Thanks to Jax Schumann, I just learned that there is now a Cylon Detector iPhone app available:

Friends. Family. Coworkers. Everyone around you has one thing in common: They might be a frakking cylon.

With the iPhone Cylon Detector, you will know the truth.

This is an outstanding development. Previously, the only known reliable methods for identifying Cylons were:

• Dismantle a nuclear warhead and use the enriched radioactive material to construct a lab-sized Cylon detector.
• Have sex with the Cylon and check to see if his or her spine lights up.

This iPhone thingy seems a lot easier.

The things you learn from conversations on Facebook…

• Evan Goer [status]
  Oh, $5 clearance wine from Santa Rosa — you are surprisingly delicious! Why oh why did I only buy four bottles of you?
• Michael Toback at 7:30pm January 8
  I sense a problem here. http://www-ai.ijs.si/eliza/eliza.html
  Cheap therapy for cheap wine.
• Evan Goer at 7:34pm January 8
  You: Why did I not buy enough cheap, delicious wine?
  Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?
• Sarah McNeil at 7:41pm January 8
  I think… I think it was your girlfriend’s fault. 🙁
• Michael Toback at 7:43pm January 8
  Eliza: But you are not sure you think it was my girlfriends fault?
• Evan Goer at 7:44pm January 8
  You: Ek er rei??r ok ?? brand!
  Eliza: Please go on.
• Evan Goer at 7:47pm January 8
  Wait — has Eliza just come out? After all these years?
• Michael Toback at 7:50pm January 8
  Yes. First LiLo, now Eliza!

Note for the People Magazine-challenged: “LiLo” refers to an actress/singer/starlet named Lindsey Lohan, not Lilo Pelekai of Hawaii or LILO the Linux bootloader. Now back to your regular programming.

Denial

“Wow. I’m shocked Yahoo wasn’t more reasonable. The stock will probably go down at least $5 on Monday. It is surprising that Ballmer walked away instead of trying a hostile bid at $33,” said Walter Price, a senior portfolio manager at RCM fund management company in San Francisco, which had 21 million Microsoft shares and 2 million Yahoo shares as of the end of December.

Anger

Ms. [Laura] Martin also had harsh words for Yahoo’s management’s “unbelievable” actions. “This is management putting its employees and its job security ahead of current Yahoo shareholders’ interest,” she told the news service. She also told Reuters that she expects several shareholders lawsuits to be filed against the company on Monday.

Bargaining

“Had there been a full deal on the table, a hostile deal, at $34 or $35, we would have had to take a look at it,” Bill Miller, a portfolio manager for Legg Mason, told The New York Times. “Our number was higher, but it doesn’t mean we would have rejected it.”

Depression

Microsoft’s disappointing numbers, which sent its stock down 4.5 percent in after-hours trading, will only put pressure on the software behemoth to raise its bid.

On Wednesday, Steve — as in Steven Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive — cavalierly suggested that the company doesn’t need Yahoo and can go it alone. (That’s untrue, by the way. If Mr. Ballmer doesn’t win Yahoo, his failure will be seen as a major management blunder, and shareholders could raise questions about his leadership.) He has also threatened to start a proxy contest by this Saturday unless Yahoo reaches a deal with them.

But Mr. Ballmer’s tough talk now appears to be pure bluster ahead of what he knew was going to be a bad quarter.

Acceptance

“We believe the economics demanded by Yahoo do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal,” Ballmer said in a statement.

Yesterday, an ominous message appeared in my inbox from one of our key engineers, via our bug tracking system:

Didn’t get my visa. Moving back to Calgary. 🙁

CLOSED / WONTFIX

Oh, crap!

Okay, I realized that it was April 1st and all. And having to pack up and move back to Canada all of a sudden? That sounds fishy too. On the other hand, closing all your bugs WONTFIX, that seems awfully serious. That couldn’t be a joke… could it?

My friend Jay says I shouldn’t have been fooled for a second. “Dude, engineers never voluntarily update their bug states. That was your red flag right there.”

Ten years working in the Valley, and still so naive. Sigh. Live and learn.

So after reading the news early this morning, I drove into work. As I was walking to the building, I passed a leafless tree and saw a black crow perched overhead.

CAW! CAW! CAW! it screeched.

That doesn’t seem good.

This afternoon the movers decided to tear down a bunch of cubes in the row next to mine. I think they were throwing things on the ground specifically to make it impossible to do any sort of work within a 100 meter radius.

Fed up, I headed down to The Faultline. At the Faultline, I can work in relative peace and quiet, with unlimited frosty IPAs within arm’s reach. Until my battery runs out — then I guess I get to go home.

Damn, it’s good to be a Princeling of the Silicon Valley.

Today I opened my mailbox to find this letter:

To all Current or Former Sun Microsystems and SeeBeyond Technology Technical Writers:

A lawsuit entitled Dani Hoenemier v. Sun Microsystems has been brought in California Superior Court, Santa Clara Counta on behalf of a proposed class of current and former Technical Writers (“TWs”) employed by Sun (and/or SeeBeyond Technology Corporation) since September 21, 2002. The lawsuit alleges that TWs, such as yourself, were misclassified as exempt employees, and should instead have been treated as “non-exempt” employees subject to all the regulations that govern non-exempt employees, including the obligation to track hours worked, the right to premium pay for overtime worked, and the right to mandatory unpaid meal breaks or additional compensation for missed meal breaks. Sun alleges that it correctly classified its TWs as salaried exempt employees, that it is not obligated to classify and treat them as hourly employees, and that it therefore should not be required to do so.

