This time, a few blocks away, I have a hotel room that’s half as nice (not that I couldn’t have had a nicer one if I wanted) but I have it all to myself.

As for jet lag, my cunning plan seems to have worked reasonably well … certainly better than the last time.

Also, I took my first opportunity to rectify a major gap in my Swedish experience: pickled herring. It was delicious, but you might not want to take my word for it; I’m a gefilte fish fan.

This Saturday morning I woke up at 8 AM Pacific time. Next Monday, 9 days later, I’ll be waking up in Stockholm, Sweden … 9 time zones away.

Logically, the solution is for me to live on a 23-hour cycle this week, so that by the time my redeye takes off on Saturday afternoon it’ll be bedtime.

For me, going to bed early every day for a week is just about the ultimate test of willpower.

Bedtime!

EDIT: It’s 3 AM on a Thursday morning, and projected bedtime tonight is 6 PM local time. This is beginning to feel a little bit crazy. The one-hour deficit of free time every day is felt acutely, although I did find time to watch two episodes of The Daily Show with John Oliver yesterday before sunrise.

EDIT2: Success? It’s 1 AM on a Saturday morning, or 10 AM Stockholm time. Overall, it hasn’t been too hard, although last night, trying to fall asleep in broad daylight (and Friday-night traffic noise) was tough. If I can stay on this trajectory I’ll be on the right rhythm by the time I arrive, although my flights aren’t perfectly aligned for that. Now I have all day to pack and prep. Or watch more Daily Show.

Basically, it’s pretty boring.

The book starts with a plague that kills almost half of William’s grandparents’ generation in the 1340′s, and ends with another outbreak of plague that kills John Paston II. In the century in between there are skirmishes, wars, assassinations, coups, and a ton of lawsuits, invariably land ownership disputes.

Granted, there’s a lot of action, but it’s boring in the sense that there is no evidence of net change. Some people are richer than their parents, and some are poorer; the royal family tree is tangled (but not especially more tangled at the end than at the beginning). Alliances shift, territory is won and lost.

Ultimately, if a time lord switched William Paston with his grandson, at the age of, say, 25, I see no evidence that either would have found anything especially interesting about the change.

I’ve often wondered if the sense of rapid progress in our time is just a matter of foreshortened perspective … but after reading this book I think it’s real. I also think it’s not just “exponential”. The society of medieval England seems remarkably sophisticated, and yet totally “stuck”. All surplus economic output is lost to disease, violence, and self-aggrandizing religion, leaving little for the advancement of society and technology.

I doubt our century will look the same in retrospect … but we will look more similar than I would like.

EDIT: Actually, one very exciting thing did happen during this period: movable type printing presses (a la Gutenberg)! There is one mention of John Paston II acquiring some books, but it’s not clear whether they were printed using movable type, or indeed printed at all. Nonetheless, that’s one of history’s most pivotal inventions and I can’t let it go unmentioned here.

Lightweight buddy comedies with a hint of recession commentary aren’t usually our bag. Nonetheless, today we all got free tickets to The Internship, a movie which has nothing in common with Google’s taste in movies … except that it’s about Google.

Ostensibly it’s about these two guys who go to work at Google, but somehow Google seems to come out as the main character. I think the word “Google” is probably said more than any character’s name, maybe all the characters’ names. Even if you turned the sound off, there would still be a ton of Google logos.

Frankly, I have no idea what this movie must seem like to people who aren’t Google employees. From inside, it’s feels very strange, like a love letter from a secret admirer who may have some misconceptions about you.

The movie has some pretty huge deviations from the reality of Google. A movie needs personal dramatic tension, which is, frankly, in short supply here. To fill that need, it replaces our common-sense engineering internship program with a game-show battle between teams. “Only the winning team will be guaranteed full-time employment.” The concept is shockingly callous, and the challenges, which include a Quidditch match, are bizarre and arbitrary. On the contrary, our whole performance review system is designed precisely to ensure that employees don’t feel like they’re competing against each other.

