While she had some wild times with her young friends and associates, there
were a few very hard and fast rules in Marty's home, number one of which was,
no drugs. She might play and party hard with her crowd, and play games that
were irreverent and occasionally obnoxious, but it was all clean and mostly
legal.
Despite playing and clubbing, at core Marty retained a serious relationship
with anyone who needed her in that capacity. The parents of her friends were
willing to let them come and hang out specifically because her place was safe.
Additionally, she took it on herself to try to assist her charges past the
lumps and bumps of growing up. In some cases, there was much more going on
than just the normal angst of adolescence, and Marty worked to assist with
that as well.
One of her messages was constant, with anyone who would listen: get a college
education. She repeated this message not just with her young charges, but
with all of her classroom aides at school, and she was proud of each and every
one who took college courses. She practically burst with pride over each of
her mentees who graduated college, whether young or not so young, such as her
former aide Lynn Smart.
Many of her companions modeled for her to draw and paint during this period
of her and their lives. Marty painted the bulk of her "Watching TV" series
around this time. Each portrait in this series depicted the model as they
watched a favorite movie or television show, and each portrait was executed
from start to finish in about two hours, give or take.
Marty also mentored her friend Dakota Warren, himself an aspiring artist and
craftsman. As a craftsman, Dakota specialized in tilework, and he and Marty
collaborated on several tile murals for her house. He supported himself
through such tilework, but he also competed for and won several public art
commissions. In many ways, Dakota is and was the son Marty never had.
Dakota was the person who introduced Marty to the Internet. He interested her
by showing her how other artists were using the Internet to show their work.
Inspired, she collaborated with her cousin Melissa in creating her own art
site, showing all of her work as well as some of her writing and providing a
resume of her professional life.
Back in the workplace, Marty was taking cognitive behavioral theory and
applying it to the problems of her emotionally distrubed elementary school
students with great effect. This was more than just a job - this was a true
mission, a true calling. The students that wind up in the ED classroom aren't
just unhappy or a little angry. Marty's students were accomplished arsonists,
molestors as well as molested, drug users and sometimes dealers, and other
sorts of criminals. Their destiny was to wind up in prison; then they met up
with Marty.
At core, what Marty did was to identify the weak spot in the traditional cycle
of violence. The cycle propagates itself by inculcating children while they
are helpless and weak. The first lesson that it teaches is that there is no
consequence for bad acts, that in fact there are no bad acts, no right or
wrong.
The first countervailing lesson a student learned from Marty is that there is
in fact a standard that they must abide by - obeying is right, and accompanied
by a good consequence, and disobeying is wrong, and there is a price. From
there, she could build in each student an inner voice helping discriminate
right from wrong. That each inner voice would sound like her was just a minor
side effect of the process.
Science fiction writers like to come up with all kinds of interesting what-ifs
about historical events and then write big elaborate stories about them. What
if the South won the Civil War? What if Hitler won World War II? What if
the Stanley Steamers didn't blow up quite as much and the gasoline engine
never took off? And so on and so on.
What if Scott had met Marty in 1984, or 1985, or even 1986 or 1987?
The first question any writer needs to ask about their what-if is, is it even
plausible? How could the South have won the Civil War? What could Germany
have done differently to win WWII? Sometimes, maybe, the what-if isn't so
plausible, but then everything else about the story has to be ironclad. If
you want to write a story about what if aliens invade Earth in the middle of
World War II, you had darn well better know everything there is to know about
that era, and then some.
Is it plausible for Scott to have met Marty at college? In truth, it's not
only plausible, it was almost impossible for them not to have met. CSU
Stanislaus only had about 5,000 students in the mid-1980s. It wasn't even an
official University in 1984, when they both enrolled - it was CSCS, California
State College, Stanislaus, and it only got upgraded in 1985 or 1986.
Moreover, the biggest impediment to their meeting - Marty's college boyfriend
- socialized with one of Scott's Computer Science professors and the prof's
wife. It turns out they were all Grateful Dead fans and went to concerts
together.
Additionally, Scott and Marty both remember going to the Sacramento Railroad
Museum during college as part of a group. Marty remembers the person Scott
rode with - he was another member of the Grateful Dead fan circle of the time.
It's a virtual certainty that they were on that trip together.
Lastly, both Scott and Marty hung out at Mom's, the on-campus hangout joint,
on Fridays after classes. They probably sat there and looked at each other,
both too shy to break the ice, from the tables of their respective social
groups. They may have stood in the snack line together, bumping up against
each other's spaces and social inhibitions.
The next question, when designing the world of what-if, is what would happen,
and would it make a difference? If the South wins the Civil War, and makes
itself into a separate country, there are various possible consequences, such
as the United States and the Confederate States fighting on different sides in
World War I, that make still other things go differently. If, on the other
hand, what happens is that the South actually conquers the North, takes over
completely, and then the CSA goes on much as the USA would have historically,
there is a lot less story there because the what-if made no difference.
So, what if Scott and Marty had met in college? Would things have gone
differently? The answer is not just yes, it's heck yes. Even if all that
happened is that they dated for a couple of years and then split up, the
period of time in which they would have been involved with each other was the
same period of time in which both of them got into rather stinky
relationships. The barest minimum that would have happened is that they could
have saved each other those horrible painful years.
Much more likely is that they would have stuck together all the way through
Marty's college years. When Scott moved to Silicon Valley in the late 1980s,
he may very well have continued the relationship, albeit at a long distance.
