Monkeytreats

If you follow stocks and business news at all, you gradually develop a limited understanding of corporate metrics. EBITDA, ROI, etc…all just different ways to measure how a corporation has performed historically or is likely to perform in the future. Some are more esoteric than others, and there’s debate amongst analyst-types about which ones really are useful and accurate.

In my opinion, there are only two important yardsticks for any corporation or corporate decision:

1. How evil is it?
2. How stupid is it?

The logic here is that corporations do evil things sometimes, and they do stupid things sometimes, and sometimes they do evil, stupid things. The goal would be to not do evil, and not to be stupid, and in particular not to be stupidly evil.

Allow me to provide some examples to help illustrate the point.

Enron: Evil, not stupid. Enron made money hand over demonic fist by completely discarding ethics and common decency. So, if you look at it in a Machiavellian sort of way, they were quite clever, but so evil that it boggles the mind.

Microsoft: Evil, not stupid. MS has had a growing stranglehold on the computer industry for 15 years, and have done plenty of evil things to get there. How do they sleep at night? “On a bed of money, surrounded by many beautiful women.”

Ion Storm: Not evil, but stupid. They blew a staggering amount of money developing their games, and wrote hype checks that their product couldn’t cash.

SCO: Evil AND stupid. They initiated a slimy and questionable legal action against the supporters of a free product that has contributed enormous value to the public domain. Their reputation was tarnished forever. They are now losing customers like mad, partly due to the rising tide of disgust over their actions, and partly due to customer concern over the continuing viability of the company, given their increasing legal fees and dwindling revenues.

The preferred method of applying the Stupid vs. Evil metric is to give the corporation or corporate decision a Stupid score from 1 to 100, an Evil score from 1 to 100, and then plot those scores on a graph with a vertical axis of Stupid and a horizontal axis of Evil.

The goal is to be as close to the lower-left-hand corner as possible. If you’re in the upper right…

I’m not much of a business guy, but I’ve worked corporate jobs for the last nine years, and gradually some awareness of how corporations work has filtered through my protective force-field of disinterest.

It cracks me up to read stock boards and watch some day-trader in Nebraska try to figure out where a corporation is headed based on the few hazy nuggets of information that he can get from the news. It’s sort of like the old joke about the three blind men and the elephant—you can see how they got to their conclusion, but it’s just ludicrously wrong.

The thing that I think is really interesting is just how often the prognosticators will overestimate the company’s abilities and plans, rather than underestimate. I suppose that at certain companies, for certain bounded periods of time, they are able to execute phenomenally well, surprise everyone, and keep it all secret. In general, though, even reasonably nimble corporations stagger along, work inefficiently, execute poorly, and succeed in the end through a combination of:

1. blind luck
2. sheer brute force of resources
3. competitors that are similarly inept.

I’m not saying this is the case all the time, but it certainly is the case plenty of the time.

I personally had an experience, early in my career, where the company that I worked for was “caught” collecting data that could be tied to an individual user, without notifying them that this data was being collected. There was much outrage among our users and in the press, and quite justifiably so. It appeared that we had some nefarious corporate strategy to build up dossiers on our users, Big Brother-like, and use it for God knows what evil purpose.

The thing was, the probable reason that we were collecting that data was that some naive program manager had been working on a spec, and thought, “Hey, we should collect this data, that would be useful.” The feature was granular enough and buried deeply enough that it probably never went through executive review. The developers were probably too overworked to spend any time thinking about the ramifications of what they were building. In the end, I would be surprised if anyone had ever even taken the time to look at the data.

In other words, this was not a corporate strategy, there were no plans to do anything nasty with the data, and probably no one even knew that it was there to look at. Once the story hits the media, though, nobody is going to believe that. There is no way for a corporation to prove its intent.

So in the end, we looked like huge evil assholes, when what we’d made was an dumbass mistake.

I should clarify that I don’t intend this to be an apologia for my company; I’m specifically not using its name to avoid that. Generally, I think people are right to assume the worst of corporations, because there are plenty of examples of corporations doing truly vile things.

