Four things

Justin obviously thinks I need to be posting more on my blog, so he tagged me to do the four things thing. So here we go:

Four Jobs I’ve Had

1. The longest-held job I’ve ever had is actually only part-time (and ongoing). I’m a non-executive directory of a group of private psychiatric hospitals in the UK. It’s a fairly easy job — board meetings every so often for which I sometimes get a free trip to London.
2. After selling my first startup, Panopticon, I put in 6 months are the acquiring company before leaving after realizing there was a good chance at some point of most of the senior management of the company being indicted. Never actually happened, but let it never be said that all business people are ethical. Sometimes, people may have a lack of morality in business decisions they make, and sometimes, well, they’re just fucking crooks. Anyway, this isn’t one of the 4 jobs I’m going to discuss — it’s just setting the groundwork. After I left the acquiring company, I spent 2 years wandering in the wilderness, during which time I worked for a few months fulltime at a market research company. It was absolutely fascinating seeing things like actual real life focus groups and market research surveys being conducted by Silicon Valley companies, viewing the whole thing from the marketing department’s perspective.
3. While at school, I worked for Robert Debski while he was a visiting prof at Stanford, and wrote for him an extremely neat Mac application. The app had a backend connection to an Oracle database which stored a (at the time) large collection of scanned & OCR’d polish literature. There was also a polish language dictionary in there. As a student, you could type in an inflected form of a polish word (and polish uses both prefixes and suffixes in its inflections); the app would extract the root of the inflected word, then give you the standard form, the inflection, a dictionary description, and the word used in other inflected forms in snippets drawn from the literature archive. I don’t know why I’ve never seen a similar dictionary application before or since — the concept of seeing not one or two, but potentially hundreds (if you hit “more”) uses of a word in context can give a much finer sense of the meaning(s) of a word than the standard way that dictionaries operate. If you use a dictionary app today (even the online ones), they are merely digital versions of their paper predecessors — no feature has been added other than a more powerful search function for finding the word in the first place.
4. One summer in highschool I worked at Glaxo (before they added SKB to the name) in Greenford on the outskirts of London. My job was doing a bunch of cutting & pasting (with actual scissors and glue) taking research reports on new drugs from the scientists and reformatting the information therein to be filed with the drug approval boards (FDA equivalents) of about 10 or 11 southeast asian countries. Mostly, it was steroidal anti-inflatory drugs, and they’d be applying at the same time for the topical version (cream for rashes), the nasal inhaler (allergies), the oral inhaler (asthma) and the pill/powder form (just about anything else) at the same time, but would have to file separate applications for each form of the drug. Some countries had to have separate apps for each dosage level of a particular form (eg 100mg pills vs 200mg pills). Anyway, lots of cut/paste needed by someone with at least some knowledge of what the science meant so they’d know which sections to paste and which to scrap. But so mindbendingly boring and repetitive (other than some of the clinical trial stories) that nobody but a highschool student on a summer job would want to actually do it.

Four movies I can watch over and over

1. Dr Strangelove.
2. The Maltese Falcon. Some of the best dialog ever written in a Holywood movie.
3. Seven Samurai. The pacing of the action is about as close to perfect as can be achieved.
4. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in Extended Edition.

Four places I’ve lives

1. San Francisco, CA. Walking around San Francisco today, I still have flashbacks occasionally triggered by familiar smells from long ago, where I’ll recognize something I haven’t seen in 25 years.
2. On the grounds of a psychiatric hospital. There was actually a big wall between us and the main grounds of the hospital, but the house was owned by the hospital. We lived there for about 3 years I think when I was 7-8-9 years old. Richmond park just down the road was excellent.
3. 3rd house from the top in the cluster of 4 terraced houses in the center of the picture. Looks like the Keyhole snapshot dates from mid June. Every year for midsummer’s night, the 50-odd houses around the central garden who all share access to it pitch in together and hire a band and put on a party. The tent in the garden there must be for that party. That’s the house where I mostly grew up. I think we moved there in 1984, and I left when I went off to college in 1992. My parents now live one block east, in the middle house of the cluster of 3 in the bottom-right corner.
4. This house is currently under construction. You can see where our old deck used to be (as well as our flowerpots thereon). ETA on the new house looks like probably about September 2006.

Four TV shows I love

Jeez, this isn’t going to be easy — I don’t watch much TV these days

1. The Daily Show. Almost as good as british TV news at reporting what’s actually going on in the world. But not quite. On the other hand, it’s generally funnier.
2. American Idol. The manipulation by the producers, who know all through the first dozen or so episodes who’s going to be in the final 12 (they’ve known since it was all filmed and decided 6 months ago) is fantastic. I think very few people watching the show realize that the producers already know what’s going to happen next week. The element of control that the producers wield is only slightly diminished once the viewing public gets to start voting too; “We are all individuals.” “I’m not“
3. The Today Show. Featuring the highest paid news anchor in the world: Katie Couric. She and Matt Lauer are incredibly good at what they do, which is what I call “Labrador Journalism”. Imagine you’re supposed to be interviewing some important world political leader. Now imagine you’re a labrador retriever.
4. Cops. The original, and still the best. I can never decide whether the original creator of the show admires the police, or whether he put that on as a front to the TV people so that he could air his documentary about consistent and rigorous violations of every right an American has, perpetuated on a daily basis by the police of every city in the country. The combination of schadenfreude/horror is a balance which not even Springer could attain in his finest years.

Four Places I’ve Vacationed

1. Rajasthan, India — best backpacking trip ever
2. Petit St Vincent, St Vincent and the Grenadines — best restful trip ever
3. Southwestern Anatolia — best boat trip ever
4. Solomon Islands, New Zealand, New Caledonia, Fiji — best island-hopping rugby trip ever

Four of my Favorite Dishes

1. Charcoal-grilled ribeye steak — the reason I could never be vegetarian
2. Sugar-snap pea soup — if you live in the bay area, you should visit Le Papillon just off 280 in west San Jose. It’s not cheap, but it’s one of the most european tasting menus I’ve had in the US.
3. Christmas Pudding with brandy butter
4. Chicken and 40 cloves, with sourdough bread to smoosh the cloves on/suck up the olive oil.

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now

1. Somewhere the cleaners aren’t vacuuming
2. Somewhere the baby’s not crying
3. Somewhere the dog’s not chewing on me
4. Somewhere I can’t see that my inbox has 79 unread messages in it

Four Sites I Visit Daily

1. My feed-on-feeds powered (tweaked) aggregator
2. Eschaton. Someone once asked why I read Atrios instead of someone like Josh Marshall at TPM. My reply was that Marshall’s signal-to-noise ratio is often too high to be interesting.
3. Slashdot
4. Gumstix.org

Four People I’m Tagging

I’ll add some people once I’ve done some more thinking about who might be interesting. Biggest problem is most of the interesting people don’t have blogs.