When Marty graduated, she would have been open to moving to Silicon Valley
herself, and so they probably would have wound up there, together, getting
married and buying property together. When the Internet boom came along,
Scott would have been well-positioned to participate, and they probably would
have done very nicely indeed.
At the very far end of the spectrum is the story Scott made up for Marty in a
sentimental moment. In one universe, far away in sideways time, Scott and
Marty got together and became very successful and powerful. In fact, they
became so successful and powerful that they dedicated themselves to traveling
all over the multiverse, and everywhere they went that they found themselves,
they intervened in the flow of events so that their alter-egos of that
particular universe got together. And that's all they do - travel from
universe to universe, planting the seeds of new romances every which way.
After a couple of months of bouncing around, Vixie sent Scott to San Francisco
to do some management work for David Holub, President of Whole Earth Networks,
a small regional Internet Service Provider (ISP). David was directly managing
his systems administration team, and wanted someone to take it off his hands
so that he could focus more directly on managing the company. Scott started
out working in San Francisco three days a week. After a couple of months,
Vixie messaged Scott out of the blue that he needed to give notice to Whole
Earth and get himself out to Phoenix again the next week. It seems that he
was moderately displeased that Scott and David had renewed Scott's contracting
agreement without consulting Vixie, and he was showing his ire by being rude
and arbitrary in terminating it.
When Scott went into David's office to give notice, David asked him if he knew
of anyone who was available to take the position over full-time, and named a
salary range that was a notch above Scott's current pay, with the title of
Vice President of Engineering. After not very much consideration, Scott put
in for the position himself and quit Vixie Enterprises. The parting was not
entirely amicable, and Scott had to threaten legal action over some back pay,
making things even less pleasant.
Whole Earth looked like it would be a pleasant gig, and the title, pay and
responsibility represented to Scott exactly where he wanted to be at that
point in his career.
Scott had never really looked into the ownership of Whole Earth Networks. He
learned these things over time: David Holub had started an ISP originally
called "Hooked" (as in "Get Hooked on the Internet"). The firm was under-
capitalized, as most small ISPs are, and he sold control to an associate in
order to get money to expand. At somewhere around the same time, Bruce Katz
(pronounced "Cates"), whose father had started Rockport Shoes, decided that
the Internet would be an interesting place to play. He had sold the shoe
company to Nike and had a considerable amount of money to play with. He
bought a conferencing system, The Well (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, a
spin-off of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog), that was one of the oldest
and most prestigious conferencing systems of the pre-Internet era. Bruce then
bought Hooked and reorgnized the two companies into three. The Well was
stripped down to just the conferencing system. Development of The Well's
conferencing software was moved to a new company, Well Engaged. Lastly, the
portion of The Well's operation that provided access to the system was merged
with Hooked and the result was christened Whole Earth Networks (WENet).
About three weeks after Scott started with WENet, Bruce Katz' assistant
Claudia showed up one morning. David Holub was absent and Claudia had a
strange scary-looking fellow in tow. The new man was introduced as Kevin
Randolph, and the executives of Whole Earth were told that he was the new
President and CEO and that he had been hired to sell the company.
The firing of David Holub was immensely unpopular with the long-time staff,
especially with the systems administration group that reported to Scott. Some
of them went so far as to hang banners and pictures from their desks,
protesting the firing and demanding that David be brought back. It looked for
a while like the situation might get ugly, with a mass resignation, but with
time things calmed down and the company kept going under the new CEO.
When a child is two years of age, they haven't yet developed the sense of
self, what some writers call the "analog I." In the normal course of
development, the child begins to become aware that the parent is separate from
the child, and over time comes to a full understanding of what it means and
becomes reconciled to separateness. Kindergarten normally starts around the
time that this process reaches the point where the child can tolerate being
away from their parent for half a day.
During the course of this process, there is a point, normally around the age
of three, where the child is in full rebellion against the realization that
the parent is separate from them. This is completely typical and normally it
ends within a year or two.
Psychologists have a lot of names for the situation where this normal
maturational process has become derailed. The names reflect which stage went
awry, or what particular feature of the person, usually an adult by this
point, is dominant. The names are of different personality disorders, such as
Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and
Antisocial Personality Disorder. These names just differentiate among
situations in which the person under discussion has a blurring between self
and non-self and the degree to which the person acts on that blurriness.
Basically, what happens is that the child becomes stuck at this point, and
grows up into an adult whose basic personality is that of a three year old
child. They won't be retarded in the typical sense - they'll have language
and intellect appropriate to their chronological age - but their motivational
and belief system is that of a three-year-old. They will have the verbal
ability and experience of an adult and they will put it into the service of
fulfilling the needs of a child who wishes to be in a state of union with the
parental figure. When they enter into relationships, they aren't looking to
have a mutually supporting and nurturing relationship between two equal
partners who are facing the world together and finding joy in the alignment of
goals, objectives, skills and abilities. These people, these emotionally
stalled adults, are looking to recreate a specific situation in which they are
the child again and the partner is the parent, and the parent is in service to
the needs of the child. Not only is the parent figure in service, but the
partner/parent must not have needs of their own that go against the needs of
the child. If the partner has the nerve to have a need of his or her own, the
broken person flies into a rage, just as the toddler rages when he or she
realizes that the parent is a separate person. Each time the partner diverges
from the image the disordered person has, the disordered person relives the
experience of the three-year-old and behaves just as rationally.
