Am I reading The Onion or another parody newspaper? Better check again, because this story sounds just way too good to possibly be true...

According to Wired and others, Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon of the FBI came up with the next brilliant way to add names to the rapidly growing terrorist list: they decided to look through San Francisco grocery store records for suspicious spikes in Iranian food purchases.

Think about this for a minute.

The logic going on here is just amazing. If you buy Iranian food, you must enjoy Iranian food. If you enjoy Iranian food, you must be from Iran. If you're from Iran, you must be a terrorist. Sure, that makes sense. After all, everyone knows that only terrorists eat falafel. Yes, those deep fried balls of chickpeas could only be enjoyed by an evil mastermind terrorist.

So now not only do you have to be careful not to read anything suspicious when you're on an airplane, it's also a good idea to watch what you eat. Because nothing says "I hate you for your freedom" like some tasty shawarma.

Time recently posted their list of five worst and 25 worst websites on the web.

I, personally, am quite sad that neither zombo.com or havenworks.com made it on the list. Clearly Time just isn't up with what makes an awesome site. But it's worth checking out the list anyway.

In the my life is so hard; world's tiniest violin department...

So I spend most of my day on Friday in the Google ball pit, as one is likely to do on a Friday at the Googleplex. Because if you're not answering e-mails and doing code reviews from a ball pit, why are you bothering to go to work at all?

Anyway, so there I am in the ballpit all day, doing things like having tea delivered to me, and meeting the actual original creator of the ballpit (who jumped in with some friends to say hi), and then I discover that my cell phone is gone from my back pocket.

That's right. My cell phone is somewhere in the ball pit. On silent.

So guess what my Monday morning is gonna entail when I get back to work. Oh yeah. A day of ball diving for my cell.

There are points in life that require reflection because everything's about to change and the precipice puts you at a unique vantage point; like switching from high school to university, or moving far away from home. And then there are points in your life that have been arbitrarily declared as special -- not because there's anything inherent about that moment in time that makes its passing any more significant to the universe than the moment prior -- but rather because we're creatures who like to organize the world around us, even if our categorization methods are arbitrary by necessity. We mark these moments as special in a desperate attempt to understand what is otherwise unyielding constant change; counting trips around the sun is one of these arbitrary markers.

So though nothing in this moment requires or deserves reflection, because there's nothing that makes today different from yesterday or tomorrow, I'll take advantage of it nonetheless, because you're only a quarter of the square of the arbitrarily chosen number base system of an arbitrarily chosen delineation of the passage of time once.

Let's begin.

Some of you may have noticed that I was supposed to have taken over the world by now. I've been striving for this elusive goal for so long that when my elementary school friends IM me, a frequent question is "taken over the world yet?" I haven't. (You may have noticed.) And I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time figuring out where I went wrong. Were there some doors I missed? Did I start too late? Did I lack focus? Is it possible at all? Do I have a plan, or am I just hoping magic will make it happen? Is that why I've failed?

Even if I succeed, now or five years from now, or twenty years from now, or fifty, history will no longer write anything hereonout as happening to me "at a young age". I'll no longer receive bonus marks for accomplishment during youth. That means I'll have to look for bonus marks elsewhere, like long-term impact, or simply accept that bonus marks are no longer a viable way to "win", and I should be aiming for success in the root core of what I do without any hope for bonus marks.

The time trial is over (failed), so it's time to stop looking for the shortest path from here to there and start looking for the best way to do it right. How can I improve? Who can I learn from? Who can provide shortcuts? What needs changing and what needs keeping? What are my causes? What will keep me up at night, for decades in a row, restless until I'm able to fix it? Will it make enough of a difference for the whole journey to be a success? Where is the end post?

The next time I hit this marker (fifty! Ha! fifty!) I should be done, or almost done, or it will be too late. I'm not even halfway there yet, which means there's less time for distractions along the way; it's time to focus. In many ways I'm still just as clueless about which direction to run in as I was even ten years ago -- which is insanely frustrating. I'll start wondering if all of the doubters have a point, and if the world can't be conquered and only those who really are crazy believe that it can be. But then I'll get a leap in the right direction, all at once, and it will just feel right. And it becomes hard to believe that anything that pulls and tugs so insistently, that nags me when I ignore it and fits so perfectly when I find it, could be wrong. Perhaps it's driven by madness but if so, the mad could hardly be the judge of that.

