The night Microsoft died

I'm sure every other blogger on the 'net has written about how stupid Jerry Yang is. I know there was a shareholder lawsuit in the works before the board voted. I'm going to stick my neck out here and opine that Microsoft needed Yahoo! more than Yahoo! needed Microsoft, and that Ballmer et al are the ones who blinked, or worse, didn't get it.

Does anyone on this lovely little Earth actually think that Microsoft sans Bill Gates is going to be more than, say, DEC without Ken Olsen? Everyone who thinks Ray Ozzie is going to lead Microsoft into the next generation of greatness raise their lower left tentacles.

Microsoft has been desperately trying to get "online" for 13 years now, and so far has flopped at everything they touch. Even the things they do well in the product world tend to suck in the online world. They just can't grasp the whole essence of "less is more." For a funny example of what I mean, see this funny video.

Only time will tell, and I don't think the road ahead is going to be all that pretty for Yahoo! The descriptions I hear of the company, from both inside and out, tell of a company bloated with competing divisions, layers of useless competing management, and money and talent and energy wasted on many things that don't get used by customers or generate revenue, but Yahoo! is still one of the bellweathers of what the Internet is becoming. Yahoo! shop sites are one of the easiest ways of creating an Internet business and they have thousands and thousands of them. Their expertise in Internet marketing, aka "banner ads," is so great that even Google pairs with them in this area.

Microsoft, by comparison, has their hapless MSDN and utterly useless Windows Live non-brands. They just keep missing the whole Internet revolution, watching it pass them by. Rots of ruck, guys.

Drink, drank, drunk

Today at work, the subject of drinking came up. One of the conversants asked me "You're not a drinker, are you? You seem like the drinking type..."

Hmm...

I'm not sure how to take that. I think he meant it in the "you're not a stick in the mud, and seem to like to have fun" type. On the other hand, maybe he meant I'd be a lot more interesting with a couple of stiff belts in me. So I bored him with the story of why I quit drinking in the first place. Take that!

I had been crewing on a J/35 that summer, racing my with good friend and boat pusher Joe Housely. (This was Joe's second J/35, Epidemic, purchased as a rebound from the trauma of selling his first J/35 Contagious. Joe, you see, had a terrible case of the sailing disease, so bad he regularly tried to spread it to other people by being the chief sales guy at the local J/Boats dealer.) Yes, this is the same Joe Housely who years earlier convinced me to squander a large chunk of my newly graduated salary on a J/22, my first true love dJinni.

So anyhow, the sailing season is finished, we've just finished (badly) in the second race on Sunday and are headed to shore. Wind was scarce that day, with the finish mark placed way out on the lake. Nobody was patient enough to ghost back in, so we folded the sails and cranked up the "cast iron spinnaker" and were motoring back in when Joe brought out a bottle of Cuervo Gold 1800. Ah, my old friend Jose. We passed the bottle around the cockpit twice, even his 16-year-old daughter Carrie took a couple of hits off the bottle. No worries about spreading diseases when you're drinking high-quality antiseptics, right?

After the second round, Joe said something to the tune of "we need some real drinks" and led the entire crew below to mix gin and tonics. To my surprise, Carrie went with them. I knew Karen wasn't going to let her drink anymore, and Carrie had a little bit of a crush on me, so I was surprised she left. I found myself standing on the tiny little poop deck at the stern of the boat, leaning against the pulpit rail and steering with my toes, holding the bottle of tequila a little less than half full.

I contemplated Jose for a minute, and then took a good, long swallow. A few more and the bottle was gone. The warmth of the tequila competed with the warmth of the sun. The boat was behaving well, J/35s tend to buck a little while motoring, but we were taking it easy to keep the sound down in the cabin, so I wasn't really paying much attention to the boat or myself or anything else and then...

Splash!

I fell off the back of the boat.

I was feeling no pain.

The water was warm, and it's pretty hard to get very wet in the Great Salt Lake. Really. I just laid back and floated and paddled a bit and got really comfy.

Epidemic motored merrily away, moving much faster than I could possibly swim, even if I was trying. I wasn't.

We were three, maybe three and a half miles out. Antelope Island lay 7 or more nautical miles to the north. Both were well beyond my range, even if I was trying, though it really is hard to drown in the Great Salt Lake. Maybe I would have made it to shore before I got sunburned to death. Probably. But I wasn't trying.