A movie also needs a love interest, and so Owen Wilson pursues an unwilling executive who tries to shake him off but can’t seem to lose him. In the real world, this is called stalking. It’s called out explicitly in the orientation training as Not Tolerated Even A Little. If anything, the movie depicts an archetypal Hostile Work Environment, at least for that character.

Finally, a Google hiring committee would never send salesmen into the engineering intern program, where they might indeed be very uncomfortable. They would be hired into one of our sales internship programs. Google employs many thousands of people in sales; we don’t try to squeeze everyone into the Software Engineer mold. That would be stupid.

Maybe to make up for these ugly implications, the movie turns all the other aspects of Google into a shining paragon of joy. The result feels to me like looking at your own animatronic wax statue in Madame Tussaud’s. It says all your catchphrases almost right, and has better hair than you ever did … but the life force is missing.

To me, what’s really missing is the internal dynamism. Characters sometimes say they believe that Google can really be a force for good, but they don’t show why: the chaotic, comprehensive, impassioned internal debate, where Googlers endlessly disagree … about how to do the best thing for our users and for the world. Google is a place where every engineer is an ethicist, and no matter how acrimonious the debate both sides always start from the same axioms: don’t be evil, think of the user. Amazingly, the company even invites the rank and file to pepper top management with critical questions in an open forum multiple times a week, airing grievances and suggestions of all kinds.

Maybe a movie with more of that would be a little more savory, and a little less saccharine.

After searching in vain all evening I am convinced that, no matter how obvious the idea might seem, no one has manufactured a Blu-Ray player that is also an external Blu-Ray drive. I just want to be able to plug my player into my laptop and read some disks that way sometimes. The closest thing is external drives that claim “AV connectivity” to your multimedia TV, but (due to DRM!) you can’t play Hollywood Movies that way, only video files stored as standard data.

Even if I were inclined to crack the crypto so I can play (legally acquired!) movies through my laptop on Ubuntu, my laptop isn’t fast enough, and frankly it’s just a huge pain. So my only option is to buy two completely independent pieces of hardware that are, internally, largely identical (and hence spending twice as much money as would otherwise be needed).

I guess this a good reminder that I am a very strange person. Otherwise, surely some intrepid manufacturer would patch their firmware, wire up one more port, and claim a big chunk of that 2x price as profit.

Looks like I’m the only one who wants a Swiss Army Knife.

In a history of physics class I took in college, my professor speculated that this might be due to the end of the Cold War. In the 1960s, he said, to be a physicist was to be a very popular person, because a good cocktail party always needed a physicist to answer all the questions about chain reactions, isotopes, and orbital mechanics. The various arms and space races with the USSR made for a strong job market for engineering grads … until the 1990s, when it all abruptly came crashing down.

So I took notice a few weeks ago when The Big Bang Theory, a show whose main characters are almost exclusively scientists and engineers, overtook American Idol to become the top-rated show of the night.

That got me thinking … this isn’t isolated. The Big Bang Theory has good company. To me the obvious one is Mythbusters, a hugely popular show that does nothing but real science on air. Then there are powerhouse series like House MD, CSI:*, and others that took long-standing genres and reanimated them with an extra injection of scientific detail.

On the celebrity front, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both rose and rose and rose in the public consciousness, and transformed their public image into something almost universally positive. To the extent that anyone can name company founders and CEOs today, they’re likely to be the founders and CEOs of technology companies. Among household names Neil deGrasse Tyson also comes to mind, reprising Carl Sagan’s role that was so missed in the 1990s.

Even the word “nerd” has become a badge of honor, albeit appropriated for all manner of enthusiasms.

I admit, my perspective is not objective. I don’t have two representative samples of middle schoolers from 20 years apart… but my feeling is that something changed. The economics of technology industries, the concerted efforts of educators, and the direct presence of technology in our lives have conspired to make science cool again.

That’s a good thing.

