Separated at birth: David Foley and Ira Glass

So, we received in the mail a preview DVD of the new collaboration between the Showtime cable network and the Public Radio International show, This American Life. My wife and I watched it, and we got to see Ira Glass for the first time. My first thought was "That's David Foley. This must be a gag." However, once I heard the voice, it was clear that it was our old buddy Ira.

See for yourself (Ira's on the left and David's on the right):


My wife thinks I'm nuts, and that they look absolutely nothing alike.

Star of the Show

This is my daughter Lucy.


She was in the Club Med 'Petite Club' end-of-the-week show. She did a group number,

and then she was the star of a second segment.

Rob on the trapeeze at Ixtapa Club Med

My family went to the Ixtapa Club Med in February 2007, and I took a turn on the flying trapeeze. Excellent experience that I'd recommend to anyone.

2007 SAP Open

At the 2007 SAP Open tennis tournament, I saw a match today with Bjorn Phau. He showed incredible sportsmanship while playing in the first round against Konstantinos Economidis. A ball that Phau hit to Economondis was out, but not called out by the line judge. Economidis returned it, and Phau having seen that his ball was out, let the return go by, giving the point to Economidis. Phau went on to win the match and advance to the second round.

He was graceful, both in his stroke and his approach to the game. Quite refreshing to see someone acting professionally in a professional sport.

Memorial for Grace Alice Gilbert-Fagen

My wife Jennifer and I expected our third child on January 1. Unfortunately, when we went in on Thursday, January 4 to induce labor, they weren't able to find a heartbeat. Jennifer had been in on Tuesday, January 2 for a non-stress test, and the baby was happy and healthy from all indications.

While delivering the baby, we discovered that there had been a cord accident. The cord had wrapped very tightly twice around her neck some time late Tuesday night and become compressed to the point where blood flow was blocked. In every other way, she was a perfect baby.

We decided to call her Grace Alice Gilbert-Fagen.On Saturday, February 3, we had a memorial service for Grace at our home. Family, friends and co-workers showed up to support us in our moment of great sadness. Jennifer and I both said a few words. Jennifer read the following poem:

Emily Dickinson (1830–86).
Complete Poems. 1924.

Part Three: Love

XXXIII

I HELD a jewel in my fingers
And went to sleep.
The day was warm, and winds were prosy;
I said: “’T will keep.”

I woke and chid my honest fingers —
The gem was gone;
And now an amethyst remembrance
Is all I own.

I read something that I had written for the occasion:

Last spring, I wrote a poem.
It was a short poem, only 23 lines long.
Into that poem I put everything that I am:
all of my hopes, all of my dreams, and all of my love for my family.

I gave that poem to Jennifer, and she bound it into a book.
It was a short book, with only 23 pages to start, but plenty of room to grow.
She put into that book everything that she is:
all of her hopes, all of her dreams and all of her love for our family.

We waited patiently, and in the case of Eloise and Lucy not so patiently,
for the author to arrive. We wondered what the story might turn out to be.
We wondered if the author might be an artist, like Eloise.
We wondered if the author might be a gymnast, like Lucy.
We wondered if the author might be a dreamer, like me.
We wondered if the author might be the best of all possible people, like Jennifer.

The cover was beautiful, the spine was strong, and the pages were smooth and blank.
The book was perfect. The pages were ready for the author to write the story.

But in the end, when the book was delivered, the author was missing.
A tragic accident took the author from us before the story could even get started.
Grace Alice Gilbert-Fagen will never have the chance to write her own story.
And so, in her honor, we who love her, gather to write the epilogue.

Senator Tim Johnson Conspiracy Theories

Well, I just checked google, and there aren't any conspiracy theories that have yet surfaced about Senator Johnson. I certainly wish him well, both for his own sake, and for the sake of the country.

Just seems to me that we should check him for any Polonium that George W. Putin, or one of his minions, left lying around.

