking off a few days once we ship the darn product. I've got lots of little projects on the computer I'd love to work on, and at the same time I'd like to get away from the wretched machine for a while and get some much-needed exercise, peace, and serenity.

So I know what i want to do, but as we say in the Valley, execution is the key. We're trying.

Yes, it's another bachelor week for Mahlen, as Diane has two, count 'em (one) (two), two work-related conferences this week, one in Santa Clara and one in Buffalo NY. If i can peel myself away from Team Fortress Classic, which i really need to do to save my poor aching hands, then I'll either unpack, hang out it cafe's, work late, or do nerd projects at home. Place your bets, gentlemen...

Still in Noon's alternative Manchester, England, this is a collection of ~50 short stories (some just two pages), many of which obliquely refer to each other in "ohhhhh" sorts of ways. Some of the pieces, are in fact, "dub" versions of the previous story, short poems based on the ideas of the longer work. Sort of fun, though not as compelling as his longer works.

Another thin smattering of oddness from British science fiction author Jeff Noon. This book leaves the alternative Manchester that he fleshed out in his previous Vurt and Nymphomation, and presents itself as the output of a computer program that can mix/blend/purify/morph text in variously strange ways. It doesn't read like a narrative; it's like reading draft versions in the creation of a really odd poem. Hard to recommend (and hard to find), but interesting in it's own way.

A mind-bending "hard" science fiction book about the sentient computer programs that used to be people, and what they discover when the last "fleshers" left on earth are threatened with extinction. Egan takes you pretty far, and then when he gets there, he goes a lot farther, constantly squaring the removal from our everyday reality, and yet it continues to work. An author I'll keep an eye on. I heard about this book from someone on kuro5hin.org, one of my favorite web-based discussion sites on technology and culture.

It's been a wet windy day here at the house, with whistling winds whipping against my window here in the west-facing office. In fact, it's been pretty universally wet the last few weeks, enough that Diane and I haven't really been able to (well, wanted to) take advantage of the fact that we're so close to the beach and several parks. Nope, we've just been huddled in the house, enjoying the very effective central heat, and recovering from some hectic weeks. We even had a little fire in the fireplace last nice, with one of those weird artificial logs. Still not really unpacked, and not really in a big hurry...

On Sunday, Diane's ancient TV finally appeared to give up the ghost, refusing to turn on. Truth be told, we'd been looking for an excuse to give up her old thing, with the dials that you get up and turn and the crappy reception and all. So I looked up new TV's on Consumer Reports Online, and found that TV's are a hell of a lot bigger than they used to be; 27 diagonal inches was the smallest size they reviewed. I went for the JVC AV-27D201, which is now sitting proudly in our bedroom, bathing us with big beautiful full-bodied color.

As it turned out, the old TV now mysteriously works again, but there's no way we'd go back to it; even one evening has ruined us. I'm throwing out all our books this weekend; who needs those dusty old things when there's so many episodes of "Friends" to watch?

We spent much of the weekend unpacking and arranging things (including, natch, this computer), although the question, "Hey, babe, where's that (fill in the blank) that we had on the table?" is still most frequently answered by a blank stare into space and then a "Hmmmm..." that goes nowhere positive. Of course, staring into space and humming is a hobby and professional hazard of mine, so maybe not that telling. Still, we are starting to really enjoy and appreciate the place. It has much better natural light, hardwood floors, central heat that really works, a big yard for the cats to gingerly explore, and so on. Yesterday, while waiting for the DSL line to go in, I signed our first mortgage check, and I had a palpable sense of, yea my brother, pride of ownership and accomplishment, as well as a tinge of, "I could buy a slick new computer for that much money." With that check, I think I may have purchased the space taken up by the toilet; well, maybe the toilet paper holder. Anyway, that sucker belongs to us!

Not surprisingly, while this site was down during our move, Diane and I were amazingly busy; so busy, in fact, that if the site had been up, I probably wouldn't have had time to tell you the news anyway. But I'm now on a slow 38 bus to work, so pull up a chair, light up a stogie, and set with me a spell.

So, when last you heard from me, we were in the midst of packing our big/heavy/fragile things. On a Friday, Diane led two movers and went all out for 8.5 hours, sort of a Hail Mary play of moving; even the mover guys, people who are paid to be strong, were tired by the end of it. So, the lovely Diane, exhausted by her labors, bids the movers adieu, and sits down to rest when, brrring, the phone rings. Is it Mahlen to offer his heartfelt congrats? No, it's a neighbor of Diane's maiden Aunt Minnie, who apparently has been in a hospital in Walnut Creek since Tuesday after a bad fall (breaking nothing, happily), possibly due to a small heart attack or stroke. Minnie had forgotten that Diane had not changed her last name when she got married, and so had been telling the staff to look in San Francisco for her niece named Diane Mahl. This neighbor had finally thought to look at Minnie's Christmas card, and it was only because I had neglected to unlist Diane's number whne we moved that she had found us.

