Being Dumbledore

"You know who I want to be like?" I asked a friend tonight. "Dumbledore."

"You want to be like Dumbledore?" Doug said. "You mean, dead?"

Which wasn't quite the point.

The point – to the extent there was one – is that as much as I can admire a fictional character for anything, I admire Dumbledore's ability to take things in stride, to somehow be above it all.

I just finished The Halfblood Prince tonight (yeah, yeah, two years after everyone else), and I found that I was surprisingly moved by the ending. When Sirius died at the end of book 5, I found I didn't really care: Rowling hadn't done enough (in my opinion) to really make me care about him as a character. Lupin was much more interesting and sympathetic. But I was genuinely saddened by Dumbledore's death. It had to have been quite difficult for Rowling to kill him off (much like it must have been difficult for McMurtry to let Gus die at the end of Lonesome Dove). I will miss Dumbledore.

The thing that made him so interesting to me is his ability to be in charge of a situation, completely unthreatened by anyone else, while maintaining a bemused but quite genuine humility through the whole process. Granted that it's easier to write that sort of character than to be that sort of character, it's still something to which I aspire. I invariably get defensive in an argument, and it almost always works against me. The ability to keep your cool while defending your perspective is as rare as it is valuable. It's rather odd that this equanimity is so difficult to find: and even more odd that, although I recognize its value, it's still so difficult to achieve.

Dorothy Lake

Galena was busy today, catching up with friends, so I took the opportunity to head into the mountains. I looked through our map of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, and decided on the trail to (and past) Dorothy Lake, which I hadn't hiked before.

The weather was beautiful, and the trail wasn't overly crowded – I probably passed 30 or 40 people over the 13 miles I hiked. A few pictures:

Turns out that most of the pictures I thought were any good from this hike were of plants and wildflowers more than scenery. Most likely that's because it was pretty harsh sunlight most of the hike -- which makes for great viewing, and a great time, but not so hot pictures.

As a side note, I should mention that I love my Nikkor 18-200 VR lens. Recommended.

Keith’s Blog

Turns out that Zango's CEO – Keith – my "little" brother – has a blog going. It's interesting enough to read. Recommended.

Getting Stuff Done

An exchange I had today with another senior manager here at Zango gave me an opportunity to put words to my philosophy around changes to our production environment. It can be summarized as:

1. Move fast enough to make mistakes.
2. When you make a mistake, slow down enough to figure out what went wrong, and don't do it again.

Both parts of this philosophy are critical. If you don't have #1, you'll never get anything done. If you don't have #2, you'll keep screwing up the same way over and over again.

I've worked in environments where #1 wasn't the case, where change control processes were out of control, and crippled people's ability to get things done. At one company I worked at, before you could make a change to the environment, you had to do a formal write-up, then send it to a committee which met once a week, and only after that committee had approved it could you actually make the change. The net result was that nothing got done, and employees (not all of them in IT) got very frustrated. If you're AT&T, and any outage is immediately visible to millions of people, I admit that you do need to be this careful. But for most companies – and Zango is one of these – you'll end up getting more done in the long run if you're willing to take a few risks and make a few mistakes along the way.

I've also worked in environments where #2 wasn't the case, where we kept making the same mistakes over and over. But at Zango, any outage triggers our post-mortem process: we describe what happened, what the impact on revenue or installs was, and do our best to drill down to the root-cause of the problem. Then we document the steps we'll take to make sure it doesn't happen again, and follow up to make sure those steps were taken. Over time, this process cuts down on the number of needless mistakes more than any decision to "go slowly and carefully" could.

And a final unnecessary point: out of a somewhat macabre sense of humor, I insist on calling them "post-mortems," not "outage reports" or anything like that. Ever since I worked at a funeral home during college, the image of a body – or in this case, a project or a rollout -- lying open on a slab, with people gathered around and pointing, has been a rather potent one for me. You can't help but pay attention.

Rereading Potter

Like millions of other people, I'm looking forward to the two new Harry Potter releases, the film this week, and the book next. Galena and I have been rereading the entire series in preparation: I finished The Order of the Phoenix last night, and when my allergies got me up at 1:00 am, managed to make about 100 pages of my way into The Halfblood Prince.

It's interesting rereading the series. Even though I enjoyed Rowlings' work, when the first Potter books came out, and were widely compared with Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, I was insulted by the comparison. "Fifty years from now," I said to anyone who was interested, "people will be asking 'Harry who?', but they'll still be reading Narnia." I still think that the Chronicles will last longer than Harry Potter, but my opinion about Harry Potter has become somewhat more nuanced.

Lots of people have pointed out that the plots have become darker, and in that way, more interesting. But Rowlings' character development has also been better than I expected it to be. Harry isn't all good, any more than his parents were: he's moody, he doesn't trust his friends, he gets angry, and at one point he uses an illegal cruciatus curse. Lots of characters who are on the "right side" are still unpleasant people, and in that way, it's a good deal like real life. Harry's disturbing trip through Snape's pensieve, or his misplaced attempt to "save" Sirius at the Ministry of Magic, were not what I expected – and are therefore more interesting than I expected.

Still, there are aspects to the books which have disturbed me this time around. I don't like the way that the characters – all the characters – lie so casually. For a book which revolves around the fight between good and evil, it's not always clear to me what Rowling sees as the difference between the two. I'm not complaining, of course, that the characters are themselves ambiguous and complex. Jane Austen's novels portrayed complex characters with very mixed motives – but the narrator's moral perspective is always clear: Emma Woodhouse is portrayed sympathetically, but the narrator leaves you no doubt as to her failings. But I don't get the same sense from Rowling that she's quite as clear about the moral problems with many of Harry's actions. If the narrator judges them at all, it is from a distance, and almost as an afterthought.

Perhaps I'm misjudging here: I've only read the books twice, after all, and it'll be another couple weeks before I can read the last one. But I get the impression that Rowlings' somewhat muddy moral perspective reflects, not surprisingly, the muddy waters of the 21^st century in which she (and all of us) must wade.

Pico Computing

I had a fascinating lunch today with a friend I met a couple weeks ago. He's a Christian, a graduate of Seattle Pacific University (where I taught briefly), and a hardware engineer at Pico Computing. Pico makes massively parallel FPGA computers that get used by anyone who needs to solve compute-intensive, data-light problems. (I've heard that certain government agencies, for instance, have those needs.) My friend is one of those quiet, humble, intense intellects that you don't run across very often: the sort of guy who enjoys discussing chip design as much as discussing C. S. Lewis.

We sat in an Indian restaurant in Ballard, just north of the Ship Canal, enjoyed a rare hot day in Seattle, and talked about life in a startup. Pico's about where Zango was at 7 years ago: they seem to have some very smart people there, and have the potential to tap into a big and growing market. (Not everybody who wants to model protein folding, or crack the latest cryptographical algorithm, has access to a network like folding@home or World Community Grid.) After lunch, we walked back to Pico's offices, and he walked me through their design process, and he showed off a prototype of their latest not-quite-launched product. It's an interesting gig.

Pico has some big competitors – Nvidia's Tesla product line is going after roughly the same market, with a very different technology (Graphical Processing Units) – but if they can get past the bootstrap stage, I think they've got an interesting future ahead of them.

Goat Rocks Wilderness

We're back in touch with civilization, after a very relaxing week spent mostly hiking and backpacking through the Cascades. Rather than bore everyone with the details of our trip, I'll just post a couple pictures from Goat Rocks and Mt. Hood.