Employment opportunities redux

Here's an excerpt from an email I sent to a friend who was telling me that she didn't want to commute quite as far as Los Gatos for a job:

Anyway, if you *were* working, and there was anyone that you'd want to have on your team again, let me know who they are. They're not necessarily even traditional QA people. Anyone who is smart, curious and diligent, and who understands how computers work qualifies.

I'm trying to build a different brand of QA. It's the java engineers who are ultimately responsible for the correctness, completeness and scalability of their product -- you can't test in any of those attributes. All QA can do is assess whether those attributes exist and advise the developers on any significant lack.

I'm not looking for someone who knows silktest or loadrunner or even jUnit inside and out. I want someone who can understand the fact that our business is driven by three things: 1. customers can sign up, 2. customers can add movies to their queue, 3. customers get discs shipped to them

Everything else is just syntactic sugar that dresses up our core semantics.

So, as I've mentioned before, I'm looking for a couple of people who are interested in addressing the issue of software quality at Netflix, and I'm NOT looking for a browser-poker or someone who dreams up test cases for an offshore outfit to throw warm bodies at.

If you want to help us run with scissors, apply

Free Blockbuster Rentals for Netflix Customers

On HackingNetflix there is an article about being able to take the address flap from your Netflix rental envelope into a Blockbuster store and getting a free rental. I wonder if BBI is harvesting the addresses for targeted direct mail campaigns? That free movie might not only be costing you the gas to drive there, but it might cost you a bunch of future junk mail, too.

Employment opportunities

Most people think of Netflix as either a movie company, or a logisitics company, because on the surface, we appear to buy DVDs from the studios and just mail a bunch of plastic around the country.

However, the secret sauce to the business is that we're really a software company. We're solving problems in how to scale the website to serve 20 million members (Java, Oracle). We're working on machine learning problems (like the Netflix Prize) and scaling problems with our recommendations engine (C++, mysql). I'm most closely involvd in figuring out how quality fits in to all of these development processes. I'm changing the role of a QA engineer from someone who pokes at a browser to someone who writes software to test software.

Then there's all the stuff that the back end teams do (logisitics, inventory, order generation). Once all the software's figured out, it has to run somewhere, and we need good system admins, DBAs and managers for those people that can plan for growth and install, configure and deploy to that plan.

The key thing is that we aren't doing this with an army of developers like an eBay, Yahoo or Google. We've got a relatively small team of really smart software engineers solving problems in an efficient and clever manner. A very deeply ingrained cultural value here is to only hire very senior people who understand how to solve problems, and then go and solve them. It's how we've been able to scale from just over 1MM customers when I joined 3.5 years ago to nearly 6MM customers today. The team that builds the website hasn't grown by more than 10-15% over that time, and we've added a ton of new stuff to the site. It's all because we don't scale the business by doing what we were doing just with more people; we scale through clever automation.

There's a list of what's open at our jobs page, but if there's something that anyone's specifically interested in, let me know. We're always looking for the right kind of person more than we're looking for a particular technology or skill.

I stuck the equivalent of two dead bodies in the ground today

That would be the six bags of concrete that weighed sixty pounds each. I'm building an emergency shed out in back of the house. This has been a bit of a saga, going on for the better part of eight months. Maybe I'll tell that whole tale some other time. For now, I can share the more 'concrete' part of the story.

If you haven't worked with concrete then you may be underestimating, to a great degree, my latest foe. Six bags of portland cement, sand and small rocks. Each bag is 0.45 cubic feet of concrete. A half a cubic foot sounds pretty small. It is pretty small when you're trying to do a footing around the perimeter of a 8'x10' shed foundation. I did six bags on Sunday and six bags today while waiting for an air conditioning repairman to show up. It only took me an hour to mix and distribute the six bags, but that was the longest stinking hour of my life. Add on top of that the effort to get the 360 pounds (hence, the two dead bodies reference) of dry concrete down from the garage to the shed site, and I didn't have to go running this morning to get a workout. I considered whether to cut down the amount of water I was mixing in, to balance out the amount of sweat dripping off me that was falling into the mixing trough.

