Good afternoon, plucky aspiring fiction-writers! Do the vagaries of the business have
you down? Well, cheer up — things
could be worse!

Had lunch and a couple of beers with J.C. Flores. I didn’t even know he was living
up here until Brian mentioned it offhandedly. And now I discover J.C.’s probably
moving back to L.A. in three months or so. Thanks, Bri.

Anyway, J.C. recommended that I get cable modem and buy a splitter — I should be
able to get basic cable for free that way. Plus, if you want HBO, the cable guy
will probably *cough* sell you a filter for it *cough*. But you didn’t hear me say that.

I wonder why they don’t pay those cable guys more? I haven’t heard of a single one who
doesn’t make money on the side. It makes me wonder, at what point does systematic
bribery merge with the “legitmate” economy? If I don’t rip off the cable company, am I
ethical, or just stupid? Aren’t I just subsidizing the millions of people who
do rip off the cable companies? And it’s not like AT&T cares about my
welfare…

No, I don’t buy that. If a price is unfair — don’t pay it. Do I need cable? Do I
really need TV at all? Nah.

Maybe I would feel differently if this were Pac Bell or E*Trade. But no — I still think
it’s not right to rip off corporations directly. What I can do is
explain to my friends and relatives how those companies treated me. I’m sure I’ve
killed a few prospective Pac Bell DSL contracts, and at least a couple of
prospective E*Trade accounts. That’s enough to make me happy.

I just got back from a ski trip to Big Bear (with a brief stopover in
Santa Barbara to visit Rachel). Joining me on the trip were Nancy,
Mike,
Eric, Susan, Byron, and Karen. My philosophy is that all
trips are in some way educational. On this particular excursion to
exotic Southern California, I learned the following:

• Rachel is doing fine, but she has become very annoyed with another
  graduate student who is working with her on the same giant project.
  “I’ve decided to use my knowledge from my sociology classes to crush her,”
  Rachel said. No, Rachel, no! You must learn to use your powers only
  for Good, never Evil!

• Rachel’s husband Ben seems to be doing just ducky. He always seems
  to be doing just ducky. I think I’m not very good at reading him.

• It is good to know friends who have friends who have large cabins
  with vaulted ceilings in which you may stay for free.

• Lucky Charms are, cup for cup, healthier than Kellogg’s Raisin Bran.
  Lucky Charms are equal or better in every vitamin/nutrient category,
  and they actually have fewer calories. The one category where Raisin
  Bran wins is fiber: 28% RDA to 7% RDA. But who needs regular BMs
  when you can have purple horseshoes and red balloons?

• Skiing in 50 degree weather is really nice, aside from the occasional
  slushy patch.

• Skiing in rental boots is not so nice, particularly when they give
  you blisters on your calves.

• Proficiency in Boggle does not translate into proficiency in
  Scattergories (vindication for the domain-specific knowledge
  theory of intelligence?)

• The official legal way to refer to
  “insider
  trading” is to call it a “Section 10(b)-5 violation”.

• Contrary to popular myth, in blackjack a “bad” third base player
  does not affect the odds
  of another player winning or losing. Consider the following example:

  Dealer is showing 12, and so will bust if he draws a 10.
  The deck has N cards:  
    G   "good" cards (tens), 
    N-G "bad" cards (non-tens).
  
  If the third base player stays, the dealer's odds of busting are
  simply G/N.
  
  If the third base player hits, there are two cases:
  
    Case 1: a G/N chance he receives a "good" card.  There are then G-1 
    good cards left, so the dealer's odds of busting are now (G-1)/(N-1).
  
    Case 2: a (N-G)/N chance he receives a "bad" card.  The dealer's odds
    of busting are now G/(N-1).
  
  The total odds of the dealer busting are therefore:
  
    (odds of Case 1) x (odds that dealer busts given Case 1)
      + (odds of Case 2) x (odds that dealer busts given Case 2)
  
  Or:
  
    (G/N) x (G-1)/(N-1) + (N-G)/N x G/(N-1)
  
  which is, putting everything under a common denominator:
  
     G x (G-1)   (N-G) x G
     --------- + ---------
     N x (N-1)   N x (N-1) 
  
  which is, expanding and cancelling terms:
  
     G^2 - G + GN - G^2      GN - G       G x (N-1)     G
     ------------------  =  ---------  =  ---------  =  -
          N x (N-1)         N x (N-1)     N x (N-1)     N
  
  Which is the same result as if the third base player had stayed.
  