This letter is to advise you of the pendency [EG — “pendency”?] of the lawsuit and that Plaintiff’s lawyers wish to obtain your name, address, and telephone number for the purpose of contacting you to obtain information regarding Plaintiff’s case against Sun. The Court has not yet determined whether this action shall actually proceed as a class action. You have no obligation to talk to Plaintiff’s counsel, but you also have the right to do so if you wish to do so. Sun is prohibited by its policies and by law from retaliating against you for speaking to Plaintiff’s counsel.

You do have the right to refuse disclosure of your contact information to third parties. If you do not wish to have your name, home address, and home telephone disclosed to Plaintiff’s counsel to enable them to contact you, you must return the enclosed postage pre-paid, self-addressed postcard by July 17, 2007. Unless you exercise your right to privacy in this manner, you will be deemed to have waived that right and your contact information will be disclosed to Plaintiff’s counsel.

If you have any questions regarding the release of your private contact information, you may call Rosenthal & company LLC at 1-800-xxx-xxxx.

Please do not contact the court.

Thank you.
To which I had these thoughts:

1. I have great sympathy for class action lawsuits against corporations in general. Often people who have been wronged simply have no other recourse.

2. I do not know Dani Hoenemier personally, but I have met technical writers who are like Dani Hoenemier. Technical writers like Dani Hoenemier make life more difficult for those of us who prefer to make our living doing honest work.

3. As someone who still has affection for his ex-colleagues at Sun, and more importantly as a current SUNW shareholder, I hope this suit fails catastrophically.

4. If Plaintiff’s lawyers thought I might view this suit with even a shred of sympathy, that hope was lost when Plaintiff’s lawyers chose to include that asinine opt-out disclosure refusal form.

5. We were all salaried exempt employees, you numbskull.

Oh, and if any Sun Microsystems attorneys happen to stumble across this post, please note that I would be happy to assist you in any way I can.

Best regards,

Evan Goer

Please go and purchase this book and read it cover-to-cover.

Failing that, please familiarize yourself with some of the contents.

Failing that, please at least be aware that when you have a stringy thing, you can do stringy-type things to it.

Thanks and best regards,

The Internet-Using Public

Should first-time novelists be paid? (hat tip Mur Lafferty)

Wow, I’m glad my first manager didn’t have this perspective. “Congratulations, you’re hired! Of course, we have little reason to expect big returns on your first job. And hiring someone like you, from an economic perspective, is hardly worth our time. As the party who puts money into the costs of training, a cubicle, a computer, heating and lighting, and a FrameMaker license, we’re the ones who stand to lose the most. Therefore, we’ll start you out at a salary of $0 with no benefits. If things go really well, after twelve months we might revisit your contract. How does that sound, kid?”

Who out there has such poor self-esteem and business sense that they would buy this argument?

And don’t say “graduate students”, that’s not funny.

Earlier this week, M’ris called me at work to let me know that there was a glitch with the big group dinner she had planned at La Bodeguita del Medio. They couldn’t take reservations for a party our size. “Oh…” I said. And then the little platters in my brain started spinning…

SELECT * FROM Restaurants WHERE Ambience LIKE ...

“No, no,” said Marissa, breaking my concentration. “I’ve found another restaurant that can seat all of us.” Later on at the dinner she told me (paraphrasing), “Even though you hadn’t said anything yet, I could tell you you were going into Helpful Bay Area Mode, and I had to stop you.”

I had always thought that the spinal reflex to leap in and start solving problems (even the ones that don’t necessarily need solving) was more of a engineering thing, or maybe just a plain old male thing. But it could be a Bay Area thing as well. It’s hard for me to see my own culture clearly, since I’ve been marinating in it for thirty years.

Coincidentally, that same night I caught the end of a roundtable discussion on the radio about the valley and solar power companies. The moderator was John Doerr, the panel included folks like T.J. Rodgers and other such big cheeses. And as you might expect, it was a virtuoso performance of valley optimism. Green power is coming! This is the first time we’ve built a new world energy infrastructure in the last 100 years! And when it comes to designing and deploying this new infrastructure, we are gonna make shitloads of money and save the planet and totally kick Europe and China’s ass in this new trillion dollar market! But if for some almost inconceivable reason they beat us, the whole world wins anyway, so let the games begin!

It was pretty awesome. So we’re gonna tech our way out of this mess. Build absurdly cheap and efficient solar panels. Reconfigure the Main Deflector Dish.

The thing about the Bay Area is that we are not only selected for efficient transmission of this virus, but we are also selected for lack of immunity. For a moment even I started thinking, yes! Of course! The World of Tomorrow will be all about this stuff! I will quit my current job right this second and join a solar power startup! And … spend seventy-five hours a week documenting silicon processing and manufacturing techniques. Hmmm. The moment passed.

But still, I couldn’t help smiling on my way home from the restaurant in my 30 MPG carbon-spewing vehicle. Being helpful. This is the Way of my People.