My afternoon today

Correlation may imply causation.

Productivity

I am quantifiably bad at studying:

Things I’ve scribbled in the margins while listening to the radio and studying.

Ke$ha - Tik Tok: Kesha sounds like a Goddamn wreck in this song. I’m down to party, but why would you want to roll with a girl who brushes her teeth every morning with a bottle of Jack Daniels? It seems like going out with Kesha is a never ending episode of you trying to find a graceful way to recover her passed out body from the middle of the dance floor before she’s trampled by a bunch of club patrons. And if poor Kesha kicked things off with 151, that dance floor might turn out to be somewhere more exotic – like a Mcdonalds ball pit.

Lady Gaga – Paparazzi: I’m a little afraid of Lady Gaga that she reiterates that she’ll “be kind, but I won’t stop until that boy is mine.” This seems like the precursor to her kidnapping
the guy and keeping him in a cage or something.

Trey Songz – I Invented Sex: How could you ever think that Trey Songz invented sex? Even then, assuming that Trey Songz is some kind of patriarchal genetic Adam, why
would you want to have sex with him? This is like saying you want to have sex with Methuselah. Or Robert E. Lee. Or Trent Lott.

Iyaz – Replay: I wonder what it’d be like if it was another music player.  ”Shawty’s like a melody in my head that I can buy with my Zune pass for 14 a month /so I’m singing like, heyyy / she’s like my Zune HD stuck on replay (because the button controlling replay is wedged in the slapped-together anodized aluminum)”

Taylor Swift – You Belong With Me: Wait, does this mean that you wear less formal clothing or that you only wear t-shirts and no pants. If it’s the latter, the guy might not be with you because he thinks you’re crazy. Just saying.

Cobra Starship – I Make Them Good Girls Go Bad: It seems like it’s less “make the good girls go bad” and more “I make some libertine girls stop unnaturally conforming to societally-acceptible behavior.” That sounds less musical though.

David Guetta – Sexy Bitch: For all of your effort in “trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful,” the best you can come up with is calling her a bitch? Casanova.

Chris Brown – Transform Ya: If I was a young woman, the last thing I’d want is Chris Brown transforming me into anything.

A haunting expanse of light.

When I was in New York for a week last summer the song She Wolf by Shakira was playing in every cab I stepped into. This was kind of weird; I had my Zune with me when I was in Manhattan earlier that spring and there were at least 2 or 3 different dance and hip hop music stations that I could pick up from my player’s receiver. Given this, the math geek in me (who I sometimes can repress with a magic potion called cognac) was ablaze noting that there was no particular distribution to when my friend Johan and I stepped into a cab, and that even while the selection of radio stations was probably weighted towards one or two of the stations that we were still getting a pretty random sample in every cab because the cabbies themselves were different each time (and had different tastes in music I’d assume). Given all of this, and the plentiful selection of pop music available this last summer that was more popular than Shakira’s album, it seemed pretty improbable to hear She Wolf on every one of our many cab rides through the city.

So I’d like to think that there was something else about Shakira’s song that linked it to New York. And months after my flight from JFK landed one late Sunday night in August, I can still feel New York through that song. The introduction sounds like a choir of city sounds outside a cab, muffled by a frosted glass window. As the song progresses, the beat thumps like the procedural and regular division of streets and avenues across Manhattan. The soft guitar interlude twinkles like a thousand lights: lit apartments, cell phones, street lights, and traffic lights that change colors in cadence. Even the song’s transitions feel like I’m drifting through different parts of the city and watching the people and feeling change like the architecture outside.

What draws me to New York isn’t anything material. I have some friends that live there, sure. And yeah, the night life is unparalleled if you’ve got the money to spend and a taste for hedonism. But what really draws me to New York is a feeling of warm excitement. I’m not sure how to describe it any other way.  My face and skin heat up like I’ve had a few shots, and when I look out a cab window at the sparkling towers that move in all directions towards the various infinities I’m filled with some mixture of slack-jawed awe and heart-pounding excitement. There’s so much to do. There’s so many people to meet. When my eyes are pulled out of my head by those city lights I feel like the night’s always young and that it’s never, well, over.