Fortunately, the wind was so light and the surface of the lake so glassy, when the boat started turning of her own accord a few minutes later, Joe got upset with the change in course and bellowed up to ask me why we were turning. When I didn't answer, he sent somebody to check out why. I imagine they were quite surprised to find the cockpit empty, helm hard over, and Epidemic circling back as if to find me on her own.

Whoever it was screamed those famous words "Man Overboard!" bringing the drunken rest of them up onto deck. Joe, calm in a storm even with a few G&Ts in him, realized he could follow the bubble trail from the prop and exhaust, and at least get closer to where I was. Some time later, somebody spotted something in the water (too small to be a whale, to big to be a brine shrimp) that turned out to be me, they motored up, paused, and Joe dropped the swim ladder into the water.

I climbed back into the boat with some reluctance, and probably a bit of staggering, to the universal derision of the rest of the crew, still gripping Jose by the neck. Joe asked how much I had wasted, and I quickly reported "None!" No wonder, huh?

Back on shore, I hosed off the salt, went back to my own little boat, and slumped into the cabin. I was smart enough to realize I wasn't in any condition to drive, so I huddled in my little dJinni and sobered up. Late that night, I woke up with a splitting headache, drove to the nearest place to get some food, and gorged myself on ham sandwiches, ibuprofen, and Mountain Dew, then drove home.

The next night, back at home, my brother asked me where I'd been. We were sharing an apartment in Salt Lake City at the time and it was unusual -- as in never happened before -- for me to stay out all night. I told him about my visit with Jose and the brine shrimp and he opined "You really are a dumbass, aren't you?"

I guess I hadn't really contemplated the enormity of what I'd done before then, but yeah, looking back on it, it was pretty stupid. Falling off a boat miles from shore is no laughing matter, doing it with nobody else on deck even worse. It turned out well not because anybody did anything right, but just because the weather was so benign.

After this little episode, I became much more reluctant to drink to excess, and was never much of a social drinker. In the next year or so, I realized that drinking just didn't fit my life anymore. Giving up drinking was one of the easiest things I ever did.

Like my Father

Last week my wife and I were asked to talk in Church. It wasn't necessarily a good time for us, but our wonderful Bishop thought it might help us to contemplate the assigned topic, "To Be Like Him." The Him in the subject was, of course, Jesus Christ, but I always like to open a talk with a story from my life that helps me personalize the message. When I thought about this topic, one event leaped immediately to mind to illustrate this point. I'd like to record it here, too.

The summer before my 24th birthday was a great time for me. I was living in Seattle, doing work I thought was very important, and doing pretty well at it. It was a job others considered difficult, though it seemed custom-made for me at the time. I was working at a testing lab inside a facility owned by Boeing, working for another company on a big government program. I had a daylight basement apartment in a beautiful house on the shore of Lake Washington, with a dock 20 steps from my front door where my sailboat was tied.

I worked the night shift at the Boeing lab, 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. At 7, when our shift ended, my co-workers and I would clear our workspaces, return to the office, then go to breakfast in the Boeing cafeteria. After breakfast, we would return to the office, finish our paperwork for the day, handle the beginning of the day's email traffic, then leave for home, a 10-minute drive for me.

Returning to my apartment, I would leave a trail of clothes as I passed through the house. I would find a pair of shorts to wear, grab my sailing bag, and head for the boat. Slipping away from the dock was the best part of my day, something I did nearly every day. Normally I would sail until I was too tired to continue, then pull into home or one of the many lakeside parks that surround Lake Washington. Once safely tied up, I would fold the mainsail over the small cabin on my boat, crawl into the tiny V-berth below, and go to sleep, using a sail bag or a life preserver as a pillow. Later, when the sun sank low on the horizon, I would wake from the change in the light, motor or sail home, shower, and start my day. I was an idyllic existence for me.

On this particular day, my usual plans were foiled by a lack of wind. It was a hot summer for Seattle. I sat and bobbed with the sails flopping for a half hour before I gave up and folded them, staring at the end of my dock only a few hundred yards away. After realizing I wasn't ready to go back to my empty aparment or the loud rock band practicing in the garage next door, I scrounged in my tiny cabin and came up with a bucket, scrub brush, and bottle of boat soap.