According to a USGS
report on US gemstone consumption, the numbers for 1999 and 2000 were the following:

Stones (cut but unset)	1999		2000
	Carats	Value (US$)	Carats	Value (US$)
Diamonds	19.2 million	9.16 billion	19.5 million	11.3 billion
Emeralds	5.04 million	183 million	22.1 million	176 million
Rubies & Sapphires	11.2 million	239 million	12.9 million	241 million

So in the U.S. market in 2000, cut-but-unset diamonds were worth (per carat)
72.8x more than emeralds, and 31.0x more than rubies & sapphires. Interesting.

Yesterday Dad cooked rack of lamb for dinner. It was just us guys — Mom was out
of town, and Sarah had an “emergency birthday party” to attend.
We mostly told stories about Grandpa and talked about
IntraOp. Good news — they’ve just
signed a new manufacturing deal with a new company.
Hopefully the new partner, unlike the old one, won’t simply renege on their
contract because they judge that course of action to be more profitable.
So that’s one problem down. Now for more funding…

It’s been so frustrating to watch IntraOp limp along so undercapitalized
for so long… always, there’s never been quite enough money to manufacture
that next machine, hire another sales rep, … you name it, they didn’t have it.
It was particularly painful during the Internet boom, where you had companies burning through
ten million dollars a month with no business model whatsoever — while IntraOp
was spending two orders of magnitude less money, and selling a real product that
cures cancer (and for a actual profit, imagine that!)
I think Dad’s problem is that he’s too honest. “How can I ask someone to invest
in a company without telling them exactly what they’re getting into?”

What’s happening to our family? Grandpa George was a successful businessman. On
the other side of the family, my great-grandfather was even more successful
(because, as my uncle says, “he was a ruthless son of a bitch.”) But we Goers
and Harmans and Kellstedts seem to be losing our edge. My fathers and uncles
have struggled mightly to get their businesses off the ground. and my sisters
and cousins have shown no interest in entrepreneurship at all.

Over the last few years I’ve read maybe over a hundred magazine articles
that have extolled the virtues of The American Entrepreneur: being tough and fast
and smart and blah blah blah. The funny thing is that the real
entrepreneurs that I’ve spoken to all tell me the same thing: at any moment,
your small business could be crushed. A big company will just take over the
market and squash you. Or someone will rip off your patent, or
refuse to pay for inventory, or renege in some other way. The sad part is,
for a small business it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the legal right. As
Mike likes to point out, justice, like medicine, is
expensive. You might win your lawsuit, but it’ll probably be far too little,
too late to save your livelihood.

My impression of the entrepreneurial world? It’s not really about being tough
and fast and smart (although that helps). It mostly has to do with luck. And
it probably has something to do with being a ruthless son of a bitch.

That’s why I like writing. The luck part is clear enough, but the son-of-a-bitch
part is completely optional.

M’ris reminds me why we need engagement
rings. “Silly Evan,” she says, it’s because “paying off med school loans doesn’t
give a physical mark saying, ‘Hands off! This woman is property!'”
Sheesh, I can’t believe I forgot about that.

We then discussed alternative solutions for the problem:

Mris:  >> Maybe a tattoo would work....

Me:    > Now *that's* using the ol' noggin!  The only problem is, 
       > the tattoo idea needs to hit "critical mass" in the public 
       > consciousness, otherwise it won't act as a deterrent to all 
       > those unscrupulous predators out there.  Kind of a 
       > chicken-and-egg problem there.

M'ris: Ahh, but the tattoo just needs to be on the forehead and 
       read "taken."  Subtlety is quite overrated.  Then as the custom 
       evolves, it can become simply a t or something like that.

When I brought up this issue with Mike, he immediately
launched into a discussion of property law. In the 19th century, some whalers
would hunt whales by firing harpoons from shore. However, there were
many whalers, and when you’d shoot a whale, it would dive, swim off for a while,
and then beach itself and die. There was no way to tell who owned
the carcass. So each whaler had to decorate his harpoons in a distinctive manner.
(The decorated harpoons were called, “waifs”.)

I’m not quite sure what this has to do with marriage, and I’m not sure I
want to know.