So, Diane exhausted as she is, gets the whole (slightly exaggerated and sensationalized) story from the neighbor, and then, beat as she is, goes to Walnut Creek with me to see Aunt Min. All things considered, Minnie's doing fairly well, although now realizing that living by herself is no longer tenable (she's deeply in that keep-everything stage that people can get into).

So, that weekend (and all the next week, for that matter), as I continued to pack up and move stuff from the old apartment, Diane drove like crazy around the Bay Area, visiting Minnie's home in Napa, the hospital in Walnut Creek, Minnie's accountant in Napa, and so on, in a nearly endless loop of activity, and not really fun activity, either, ya know. She tired.

It appears that the DSL line is now up and running, that the world's DNS services have re-calibrated to the new address, and that all is right with the world. Uh, that is, that mahlen.org is back online. Rejoice, brave Romans, rejoice and make merry!

On Saturday, Diane's friend Cathy (sp?) very generously came over with her truck and the three of us moved stuff for several hours before having dinner at India Clay Oven. That put us over the edge in terms of moving; I'd say it would now be more work to move our stuff back to the apartment (not that this was really an option or anything). The apartment is defininately looking less full and less ours, and the house is looking like some place we'd live in.

Sunday Diane and I were so sore and tired from Saturday that we weren't really able to do much more. But this week I'm sure we'll be packing the barely justifiable "why do we have this?" stuff, as well as the daily essentials.

We've spent the last couple weekends packing stuff and moving it to our new home; the big/heavy/fragile stuff will go there in a couple weeks, and Diane and I and the cats will follow. We're sore and busy and cranky all weekend long, but we're surviving. You know you've been moving when you find you have a favorite kind of cardboard box (those banker boxes with the removable lids and handles, FYI).

I've now arranged for our new DSL line to go up at our new home; however, the line won't be installed until February 20th. While I'm not disconecting this computer for a little while, don't be terribly surprised if the site goes dark for a while before and around that date. We'll try not to do anything too interesting in the interregnum.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, they make you strange. I've updated the Find Mahlen page to include not only our new address and telephone number (of course, we haven't moved in yet, so don't expect us to answer the phone), but also with the fact that my employer, the mighty Yalta Communications, has changed it's name to Harmonic Corporation. Are you with me folks? No? OK, I'll stand here and wait until you're ready...

This is Bronson's novel of Silicon Valley (before the Web boom was in full swing), a place he covers later in non-fiction in The Nudist on the Late Shift. Bronson is an interesting observer of Silicon Valley life; unlike most, he's not especially dazzled by the large amounts of money on the table or the huge egos involved. Instead he seems interested in the people who do the work, why they do this unusual work, and what the work does to them, how it shapes the way they look at the world. He also, again unusually, refuses to make fun of or point and sneer at the denizens of the Valley. He treats his fat, socially inept characters as kindly and accurately as he does his more physically appealing (although usually more ethically ambiguous) characters.

The novel revolves around the intrigues at a cutting edge microchip design lab, the rather Machievellian plotting of a couple of it's members, and that urge to strike out on one's own in a new company. While I can't say that the novel's tone much resembles any of my past jobs in the software industry, I don't have a hard time believing that such things do go on, and Bronson does capture the sense, emotions and purpose of Valley people. I thought Nudist on the Late Shift captured the reality of the valley better, but that this novel captures the high drama.

Financing is done, the old furniture is out, the title is cleared, and as of last night, the keys are now in our hands. We own a house. A house. Our house. I'm just getting used to the phrase, bear with me. I have to work around the house. Mortgage payment. Renovation. Home Depot. Power Tools!

This is an excellent, excellent book. I'm really glad i read it, especially now, just before we move into our new house, because it sparked off all sorts of thinking in me about the nature of places and buildings and the co-evolution between a building and its occupants. The book is about how buildings change over time, and which ones do so easily, and which ones don't. It covers a myriad of topics, from the ghastly failures of modern architecture to the appeal of buildings where no one cares about the appearence of the place, so they can be adjusted to people's needs very quickly. It was the latter point that inspired me to make our new garage a "shop" for us to use for messy long-term projects as well as storage for supplies and so forth. This means that I have now come full circle; yes, I am now my father.

