{"id":2886,"date":"2008-07-29T15:13:06","date_gmt":"2008-07-29T23:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/?p=2886"},"modified":"2008-07-31T07:44:53","modified_gmt":"2008-07-31T15:44:53","slug":"hot-off-the-presses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/2008\/07\/29\/15\/13\/hot-off-the-presses\/","title":{"rendered":"Hot Off the Presses"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, spurred on by the revelations that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?hl=en&amp;q=%22tom+costello%22+hitler&amp;btnG=Google+Search&amp;aq=f\" target=\"_blank\">ex-Hitler Speech connoisseur  Tom Costello<\/a> from my old college <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tcd.ie\/\" target=\"_blank\">TCD<\/a> has got himself a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blogpulse.com\/search?query=cuil&amp;image22.x=0&amp;image22.y=0\" target=\"_blank\">new search engine<\/a> that apparently returns <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theregister.co.uk\/2008\/07\/29\/cuil_launch\/\" target=\"_blank\">more targetted gay porn<\/a> results than Google, I did some <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">googling<\/span> searching to see what was going on with that web of people from the early 90s, with whom I apparently share 2 or 3 degrees of separation according to stalker vanity sites such as LinkedIn, FaceBook, etc. Sarah Carey is, of course, doing some PR for Costello&#8217;s lamentably spelled Cuil, and churning out the usual <a title=\"GUBU (Sarah Carey) - Life in the Valley 2008-06-17\t\tNote: one of the ones that I had to let a few days pass before I could post it as I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really like parts of it - especially the end - it seemed twee. Jet lag is the excuse. Still, already a couple of people said they enjoyed and emailed me. So for the record..here it goes\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\t\tI have a secret life. You may know me as a domesticated, rural housewife and while this is true, for the past year I have also tasted the life of an international software executive.\tLast summer an old friend from college rang me from Palo Alto in California. He was starting a software company and wanted me to do some work for him. I tried refusing but he wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to be put off. 'How long does it take to write a column?' he demanded. 'Er, a day,' I replied. 'And what you are doing the rest of the time? The boys are in a cr\u00c3\u00a8che aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t they?'\t'Well, only part time,' I defended, 'and I have the house to manage. And the garden. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m really very busy.' 'Yes, very busy Sarah.'\tA contract arrived which informed me I had just been appointed as a 'Strategist to the CEO' of a fledgling company. That means I help him plot stuff, as he says himself. Fortunately, this plotting requires my presence in sunny California from time to time and on each trip I am amazed at the number of other Irish technology people I meet on their way to 'the Valley'.\t\tSilicon Valley is the name given to the southern suburbs of San Francisco that run about 150 miles down to the quiet town of Almaden where IBM has its research centre. At its heart lies Stanford University in Palo Alto, surrounded by the offices of many of the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s greatest technology companies. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the undisputed global capital of high-tech. How did this happen?\t\tEveryone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s got a theory. Some say that the DNA of Californians is embedded with the adventurous spirit of the first settlers here - the ones who followed the Gold Rush. John Markoff, a New York Times journalist, has argued in his book What the Dormouse Said that the mind-expanding virtues of drugs helped too. In California in the 1960s, hippies + acid = flower power. PhD graduate hippies from Stanford + acid = modern-day computing. Stanford graduates such as Messrs Hewlett and Packard set up here in the 1950s and within twenty years Xerox were inventing many of the technologies we use in every day computing.\t\tThrow in the Venture Capital industry and soon the Valley filled with enormously rich geeks.\t\tIrish people pop up everywhere in this unlikely environment. On the flight out, engineers and middle-ranking executives sit at the back of the plane while up the front there are the likes of Niall O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Connor from Limerick, the chief information Officer of Apple.\t\tOther leading lights are John Harnett, also from Limerick,at Palm; Tony Redmond the chief technology officer at Intel, Brian FitzGerald at Intuit and Conrad Burke of Innovalight, a solar-energy start-up. The Irish have a history of emigration but from the mid-1980\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s we started to churn computer engineers instead of civil engineers out of our universities. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when we stopped building skyscrapers and tunnels and started building semi-conductors and cutting edge software.\t\tWith all those stock options, Silicon Valley is a rich place. I stay in a hotel in Palo Alto and walk around to the office each morning, slowly adjusting to the fact that I am supposed to smile and greet fellow pedestrians and joggers. The tree-lined streets are perfumed with flowers and weirdly quiet. They have so much space here that buildings are low rise, mostly only two-storey and the noise of their huge cars is lost into the atmosphere.\t\tThe serenity is catching \u00e2\u20ac\u201c I become conscious of my foot fall. People speak quietly, even the children. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s beautiful, but surreal. You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help wondering if all the loud, crazy people have been rounded up and shipped into San Francisco.\t\tThe signs of an ailing economy are evident though. When I pop over to the Stanford Shopping Centre, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hardly anyone there. Hardly any staff either.\t\tHilary Keane works for Enterprise Ireland in their Palo Alto office, helping Irish software start-ups work on their pitches to the venture capitalists. She lives in the city and commutes to the Valley each morning. She pays $75 a week now to fill her 2 litre car, the smallest she could buy when she moved out here. Before you didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t notice the price and now you do.\t\tThe result is that like in Ireland people are getting cautious though due to the software billions, this part of the US is suffering least.\t\tIn our little company there are about 25 staff, over a dozen of whom have PhDs. Attracted to Stanford from all over the world, these are some of the smartest people on the planet. Lunch is ordered in every single day. Huge fridges burst with snacks and drinks. Bowls of strawberries and muffins lie around the rest area.\t\tThe company pays for a personal trainer and gym membership for everyone. A doctor calls round each Friday, after the weekly barbeque, to see if everyone\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in good health. Employees drift in an out at times that suit themselves.\t\tWhen I observed this behaviour first I was appalled and took my CEO friend aside. This was disastrous! His company would never succeed if he wasted money like this and didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t crack the whip. He laughed. This is the way it works out here. You have to be nice to people.\t\tWell if that was the case, he could be nice to me. I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to fly home in the back of the plane. I summoned up the audacity to ask for business class travel and was granted it without hesitation. Knowing the cost of the ticket was over \u00e2\u201a\u00ac2000, which is about $5 million given the current exchange rate, I had to walk around for 15 minutes afterwards chanting 'I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worth it. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worth it. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m worth it'.\t\tBut am I worth it? What on earth was I expected to do amongst these doctorates and luminaries. Within minutes of my arrival it all becomes clear. They may know something about computers, but I know a thing or two about people. All the fancy programming in the world won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t convince people to use their product and they need me to figure out how to tell people what they do. I am a devotee of the Internet and email but nothing can replace coming out here and looking them in the eye. When you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in the same room as someone, one look can explain far more than a phone call or email.\t\tOfficially then my job is to develop a communications strategy which simply means working out how to talk to people.\t\tI\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got a PhD in talking alright, and I appear to have talked my way into the American Dream. For the moment it is still a dream though. Then I tap my shoes and wake up back in Enfield. I have the best of both worlds. Theirs is good, but I confess, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m glad I live in this one.