Few normal adults would willingly seek to have a romantic or marital
relationship with a three year old. However, the people who have these sorts
of disorders have become skilled at getting their needs met, and at the age of
three, the moral sense has not developed, so they have no moral inhibition
against doing whatever they deem necessary. This is why what we call
antisocial personality disorder (or sociopathy) is frequently present along
with the other features of this disorder. Like most diagnoses, sociopathy
must rise to a certain level before being considered clinical, but even when
it's not at that level, it is almost always at the sub-clinical level.
When people have a good social support and family structure, the people around
them help them steer clear of individuals with disorders like the above.
There are times, though, where what happens is that the disordered person is
able to co-opt their target's friends or family, or drive away some or all of
the support structure. At other times, their target doesn't have much
structure - they've moved or otherwise pulled themselves out of their
structure, one or more family members die, or other events leave them
vulnerable. When these things happen, the disordered person may be able to
establish themselves in their target's life in such a fashion that, even
though the target may be fairly healthy, they become embedded in a sick
situation and find themselves being supported only in becoming emotionally
unwell.
This is not to say that this process is the least bit simple or easy. It will
take time and a lot of exposure. Still, there is hope. Unless the structures
are someday found by some scientist to just not exist or to be hopelessly
deformed, even the densest systematizer should be able to learn to love art as
much as they love the artist.
Companies come in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and the one thing they have
in common is that if they're for sale, they are generally dysfunctional. As a
buyer, the trick is to spot what's wrong and determine whether you can live
with it.
Actually, the dysfunction tends to extend to all companies, for sale or not.
In a corporate transaction, you have broken Company A buying broken Company B,
and the people involved are all busy scoping out each other's brokenness.
Whole Earth had one primary problem: as companies go, it was poor. It had
revenue of around $5 million per year, which is pretty nice if you're one
person, but pretty iffy for 50. Being poor meant that Whole Earth didn't have
good toys, and it didn't have enough money to give people good pay, so they
were unhappy. Not having good toys meant that it was hard to provide good
service to the customers, so they became unhappy and went away, which meant
that less money would come in.
Now, when you come into a company and you want to make it healthier
financially, you need to look at two things: how much money comes in, and how
much money goes out. A lot of people go for the quick fix - they cut down the
money going out - it's called cutting costs, and it usually involves firing
people. The idea with cutting costs is that there's a lag time between when
you cut the costs and when those cut costs come home to roost. Usually what
happens is that the cost-cutter doesn't just cut out fat - they also cut
muscle, and weaken the company. Anyhow, you try to sell the company during
that lag.
The other way of fixing the company is harder - you try to boost the money
that is coming in. Usually you need some money in order to make that happen -
it's called investing. You take this money, you fix up some stuff, maybe you
hire some people, and if you've done it right, revenues go up not just enough
to pay the money back, but some beyond that.
Kevin Randolph had an expression about cutting costs: "You can't save your
way to success." The course he took with Whole Earth was the harder and more
ethical one. He got honest money where he could, and he moved Whole Earth
from just treading water to where it could actually begin to have some forward
motion. He took Scott under his wing and mentored him in management, and he
got Scott to implement improved services. In some cases costs actually were
cut, but by and large what happened is that Whole Earth actually got some new
toys and various real problems were fixed.
One of Kevin's other mantras was "Fewer, better people." He and Scott had a
few go-rounds over this particular mantra, but once they got all of that
sorted out, Scott came to understand that instead of having 12 people on his
team, several of whom were distinctly mediocre, he could have 8 people, all of
whom quite good. Furthermore, Scott could pay those 8 good people much better
than 12 people had been paid, and this made both him and his people happy.
One of the surprisingly simply things that Kevin taught Scott was about
providing treats to his people as a way of building the team. It is amazing
what a little food and a few toys will do for morale and group-feeling. Pizza
is the traditional food, of course, though donuts were thrown in occasionally,
given Scott's fondness for the sugary food-like stuff. Scott also went to
Toys-R-Us one day and put about $200 of Nerf guns into his team's hands. This
was especially fun given that Kevin sat in a glass-walled office. It wasn't
unusual to come into Whole Earth and see a salvo of Nerf darts, with their
suction-cup tips, stuck to Kevin's office wall. Kevin's response to this was
distinctly tolerant: "Tell your people to not do that when I have guests."
With an accelerator in place, what happens is that on a sale, your option vests 100% and you can buy it on the spot. Since selling the company usually means selling all of the stock in the company, the buyer agrees that they will buy the employees' stock as well as the owners', so the employees get to "flip" their option immediately - buying it from the old owner and selling it to the new one. The employees then pocket the difference between their option price and the sale price.
This sort of accelerator acts as a strong incentive for employees to stay on until the sale, because if you are not employed as of the official closing date, you don't get to participate. However, this doesn't do anything to get people to stay around after the date of the sale. Even in the best of cases in any sort of buyout, things get shaken up and people become afraid for their jobs, so Kevin offered a second level of incentive to key employees. The key staff of Whole Earth was given an employment contract that said that for six months after a sale, if they were laid off or they had a substantial reduction in their responsibilities (an "effective termination," where they had their job duties taken away but they weren't actually fired), they would get a severance package of six months' pay.
By addressing these various issues, Kevin had taken Whole Earth from, frankly, a pig in a poke, to being a saleable property. It was still substantially a 5 million dollar per year regional ISP, but at least it was healthy instead of sickly, and it had something that looked like a potential future.
