William Reardon’s Blog

To those I’ve shared written corresponded with, it will come as zero surprise that I simply cannot spell. Likewise, anyone who’s read this blog for any length of time. (Although maybe not some.)

A while back, talking with Khayman one day, I found both he & I shared the same dirty secret: we both would use Google as our fall back spell checker.

You spelling bee winners may have no idea what I’m talking about, but the rest of you, the ones living your hidden lives in red squiggly line hell know what I mean. For me, the challenge often isn’t to spell the word right. I know I have no hope of that. Rather, for me, the challenge is to get the word spelled close enough that the spell checker can figure out what the hell it is that I’m trying to spell.

And, I’m sad to say, I’m pretty good at stumping it. For whatever reason, no spell checker, anywhere, not Word, not ispell, not aspell, can figure out my spelling of convience.

Before Google, when failed by a spell checker, I used to fall back on a combination of grep, regular expressions, and /usr/dict/words. The experience was always mixed. I knew for certain it started with ‘con’, but then so did a lot of other words. ‘vence’ has to be in there some where. Wait, no results, I guess not. Damn. Most often, I’d just page through a long list of words until I found what I was looking. Ah, convenience. There we go.

However, today it’s just a click away.

convience.

‘Did you mean convenience?’

Why, yes, I did. Thank you, Google.

The reason this works is it takes advantage of the countless interactions my fellow dysfunctional spellers have with Google, combined with a little help from their loved ones.

In the days before search engines suggested the correct spelling of things (or even today when you stump them)things typically went something like this:

User: convience
Search Engine: … Crap Results …
User: Back Button

User: convenaynce
Search Engine: … Crap Results …
User: Back Button

User: convieance
Search Engine: … Crap Results …
User: Back Button

User: conveyience
Search Engine: … Crap Results …
User: Back Button

User: conviaence
Search Engine: … Crap Results …
User: Back Button

This would happen easily a dozen more times. (You know you really messed up when you get no results.) Eventually, surrender:

User: ‘Honey, how do you spell convience?’
Honey: ‘I think it’s c-o-n-v-e-n-i-e-n-c-e, but I’m not sure. You might want to check.’
User: convenience
Search Engine: ‘ Good Results ‘
User: ‘That’s it. Thanks, honey.’

What Google does is learn from this interaction. It looks at your sequence of searches, it sees you refining your query, and by terminating your search (and probably clicking a link), figures that’s what you must have meant. So it’s not that Google has any new or improved spelling heuristics to offer a better spell checker, rather, it’s learning from actual human beings. And, turns out, that approach works really well. Hence, it can figure out convience when nobody else can.

So it surprised me earlier this evening, that not only did I trump Word’s spell checker, but Google as well. And not only that, but I was right!

Typing ‘’sh’ into Word, I found the familiar red squiggly appear underneath. Hmmm’ none of the suggestions are correct. A few variations with much luck. I throw ’sh into google & it’s not hot-linked over to the definition. Hmmm, must be spelled wrong. Not even a suggestion. Damn. A few variations there, no luck. Huh.

Now I’m wondering if ’sh is even a word or something I’ve made up. I could swear it is, though. On a lark, I try dictionary.com. Damn, no suggestions. Wait, that’s a definition. Hey, that’s what I thought it meant’ did it fix it for me? No, wait! I had it right. Double-check Google. Double-check Word. Same results. Whoa. I beat Word & Google. Those bitches at Scripps better watch out now.

Now, you may be wondering in what context I was using ’sh. Was I looking for an antonym to describe me? (Antonym, there’s another hard one.) Actually, no. It was describe some of the sights in West Hollywood.

See, Ticketmaster’s offices are right on the Sunset Strip, so day to day, just going to coffee shop, you see a fairly eclectic collection of individuals. People who looked like they fell out of Entourage. Rockstars-to-be with their own distinct look. People who feel that some pieces of clothes, typically considered required, are, in fact, optional. (Those are the best.) Add in Halloween & the craziness ramps up a level.

Yet, the strangest personal sighting for me, still remains last week. Driving home, I saw a group of 3 guys walking down the Strip. Two where dressed normally. At least Sunset-normal. I’m not 100% sure of the details, because of the third guy. The third looked as if you had starved a Calvin Kline model, given him nothing to wear but a pair of diapers and glued a set of angle wings to his back. Honestly, I’m surprised the wind was blowing him away. Or that he wasn’t cold in that outfit.

And, honestly, if that doesn’t call for the use of the word ’sh, I don’t know what does.

Good Day, Mr. Kubrick (via Brandon)

There’s no entry for him on IMDB, so I’m guessing the acting thing didn’t work out too well.