This feeling is a familiar one. It feels a lot like the reason why I like Silicon Valley: the opportunities are endless and nothing’s written in stone. But for me, Silicon Valley’s opportunities and adventures seem firmly about solving problems and doing what I’m supposed to do – seemingly what I was born to do. New York is not my town. I’m not a finance guy, I’m not interested in investment banking, and I don’t know if I ever could wear a full suit and tie every day. I think maybe that’s why I like it so much – I’m not supposed to be there. The feeling that lights me up and forces me out of bed is familiar, but it’s without the sort of command or impulse to go out and solve problems. It’s blank and empty because it wasn’t meant for me. I get all the energy that jazzes me up without the bans and charges that should come with it. In effect, New York lets me forget about what I’m supposed to do with my life. The pleasure that comes with marveling at what I can scribble on a tabula rasa is all there, but nobody’s telling me what to write.

There really is something liberating about that city. It doesn’t feel like it’s real. It’s more like an illusion – an infinite, haunting expanse of light made permanent by the hopes, blood, sweat, and dreams of everyone that works and lives there.

It’s exactly like Silicon Valley and technology as a whole. Just, not.

We forgot about that whole “Europe” place.

I honestly had to pick up my jaw off the floor when I heard that the DoJ cleared Oracle’s acquisition of Sun earlier this year.  By all of the literature supported by the DoJ’s official policy book, The Horizontal Merger Guidelines, it seemed like Oracle and Sun becoming one great Valley monolith was the worst thing that could happen. Monopolistic control of the resource market for a product? Check. Price setting powers by significantly reducing competition in a major revenue center? Check. I could go on, but you get the idea: this was exactly the type of thing the DoJ and the Sherman Antitrust Act was supposed to stop.

Of course, that’s not what happened. The DoJ and the FTC greenlighted the acquisition based off of the idea that Oracle’s purchase would not constitute a monopoly in its products’ markets. They recognized Sun as a manufacturer of servers and Oracle as an enterprise software company. Now this isn’t all lies and deceit. Sun continues to derives a ton of revenue (if not most of its revenue) from its production and maintenance of its line of SPARC-based Solaris servers. This has largely been the same since the late 80’s. But, like a lot of other people, I was concerned about the effect of Oracle owning a fairly recent acquisition that Sun had made the year before.

In February of 2008, Sun purchased the rights to an open-source database server known as MySQL. MySQL is the preeminent open-source database server. Everyone that isn’t on IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL uses it: Google, Facebook, Twitter…etc.  MySQL may not be as immediately scalable as its polished enterprise database server competitors. But it’s free, and the community has done a great job to work on making sure it runs well in distributed environments. MySQL was the poster child for innovative reform in the database sector. Its presence has changed the game considerably. It’s a damning threat to enterprise offerings by all of the older players just like Linux threatens proprietary Unix servers, Solaris, and Windows solutions in the server OS market with good technology at the low-low price of free. It’s forced everyone to really up their game in terms of cranking out great products in order to compete.

Once again, wohoo free market.

Oracle’s purchase of Sun does give it the rights to nifty cool things like the ZFS file system, Java (which they use with 10G to create a very cool app server/db server solution), and Solaris. But it also gets the rights to MySQL. With most of Oracle’s business done in the database sector, this whole maneuver could  be an expensive way of eliminating the competition from MySQL to push the market back towards the 90’s-era database oligopoly. That’s dangerously anti-competitive behvior there, buddy. In fact, that’s textbook anti-competitive behavior.

But maybe the Department of Justice is right. Maybe this isn’t about Oracle sweeping away the competition like ants. I mean, it’s not like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has a reputation or anything.

And again, this stuff isn’t all new. I wrote a lot about this whole affair before when word broke that Oracle and Sun started doing the M&A dance earlier this year. What is new is what the EU recently said in their review of the issue: “no.”  The EU rejected Oracle’s acquisition based on this very issue. They felt that if Oracle acquired Sun, Oracle would wind up with monopolistic control of the database market. Who called it.

With the EU’s formal objection of Oracle and Sun getting married all hell has broken lose. Sun has announced some horrifying layoffs. Oracle has petitioned congressman and ambassadors to reach out and shake the EU’s commission into OK’ing the deal (one has some very scary The Godfather imagery from this), and in general the sky is falling. Oracle and Sun were already in maneuvers to start consolidating their businesses, so this revelation is as crushing as it is sudden for them.

But the lack of concern by both Oracle and Sun about whether or not they’d run into antitrust problems is what really disturbs me. With MySQL and 10g falling under the same command, did you really think this wasn’t going to be an issue? Maybe the DoJ and the FTC would not do their homework about Sun’s intellectual properties, but someone had to realize at some point that you’d walk away with a radically-powerful control over the database market.