These cleanup activities had been taking place in parallel with the search for a buyer. There were any number of inquiries, but the company that finally took the bait was GST Telecom of Vancouver, Washington.
Excerpted from http://www.satanic.org/gst/ Real Press on the GST Buyout of Whole Earth Networks There's been rumours that GST is buying WENET, the Bay Area ISP which is made up of Hooked Inc. and the WELL's Internet branch. Well, they're true. They're gonna fuck over some other poor bastards, just like we were. Read all about it. Eric reports: word from the inside is that things are already getting fucked beyond belief. The recent loss of key technical people signals the beginning of yet another exodus away from a once great community ISP. One short-terming staffer's suggestion for naked Twister at the "team-building company picnic" was met with censure and disapproval. In another painfully ironic twist, the "internal communications director" of the tech staff sends out all email in Microsoft Word attachments... which no one on the technical staff can read in their UNIX mail clients. More to come... [6/19/98] Good luck to all the WENET employees and customers. Satan knows, you're gonna need it.]]>
UUNet had been founded in the 1980s by Rick Adams, sponsored by Usenix, the UNIX Users' Association. In the 1980s, the Internet was a closed network, and a parallel network, the UUCP Network, had been built up among sites that were too small, too poor or in the wrong category to be able to get onto the Internet. UUCP worked by having the participating computers dial each other up on the phone and exchange e-mail files in an individual two-way swap. Along with this e-mail system, there was a global bulletin-board system called Usenet that shared many of the same underlying mechanisms.
When Scott was in college, he played around with e-mail, but the e-mail systems he was familiar with were just a way to exchange messages with other people on the same computer. Back in those days, PCs were still pretty expensive, and usually people at a University shared one or two largish computers by using so-called "dumb" terminals to connect to them. You sat at your terminal, doing your work or playing Rogue or Hack, and when you got bored you typed "mail" and the system would show you any e-mail you had gotten from a friend sitting at another terminal, or earlier in the day or whatever.
In 1986, after Scott graduated college, he had dialed back into CSU Stanislaus' main UNIX system to check his mail and see if anyone was around. He had noticed, on and off in the past, people running some program called 'rn', and after finding no e-mail, he decided to try typing in 'rn' and see what ensued. With two characters and a carriage return, his world was totally transformed. 'Rn' stood for 'read news', and it was, at the time, the most sophisticated program that existed for reading Usenet, the aforementioned global bulletin board system. All of the sudden, Scott found that he could read postings on hundreds of subjects, from thousands of people all around the world. Moreoever, he could post and converse with them, and as a consequence of the way Usenet was integrated with UUCP and e-mail, he could also send private e-mail messages to anyone not just on the UUCP network, but on the Internet as well as other networks like BITNET, a University network based off of IBM mainframe machines.
Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-crg!lll-lcc!csustan!smdev From: smdev@csustan.UUCP (Scott Hazen Mueller) Newsgroups: net.micro.att Subject: PC6300+ question Message-ID: <138@csustan.UUCP> Date: Thu, 21-Aug-86 19:01:05 EDT Article-I.D.: csustan.138 Posted: Thu Aug 21 19:01:05 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 22-Aug-86 06:32:58 EDT Reply-To: smdev@csustan.UUCP (Scott Hazen Mueller) Distribution: na Organization: City of Turlock Lines: 8 Keywords: 6300(+) Unix(tm) MsDos We're running three 6300's at our installation (MsDos - yecch). I've heard (real) rumors that these machines can be upgraded to 6300+'s. Has anyone out there done so? Also, how much MsDos compatibility is retained? I run a CAD system that does a lot of nasty screen hacks, and the main reason to upgrade is for increased processing power for this application, but if I can't just copy files around to do the port, there is no sense in spending bucks on hardware, unix or no. Any solid info on the + will be much appreciated. Tanks advance... \scottBy 1987, Scott was running his own UNIX system at home so that he could participate in the UUCP and Usenet networks as a full peer. When he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area later that year, he began to form active UUCP connections to anyone who would talk with him. At the peak of his UUCP years, he had connections with nearly 40 other sites, including the NASA Ames Research Center. He also participated in a private Usenet network for the brand of UNIX machine he was using, an AT&T 3B1 (aka the "UNIX PC"), and as part of that activity had UUCP links with sites in Rhode Island and New Jersey. He even briefly had a UUCP connection with a site in Namibia, Africa.
One of Scott's connections was with UUNet, which had made a business of providing UUCP connectivity for a fee. It was pricey; even when Scott was very careful in how much he used it, it ran $75/month, and he was a modestly-paid support technician. Still, it was a prestige connection, and for a while his e-mail address was 'scott@zorch.uu.net' because he was a customer.
Rick Adams' UUNet had been a community-oriented corporation. As it had grown bigger, and moved from the relatively limited UUCP networking space into the burgeoning commercial Internet, it had lost that flavor. Eventually, UUNet was acquired by Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) and MFS was in turn acquired by LDDS/Worldcom, back before Worldcom's chairman Bernard Ebbers was forced out over accounting fraud. UUNet had built an Internet backbone and the associated customer business on top of wires and fibers leased from various phone companies, but despite the expenses of doing so had agreed that they would exchange traffic for free with smaller ISPs if the smaller ISPs would come to the meeting points and connect with them there. This practice was called "peering" and many of the technicians who had built the Internet felt that free peering was in the greater community good.