Prepare to shit your pants: 300

Woman: Saddam guards buried people alive

Prison guards under Saddam Hussein used to bury detainees alive and watch women as they bathed, occasionally shooting over their heads, a former female prisoner testified Monday in the genocide trial of the ex-president.
…

A prison warden she identified as Hajaj ‘ whose name has been given by earlier witnesses in the trial ‘ “used to drag women, their hands and feet shackled, and leave them in a scorching sun for several hours.”

“Soldiers used to watch us bathe,” said the woman. The guards also fired over the women’s heads as they washed.

The woman said several relatives disappeared during the offensive against the Kurds. “I know the fate of my family (members). They were buried alive,” she testified.

The prosecution presented the court with documents showing that remains of the women’s relatives turned up in a mass grave.

It baffles me that I live in a country where our isolated mistakes are given moral equivalence to the systematic torture of a dictatorial regime and that some how that prior state of affairs was the preferred state between the two.

As our generation’s version of the JFK assassination, everyone remembers where they were & what they where doing on 9/11. I do as well, but it’s also struck me as curious how 9/11 has interleaved with my career at Yahoo. Three major milestones happened the day before, the day of, and the day after.

While the latter two happened on anniversaries, the first milestone happened a day before the actual event. I received my offer from Yahoo on 9/10/01. I was happy to hear it, as I wasn’t 100% if I would be getting one or not. The next morning I was awoken by my sister calling from the east coast.

I think at that point only the first plane had hit and while major news, nobody was certain what was going on. So the bulk of the call was telling her about the position, the offer, next steps, etc. As we said goodbye, she said it sounded like more was happening, and that I should go turn on the TV, which I promptly did. Only then did the enormity of the day’s events set in.

Later in the afternoon the recruiter from Yahoo called, expressed hope that nobody I knew was on the planes bound for LA, and that obviously everyone was shook up, so there was no rush on the offer & to take as much time as I needed. Prior to receiving the offer, I had decided what the criteria was I needed to accept. Yahoo met it, so my mind was more or less already made up, but still, I was touched by the gesture. I thought it was a good sign of the kind of place I’d want to work.

The second milestone my most uniquely Yahoo experience. My first year, working in My Yahoo, was interesting in learning how everything worked and how they handled so many users, so many page views, all with every changing data, but, over all, not that different from starting on any other job. During that time, Yahoo was still recovering from the dot.com crash. A few months after my start, we underwent a round of layoffs. Terry Semel had recently come aboard, but people where still deciding for themselves if it was a good thing or not. The general direction seemed up in the air & the company felt rudderless.

In My Yahoo, our focus shifted to the SBC partnership. I was involved in helping build out pieces of the portal, working with other teams to use their data in the new modules. Eventually I found my personal focus moving over to the system that replicated the bulk of near-real-time data for us — things like headlines, weather, sports scores, etc. Created by one of more senior engineers (and a great guy to work with), it was another great learning experience, but the maintenance ended up being a bit mundane.

So it was with a bit of free time, that I read Ash’s email asking for volunteers to help build a tribute site for the first anniversary of 9/11. I remember using cal to confirm my feeling: 9/11 wasn’t that far away. How would they pull this off? I didn’t know if I’d be able to help, but having nothing to lose & at the very least it’d be interested, I fired off an response saying I’d like to help.

An invite for the kick-off meeting shortly followed & once congregated, I walked in, looked around & quickly decided I was in over my head. I knew most of the faces in the room, if not personally, then by their reputation and abilities.

Debating if I should just walk out, the meeting started, quickly delving the specifics of what we wanted to build. Users would be able to create a “tile.” The tile would contain a large graphic — things like hearts, doves, national flags, etc. — and a text message. People would be able to share their tile with friends & family, but you could also browse tiles. You could do a generic search or simply look at the ones from your hometown. They would all tie together and make a larger “quilt”, the spirt similar to a virtual AIDS quilt.

The deadline for the project non-negotiable, we then set about deciding how to build it & built it fast. We considered using a few internal platforms, but most of those ideas where scuttled for a variety of reasons. We had recently decided that one of priority templating technologies would be deprecated in favor of PHP and the company was doing more & more with MySQL, so why not give those a go. Jeffrey, from the Finance team, was there. They made heavy use of MySQL, so that seemed like a good option. I don’t think any of us had used PHP, but figured how hard could it be? Rough design in place, we decided how to break things down & set out to do our individual pieces.

From there, for the next 1-2 weeks, things quickly became a blur. As the calendar marched forward, so did the pressure. Sleep became optional, as 20+ hour days and all-nighters became the norm. My ignorance of PHP was replaced with hatred of PHP. MySQL was starting to melt, but luckily, Jeremy was drafted and he was able to make magic happen & keep things running.

Some amazing things happened in the middle of it as well.