In Other News: On Poker Night this week, we only had three people (two of our
regulars were out of town). So there weren’t enough for poker. However, our host,
Page, has been trying to get us to play
Mordheim
for a long time now. I admit, I had been cool to the idea of playing Mordheim — I’m not
really into miniature-strategy games. But Page finally wore me down — “You can play
a squad of human mercenaries, undead, rat-men, battle nuns…”

Battle Nuns?! Why didn’t you say so in the first place!

So it turns out that basic rules in Mordheim are easy to learn, set-up is fast,
and the game has a cool 3-D aspect to it. And the best part is that a match takes
less than two hours (even if you choose to fight until one side is
completely wiped out — or as we call it, “To the Pain!”^TM).

Anyway, I am proud to report that my crack warband of Battle Nuns carried the day
against Page’s foul undead legions. Once again the Pants of Evil have been yanked
down by the Mocking Hands of Justice! Page, good sport that he is,
commemorated the battle in a news report.

Finally, last night I saw Monster’s Ball
with Mike, Nancy, and Sam in downtown
San Jose. It was a decent
flick (I loved the nearly wordless ending scene — Halle Berry can act.)
Unfortunately there was a jackass right behind us who had an inappropriate laugh or
comment every minute-and-a-half. Yes, these jerks are in the artsier theaters, too.

Nancy then took us to Picasso’s, where we ordered tapas and a bottle of wine.
M’ris! Wake up, pay attention — they had tapas! I found tapas! And this reminds
me, it’s time for another winelog entry:

Campillo, Spain, 1996 Crianza: ¡Bueno!

I wasn’t going to comment on my grandfather’s funeral in Florida, but I’ve changed
my mind. Just a few words on the rabbi:

• He was over an hour late. This was due to traffic — although one of the
  mourners, coming from the same direction, managed to make it nearly on
  time by taking backstreets.

• He arrived wearing:

  • a white jacket and shirt
  • black pants
  • black shoes with large gold buckles
  • a yellow tie, askew
  • a deep orange tan

  
  

• My aunt had given him some anecdotes about my grandfather the day before.
  She was concerned about whether the rabbi had gotten everything down
  properly, because the conversation happened over a cell phone, while
  he was driving. My aunt took him aside right before the ceremony to make
  sure he had everything straight. It was a good thing she did — he had everything
  completely mangled.

• The non-mangled eulogy wasn’t a big improvement. He managed to get my
  grandfather’s Hebrew name wrong, and he mangled a few of the dates. (Grandpa
  came to the States in 1920, not 1912 — a significant distinction, because he
  spent those eight formative years starving in war-torn Poland.)

On the other hand, he drove off in a Mercedes S500 sedan. I can only surmise that the
whole late-to-the-funeral, wear-tacky-clothes, and offend-the-grieving-aunts-and-cousins
gig is, at some level, working out for him.

It’s going to be a couple of days until my next journal entry.
My grandfather, George Goer, passed away… peacefully, in his sleep. He
was 93.

I’m off to Miami for the funeral. More later.

I’ve decided that everyone should move at least once every six months. Moving is good
for your moral fiber. It obviates nearly every one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Take Covetousness, for instance.
The human spirit of generosity truly shines forth when you’re moving.
“Here you go, this is yours.” “No no no, you take it, it’s yours.”
Just heartwarming.

Or Gluttony. I don’t know how
anyone can clean out their fridge without vowing that they will never touch food again.

Lust? Hard to be in the mood when you
stink of sweat and bleach and whatever the heck is under the fridge.

Sloth? Not a chance, when you’re
supposed to be legally out of the house in a few hours. It’s enough to make even
Sam work his tail off.

Unfortunately I can’t fit every one of the Sins into the picture. Particularly
Wrath. So hold off on emailing Robert Bork and asking him to
call
off his crusade. I haven’t completely solved the whole USA-moral-decay
problem yet. Give me a few more weeks. I’m sure I’m real close now.

This morning I threw caution to the wind and listened to
The Greg Kihn Show
instead of NPR, like a responsible fiber-eating person. Greg Kihn is
sometimes pretty funny, despite what Pat says,
and he has this great grizzled old rock star voice.
Anyway, during the show, Kihn mentioned that at his last Niners game, he and the
crowd chanted, “Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball!
Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball!”
Kind of like
“Fight Fiercely Harvard!“,
I guess.
Kihn, in true Dave Barry form, swears he is not making this up.
“The really cool thing,” he said,
“was that we did repel them and they did relinquish the ball.”

Hard to believe we’re 12-4.

