Congratulations, Louis and Jim

[Before I explain who Louis and Jim are, and why congratulations are in order, indulge me as I tell the story of how I met them]

Ever since I was a kid, I knew that I had a cousin Louis. Every so often, his name would come up and that he lived in San Francisco. I don't recall ever meeting him, and the only picture I ever saw of him was with a black cat that had a piercing stare. So I always remembered Louis and the cat... Louis and the cat.

Fast forward to my teenage years when I finally discovered why I'd never met Louis. It turned out that Louis was gay, and because of this, his parents basically disowned him, which is why I didn't remember meeting him. He ditched New Orleans and moved to San Francisco, and that's pretty much all that I ever heard of him. My grandparents did visit him once or twice on their travels, but for the most part, we never spoke about Louis. He was just Louis. He was gay. He lived in San Francisco.

Fast forward again to the late 90's. Working for Apple, I found myself travelling frequently to the Bay Area—usually to San Jose, but occasionally to San Francisco. At some point in the year 2000, I remembered that my cousin Louis in San Francisco and that it would be nice to look him up since I was out there so often. It never seemed fair that he'd been unceremoniously drummed out of the family, and especially unfair to me that I hadn't gotten to meet one of my cousins.

I called my grandmother and got Louis's phone number and dialed the number. As I anxiously listened to the phone ring, I thought about what I was going to say. Would he be happy to hear from me? Shocked? Annoyed? Angry? Anxious as I was, of course, I got his voicemail. I left a somewhat awkward message and waited for him to call back—if he ever did call back.

A few days later, Louis called me back. I explained that my job took me to the Bay Area somewhat often and that I knew he lived in San Francisco (Wrong! He lived in Oakland!), and that maybe we could get together for dinner or something. He graciously invited me over to his house to meet him and his partner of many years, Jim. As we chatted, he asked about my family as he'd been out of touch with them for some time. I'll never forget the lump in my throat when he asked how his uncle—my grandfather—was doing. I didn't know how to tell him that he'd died two years earlier and I felt like a total jerk when I just blurted it out. I mean, how do you tell someone something like that? But I digress.

A few nights later, I took the BART to Oakland and Louis picked me up and drove me to their house, popping half a dozen pieces of nicotine gum on the way home. I didn't know a lot about him, but he sure liked his nicotine gum!

Dinner was some of the best Italian food I'd had in a long time, and the conversation flowed even more easily than the wine. Louis and Jim turned out to be what they call in the industry "good people." They were clearly two people who were made for each other, and they were a joy to talk to--passionate, irreverent, curious, and downright hilarious. We talked for hours before they drove me back to San Francisco sometime close to midnight.

From then on, it was no longer just "my cousin Louis," but "Louis and Jim," and we kept in touch more often as time went by. Marie came out to the Bay Area with me on one of my business trips and visited their house and spent the next day up in Sonoma with them. We had a blast (and a whole lot of wine).

I was honored when they accepted my invitation a year and a half later to come to my wedding. They even came out to spend Thanksgiving with us one year. Who knew that that simple phone call eight years ago would bring not one but two wonderful people into my life. I guess I'm a pretty lucky guy.

And all that brings me to why I'm writing a post titled "Congratulations, Louis and Jim." It's because after 35 years of being together, they got married today—all because the Supreme Court in the state of California finally ruled that same-sex marriage was legal.

When I got an email from Jim earlier today announcing that they'd gotten married, I let out a whoop that scared half my office mates. I was so excited that I pretty much told the good news to everyone I saw this afternoon. In fact, I'm still pretty excited. They even got interviewed by a few reporters for the LA Times and the San Francisco Gate (Picture and an audio clip on that second article).

So, congratulations to two of my favorite people. May you have another 35 years together.

(photo from SFGate as Louis hasn't sent me his pictures yet, ahem.)

I'm Sorry, You've Reached an Unlisted Email Address

Lately, I've been encountering more and more people who want to participate in open source communities (and other online communities) but seem to be afraid of having their email address posted anywhere on the internet out of the sheer terror of drowning in spam. Given how easy it is to setup an extra email address, why not just create an extra account and use that for your public address, saving your "private" address for your friends and family?

I've had the same email address for over 10 years, and according to GoogleBot, it's listed in at least 960 places on the web. According to Gmail, I get about 1500 spam emails a day, and Gmail catches about 99% of them on any given day, which is extremely manageable (thanks, of course, to the extremely hard work of Brad and his team). Does Gmail get any false positives? Maybe--I just don't have time to go wading through the river of spam to check (54,061 at last count). Long ago I decided that I'm OK with any false positives that get through--if someone really needs to get a hold of me, there are a number of ways to do so.

In short, if you want to participate in online communities such as open source projects, just setup a "public" email address, use that, and don't live in fear of getting buried in spam.

The Best Place to Work in Chicago

It's been almost a year and a half since our Chicagoist interview was published, and a lot has changed since then. The Google Chicago engineering office has grown tremendously since we started hiring in May of 2007, and I have to say that I was pretty excited to find out today that Crain's Chicago Business ranked Google first out of the top 20 places to work in Chicago. They even created a slideshow to give you an idea of what it's like to work in our office (narrated by Ben and I). It really does a great job of capturing the look and feel of our office.