Confronted with an apparent performance issue in PHP, we called up Rasmus, the creator of the language (prior to him joining us). I initially balked, the analogy of pestering Stroustrup with my idiotic C++ questions bouncing in my head. At Petsmart, I couldn’t call Gosling when servlets blew up. Part sleep deprived, I remembered the size of Yahoo and imagined that maybe when you’re that big, you get a rolodex of Computer Science heavies. Maybe it makes sense. Snapping back into reality, I realized people where still talking to me, explaining that Yahoo was already in contact with him & we were hoping he’d join us full time. Damn, I thought. I would have liked that rolodex. I wanted to complain to Larry about the behavior of &foo;.

Needing hardware, an ops manager showed up in my cube a bit later with an excess amount of hardware for us to use. The only question was how could they help us get it up & running. No politics, no debate. Just how can we help.

After launch, we got a tremendous response. So tremendous that the simple moderation required for each tile — simple sanity checks to prevent hate messages, spam, and other things counter to the spirt of the project — quickly overwhelmed the tasked manpower. Another call for help went out, and the response was huge. In particular, I remember running a database query to see who the top moderators where. I was proud that in the top 10 where several of our senior managers. Everyone was rolling up their sleeves & doing whatever they could.

It’s still probably one of the craziest projects I’ve ever worked on. Crazy in terms of high profile, crazy in terms of effort, crazy in terms of dedication, crazy in terms of lack of sleep, and crazy in terms of pressure.

I loved every minute of it.

My third & final milestone was much more recent. On 9/12/06, after five years at Yahoo, I submitted my resignation. It was a difficult decision, but it was time to move on. There’s a lot of great things at Yahoo (witness Hack Day) and it was sad to say goodbye to so many good people.

So, it had to be something pretty compelling to make the switch, and that it is. Later this month, I’ll be joining the team over at Ticketmaster.com. I’ll write more about it in the future, but knowing a fair bit of the team already, it’s exciting to start a job knowing that I’ll be working for a great boss, with some really talented people, and taking on some challenging projects.

Between jobs for the next two weeks, I don’t have much in the way of big plans, but I’m thinking that’s a good thing. I’ll join my mom visiting my brother up in Seattle (who, btw, is moving from MS to Google!), and catching up on various errands I’d been putting off. Today, after a year and half of waiting, I finally got the tiny holes in the top of my jeep fixed. Aside from that, it’s whatever I wake up in the morning & feel like doing. Some reading. Some hacking. A little bit of video games & tv.

Day 1 was today, and so far, so good. :-)

After having symptoms akin to whopping cough, I went to the doctor the other day and found out I have bronchitis. A coworker was kind enough to recommend an urgent care clinic close to home, so, since work email was down for about a day and half, I figured I might as well.

Urgent care, for the record, is a bit like the Kmarts of hospitals. They also seem to be under the mysterious impression that sick people enjoy waiting. You’d think, given our general state of sickness & having to deviate from our normal lives, that would realize we’re more grumpy than usual & are even less happy waiting.

Yet, that’s what I did. Wait. I waited two and half hours before being called. Then, once called, I waited twenty minutes in a room for a doctor to actually show up. After deciding that I needed a prescription, I had to wait fifteen minutes to get it. Taking the prescription to CVS, I had to wait twenty minutes to get it filled. Mollie once told me I had a problem with waiting just for a restaurant, so you can imagine how annoyed I was with this.

The doctor visit itself was extremely short. He stayed, for, what, three, four minutes top? He diagnosed me with bronchitis, said I needed a prescription & that he would be right back — out the door before I could say anything. On his return, I figured I could ask him some of the questions bouncing around my head: How does one get bronchitis? How did he know I have it? Am I contagious?

After waiting the fifteen minutes, the door opened again. Only instead of being the doctor it was a nurse returning with my prescription and a form. The form had a few checkboxes filled out telling me to follow up wit my primary physicians should the symptoms worsen, not much else. Annoyed & cranky, I decided to just ask the nurse my questions although she seemed surprised & unprepared. The main thing I found out was that is was fine to go to work, but couldn’t really tell me how they knew & how I caught it.

After explaining to my mom the steps the doctor had gone through, she explained the diagnosis was probably based on listening to my lungs. I still don’t know how I got it, but I’m blaming it on Disneyland. While waiting in line for Star Tours with my sister, I had my hand on the railing. It’s dark, so moving forward, I didn’t notice part of the railing was covered in some sort of liquid and slid my hand right through it. What is was, I still don’t know & still don’t want to. Lord knows what could have come out of one of those children. It was pretty gross at the time, so my only concern was getting it off of me, repeatedly wiping my hand on the legs of my jeans.