I think mostly I need to start making decisions. Decisions are scary because they close doors and I've always profited from closing as few as possible, but this breadth-first search isn't getting me deep enough fast enough. It's also a lot riskier, and risks mean a higher chance of failure, and failure is terrifying, but I s'pose if this were all safe and easy and failure-proof that every second person would be out there taking over the world.

The most motivating thing to get me there is when I realize that I'm failing, that I messed up getting there while "young" and if nothing changes I'm going to miss it entirely. It becomes a challenge. And I respond strongly to challenges.

So although I have to apologize to some of you -- to whom I promised ownership of countries, or a better world after I take the helm -- although you'll have to wait a little longer yet, it doesn't mean it's not going to happen. On the contrary, I know it will. Twenty five years has provided me with enough wisdom to know it'll be another long journey yet. But twenty five years hasn't talked me out of it. No longer "young", but certainly not yet "old", this is a good time to get things done. And I plan on making it happen.

I'm just finishing up reading Kitchen Confidential in which chef Anthony Bourdain describes life in a professional kitchen. He talks about getting your blood everywhere, and disguising old meat to cut corners, and the rough social hierarchies behind that kitchen door. And yet he makes the entire lifestyle seem hopelessly romantic. I dare you to read the book and not think, even for a second, "god I wanna do that", or at least "god I want to go backpacking in France for a few months". He doesn't make it sound luxurious or easy, but rather describes an otherwise entirely hidden culture and then makes that culture palpable to us civilians who normally just eat the food. It gives the food meaning. It makes me want to go find some exotic restaurant and become a part of the culture, even if I can only glimpse at it from the consumer side.

I was walking through the downtown core of San Francisco today, wearing an old UofT t-shirt and a pair of jeans with a cheque for a handful of cashed GOOG stock in my pocket. I looked like a poor student, at best, and though it wasn't a fortune on that piece of paper -- I'd mostly cashed a few stock to see what the process would be like than to gain any actual income for it -- it was still enough money that I felt guilty every single time I walked past a homeless person sleeping on the sidewalk. I was "working from home" and had taken a few hours off to head downtown in the middle of the day. I didn't ask anyone if I could work from home, I just set my status message to "WFH". I wasn't taking the subway there; I walking because I could afford to -- I wasn't in a rush. It was the middle of the day and I was taking a leisurely trip downtown.

As I walked, Kitchen Confidential fresh on my mind, it occurred to me that my life right now is not like most people's lives. When people ask me how my day is going, it's nearly impossible for me to reply and not sound like I'm gloating.

"I'm drinking tea that was just delivered to me in the ballpit. What? Yeah, we have tea and snacks delivered to our desks every day at 3 pm."
"I'm listening to Obama address Google. We invite all the presidential candidates to come talk here and we can ask questions."
"I'm just a little tired. Just came back from the gym, did some running. But I have a massage scheduled in half an hour."
"Eating pumpkin waffles and bacon for breakfast."
"Be right back, gonna go grab some champagne and chocolate dipped strawberries from the meeting room down the hall."

I'm not just gloating. I mean I am, but I'm not. These are my actual days. Now it's not like I sit and eat pumpkin waffles all day -- though sometimes it seems like it. We have our internal issues and there are stressful events. I actually do actual work and tackle extremely hard problems sometimes, but the funny thing is that the actual work and the hard problems are often the part of the day that I enjoy most. "I got to do coding today!", one Googler will often exclaim to another, excitedly, and mean it.

Every week we write up what we did that week and post it to the intranet for all to see. Here's what I did last week (edited a bit to make sense to the general reader):

• Presented the UI design doc for my team's project
• Organized a user doc fixit for my team (all day Wednesday)
• Attended Canadian Anita Borg scholarship kickoff
• Coordinated with Canadian recruiters to find a way to get Canadians-moving-to-US information to new hires
• Worked to improve testing lecture given to new googlers their second week
• Coordinated with teammate to get our continuous build green and set up a policy to keep it that way
• Mentored an internal team that captures kernel failure information from machines in datacenters to improve their testing practices
• Signed up to be in PyCon 2008 review committee
• Submitted expense report for China-Korea-Japan trip
• Met the guy who built the ballpit ... in the ballpit

The thing about that list is that I don't think that there's a single thing that I did last week that I didn't choose to do. It all came from things I decided to do, or things I volunteered to be a part of. None of it came from anyone telling me to work on any of those things. I decided to organize a doc fixit, I decided to get our build green, I decided to be involved in the Anita Borg scholarship.