MFS had built some of the major peering points (MAE West and MAE East) and they got a cut of the action when ISPs arrangede to connect into those locations, so they were happy to continue the tradition of free peering. Worldcom, once it acquired MFS (and hence, UUNet) didn't see things quite that way. They had been a long-distance company, and what they saw was that free peering competed with their long-distance carriage business, so they decided that they were going to stop it, and their one of the targets of opportunity was Whole Earth Networks.
Under its new CEO, WENet sorted out its differences with UUNet. This was very important to WENet, because it had free peering with more than one much larger ISP, and this grandfathered-in connectivity was one of the assets it felt it had to offer in a sale.
PSINet to peer with small potatoes By Courtney Macavinta Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: August 25, 1997, 5:40 PM PDT UUNet's policy shift sent some small Net providers into a frenzy, with one of them even threatening to sue over the change. UUNet eventually pacified most of the protesters, including Whole Earth Networks and NetRail, both of which cut confidential deals to continue peering with UUNet. "I think what UUNet wanted to do was a good thing for UUNet. What PSINet is doing is good for them, but it's good for a lot of other people too," said Scott Hazen Mueller, vice president of engineering for Whole Earth Networks. He said the free peering will help PSINet build out its reach, making it a more desirable ISP. "If we don't already have an agreement with PSINet, we'll look into it," he added.]]>
One difference between GST and the other players in the fiber-based CLEC space is that GST was also working on installing its own long-distance fiber runs. Part of their game was to install extra fibers and then trade those fibers with other companies so that they could increase the size of their network without actually having to dig trenches and lay cable themselves. GST's goal was to make itself into some sort of substantial phone company that serviced customers in a regional basis.
As part of their strategy of building this multi-faceted business, GST went on a bit of a buying spree and picked up ISPs in Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest. In the late 1990s, ISPs and telephone companies (telcos) were considered to have synergy - to be complementary - because the telcos owned the wires and fibers and the ISPs put signals (phone calls and data connections) onto those fibers. The idea was that the ISP would save money by getting their connections from their parent telco at wholesale rates, and the telco would save money by getting the ISP to be a guaranteed customer for their wires and fibers. In this manner, the overall company would be able to save its way to success, or some such.
There was one small problem with GST's strategy: they weren't any good at actually executing it. The first glimmering of this problem surfaced, from the viewpoint of the folks at WENet, prior to the actual acquisition. People who had been on staff at GST's prior acquisitions in Hawaii and Oregon had created a series of web pages, hosted at satanic.org (a Satanism spoof site), detailing their history with GST and their beefs with corporate management.
In a modest example of what a small world the Internet was, satanic.org was run by Eric Sorenson. Eric was the roommate of JD Falk, who was an associate of Scott's in anti-spam activism and a member of the Provisional Board of CAUCE, the anti-spam lobbying organization. As part of CAUCE's early campaign to lobby the US Congress to pass a good anti-spam law, the Board drafted a letter to Congress, printed 535 copies of the letter, 535 envelopes for all of the Senators and Representatives, and held an envelope-stuffing party. The party was held at JD's house; attendees included Scott, JD, Eric Sorenson, Sean Eric Fagan and James Glave, at the time a writer for Wired News. As part of the proceedings, Scott brought a passel of supplies from Costco and barbequed up a lunch for the crew.
-----
Back in the 1950s, a radio comic named Red Blanchard coined the term "zorch," meaning "cool," approximately. Scott's dad was a teenager in that era, and a friend of his tagged him with Zorch as a nickname. When Scott was a small child, his dad must have thought having a son was pretty cool, because he called his son Zorch.
When Scott bought his first UNIX computer, his AT&T 3B1, he needed to have a "node" name for it in order to be able to attach it to the UUCP network. He decided that he really liked the name "zorch." When his dad objected, wanting zorch to be reserved for Scott's first son, Scott stated that he wasn't going to have kids and that he'd use the name for his computer.
It took Scott a lot of years to appreciate how that must have hurt his father.
Having named his UNIX computer "zorch", when Scott was a UUNet customer, his customer account name and signon into UUNet's machine was the name of his UNIX computer - zorch, again. In the mid-1990s, after Scott stopped being an actual customer of UUNet, he got a guest account on one of their systems to use for performing the public service of moderating some Usenet newsgroups. When the UUNet staffer told him to pick an account name that wouldn't be in conflict with one of their customers, he picked zorch as his account name.
After that, when Scott set up a computer account, if he couldn't get his first choice ("scott"), he chose "zorch" as his account name. When he arrived at Whole Earth, the account name "scott" belonged to one of his staff, so he took his second choice. Thereafter, he was known as Zorch to the people who worked for him.]]>
Scott did retain a customer relationship with GST Whole Earth Networks, as the San Francisco company was known post-merger, for a couple of years. He had what had been a high-speed connection at the time, a dedicated 56Kbit leased line, running into WENet headquarter as one of his perqs of working there, and he retained it at his own personal expense afterward. From a distance, he saw as Whole Earth's bread-and-butter dialup business was sold off to another company, and eventually he and his leased line were sold to Time Warner Telecom.
Now, due largely do his first wife, Scott's financial situation in mid-1998 was none too good. Even though he had been making a decent salary as a vice president at WENet, and had made a couple of month's pay on the sale of the company, he wasn't in a position to take an extended leave. Instead, he took a short vacation, and spent time on his cellphone while nominally camping making calls to two potential employers.