I spent that noon scrubbing and dousing the boat, enjoying the heat of the sun and cold of the water. When I had finished scrubbing the decks and cockpit and standing on the back of the boat to make sure everything had drained, I was overcome with weariness. The end of the dock was still only a few hundred yards away, so I lowered my little motor and motored slowly back to the dock. I quickly secured the boat and headed home, wanting a shower and bed.

As I walked through my living room towards the back of the apartment, picking up the clothes I had scattered in my haste that morning, I developed the eery feeling that my father was in my apartment somewhere. Entering the bathroom, the feeling became so strong I even called out for him, looking around my small apartment and wondering if he had decided to fly to Seattle and surprise me. After searching the apartment for a couple of minutes, I returned to the bathroom to shower and it hit me why I had such a strong feeling he was there: I smell just like my father.

When I was a teen, my father did small contractor jobs for people he knew, and his 3 sons provided the labor pool. We paved driveways, finished basement rooms, and other small jobs like this. Looking back on it now, I realize it was a wonderful way to learn to work, and to draw closer to my brothers and father. My opinion at the time may have differed a bit. One thing it definitely taught me, though, was the scent of my Father's sweat.

To discover this startling similarity at this age, when I was just beginning to really see the world through an adult's eyes, was quite a revelation. Over the next two years I found many more physical resemblances that surprised me, because I have always looked so much like my mother's family. I also came to understand and respect my father much more than ever before, and we became much closer to each other. Now that I'm a father too, I have immense respect and love for my father, for the sacrifices he made for my family and for me personally.

The Gift

I've just finished reading "The Gift" by Richard Paul Evans. I've had this lying around for quite some time, my Mother gave it to me as a Christmas gift. It was signed to her by the author, not surprising since my sister works at one of Rick's Christmas Box Houses. I was quite surprised at how well the story flowed, I expected something much more ethereal and preachy. Quite the contrary, I actually devoured the book in a few hours. I've been reading a lot lately, returning to an old safe and socially acceptable refuge from a world I can't make work.

At any rate, this book brought to mind a family story. I've been meaning to write some of my family stories lately, to record them for my daughter or anyone else who might someday be interested, before I forget everything. This story is about my best Christmas gift ever, which I got twice.

A decade ago, when we lived in South Jordan, a suburb of Salt Lake City, we had a wonderful home teacher named Clint Bennnion. Home teachers in our church are pairs of men who visit with a few families each month, extending a gift of friendship and making sure the families needs are being met. I've been a home teacher for many years now, and home teaching here in California has given me two of the best friends I've ever had. It is a great way to get to know people, and a tremendous opportunity for service.

At any rate, Clint came prepared with a great Christmas question that December. We gathered our little family, my wife, daughter, and I, and Clint asked us about Christmas presents we had asked for or were expecting. Then he asked if there was a difference between a present and a gift. The question took my breath away.

In 1969, my father was a Sergeant in the US Air Force, stationed at a NATO test range at El Outia, Libya. We weren't allowed to go with him, so my Mom and the four of us kids went to live with her father, Grampa Ray, and our incredibly cool 17-year-old Uncle Karl, at "the house on the river" in Bristol, Indiana.

When then-Captain Qaddafi staged his coup and deposed the government of King Idris, all of the NATO personnel were brought to the big air base in Tripoli. Later, in December, when Qaddafi decided to oust the Americans and Europeans, my father was wounded in some of the fighting near Tripoli. We got a Red Cross telegram that said "Sgt. Peters wounded fighting Tripoli return uncertain." Then nothing. For days and days. One afternoon in early December, just before his birthday on the 12th, we got a call from Aunt Shirley, my mother's sister. She told Mom "I think Pete just called, he said he's in Detroit getting on a plane for South Bend, to come pick him up."

Mom packed the 4 of us kids into coats, threw us in the car, and finished the 30 minute drive to the airport in time to meet him coming off the plane. I don't know how, but my Mother can move mountains when motivated.

Daddy came off the plane with his head wrapped in bandages and a bag that looked like his but wasn't. He had been wearing the same uniform (and underwear) for 3 days, since somebody else had his bag with his changes of clothes. It didn't matter to us, we had him home and mostly in one piece.