This is not the typical life of a software engineer, by any means, but amongst the software engineers around me, these "god we're spoiled" stories are an every day thing. We live at the height of luxury. Amazing food, a wealth of possibilities and the resources to make those things happen. Holidays and parties and special events and speakers at every turn. The weekend comes and you're in the middle of a vibrant city with farmers markets and live classical music at bars and geekfests and movies in the park and the finances available to you to do basically whatever you want. The people around you are young and energetic and insanely smart. It sounds like an overused recruiting pitch, I know, but I've been here for a year and a half now and not a week goes by that I don't think about how ridiculous our lives are.

I also know that it won't last forever. No one can live like this forever: where one's biggest problem in life is "where should we go for dinner?" We're accumulating a debt -- a virtual one, but one that's equally as important. We owe this back to those who aren't living this life. Not only in writing great software, because that hardly begins to pay for it, but also in small things (if you can afford to buy local produce, you should) and much larger things. I don't think I could leave Google one day and then take a job that just involved accumulating wealth or selfishly pursuing a dream that didn't help others at all. These years feel like I'm spending a very large scholarship that was given to me (perhaps unfairly) by the rest of the world, and it's my responsibility to use it to learn what I can so that when it's over, and even before it's over, I'm able to repay it back.

This insane life of luxury which shouldn't belong to anyone my age is something that could be in a book. Something that should be in a book. This corner of software engineering is every bit as romantic a life as the pages of Kitchen Confidential. How strange that a discipline made up of anti-social nerds in a very technical, clinical, sterile field would have such a corner at all.

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential's author, came to visit Google yesterday. He stood at the front of a crowded room and told us about his adventures and we listened in awe, wistfully imagining that his life was our own. Our lives are different from his -- fewer steak knives and more for-loops -- but we do share something. What we share is the fact that our lives are not like most people's lives. When we tell stories, they seem almost too fantastical to be true. Both sides of the podium yesterday contained just normal people who happened to get lucky a few times and had the talent to match, and are now reaping the benefits a hundred fold.

I'm extremely lucky to be living this life. Though my last post contained a lament on my failures, I don't want to minimize what I do currently have. I know just how lucky I am. Lottery lucky. I know this.

My reason for looking to the future is not because I don't appreciate what I have now, but because it is the best way that I know to thank the universe for the present. I'm not trying to reap more -- I have more than my share already -- I'm trying to find ways to share what I already do have. And that's the reason why I lament over my failures: because though there's thousands of us who live these insane lives, there are billions more who can only dream of what it must be like.

Nart pointed out to me today that our baby, Psiphon, was written up by esquire to be one of the six ideas that will change the world.

It's funny to read back to blog entires a few years ago when I say things like "Classes are going okay this term. Spending Op Sys with freyr in the backrow, vaguely listening (they're talking about threading and not saying anything I don't know) but mostly making designs for Rhizome, Psiphon, and other projects for work."

I'm glad that the issues around internet censorship are getting mainstream attention, as every additional mention helps, but I worry when software programs like Psiphon are advertised as a magic bullet that's going to make the problem go away. It won't. This is a complicated issue with very deep social, political and legal structures supporting the censorship, and no piece of software is going to be able to counter that; it's not just a technical issue.

Those who are in a region that censors the internet and would like broader access can read about circumvention methods RSF guide. Psiphon caters to a very particular group -- those who know and completely trust someone (like family members) outside of the censored region. But there's a lot that it can't do.

Regardless, I hope that the esquire mention will make people think about the issue again, if only for a minute or two. The battle's far from over and we need all the help we can get.

Let's say someone hands you $1000 and says, "Do good in the world with this money." What would you do with it?

There's always so much talk about charities that were found hoarding using donations to fund advertising or to pay employees to sit around and do busy work or stuff like that. How do you figure out where you can put the $1k and not lose most of it to wastes like these?

And how do you decide which cause to fund? There's thousands of important causes out there that need money to make any progress.

So, go. Comments section. Where would the money do the most good? It's a survey amongst you insanecatsers.

Looking for a way to waste your day? I know you are...


Chat Noir is a game that's easy to play. No "each level gets harder" with this one, but it's still somehow addictive.