The first opportunity he was evaluating was a second stint with Kevin Randolph. GST had bought Whole Earth but hadn't been interested in keeping Kevin on board, so he had gone to Hong Kong and was working for a company owned in part by Softbank Japan. Softbank Japan was an affiliate of Softbank US, which was the primary venture capital company behind Yahoo. The company Kevin was working with, actually a small clump of related companies, included something called Asia Communications Global Limited (ACGL) and it's child operating company, the grandiosely-named Asia Online (AONL). AONL was an ISP based in Hong Kong, roughly the size of Whole Earth Networks. Softbank wanted to figure out whether to shut it down, sell it, or build it into something bigger, and it had engaged Kevin to help it figure that out.
During the 1980s and 1990s, when Scott was active in the UUCP network world, he made the acquaintanceship of one Dave L. Rand. Dave had gone on, in the commercial Internet world, to help found and run, as the CTO, an Internet company called Abovenet. Abovenet had started with the idea of being the network "above" the Internet (hence the name), but had over time focussed more on the new market of creating Internet collocation centers - facilities where average companies could bring their computers and have guaranteed power, air conditioning, Internet connectivity and other services needed to build 24x7 platforms for new applications such as e-commerce. On top of that, Abovenet was laying or acquiring its own fiber runs and so building an even bigger business that way.
Now, at the end of 1992, Scott had made what turned out to be a strategic mistake for his career. He let his first wife's whining and crying convince him to buy a house out in the sticks, in Salida, California, best described as a suburb in Modesto. Modesto, as the reader may recall, was the hick town featured by George Lucas in "American Graffiti" and the place he got his behind out of as soon as he could.
The reason that this was a strategic mistake is that it wasn't really very tenable for him to commute from Salida to Silicon Valley or San Francisco. The commute ranged from 3 to 4.5 hours daily, depending on the exact location of the employer, and the physical and emotional toll was no longer sustainable. Scott had started, around 1995, to look for some way out of the situation.
So, in 1998 as he was evaluating the two employers, location weighed very heavily in his mind. He seemed to be having ongoing miscommunications with Dave Rand over the Abovenet position, and he had worked with Kevin for over a year at that point and got on with him fairly well. The clincher for him, though, was that Abovenet was in San Jose, and would require him to commute daily through the most-congested traffic corridor anywhere in the United States - I-680 southbound between Pleasanton and Fremont. The Asia Online job would be based in Hong Kong, but after 5+ years on the road, that didn't seem like such a bad thing.
As a result, in July 1998, Scott started with Asia Online as part of Kevin's team of consultants. ]]>
What happens to all of those jocks when they grow up? Take a look around - how many slots are open for professional athletes, as a percentage of the population? How many kids are directed into athletic pursuits in secondary school, as a percentage? The numbers are kind of out of whack, aren't they?
Now, we're pretty open about this when we talk about minorities, and how they are deceived about sports as being a route out of the ghetto, but what about the bigger picture? How many people, in general, think that being a sports star in high school is somehow real and important? Yet a few short years later, they have a major collision with reality, and the next thing they know, they're selling life insurance, or used cars, or maybe they got a phys ed degree and a teaching credential, thinking they could teach gym or be a coach, and now they're stuck teaching math and science to the underachievers in junior high, because there's a big mismatch between the need for jocks in the real world and the supply of them our school systems are producing.
Yet we continue to worship the jocks and beat up the geeks. No wonder the countries of the world where that isn't true, where they have no such streak of anti-elitism, are eating our collective lunch. Japan may not be the club to beat America over the head with, but look at outsourcing to India and to China. Look at how many engineers and scientists are being graduated from schools in those countries, and realize that our educational system can't even master teaching basic literacy to our immigrant population.
When smart people grow up, they go in one of two major directions when it comes to how they relate to other smart people. If they have bought into the mythos that the jocks and the pretty people are the "best," and have bought into the ethos of anti-elitism, they are filled with loathing for themselves and for other smart, nerdy people. These sorts of people are insecure, territorial, and heavily invested in trying to show off to the cliques they weren't able to crack in secondary school. They are frequently vicious, and in general they just aren't that good. They and the jocks and cheerleaders can infest an organization, but they aren't as important as they think they are. They don't create new things, they don't do important work, as they are trying hard to hold onto the status quo.
If a kid has been told, when growing up, that they're OK as they are, no matter what those other people think of them, when they do grow up, they come to realize that the world outside of school has flipped around. What seemed important in school no longer is, and the people who were (self-)important then are nobodies now. That kid, grown up, likes to associate with other smart and nerdy people, the smarter the better. These are the people who head to places like Silicon Valley, not simply because they want the opportunities that are there, but because they want to associate with a lot of other people like them.
A long time ago, it actually was important to be faster and stronger than the other guy, because you were physically competing directly for the same source of food. That's a long, long time in the past, and those skills are no longer relevant in today's world. In the sort of heavily specialized society we have today, where the important competition is among ideas, the person who is best suited at working with ideas is the most successful. ]]>
So, on arriving at CLK, the normal process is that you stumble off the plane in a stupor (the stupor is a requirement on all flights over more than six time zones or more than 12 hours in duration) and follow the herd through the lower-level hallway. CLK is laid out on two levels, you see - the upper level, with the vaulted ceilings, huge windows and award-winning architecture is for departures. The lower level, with standard-height ceilings and much smaller windows is for arrivals. You trundle along, with your carry-ons until you reach an escalator, and following the crowd, you descend to a platform. The next thing you know, you are on a train, standing-room-only, of course, and you're wondering what happened to immigration and customers, baggage claim, and all of the other niceties and why you are already on the train to the city.