So that was my best Christmas gift ever.

A couple days after I shared this story with Clint for his Christmas lesson, my sister called. Dad had been having some mid-body pain and Mom had finally talked him into seeing a doctor about it. They did some imaging but couldn't really pin down the cause, so they were going to do an exploratory surgery because the symptoms matched an aortic aneurysm, which could be very dangerous. My sister was worried, but she always over-thinks such things. Just to be sure, I put his name on the prayer rolls at the Ogden Temple, near where he would have the surgery, and took the day off to be with him and Mom at the hospital.

The next day was a typical Utah December day, gray and cold and bleak. The surgery was at the old McKay-Dee Hospital, across the street from Weber State University, my Alma Mater. My father's too, actually. I've always hated this hospital, since they day they pushed my younger brother out the door in a coma because they had a policy of not handling "terminal cases," but that's another looong story. Suffice it to say I was predisposed to worry and unkindness.

We chatted a bit as he was wheeled into the prep room. Once he was gone, we scattered around a bit, looking variously for breakfast, coffee, Mountain Dew, or something to read, then returned to surgical waiting room for what was supposed to be a 2 hour wait. When lunch passed, it was obvious something was wrong. We went to the cafeteria in shifts, me and Mom, then my sister and her husband, to make sure there would be somebody in the waiting room when the doctor came out.

Finally, in the late afternoon, all of the other families had left the waiting room when a doctor exited the surgery doors and walked towards us. My sister who is also an EMT and knows most of the doctors in Ogden nudged and and pointed to him. I met him at the door and was shocked to see him gray-faced. He must have registered the shock on my face, he immediately said "Your Father is OK."

He paused to collect himself and then continued "In 30 years of thoracic surgery, I've never seen anything like this. What we found wasn't an aneurysm, it was a 4mm hole in the wall of his aorta, covered with a weeks-old blood clot. If that blood clot had slipped even a little, he would have bled out in a few minutes."

The next Sunday I cornered Clint at church and told him how I'd been given the same gift all over again. I've always wanted to work this story into a Christmas talk, or a talk about gifts, at church, but I've never been invited to talk about gifts. Maybe this subject is just too easy for me.

Another (small) loss

Hah, just when I thought there wasn't anything else the fire could take from us!

We've been slowly catching up with the loads of stuff we managed to salvage from the apartment at La Terraza. Last week, Diane and some friends from nearby 4S Ranch loaded up three large plastic bags of coats and clothes I removed from the apartment on my first trip in and took them to a local laundry to clean them in the big commercial washing machines. Among the treasures in this load were Diane and Bailey's new lightweight down coats from Lands End, which they had hardly gotten a chance to wear, and the beautiful dress Diane wore when I proposed to her. This was the first dress I ever bought for Diane, was a perfect style and fit for her, and she loved it nearly as much as I.

The coats came out of the laundry fine, with no residual smell, but the dress still reeks of wood smoke after 3 launderings. Diane gave up and threw it out, and I don't blame her. We don't find the smell of wood smoke at all attractive anymore, and can't take the smell in our home. Sigh. One more small defeat.

Pansy RIP

A number of friends have been asking how we've done in the wildfires in San Diego last month. I've been too busy, too fragmented, and too exhausted to really summarize our experience. We have been told the exhaustion is part of the shock, that it will pass in time. I hope this is true. Tonight I will take time to tell a small part of the story.

Sunday afternoon we were in church about 2:00 pm when we noticed the main chapel had grown quite smoky. Our bishop's counselor, Rian Jones, made some phone calls and found there was a wildfire burning near Santa Ysabel, 35 miles to the east of us. Rian reported the flames were being driven by the Santa Ana winds, and were expected to burn east and north. He prophetically said "They expect the fire to burn all the way to the coast." The Bishop dismissed church at 2:15, sending families home to prepare in case we needed to evacuate.

That night, we each packed a bag, choosing 4 days of clothes and a few important personal items for our ditch kits. We made sure our emergency kits were in the cars along with plenty of water. We went to bed late, but satisfied we had prepared in case we had to abandon ship for a couple of days.