Don’t get me wrong: layoffs are horrible, terrible things. And despite the seemingly popular sentiment that Sun’s execs are asleep at the wheel and that working at Oracle is about as non-political as being a member of Congress, both of these companies really are filled with smart and capable people on both an individual contributor level and at a strategic level. This is why I’m really unsettled. Why did nobody think that the acquisition might not run into trouble? Include something in your proposal about how Sun would divest MySQL during its dissolution into Oracle.  Talk about how Oracle would immediately sell MySQL to someone else. Do something to address this glaring and radical increase in market power that Oracle would get by acquiring one of its major competitors.

At best, not addressing MySQL seems like a glaring mistake. At worst it seems like pure hubris – like Oracle smugly and casually disregarded the possibility of being hit with antitrust concerns for being able to take out one of its major competitors in an already small market through acquisition.

And yet the world is still beautiful

One of my favorite film scenes is in a movie called Castaway from 2000. The scene begins with focus on a glass of scotch, cradled by Tom Hanks’ character as he recounts in front of a fire about his experiences being lost on a desert island. Woefully, as the rain beats staccato and the wind blows, Tom Hanks talks about his lowest point on the island. He stares blankly as he describes his realization that there would be no help coming and that he’d never see his wife again. Hanks’ character in the movie is a bit of a controlling-type of leader, and the powerlessness of his fate pushed him to realize that the last thing he had control over was when and where to die.

Is this maturity?

I’ve been partying this semester. A lot. Unlike my last two years of upper division CS, math, and econ, my super senior year is pretty much cruise control in terms of classes. It doesn’t help that the classes I’m taking are reasonably not challenging. I’ve been able to rock Global Climate Change so far despite not having the required reading and ice skating is no differential equations. Even my California History class, which is inarguably my toughest class due to the amount of reading required for homework, is nowhere near as hard as what I’ve had to do in CS or econ in previous semesters. With my hours at work capped and comparatively little to study for, I’ve decided to go hardcore into what I didn’t do in freshman year in what little time I’ve got left in college: party my freakin’ ass off and enjoy now-legal hedonism.

Four minutes.

About thirty seconds before we fight I get nervous. The steel and cloth fabric of my helmet starts to  feel claustrophobic, and I notice that my opponent looks a lot taller and a lot more intimidating than I thought he was. But as the adrenaline kicks in with the tell-tale sweaty palms and increased heart rate so does my training. I suck in the air, warmed by the last two hours of working out and the stomps and screams of previous bouts. I close my eyes and clear my mind, letting everything fade away into mushin – the “no” mind.

My senses open up and the room’s silence becomes a chaotic symphony of sounds. Each person’s breathing has its own texture. I can feel the air displaced by the people around me – subtle otherwise but right now it feels like I’m standing against a series of crashing waves. I can see how the subtle articulation of joints on each of the other kendoka betrays their movement. I can feel their openings, and I can taste their emotions like a fine wine. I sift through the body language, the eye movements, everything that they’re doing. I’m clear. I’m ready. When my mind’s in this state, I know it’s time to unleash my spirit and my sword. Through my heavily padded gauntlet (kote), I grip my bamboo sword (shinai) and thumb its plastic pommel (tsuba) like I’m cocking back the hammer on a pistol. I respectfully bow to my opponent, enter the arena, and gracefully draw and kneel in preparation for the coming storm.

Passion > Pension

I take advice from my friends very seriously. I don’t always agree with it, but I definitely listen and take it to heart. One of the pieces of advice I live by came from my friend Edlyn. While frantically packing for New York (a practice that yields a strangely deterministic spew of random clothes and belongings across her living room floor), Edlyn told me that “success isn’t about what other people think about it. It’s not about any of [that] bullshit – it’s about passion. It can’t be about anything else.” Even though Edlyn is light years away and firmly entrenched in another world, she’s absolutely right about passion and success in business.

You just can’t cut it doing what you do in tech it for anything else other than passion – especially for money.

I know one solid example of how passion wins out over wanting to get a pension (note: pensions are super rare in tech, but it’s alliterative so I’m going to use it). To empirically prove how passion makes you more successful, I present the following case study: Fasil versus Akash.

If I Had a Tumblr…

I’d post this in one of those small messages. I love Tim O’Brien, and I recently reread his short essay How To Tell a True War Story. This is one of my favorite parts:

Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when

you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love

what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your

foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and

although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things

and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder

and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world

could be and always should be, but now is not.

“Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”

- Tim O’Brien