It’s just sort of a bemusing situation when you know that you’re not evil, but you have absolutely no way to prove that to anybody.

And this leads me to my next post…

I’ve almost worked my way through the entire box set at this point. Really interesting to watch the NO CARRIER segment (about the decline of the BBS and the post-BBS era) and hear a lot of the interviewees say the same things that I was musing about a couple of posts back.

There are a lot of ways in which the Internet is a superior communications technology to the BBS. There are a few BBS strengths that the Internet can’t duplicate yet, though:

1. Location restrictions (i.e. local calling areas) meant that it was possible for you to meet every person you were communicating with face-to-face
2. A focus on public messages made it an interactive medium, rather than a passive one like TV
3. The relative inaccessibility of the medium made you feel like you were part of a secret club—there was this dimension to your life that most people didn’t have

Blogging seems like the closest Internet analogue, particularly if you’re somehow aware of bloggers that are proximate to you in the real world (via geourl, or just tribal knowledge). It still doesn’t have that sense of place, though. A blog feels like a local newspaper, whereas a BBS felt like a treehouse in someone’s backyard.

What if I ran Citadel…on a Nokia 770??

Riddle me that!

Obviously I’ve stayed up too late. Move along, nothing to see here.

I’m continuing to work my way through BBS: The Documentary. When I first read about the project, I thought it was sort of a goofy approach. A bunch of video interviews just didn’t seem like the right medium for discussing a community that was completely built from text.

My opinion on that has spun 180 degrees, though. Not only are the interviews an absolute treasure trove of information, an oral history that would have vanished if nobody had bothered to document it, they also add an in-person human element that was always there on the BBSes. Even if you never went to a Get Together, never met the other dorks that you talked to every day, there was still a real human face on the other end of the line. Probably the face of a flabby white guy between the ages of 14 and 34, but hey, that was how it was.

The movie is inspiring me quite a bit, and I keep having all these goofy ideas for projects flit through my head, these weirdly anachronistic ideas that would take that kind of dated-tech, very personal, home-brew duct-taped sort of model and shim it into the 21st century.

The one I keep coming back to, even though it’s completely impractical and a throwback rather than an evolution, is—what if I wrote a BBS in Python for Series 60, and ran it on my mobile phone? People could call it up, it’d ring in my pocket, they could leave text messages on it that other people could read…

Yes, it’s 95% retarded, but 5% awesome, no?

Well, guess I’m 31 now. How about that. 31derful years, if you feel like getting all Baskin-Robbinsy about it.

I’m continuing to work my way through BBS: The Documentary. It’s really interesting to think about how much that particular piece of technology influenced my life—I hadn’t really considered it before. I don’t think there’s any way in hell I’d be in the industry I’m in if it weren’t for the BBS fascination I developed in junior high.

There’s a woman I met in Italy, who I’ve been friends with for years now. I remember she told me (this was circa 1995) that she didn’t use the Internet much because she thought it isolated people. I thought that was bullshit then…not sure I’d say the same now.

Maybe it’s just a time of life thing, I don’t know. I was pretty actively nerdily social when I was in junior high and obsessively logging on to boards. These days I barely manage to keep in contact with my friends via email, when email is so much more centralized and simple. Back then I’d log onto a given board several times a day, maybe exchange several messages back and forth with each of dozen people. Now I just talk to people at work, and there’s very little time for anything that’s not directly task-related.

I guess the thing about BBSes is that it really felt that you were part of a group conversation. It was a small town, everyone had a sense of each other’s personality, everyone was on the same level. Now it’s more like reading, or watching TV. There are a very few people who generate content and information, which is consumed by a huge and far-flung group of people. The content generators are elevated to a certain level of nerdy celebrity, and the people who read what they write are completely invisible.

At their best, I think that blogs and the Web provide a similar sort of discourse to what there was in Newton’s time; the best minds of the day responding to each other in published essays, shoring up or dissecting each others’ ideas. A great deal of valuable understanding can come out of that sort of information environment.