The stupor is very important, you see. It keeps you from realizing, on that crucial first trip, that you can't possibly already be on the train to the city, but it also keeps the panic from escalating very far before the train arrives at the main platform and you step back off. From here, if you've done the least bit of traveling, things begin to make a little more sense. You collect your bag from the enormous carousel and take it over to be inspected, though you more usually get to be waved through. It's then onward to the immigration line. After you pass customs, you loop around a dividing wall and come up to the rope line separating the secure part of the airport from the public section. That's where Kevin was waiting for Scott, and it was one of the happiest sights Scott had seen in quite some time.
Geographically, Hong Kong is divided, like Gaul, into three parts. Originally, the British pried Hong Kong Island from the Chinese. It was on a "lease" for 99 years in perpetuity, meaning that the lease automatically renewed for as long as Britain had bigger guns than China.
Some while afterwards, the British realized that HK Island wasn't very viable. They then extracted two more bits of land from the Chinese - first, the land opposite the island on the mainland, which is Kowloon; and secondly, a grab bag of islands and bits of the mainland that came to be known collectively as the New Territories, or NT. The NT was Britain's final attempt to make HK self-sufficient in terms of things like food and water. By the 1980s, there was a problem. It wasn't so much that the Chinese had much bigger guns than they had 100+ years before, though they did. It wasn't that the British had a case of collective remorse over colonialism, though they may have. It was more a practical matter. It seems that the NT wasn't on an automatically renewing lease, and the Chinese were being stubborn about renewal. They were willing to let the lease on HK Island and Kowloon renew - at least, they said they were - but they weren't about to let Britain renew the lease on the New Territories. Furthermore, Hong Kong as a total entity was already dependent on the Chinese mainland for water and power; without the New Territories, the remaining areas, which contained something like 20% of the land and 85% of the population, would be totally unsupportable.
Ultimately, of course, what happened is that China and Britain negotiated the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control, with HK becoming a "Special Administrative Region" or SAR - "one country, two systems." In practical terms, for an American expatriate in the late 20th century, it meant relatively little. The uniformed Chinese people with machine guns worked for the People's Republic of China instead of Great Britain, but they still had machine guns, and at that point, who paid them made relatively little difference.
The geography of Hong Kong meant somewhat more than the politics. Hong Kong is both a territory - the SAR - and a city, with the city located on the north shore of Hong Kong Island and the south shore of Kowloon peninsula. If you meet someone from Hong Kong, the usual question is, "Hong Kong side or Kowloon side?"
Chek Lap Kok was a small island off of Lantau Island, in the western part of the New Territories. CLK Island was extended with landfill and the airport was built on top of it. A new freeway and rail line was built along Lantau Island to connect the airport to Hong Kong Island. The rail line, the Airport Express, also had a semi-local spur route that branched off to a "New Town" that was built near the airport to house the airport's workers.
What all of this meant is that CLK was very well-connected with Hong Kong proper, despite being out in the sticks. Your travel options included the Airport Express, which was a very nice train, as well as several options via road, such as taxi, private car, or any number of airport buses. ]]>
Where Scott and Kevin stayed during those first months at Asia Online was at the Newton Hotel. The Newton was quite reasonable by Hong Kong standards and very convenient to the Asia Online office, just 5 to 10 minutes on foot, depending on just how hot and sweaty you wanted to get.
The price for staying at the Newton was that the rooms, with a little glue, would have served quite nicely as postage stamps. They all came in the same size (ultra-small), with a choice of one bed or two, and they faced either right or left. As a Californian, Scott was quite grateful that they had a non-smoking floor, as tobacco was quite popular in HK at the time.
Anyhow, the room was slightly larger than the double bed on two sides - just enough to sidle around it. The third side featured a built-in desk with a cube refrigerator (full of the usual honor-bar crud) and a 13-inch television. The TV had one or two english-language channels, a bunch of Chinese channels, and some other miscellaneous bits. You could also "preview" the soft-core down about the same way as the regular channels.
There wasn't anything resembling a dresser or chest of drawers. In the closet, which was about the size of a small guest closet in an older American home, there was one drawer below the hanging area, and one shelf above the hangar rod. You also had a little floor space for your shoes. Lastly, the window was a bit of a bay window and there was a good-sized shelf there, which made a decent space for storing suitcases.
The bathroom was likewise compact, though not outrageously so. Hong Kong people are fond of "on demand" water heaters, so after a hot shower you would find that the mirror was strangely free of steam and quite warm to the touch. Presumably, the on-demand heater was behind the mirror.
The view from the Newton is singularly uninspiring - a small slice of Victoria Bay and Kowloon. One of the things about Hong Kong is that all of the exciting architecture that you see in media is in fact there, and it's all on the Hong Kong side. If you're on the Hong Kong side, what you see is Kowloon, which is heavily residential and hence largely socialist worker housing. If you want to enjoy looking at something like I. M. Pei's famous Bank of China building, you really want to live in Kowloon, looking back at HK Island.