Sunday pretty much stunk. I was trying to finish a story, but I had decided that
not only was I going to have an accelerating relativistic rocketship, but that the
timing of all the messages from earth were going to arrive at the correct times,
as opposed to merely sorta plausible times.

I had some initial successes in deriving some of the
equations
I needed, but then I got bogged down. My final answers were
were nonsense. I soon became obsessed, and wasted pretty much the whole day.

It was probably the inital success that sucked me in. If I had utterly failed
from the start, I would have been frustrated, but I would have given
up a lot sooner. And then I would have spent my time actually writing the story,
instead of indulging in physics snobbery. (“Ha! all those other rocketships move
at constant velocity! Mine accelerate at 1g!”) Sheesh.

Not only did I forget what was important about the story, but I also forgot
to eat, somehow. And so I was feeling pretty crummy around dinner time, when
I realized that not only did I have a ton of other stuff to do, but I was
supposed to be at my old roommate’s wife’s birthday dinner at 8:30 in
San Francisco. I just couldn’t handle staying up late and socializing on a worknight.
So I called them up and flaked. Then I felt bad about that, so the only
thing left to do was to drive over to my parents’ house and have them feed me homemade
vegetable stew.

It did the trick.

I’ve bowed to pressure. I now have a Contact page.
Of course, this pressure came from people who already have my email address.
Hmmmm…

After some deliberation, I’ve decided to hide my private email address behind a
script. I just don’t feel comfortable putting it out on the web for
anyone to grab (particularly a spambot). Maybe I’m being too cautious.
But the way I see it, my email address is like my phone number. Heck, maybe
it’s more important — after all, I’ve had the same email address for
three-and-a-half years, while my phone number has changed three times.

First day back at office, and basically I just made more work for other
people. Heh, my kind of day!

I still have a lot of unpacking to do. To avoid that,
I picked up a couple of books at the bargain rack at Waldenbooks. The first was
If
You Lived Here, You’d Be Home by Now,
by Sandra Tsing Loh. It’s… OK.
I like her language and her style. But let’s face it: she’s taking her shots at… Los Angeles.
How hard is that? Plus, I can only take so many sardonic comments and wry observations
at one sitting. Pot calling the kettle, maybe, but still.

The second book was The
Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Hey, it was three bucks. And it’s not
without its charms. Take the cartoon sidebars. When the authors provide an anecdote, they
use a cute little cartoon of an astronaut pontificating, labelled, “As You Know, Bob”. When they want
to warn you about a publishing industry pitfall, there’s a cartoon of Robby the Robot,
with the title, “Danger, Danger!” How could you not love a book like that?

Well, the move is over. Sort of. I’m still unpacking boxes, but things are starting
to settle down. We did some cleaning at the old house last afternoon with some
serious chemicals. That is, chemicals for cleaning, not chemicals for making the
cleaning process seem less burdensome.

Fortunately, my abortive career as a condensed-matter physicist ended up making me a
little more sanguine about dealing with harsh household cleansers. For example, take HF acid,
which will almost immediately start leaching the calcium from your bones. Now that’s
a hazardous chemical. Or photoresist, which (depending on the variety you use) can be
a highly dangerous mutagen, carcinogen, and
teratogen.
(Yes, I had to look up that word when I first saw it on the label.)
Anyway, as for household chemicals — bleach, Raid, weedkiller — bah! Milk of Magnesia,
as far as I’m concerned.

The funny thing about moving is that every time you think you’ve packed up all the
stuff, you open another cabinet or closet and look — more stuff! (So that’s
where Dave Smith’s staple gun disappeared to…) Eventually you
end up fighting over who should take what. I even got talked into taking an
old couch and a coffee table. Maybe all this extra furniture will lead to having
extra visitors.

Oh yeah, New Years: I had a very nice time at the Smith-Holy residence. (Not
the Holy-Smith residence, as previously discussed.)
We had some good wine and danced to some techno. (Or, I lurched around to the music
in my own off-rhythm way, content that only my friends could see how silly I was
being.) After midnight, we went out to the balcony and sang songs, as obnoxiously
as possible. It turns out that Nancy and Don know most of the songs to
Gigi, and Nancy and I managed a
stunning rendition of “I Remember It Well”. At least, I thought we were
stunning at the time.

Anyway, happy New Year to all. Just keep this in mind: no matter how your New Year’s
celebration went, it was probably
not
as bad as Andrew Sullivan’s. (If necessary, scroll down to “The Curse of 2001”.)