Monday morning we were wakened at 4:30 by a phone call from our friend Robin Kaufman. Robin is president of the Rancho Bernardo Community Council, where Diane has served in the past, and in touch with everything that happens in RB. Robin told me we would be getting an evacuation call via the "Reverse 911" system in a few minutes, and that we should begin evacuating. The reverse 911 call came 15 minutes later, as we were beginning our preparations.

We took our packs from the night before, a couple of large bottles of water, and the guinea pig cage to cars. The wind was hot and wild, once carrying my bicycle across our large balcony, throwing it into the wall near the bedroom. The air was thick with smoke and there was a strange orange glow throughout the sky to the north and east. We turned on the radio but KPBS had no information about fires in RB that early Monday morning.

We made a couple of passes through our apartment, looking for precious things to grab. On one pass through our home office, I looked at the equipment on the desks and decided Diane's Mac mini was small enough to take with us. I unplugged it from monitor and USB hub and stuffed it into my backpack. I didn't, however, think to grab the USB disk attached to my nearby home server, which contained backups of the source code archives for several projects, two commercial and two open source. I left the server running on purpose, thinking it might help me keep tabs on what was happening at home.

Our neighbor Arthur Lopes, who had just moved upstairs in our building, told me the Westview High School evacuation site had just been closed, that we should go to Qualcomm Stadium, as he was dragging a large load down the stairs. Diane ran downstairs to wake Tom and Erica Blanchett, who had not gotten a reverse 911 call.

As we carried loads to the car, I noticed the sky was getting brighter and oranger. At 5:30 or so, carrying a final load down the garage one building away, I saw embers being blown on the wind. My friend Jason's daughter Ally called my cell phone and said "Are you packing? Get out now, it just burned over our back yard!"

I ran back upstairs to see if Diane had gotten our cat, Pansy, cornered yet. Pansy doesn't travel well and hates the kitty carriers. I told Diane we needed to get out quickly. We were both thinking we were just escaping the smoke, that we would be back in a couple of days, and had discussed how difficult it was going to be on Pansy to be trapped in a car for a couple of days at some evacuation shelter. With my pressing to leave, Diane decided to put down Pansy's multi-day kibble and water feeders with food and water for 5 days, and we left. As we departed, there were burning embers everywhere and the orange glow was much brighter.

A week later, we learned our neighbor in the next building, where our garage was located, saw what he called "a sheet of fire" erupt from the top of our building at 5:45, as we were leaving the building. We didn't know it, but our building was on fire as we were leaving.

We drove across the street, helped friends Ralph and Stacy Smith gather their 6 kids into their Yukon XL, and departed in convoy. Ralph and I are both amateur radio operations ("hams") and we had small walkie-talkie radios to talk between the 3 cars; me in our Land Cruiser, Diane and Bailey in our Beetle, and Ralph and his family in their Yukon.

We found no useful information on commercial radio that morning. I scanned several FM stations and the entire AM band, searching for any evacuation information. The commercial radio landscape was infuriatingly blank of any real information. The hams, on the other hand, were on the air as we left, collecting and disseminating information as it become available. Harry Hodges, W6YOO, was operating an information net on one of the Palomar Amateur Radio Club repeaters, and was calm, collected, and indispensable. Ralph and I contributed what we could to the info net, as we made our way to Qualcomm avoiding I-15 until we got to MCAS Miramar, where I-15 was the only way past.

At Qualcomm, we settled in with the kids, trying to find what was happening at home. While the stadium was opening, very little assistance had assembled by the time we arrived at 7:15 or so. No food was available yet, and I was, as usual, hungry in the morning. We hung around in the parking lot for 45 minutes or so, then volunteers began making sweeps through the lot letting us know we should proceed to the main gate to register and move into the stadium. We did so, taking most of a row on the upper level of the A2 section, where we could see the TV screens tuned to the local NBC news affiliate.

We alternated between following the news coverage on the TV and entertaining the kids. Trying to keep Ralph's younger ones from killing themselves around the stadium was a full-time occupation, but we had four adults and three older children to take turns watching the little ones, so the adults had plenty of time to worry and watch the TV coverage.

About 10:00 am, we saw coverage of La Terraza apartments looking like the center of Hades. The view, looking down an alleyway between two rows of buildings terminated by my garage, seemed to be surrounded by flames. Thick smoke and flames poured out of one the buildings while firefighters from three engines hosed the building and the surrounding area. We began to realize that leaving Pansy may have been a fatal mistake.