Morale of the story: 1) avoid urgent care facilities, and 2) don’t touch anything in the dark at Disneyland.

Look at that intense concentration.

I spent the last couple of days with my sister and her family at Disneyland, or, as Quinn, my two year old nephew, calls it “Mickey’s House.”

The coolest ride was Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin . You sit in a chair that spins 360 degrees armed with a ray gun. As you pass through the ride, there’s bulls-eyes all about, so you can shoot at Zerg & the other baddies. Getting onto the ride there’s a life-sized version of Buzz describing your mission on etch a sketch (a la Toy Story). Quinn felt into silent awesome and stared in amazement, confronted by a life-size version of one of his favorite characters.

I was also impressed that Disney didn’t try to rip you off every chance they got. Like other amusement parks, they take your photo in the middle of the ride, and in some cases, like the others, Disney offered to sell them to you, but with Buzz, you could simply email them to yourself — for free. And like a lot of other parks, rides often had a shop at the ending, hawking theme-related shirts & trinkets. But whereas at Six Flags Great America, you’re forced to walk through these shops — much to the chagrin off parents already tired of dolling out money for over priced — Disney seemed to always have an additional path, allowing your to skirt the store. Drinks & food where, of course, overpriced, but maybe I’ve spent too much time at airports in that they didn’t seem that overpriced.

1. Apologies to Dave & Diana, but the Mandalay Bay sucks. No mini-bar. No coffee in the room. Crap TV. Crap channels (not even HBO!) Crap view. Our bathroom is nice, but that’s about it. If I’m paying that much just for a nice bathroom, I expect wiping service to be included.

2. My mom likes to randomly flip light switches when she’s bored.

3. My mom gets bored when her three sons are using the Internet & wireless. Not bad, unless the router you’re all using for Internet is hooked up to one.

4. My mom took a bath in fish oil. Not on purpose. It was before I arrived, but apparently they went out, the whole time asking my brothers “Do I smell like fish? Why do I smell like fish?” They didn’t figure it out until they got back, found their room stunk of fish, and my mom started saying they had to change rooms; that they hardly used it, except for the bath she took using their bath salts. I think it was around then that one brother noticed his fish oil tablets where missing from the bathroom. Update: Jimmy does a much better job telling the story.

5. My mom just found another light switch that will cycle our router & kick us off the Internet. “But you guys said to leave the switch by the door alone. Not by the bed.”

6. Quinn is the coolest nephew ever.

7. Buffets tend to be cheaper for breakfest or lunch than a typical resturtant.

8. If you are a stranger & block Jimmy’s way getting on the tram, he will yell at you. He doesn’t really care if you’re waiting for husband.

9. You could not defeat the shrimp mountain at Caesar’s old buffet, but the one at Rio’s Seafood showed weakness.

10. Speaking of shrimp, did you more shrimp is consumed in Las Vegas than in the rest of the country combined?

That is all.

I’ve heard of various betting strategies for playing blackjack. Double every time you lose, bumping through 2(x)-2-3-5 each time you win, etc. Since I’m in Las Vegas until Tuesday, I decided to try something different — the numbers from Lost.

The table minimum was 5, so I had to symbolically put down that for the 4, but then followed through with the 8, 15, 16, 23, & 42. I lost the 5, but the 8, 15, & 16 all paid. The 23 & 42… those where nerve racking, but hey, they both paid too.

Now the question is: Did I just curse myself & family for $99?

While it doesn’t take much for me to stay up until three thirty in the morning, there isn’t much that will make wake up at three thirty. Deep sea fishing is now one of those things.

Growing up in the midwest, it’s a stable of any boy’s youth to go various fishing trips. However, lacking oceans, there’s no ocean fishing. It’s mainly nearby rivers, lakes & stocked ponds. Not that I’m complaining — I have very found memories for fishing trips. It’s just that it doesn’t even compare to fishing in saltwater.

I had my first saltwater trip on Thursday, thanks to the trip Craig planned. Beginner’s luck proved to rule the day, as I caught the first (and 2nd largest) catch of the day, and Brandon — also a beginner — had the second (and largest) catch of the day. (It must have been our special lures & jigs.)

My first catch was a 12 pound yellow tail. It’s incredible how much these guys fight. I think it took 30 minutes to to reel him in & get him into the boat, the whole time your pole bent in a tight U that the fishy would clearly love to yank into the ocean with him.

As you can see I was quite happy once the job was accomplished.

Later in the day, I caught a 6 pound bonito, although by afternoon they weren’t biting as much, so we left Catalina Island & headed back the long beach pier. It was a really, really long day, but definitely worth it.

The only problem was we had all this super fresh fish & I’m heading off to Vegas tomorrow. I think the solution next time will be to have a BBQ the day after to have friends come over & help devour our fishies.