I actually have about 4 more bags to go, then I can actually start assembling the shed on the flat, level foundation that I've built. I'll try to snap some pictures so you all can mock my efforts.

You looking for a job? I'm looking for someone to work!

As you may or may not recall, I'm the QA manager for the Netflix website. I've also been given the responsibility to manage our customer service call center application. If you fit the following description and also happen to like the idea of the job, drop me a line or even better, apply directly.

------------------------------

Senior Quality Assurance Engineer — Customer Service Automation

The Position:
Join Netflix and help insure that every member who has a problem gets that problem solved quickly and effectively. Working on our customer call center software, you will help the people that help our members.

You will provide your expertise in understanding what to test, as well as how to test. Given a schedule that is always too short and a feature list that is always too long, you'll identify and efficiently evaluate those changes to our software that pose the greatest risk to the smooth and effective operation of the customer service staff.

We are looking for an experienced engineer with a background testing applications involving .NET, Oracle, SQL, PL/SQL, telephony integration, email and customer service application user interfaces.

Responsibilities:
• Validate and verify the correct operation of the customer service application
• Continuously improve and extend the automated regression test suite

You are:
• An advocate for the customer service representatives with regard to usable system design
• An advocate for customer service management with regard to accuracy and completeness of the system
• A bridge between the development organization and the operational groups supporting the system

Qualifications:
• 5+ years of rich GUI client application testing, building and deployment
• Deep experience with Oracle and PL/SQL or equivalent database systems
• Experience with C# and nUnit development and testing
• Experience with testing high-traffic, highly scaling, multi-threaded software design
• Able to work autonomously and flexible enough to shift priorities based on changing needs of the business
• Familiarity with use of .NET Remoting, Web Services, 3rd party .NET controls, TestComplete, Parasoft .TEST and Tuvox are all plusses
• A Bachelors or Masters in Computer Science or equivalent engineering

Harder's getting easier every day

A few days ago, I wrote about running, and how sometimes it wasn't physically difficult, but mentally difficult to put my body in an active state. I guess sometimes if you can distract the mind, the body will do what it has to.

Case in point, today while running, I was tangling with a statistical problem. There are performance monitoring tools built in to the Netflix website server that keep track of how long it takes to do stuff along the way to presenting a page to a member. We call them tracers. We keep track of the average execution time, how many times it's executed and also buckets for ranges of execution time. For example, we keep track of how many times it took less than 10 milliseconds, and how many times it took 10-50 milliseconds, 50-100 milliseconds, etc. Using them, we can diagnose the health of the system and discover if a recent change is the source of site problems.

I am studying whether we can learn if the system is healthy from comparing the skew of that distribution of buckets. I'd worked out a database query that gave me a value for skew, but I was measuring the skew of the number of hits per bucket, instead of the skew of all the values of all the individual hits (which is what I actually want). For example, if the eight buckets have the values of (10, 14, 100, 20, 3, 0, 0, 0), I would a value based on those eight numbers, with a relatively high positive skew of 2.57, because the 100 is a pretty far outlier to the right, making this distribution of eight numbers 'pointy' on the positive end. What I was really after is the skew of the 147 individual data points with 10 instances of value 1, 14 of value 2, 100 for value 3, etc. This would have a much more neutral skew of -0.56 indicating that it's slightly pointy on the left.

Anyway, while pondering all of this, I was running along and didn't even have time to whine to myself about not wanting to be out there running, and it was over before I knew it. I think I made pretty good time today, too.

It's kind of bugging me that I lost track of another thought that I had running. Something to do with just a little bit of peril. Now I can't recall what it was. I guess maybe I need the inverse of an iPod. Something I can run with and dictate the flotsam that crosses my mind, and be able to play it back later.

Interesting page from ten years ago

I saw an interesting puzzle with a surprising answer while tripping around the net today looking for something else (isn't that always the way)?