It’s not a conversation, though, and it’s not much of a way to bring people together. There is no sense of place. The group isn’t small enough for everyone to contribute, and so most people just disappear.

So how do we fix this? Is there a technological or procedural solution? How do you have a community when the population is so large?

Am I just being overly nostalgic for a particular piece of technology that popped up during my formative years? Was it just that it was such a revolutionary thing, whereas the Internet technologies that replaced it seem like an evolutionary improvement? Was it the location-based nature of the beast, whereas the Internet has no geographic boundaries?

Hard to know.

Finally got around to watching the first disc of BBS: The Documentary. I ordered it when it came out, got all excited about it, and then let it languish unopened in my basement for weeks.

What a strange little piece of history, and all the more strange because I lived through a chunk of it and had somehow managed to almost completely forget about it. When I ordered the discs, I went digging around the net to see if I could find out anything about the old Seattle-area boards I used to call, particularly any of the old Citadels.

Much to my surprise, there was still one running (Slumberland BBS), and it had been hooked up to the Internet via telnet. I logged in as a new user, using the handle I used when I was fourteen, and was staggered to find that there were some people on there who I remembered, and that they remembered me too.

The BBS was such a different kind of online community. I mean, it had a lot of the same sorts of issues, what with relative anonymity and 12-year-olds running rampant, but it had a much more personal feel, much more of a sense of place. If you were logged in to a BBS, nobody else could log in until you disconnected–you had it all to yourself. On the other hand, the sysop could sit at the console and watch everything you were typing.

It was so much more concrete, somehow. Obviously there are enormous advantages to being able to connect to any node on the Internet simultaneously with anyone else who feels like connecting to that node, but there was something nice about that tangibility.

There are so many groups and businesses trying so hard these days to build communities on the Web, and there’s so much money being channeled into solving that problem. I wonder what lessons could be learned from the BBS model?

You always remember where you were when a huge historic event happens. People say that about JFK’s assassination; I was trying to think of what events in my lifetime have had a similar effect on me. You might be amused by what events seemed important enough to my subconscious to merit a permanent place in time, space, and memory.

I was watching a Saturday morning cartoon starring Godzilla when Reagan was shot. I must have been about six, maybe seven. I remember being pissed, because the episode I was watching was the best one yet, and they preempted it to deliver the news. They finally went back to the cartoon—just as the credits rolled. I couldn’t figure out who the hell thought that the assassination of the President of the United States was more important than Godzilla.

In sixth grade, I came in from recess briefly to get something out of my desk. As I was walking into the building, Jon Nichols stopped me and said that the Challenger had exploded. I thought he was pulling some kind of practical joke on me, and spent a few long moments trying to figure out why he’d make that particular story up. This is the first time that I can remember the feeling of disbelief in the face of tragedy.

Doom 2 arrived at the Carleton post office just before my Anthropology 110 class. I remember desperately wanting to skip class, but at the time I was failing it quite badly and couldn’t quite muster up the bravery. I would ultimately squeeze out a B by writing an accidentally brilliant term paper over two days without doing a rough draft, but I had no idea that that was in the cards. I walked into class with the box under my arm and three guys looked up and said, roughly paraphrased, “Shit, Doom 2 is out? Where’d you get it? Why the hell aren’t you skipping class?”

I remember when Quake finally shipped. I had just graduated college and was still living on-campus, doing summer theater, not working, just enjoying myself and delaying the inevitable transition to being a grownup and moving away from everyone I loved. My roommate Clark worked in the post office, and he called me at 6AM to let me know that it had arrived. I’d just gone to bed around 4AM, but he knew that I would get up for this. I staggered bleary-eyed across campus to get the package, went back and locked myself in my room to play. Twelve hours later, I came out for dinner, and I was almost completely unable to communicate with other human beings—something about the combination of game immersion and sleep deprivation, I’m not sure what exactly.

I remember meeting Laurel. She came into the theater with two other people that I knew and sat down right in front of me. I introduced myself, she said hello, turned around and didn’t say another word. I had no idea how significant we’d end up being to each other.