\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sarahcarey.ie\/2008\/06\/17\/life-in-the-valley\/\" target=\"_blank\">Naif-in-Hy-Brasil<\/a> copy that a certain class of Irish readers favour as a framing device for the rather more complex entity known as &#8220;America&#8221;. But what really tickled me was clicking on a link, and then another, and then another, to find a rather late <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chickensinenvelopes.net\/zines\/procrastinations\/03.html#garth\" target=\"_blank\">review of TrinCon 400<\/a>, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?aq=f&amp;num=100&amp;hl=en&amp;safe=off&amp;q=trincon+dublin+-ohio+-columbus+-listado+-plasmid+-whitneymoore+-hospital.reports&amp;btnG=Search\" target=\"_blank\">science fiction drinking contest<\/a> me and some friends did in the early 90s. The review nails it &#8211; we had no idea what was going on, but we had bags of cash to spend because of TCD&#8217;s 400th anniversary, and we knew what we wanted (mainly no nerds with pointy ears). So we got most of it together, despite my late attempt to sabotage everything by pissing off Trinity College&#8217;s establishment after printing up a flyer calling them a bunch of &#8220;old knobs&#8221; just before the gig (<a title=\"the classic story of Harry must be when he and Tom Shippey were guests at the Trinity College SF Convention (TrinCon) in 1992. There is a traditional Friday evening dinner where the lecturers and Dean of the college assemble in the Great Hall and which the con attendees managed to get invited to. Everyone was seated and about to begin the meal when there were loud raps on the massive Hall doors. With everyone looking around and no indication that the rapping was likely to stop the porters opened the doors. Harry and Tom marched in to thunderous applause from the sf fans, thus breaking hundreds of years of tradition - the doors had never been opened during the meal before!\" href=\"http:\/\/www.iol.ie\/~carrollm\/hh\/birthday\/br.htm\" target=\"_blank\">Harry Harrison managed to piss them off with more style<\/a>). Anyway, it&#8217;s nice to know <a href=\"http:\/\/jamesb.livejournal.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">someone else<\/a> enjoyed it.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, regarding Cuil, it&#8217;s impressive that they grabbed a small VC investment to launch a Google competitor without bothering to incestuously link to any Web 2, FOSS, or social buzzy tech popular right now (a major sin for the Valley&#8217;s hype machine, and a major constraint for any of the Google-driven AdSense-addicted blogs considering writing about them going forward). They apparently also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metafilter.com\/73640\/cuil-kids\" target=\"_blank\">forgot to plan for it to scale<\/a>, to devise a page ranking algorithm that does not suck, and that the bucketing of search results was being done before Google arrived, has been repeatedly reinvented by companies since then and dabbled in by Ask or even Google (see, for instance, the 90s-era <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hotbot\" target=\"_blank\">HotBot<\/a> and today&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/clusty.com\/search?input-form=clusty-simple&amp;v%3Asources=webplus&amp;query=cuil\" target=\"_blank\">Clusty<\/a>), and that when best realised tends to asymptotically converge on either an ontological index or a yellow pages directory, depending on how you crowd source. Cuil is an <a href=\"http:\/\/joeduck.com\/2008\/07\/28\/cuil-search-ah-ha-now-i-get-it\/\" target=\"_blank\">obvious attempt to flip some Google &#8220;insider&#8221; tech<\/a> and a bunch of r\u00c3\u00a9sum\u00c3\u00a9s and captive H1-Bs to one of the search giants for a quick sale.<\/p>\n<p>They also pulled an Apple and claimed to have the Largest Index Ever (&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/money.cnn.com\/2008\/07\/28\/technology\/cuil.ap\/index.htm?cnn=yes\" target=\"_blank\">120 billion<\/a>!&#8221;), mere days after the <a href=\"http:\/\/googleblog.blogspot.com\/2008\/07\/we-knew-web-was-big.html\" target=\"_blank\">Google Blog announced it had surpassed a trillion URLs<\/a>. That&#8217;s some fine index work, Cuil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, spurred on by the revelations that ex-Hitler Speech connoisseur Tom Costello from my old college TCD has got himself a new search engine that apparently returns more targetted gay porn results than Google,&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[724,182,730,725,262,728,726,727,729,1],"tags":[1556,1398,1562,1557,1411,1560,1558,1563,1559,1561],"class_list":["post-2886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cuil","category-google","category-hitler","category-sarah-carey","category-science-fiction","category-tcd","category-tom-costello","category-trincon-400","category-trinity-college-dublin","category-uncategorized","tag-cuil","tag-google","tag-hitler","tag-sarah-carey","tag-science-fiction","tag-tcd","tag-tom-costello","tag-trincon","tag-trincon-400","tag-trinity-college-dublin"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2886\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.meehawl.com\/Blogfiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}