The twist to the story entertained me, and the commentary following the twist moved me. Even though the commentary is going on ten years old, most parts are relevant or even more relevant today.

Easy's Getting Harder Every Day

So I run several times a week. Usually every other day. I go running in Rancho San Antonio near my home. Usually just under three miles. Some uphill and some downhill and some flats. Several weeks back, I was running and thought about what it would take to run across America. After all, Interstate 80 runs from San Francisco all the way to New York City. 3000 miles at three miles a day. A thousand days. Just about three years. I could do that, easy. Be kind of hard to only do three miles a day, though. I get through my three miles in 20-30 minutes, usually. I could probably slow down a bit and do 30 miles a day over the course of 10 hours of stops and starts. That gets it down to 100 days. Start in San Francisco in April with nothing but a running outfit and a credit card, then run and walk the whole day. Go to sleep whereever you're at and do it again the next day. Might be able to make it to Manhattan for the Fourth of July.

That seemed doable a few weeks ago (even if a little crazy). Lately, though, it's been harder to get up the hills, and even going down the hills has been awkward and sluggish. Now, running across the country seems not only crazy, but impossible. The hardest part of exercise is willfully putting myself into a state of discomfort. I know that I'll feel good when I'm done, but overcoming that inertia is the biggest obstacle. Once I'm going and I'm away from the house, then it's easier to go, but those first several scores of steps are hard.

I wish I could write

I want to write the perfect paragraph. I want it to enfold the sum of all human desire. I want it to motivate the world to do well by others. I want it to have rhythm and grace. I want it to enrapture all readers and purge them of ill intentions. I want honesty and freedom and the ability for all to reach the pinnacle of who they can be. I want to believe in the best of all possible worlds, and I want to believe that the world we live in is that world.

Googling me

So, I decided to type in my name "Rob Fagen" in the Google search box to see what comes up. Here it is:

The ADB Drinking game (me)
"DBs in Vegas" (me)
Google Groups: rec.gambling.poker (me)
Membership Directory (not me)
About STLAHA (not me)
[PDF] Gambler (me)
Radio Days--and Nights (me)
Council defers appointment to Planning Commission -- Los Altos ... (me)
The First Tee of The Seacoast Home Page (not me)
[PDF] TUESDAY, MEETING DATE (me)


Not bad... only three out of ten misses, and the top three were me. Interesting that the oldest stuff is ranked the highest. Not one mention of this blog, though. I guess maybe after this entry gets indexed that I might see more of me.

But it's good for you, isn't it?

The hardest part for me about running, or any exercise for that matter, is willfully putting myself in a state of discomfort. If there was a magical machine that could stress my muscles for me, then I don't think I'd mind the puffing, sweating and thumping heart pain. It might violate the Geneva Convention, but it would be easier to exercise if I were able to abdicate responsibility for continuing.

I guess that's part of what makes a top-tier athlete: the ability to push past limits and train yourself to go past limits that stop everyone else.

That's probably what makes for a top-tier anything.

Sudoku Combat

The Sudoku Combat blog discusses the change history of a really good online Sudoku challenge game. I like it. A little quirky, but it gets the game on with some competition (which always adds a little spice!).

Well, so much for that.

Hrmph. So I'm sit down to play in the Pokerstars blogger championship. First hand of the tournament, and I get the big blind. First bad sign. I get 83 off-suit. Second bad sign. There are a couple of callers, and I check. Flop comes K83 rainbow. I check. Late position caller makes a pot sized bet, everyone folds between him and me, and I raise to 450. He comes back over the top, all-in. I have him on a King for sure, and anything but an 8 or a 3. However, I'm in for a rude awakening when he turns over K8 off-suit. I somehow managed to not find one of the other two 3's in the deck. I wished him good-luck and went on my way. I guess I may have been overaggressive in calling the all-in. Still sucks.

Maybe another shot at the Big Dance?

I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker!

This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.

Registration code: 2521058