So there you have it. A presidential assassination, a Space Shuttle disaster, two video games, and meeting my sweetie. I knew I was a dork, but I never realized quite to what extent.

Just finished reading Masters of Doom, by David Kushner. Great book. As one of the many who has followed iD since the Doom/Keen days, it was a great nostalgic trip for me, as well as serving to connect a lot of dots that I hadn’t been able to before.

It’s a great historical document, too. The Doom/Quake/Half-Life era was really a revolutionary period in computer gaming. It blows my mind to think of the amount of money and time I spent trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of my computer in those days. At the time, 30 frames per second felt like the sound barrier, like the threshold of heaven.

Seems like it’d be similarly interesting to have a history of 3D acceleration in the same time period, although I suppose it’d be drier, given that the topic probably lacks the human element and is irreducibly technical.

God, I remember when my first 3dfx card arrived in the mail. I was just out of college, living with my parents, unemployed, had no clue what I was going to do with my life, and was burning through savings like mad buying new hardware so that I could ignore what a shitty situation I was in.

I remember plugging the card into an open PCI slot, running a passthrough cable from my Matrox Mystique into the 3dfx so that the 3dfx could take over all the 3D rendering, and firing up Tomb Raider. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, it looked so incredibly real. I’m sure now it’d look chunky and choppy and crappy as hell, but at the time it was breathtaking. Then I got ahold of GLQuake, and I was completely sucked in, playing until 6am a lot of nights over my parents’ 56K connection. Was it even 56K? Maybe it was 28.8, or slower.

Doom really was the earth-shattering game, though. Even though it was visually sort of a hack, lacking true 3D environments, it was miles more real than anything we’d seen before. Its immersiveness bred obsessive replay, which bred familiarity, which bred deeper immersiveness. I knew those levels better than I knew my own dorm; I had a perfect mental model constructed in my memory, total situational awareness. I don’t think any game since has had quite the same hold on me, although I’ve certainly played some of them to death.

I’ve found that the kind of cooking I get really excited about is the Big Project style of cooking. Not in the sense of doing something really elaborate and sophisticated that looks pretty on the plate, but rather in the sense of doing something that takes a hell of a long time to cook. It’s a lot of fun to cook like this, because it makes the meal feel really special and there’s a lot of technique to learn, but it’s not too practical in day-to-day living.

Homemade pasta was the first thing I got interested in this way; there’s something weirdly satisfying about spending a couple of hours combining flour and eggs to make something that you can normally only get if you open a factory-sealed bag. Fresh pasta has a texture you just can’t get with factory-made. Al dente has a whole different meaning.

Gumbo’s another. All that roux and Trinity and everything takes a good long time to put together, and if you do it right (I still haven’t quite got the hang of it) it’s sublime.

More and more, though, I’m finding that barbecue really satisfies that cooking project urge that I get. Brisket in particular scratches that itch. There’s just something so great about taking an inedible piece of meat and transmuting it into Holy Food by smearing spices on it and cooking it for 14 hours.

14 hours is a damn inconvenient amount of time to spend tweaking the vents on a smoker, though. Particularly considering that if you want to have it for dinner, you need to get it on the heat somewhere before 4 AM and monitor it for most of a day. So it’s pretty great to have a few quick-smoke recipes in your back pocket that you can pull out when you want to smoke, but you can’t plan two days in advance.

The current favorite quick smokes in our house are smokeburgers and chicken snaps.

Smokeburgers are so good I can’t believe I’d never had them before this year. Grilled burgers suck by comparison—the patties have to be really thin or they won’t cook well, and they tend to dry out during cooking. By contrast, you can pat together an incredibly thick burger patty (1” or so), smoke it for an hour, and it’ll be cooked all the way through but still be super-moist and nicely smoky to boot.

Chicken snaps are just little slices of chicken breast that you put a dry rub on for 20 minutes and then slap in the smoker. They cook in 30-45 minutes and taste fantastic, although given how lean they are, there’s more of a tendency to dry out.

It’s possible to prepare a really tasty meal in about 90 minutes total with these two recipes, and they really couldn’t be much simpler.