This book doesn't look like much when you flip through it, but I finished it wanting to read half the books on it's recommended reading list. I heartily recommend it as one of the best books I've read in the last year.

Diane and I spent New Years Eve morning at a, for us, romantic restaurant at Haight near Masonic, the Cajun-themed diner called Crescent City Cafe. When we were first dating she and I would spend all weekend at her house, but I would be compelled to come back home to 1272 Page Street every 48 hours or so in order to feed the cats (Pooky and Lucy, for those new to our game), and Crescent City was by far our favorite place to go on our Sunday afternoons in the Haight. While it hasn't changed much (except for no more pink lemonade!), the crowd has and so has the Haight. Coming back after a couple years away makes the economic shifts in S.F. much more starkly lit. The Haight really does seem to have lost it's gritty edge and street flavor; this feeling was emphasized by the fact that the streets and clothing stores (the book and record shops are largely gone) were packed with people shopping for New Years Eve outfits to wear to their fabulous whatever-they-were-doings that night. Even when i lived there the weekend bridge-and-tunnel invasion inspired a "Thanks for coming to the Haight and spending money, now get the hell out" feeling in me; except now I'm the one coming in from out of, well, the area anyway.

So, we did do some shopping there; I bought a nice pair of pants with lots of pockets and a long-sleeved shirt with a cool graphic of the numbers from -20 to 20 with the word "Integers" on it, both at a store called True. The clothing, which appears to come from a hip-hop/urban/Black milieu, is curiously themed around images from math and science and Skylab, of all things. Unexplainable, to me, but fun for a died-in-the-wool math geek like me.

We wandered around the Haight for a while, but it was getting crazy crowded with desperate last-minute shoppers, so we went home and napped. But we took the bus down to the Metreon to see the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", which I'll review later, but it basically kicked our butts up and down the block. Then we emerged, just after midnight on the morning of 01-01-01 to utter street chaos, as thousands of people were leaving the area after watching the fireworks end, all of them going in the direction opposite from us. We got on a late running and free 31 Balboa bus, and were greeted by sustained hoots and hollering from a small group of overly and overtly festive people who cheered whenever anyone got on or off. Pretty soon they had Diane festooned with paper glasses and noisemakers and glowing tubes, and she was one of them, hooting in harmony. A very cool New Years Eve.

This is one kick-ass movie, one that is almost custom made for Diane and me to love. One of our favorite genres of films are Chinese historical tear-jerkers, movies like Raise the Red Lantern or The Emperor and The Assassin. But we also love modern martial arts movies like Jet Li's Romeo Must Die or any of the many Jackie Chan movies. Crouching Tiger is a fantastic combination of those genres, full of luscious looking antiques and insanely fast sword play. It's funny, it's sad, it's jaw-dropping incredible; a great way for us to end the year 2000.

Well, the actual official like big-money type loan for the house has been applied for, so it looks like this house thing is happening for sure! In honor of that fact, I've posted a few photos of the front of the place (we don't have keys yet, and we didn't feel like weirding out our neighbors just yet by peering into windows and such). Doesn't look like much from the front, but it'll look like home to us soon. Ahhhhh.....

We had a pleasant little Christmas this year. Diane and I went over to my parents house in Orinda early Monday morning (we were actually there pretty early for us, given our unhealthy love for sleeping in). I suspect that soon it will get very difficult to "start Christmas" that late, given that our nephew Kyle will soon be old enough to anticipate the gifts that he'll get on Christmas. My parents as well as my brother Clark and his wife Jill and the aforementioned Kyle were all there; Kyle, however, was the only one preoccupied by the task of lining up toy cars on the floor over and over again. Clark's old friend Rick also joined us for dinner (really a British-style high tea), and brought his motley assemblage of puns.

There were a lot of presents under the tree, oh, well, there was no tree this year, so, in the area where there is usually a tree, a lot of presents were there. Diane got me a new bathrobe (I'd noticed that the old one was in the trash that morning) and some fuzzy warm sheepskin slippers. On the gadget front, she also gave me a Casio Wrist Audio Player, a watch that is also an MP3 music player. I'm busily figuring out how to play old This American Life episodes on it. We gave Clark and Jill our old Palm III that Diane had used (I got her a Palm Vx recently). And lest you think that only what i get is of interest to me, I'll point out that I gave to Diane a very supple leather jacket from Santa Fe and a new bracelet.

I played Santa this year (i.e., i transported toys from the "tree" to the people they were intended for). It was really fun to hang out with the family and yet have something concrete to do. It seems to be a cultural given that Christmas is a stressful time when one is tortured by ones relatives, but I have to say, that isn't the case for me.