For those who aren't familiar with it, Pei's BoC building looks like a giant knife, slicing back into the hills overlooking the bay. Specifically, the knife is slicing at the British Governor General's mansion...a bit of feng shui that the locals rather delight in, quite understandably. ]]>
Hong Kong SAR is about 85% parkland, so to say that Victoria Park was HK's largest park would be a misnomer. Still it is a good-sized urban park and makes a significant break in the cityscape. That open space also gives the occupants of Citicorp Centre a good view.
The assignment Kevin had taken and that Scott was now part of was to look AONL over, determine if it could be fixed up, what was needed, and if the owners approved, actually do the fixing. Despite the name, what Asia Online was in fact was just a mid-sized local Hong Kong Internet Service Provider. They sold the usual menu of services (dial-up, leased line and hosting) to the usual sorts of customers, individuals and small businesses for the most part. They had somewhere around 18,000 dialup customers, perhaps a hundred or so leased-line customers (much higher speed and much higher revenue, the cream of the customer crop) and a relatively small hosting facility up there in their expensive real estate. As a small capper, in order to reduce the load on the air chillers in their data center and to control the electric bills, they had put tinfoil up over the windows in that part of the building. This wasn't exactly unreasonable, since it did get pretty warm in the sunny spots, but it was a bit tacky.
The first order of business for Scott was simply to get oriented. Hong Kong is eight or nine time zones away from the US, depending on the time of year, and it takes about a week just to adjust to the time change. In addition, there was a whole new city-state to explore. As an example, after Scott arrived in Hong Kong, he was so disoriented in his sense of place that he had his directions reversed and though he needed to turn left at the main road to head toward Central, when in fact he needed to turn right. Exploring his surrounds on the weekends, it took him two to three weeks to sort just this small item out. Eventually, combining riding the rails with walking, he walked the entire distance from Central to North Point. Given the HK summer weather, though, he only walked the distance from one station to the next on each weekend day that he went out on this trek.
Orienting himself with Asia Online was no less time-consuming. Most of the HK Chinese staff that Scott worked with had perfectly serviceable English. However, they have a sort of cultural shyness, especially the technical staff, and especially about their language, so they were painfully uncomfortable with the sort of casual converstation that California's high-technology business is built on. Ultimately, Scott's habit of using e-mail for even trivial matters came to his rescue, as the staff let him know that with e-mail, they could read and re-read his requests until they understood them.
Initially, Scott's ambit was simply as a consultant to Kevin, but after a few weeks it became time to start to change things up. As the first step, three formerly separate technical groups - the team that ran the systems and networks, the technical support organization, and the internal MIS group - were merged together into a Technology department. Scott was then announced to the merged group as their interim vice president. This gave Scott a team of some 15 or so people, including three subordinate managers. ]]>
One of the biggest problems to be resolved in the first two months was with Asia Online's backbone network. The backbone of an ISP is composed of the connections to bigger ("upstream") ISPs, and the size of the ISP's backbone, and the degree of fullness, is what will define the experience the users of that ISP have when they access external resources on the Internet.
Part of what should be happening in a well-run network is that the staff has some way to monitor what is going on in the network. Usually, because ISPs are relatively poor, this is done with the free tool MRTG, written in part by Scott's acquaintance Dave Rand. MRTG, for Multi-Router Traffic Grapher, is a system that probes the switches and routers that direct traffic within an ISP's backbone; it then stores the data and provides a set of web pages with graphs of the data. In short, MRTG enables you to look at the total volume of traffic going over any given part of your network.
Asia Online was in fact using MRTG, and they had graphs of what was going on. What took a long while to sort out, possibly because of language differences, and possibly in part due to differing cultural assumptions, was that even though it didn't look that way on the MRTG graphs, the traffic was hitting an arbitrary limit at 50% of the stated capacity of the backbone. It turned out that the backbone connection in question was only guaranteed up to the 50% level, and anything above that was catch-as-catch-can - not guaranteed at all. Once the facts were established that support that, it became obvious that the traffic level had a "haircut" at the 50% level, such that the graph ramped up in the morning, then went flat at 50% all day long, and finally dropped back down around midnight.
One of the additional minor bits of information that Scott discerned from looking at these MRTG graphs was that Hong Kong was a late night city compared to San Francisco. The evening peak at Asia Online started later and ended later than it had at Whole Earth Networks, with significant traffic going on until around 2AM. This was something that was evident as well in walking around Hong Kong on a Sunday morning - if you went out early to avoid the heat, nothing was open. The restaurants might be open for breakfast, but the various small shops largely didn't open until between 11AM and noon.
The reason that all of this technical fiddling around was important to Asia Online - important enough to import Scott all of the way from California to deal with it - was expressed succinctly in another of Kevin Randolph's adages: "You can't fill a bucket if the water leaks out the bottom as fast as you pour it in the top." Having a network that was filling up in the morning meant that from that point until the evening, everybody had trouble getting out on the Internet. They had slow performance, they became unhappy, and eventually they stopped being customers of Asia Online. It didn't matter how hard the company might work on marketing itself - Kevin's forte - or how quickly they acquired new customers, if they lost customers just as fast because the service stank.
There were other technical tweaks that Scott oversaw and caused to happen - he was assigned a modest $400k budget to ensure that the service improved, and he spent the money and the service did in fact improve. There were other changes that Kevin made to customer acquisition, but underneath it all, improving customer retention helped move Asia Online from shrinking to growing. ]]>