I expected it would be nostalgic, to be back in town with all my old friends, sitting on the same old couches and having the same old discussions we’ve been having for … between 10 and 20 years, roughly. Even so, it was much more poignant than I anticipated.

Not that I’m complaining. Every day people leave their homes because of bankruptcy, or illness, because they run out of options. My parents are mostly just upgrading, to somewhere very nearby that’s more luxurious and less of a deteriorating hassle.

Even so, it was far more poignant I had expected. Maybe that’s because to me, that little square of dirt and bedrock on the corner of two undistinguished streets was a place of unalloyed joy. It felt like I could turn any new acquaintance into a childhood friend retroactively, just by inviting them over. No, in retrospect I guess it doesn’t make sense.

My mom packed me dinner to take on the plane back to Seattle, as she always does, and included a handful of the best strawberries ever, straight from their garden, literally the fruits of their labor. That’s kind of how I felt about the house too: my parents poured a tremendous amount of work into that place, for my benefit. On just the literal level, with their own hands they built walls and closets and floors and shelves and cabinets, laid brick and tile, planted flowers and pulled weeds, rewired, repainted, and a hundred other things to make that house a wonderful home.

It was not for nothing.

I feel sad on their behalf, maybe moreso than they do themselves. It’s hard for me to remember that I’m the only one with this relationship to that house. My brother and sister weren’t born there, and even when they lived there it must have been only half their home, “mom’s house”. My parents had moved through three states each, had each rented and bought and sold houses before this one.

And we weren’t the first owners, or the second, and maybe not the third either. My dad always shaved with a rotary electric razor, but when the contractors took down the sheetrock in the master bath we found years’ worth of razorblades, tarnished black with age, that must have been dropped into the wall through the medicine cabinet’s disposal slot by some previous resident in an era before the Gillette Fusion Proglide. That house had more history than I could possibly know, maybe not all of it so rosy.

Anyway, it’s over now … and maybe it’s a good lesson in learning to accept change. There will be harder changes to come.

Even with some help from Hugin and some custom Gimp scripts, it was surprisingly labor intensive. Also Enblend just bails out rather than attempt to actually blend it. That’s ok; I kind of like the collage look.

For the record: there were 3 boats in this race. He won.

Anyway, the net is not the only thing that’s returning to a previous state. I’m headed to those Old Stomping Grounds once again this weekend. My parents are officially, seriously moving, and that will make this ~30th Memorial Day picnic the very last ever at the house where I was raised. I hear it’s already been substantially drained, as my parents have identified and liquidated all the possessions they’ve been itching to be rid of all these years.

I feel like I should be there, so I will be. But I’ll be in Boston first, because why not.

See ya.

Anyway, I apologize for the impaired uptime. Maybe I should have opted for the monthly modem rental from Comcast after all.

EDIT: OK, actually now I’m convinced this is Comcast’s fault.

64 bytes from 69.139.164.129: icmp_req=42 ttl=62 time=7.12 ms
64 bytes from 69.139.164.129: icmp_req=43 ttl=62 time=12745 ms
64 bytes from 69.139.164.129: icmp_req=56 ttl=62 time=21.5 ms

COOOMCAAAAAST!!!!

EDIT2: I called them up and they “re-provisioned” the modem. What is that? Why would it help? I have no idea.

Anyway I think it’s fixed.

EDIT3: Nope, that didn’t fix it. I spent half a day on the phone with them again, even scheduled a house call to check signal quality, before the fifth person I talked to admitted that the problem is already known, building-wide, and they’re planning to fix their hardware today or tomorrow.

EDIT4: So like two weeks, 4 site visits, and 7 phone calls later, I think they fixed it. Maybe. The first guy replaced all my cabling with hand-crimped perfectionist stuff, and it worked great until two minutes after he left. The second guy registered perfect signal quality … and 25% packet loss, which we traced back to the “tap”, i.e. the world’s largest splitter box. Anyway, I just ran pings for half an hour with no connection droppage so … we’ll see.