The news from Rancho Bernardo that day was spotty and mostly inaccurate. We heard that La Terraza was burned to ground, only one building standing. We heard that "most of" Rancho Bernard was destroyed. We heard a lot of things, but precious little real information.

We weren't allowed back into our neighborhood until Thursday afternoon, and then only for a few minutes. Ralph and I went to his house first, which we found mostly undamaged. Lots of ash, some burning in the front yard, but the house was intact and undamaged. We went across the street to La Terraza, parked with our police escort by the garage, and walked around the corner to find our building badly burned. The kitchen was mostly burned, the storage room at the end of the balcony no longer existed, and the dining room in the upstairs apartment had collapsed onto our dining table. The two bedrooms on the front of the apartment had been doused by a fire hose, the carpets were soaked, and everything reeked of smoke, standing water, and spoiled food.

Ralph and I walked the apartment, taking pictures and calling for Pansy. I looked in her favorite hiding places and did not find her. The next day we were allowed to return to Ralph's house, but my building had been "red tagged," condemned by the city as uninhabitable. Police and national guard troops guarded the 8 damaged buildings, preventing residents and vandals from poking through the remains. The next day, fences were erected around the condemned buildings and hired guards kept everyone away.

We ran back and forth between the fire department, the rental office, and the city Building Services department, looking for a way to get into the building, recover our belongings, and search for the cat. It was the usual and expected finger-pointing exercise, the owners said the fire department condemned the building, the fire department said Building Services is in charge of structural evaluations, and Building Services said the owner had to make the building safe, then call them to have the "red tag" upgraded to a "yellow tag" before we could recover anything. The owner wasn't about to do spend any money making the building safe, but wouldn't admit that officially.

Finally, the next Friday, the property manager, Amy Breitmeyer, called me and told me "We're not going to do anything for you. You're not allowed to go in, but there isn't anybody here who can stop you if you want to go in."

I called a couple of friends, ran to Home Depot to buy some hard hats, and was back at the apartment in an hour. Ralph and I entered the building and Pansy immediately ran out of Bailey's bedroom, down the hall, and into the kitchen. She hid in her favorite cupboard in the kitchen, the only one not burned away. I shoved burned and fallen ceiling panels and beams from the floor above aside, dove through the spoiled food, and got into the cupboard behind her. She was hidden behind large cans holding our long-term food storage. I called Diane, told her the cat was still alive, to come pick her up, and began moving cans.

After pausing to snap a picture, I managed to poke at Pansy enough to scare her out of the cupboard. I grabbed her as she attempted to run past me, too worn out and starved to really make much of a break for it. I struggled to my feet, slipping in the goo on the floor numerous times as she clung to me with all of her claws. I handed her to Ralph, who slipped and climbed out to the balcony to hand her to Diane, who had just shown up. Diane had already called the local vet office, and dashed her off to see the doctor.

Pansy returned home the next day. Her voice was raspy and congested from the upper respiratory infection and she had no appetite. We learned that loss of appetite is very dangerous for cats, especially overweight cats. If they go three days with no protein intake, their system will flood their liver with fatty acids and they will die of liver failure.

We nursed Pansy through the next several weeks, returning to the vet each time she crashed. She was unable to eat or drink, gagging when she approached her food bowl. She was occasionally able to drink from a running tap, but not enough to be healthy. Each time she visited the vet, she came home a little better, but she was obviously declining, devoid of energy. She seemed unable to smell and was unresponsive to catnip, which had been a favorite pastime before the fire.

As the vet bills mounted, we sought alternatives to bi-weekly vet visits. Diane demanded the local office show us how to administer subcutaneous fluids, something a friend has been doing for her aged cat for quite some time. They relented, and even sold us the kit at cost, showing Diane how to administer it on a cat in their custody that also needed fluids.

We administered to Pansy, hoping it would perk her up, and gave her the appetite booster the doctor had given us on the previous visit. Neither seemed to help much, though she purred when we petted her. That night, she seemed lethargic and unresponsive, and we knew the end was near.

Pansy woke us at 4:00 am Thanksgiving morning. She was on the floor at the foot of our bed, and sounded like she was retching. I jumped out of bed, turned on a lamp, and knelt over her. Her breathing was very labored and she was panting. We both knew this was the end. It took about 15 minutes, and she was obviously struggling. We administered subcutaneous fluids again, knowing this would not help her but hoping it would. We petted her and told her we loved her, not knowing what else to do.

Pansy's death has been the final blow to us, there is nothing else the fire can take. We are happy we got all our family out, and saddened that Pansy had to bear the burden of my hasty decision to leave without her. When we were packing we didn't realize how close the flames were, the thought our home would burn did not cross our minds. When we heard from Ally the fires were here in Rancho Bernardo, we didn't take time to think through our responses. We have regretted leaving Pansy since we saw the TV coverage of "the battle for La Terraza," and did everything we knew to care for her afterward.

Ultimately, my only anger in this is directed at the city government and especially the owners of La Terraza, who were too busy finger-pointing and trying to shuck responsibility to allow us to get into our home and find our kitty. Imagine how much healthier she would have been if she had received health care a full week earlier, when we should have been allowed back into our home. Imagine if the owners had just been willing to admit they were never going to take care of us and arrange for us to return safely to recover our goods, so we would have known our only recourse was to break the law a week earlier.

There was some coverage of this in the local news, at http://www.mylocalnews.com/nws/index.php?/main/content/renters_cry_foul_over_treatment/

I'll try to blog more about our experiences in the fire as I have time to write it, and to understand it. For now, I needed to tell Pansy's story while it is fresh in my mind, and perhaps to justify my anger you will read more about in the future.

Book review: Daemon

A couple of weeks ago I got an interesting email out of the blue. My correspondent, Leinad Zeraus, wrote to say he has written a novel that Dæmon News readers might be interested in, and would I care to review the book? He included a short capsule of the plot, roughly the same as the back-cover blurb. I was intrigued, but so far I've not found most techno-thrillers all that interesting. Most pivot around some relatively trivial point the author somehow thinks is a big idea, and the actual writing is often not that great.

I'm happy to say this book suffers from neither of these failings; Zeraus' writing is refreshingly good. I read mysteries and history recreationally, and Zeraus has accomplished a feat I've not seen to date in a novel written by a technologist: he creates characters I care about. He also manages to come up with a couple of quotes worth keeping at hand, a sign of a truly good author. My favorite, which was immediately added to the quip database in Bugzilla at work:

Her new boss was an undead automaton from Hell, true, but no job was perfect.

Zeraus patiently develops several related characters that I came to like and loathe while keeping up the pace of the story. We learn who these characters are as the story unfolds, without any of the long biographical asides that seem to plague many techno thrillers. The author treats these characters in a very even-handed manner, offering their fears and motivations without forcing judgement on the characters. This is first rate story telling, especially for a first novel.

The technology is also first rate, plausible and predictable, timed in the very near future. The technologies he brings to bear in the novel are tools that are being developed right now to spam us and control our lives in ways we can only begin to fathom. Zeraus presents these technologies in a way that is understandable and frightening, though my greater fear is that the same toys will be employed against us daily by a far less organized but no less insidious onslaught of amoral marketeers and vendors.

I read this novel only a week after having finished Michael Crichton's Prey, so I was already in the "Frankenstein creates monster which then proceeds to eat him" headspace, where this novel is firmly planted. I enjoyed the story and I actually agree with the observations on society and technology espoused by the main protagonist in the story, Matthew Sobol, who ironically is dead when the story begins. If Bill Joy had been a game designer rather than just the author of an oddly popular text editor, he might actually be Sobol.

I don't agree with Sobol's proposed "solution" to the problem, but it does make for page-turning reading. The success and drive of the cast of misfits recruited by Sobol is somewhat incredulous. We call people misfits because they just don't fit anywhere, they can't or won't take direction, are unable to work towards goals regardless of the goals or the rewards offered, and are just too likely to act randomly to count on. Zeraus presents this crew as outsiders who have been mis-typed as misfits by society, but I don't buy the idea of society being redeemed by this cast of hooligans.

Now if we could just combine Zeraus' technical insight with Crichton's ability to understand the limitless lack of foresight in humanity, and especially with the priests of the technology religion, we'd have the perfect techno-thriller. Right now, we have Daemon available to us, and it is a fine, entertaining read.