Photos by Steve Serio (who photographed, recorded, and helped produce the slideshow). Thanks Steve!

PS If you'd like to work in Google's Chicago office, take a peek at the open positions.

Farewell, John Felice

John Felice died last month at the age of 84. He was the founder of Loyola's Rome Center, a former Jesuit, a teacher, British Intelligence in World War II, Director of the Rome Center, and even the Dean of Students. He was larger than life to those who knew him--a man whose ability to give of himself knew no bounds.

He meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but he meant the world to me because he was one of my dearest friends.

I met John Felice in 1990 when I spent my junior year abroad at Loyola's Rome Center. I later had the honor of working at the Rome Center with him for two years as a resident assistant, and then for two additional years from Loyola's Lakeshore campus in Chicago as the Rome Center admission counselor, working to bolster flagging attendance at the Rome Center. John and his wife Kate were generous enough to look after me as I worked out what I wanted to do with myself and, quite frankly, as I grew up a bit (finally).

There was a time in my life when I was convinced that John Felice knew everyone on the planet--or at least one person in every town. I'd stop by his office in the Rome Center to say hello and he'd ask me where I was going for the weekend. I could mention some obscure town in Eastern Czechoslovakia, and he would exclaim "Oh! I know the mayor", pick up his phone, grab his dog-eared address book, punch in a few numbers, and before I knew it he'd set me up with a private tour of the ancient monastery on the edge of town.

That was just the way that John was--he knew people all over the world--including government officials and even several popes! And almost every last one of these friends would drop everything to do him a favor, even if it meant hopping on a plane and flying halfway around the world.

I am deeply humbled to count myself as one of those people.

John served his life as a "man for others" (in the true Jesuit sense of the phrase). Almost everyone who knows John Felice would say that they're indebted to him for one or more things he's done for them. In this selfish world of "me me me", it's more and more difficult to find a person like John Felice. He really did give his life for Loyola's Rome Center (now the John Felice Rome Center), and would do whatever it took to help someone out, whether it was to lend an ear, offer advice, a shoulder to cry on, or to grease the rusty wheels of the Italian Bureaucracy. Often was the time that he would help someone out when they neither realized they needed it, nor did they want it--many was the time when he gave me a swift kick in the backside that I didn't realize I needed (or deserved!) until a much later date.

I owe both John Felice and the Rome Center a priceless debt of gratitude for everything they did for me.

John took a lot of things very seriously--religion, education, respect, and justice to name a few, but he loved life, his students, and his colleagues and employees. And John had a wicked sense of humor: he was the master of the whispered aside and would frequently say something quietly--so only you could hear it--that would cause you to do a double take or break out into laughter. He knew it too--he'd crack wise and he'd purse his lips and shoot his eyebrows up as if to say "I did not just say that, did I?".

But he was an incredibly stubborn man and had a short temper when it came to juvenile behavior or rule breakers. I've heard stories from many alums about the student (or students!) that John Felice sent home for some infraction of the rules of the Rome Center. My personal favorite is the time he awoke from his first open heart surgery to discover the doctor that had operated on him was none other than a student that he had thrown out of the Rome Center years before. And while I saw some of that fire in him on occasion, I have the distinct impression that age and experience had a mellowing effect on him. Everyone who spent more than five minutes with John Felice surely has a story to tell about him. Having known him for eighteen years, I could tell stories for days and days, but I won't. Those are my stories, and I'll hold them dear to my heart for the rest of my life.

Goodbye John. You will be sorely missed, but never forgotten. Hail and farewell.

101.

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum.
Heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Hey Buddy, Can You Spare a Proofreader?

FAIL

Podcast Episode 02 Done

Wherein we answer our first question.

Either download the mp3 directly from the site, or subscribe directly in iTunes. (If you can't find "PC Load Letter" in the iTunes podcast directory, open the “Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast” menu in iTunes, and enter the address http://feeds.feedburner.com/PCLoadLetter.)

EveryBlock Launches

Congrats to Adrian, Paul, Wilson and Dan over at EveryBlock on their launch.

If you thought that ChicagoCrime was cool, EveryBlock is going to blow your mind. For example, take a look at what's going on around Wrigley Field or near my office.

So far it's only Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, so if you live elsewhere, you'll have to voyeur other cities for the time being.

Now with 80% More Yap Yap

After giving dozens of talks together, Ben and I have decided to do a podcast. We've kicked off with an inaugural episode where we tell some stories and lay out the ideas for the podcast, but the goal is for it to be more of a question and answer format about open source and collaborative development tools.

To download the podcast, either get the mp3 directly from http://code.google.com/p/pcloadletter, or you can just subscribe to it in iTunes. Just open the “Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast” menu in iTunes, and enter the address http://feeds.feedburner.com/PCLoadLetter.

Ben's blog post has some more detail, so take a gander over there or just head over to the PC Load Letter site to find out more.

Font Fancy: 9x15

In the past few months, several folks have weighed in on their favorite fonts—Cory Doctorow waxed poetic about Droid Sans Mono while James Duncan Davidson professed his love for Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (His blog died, so the link is to a post about his post).

I've tried a lot of different fonts over the years, but I always come back to the most boring and plain screen font ever. It doesn't even have a real name--I know it only as "9x15" and it comes with X11. It's pretty much the only font I've ever coded in, and I've got my emacsen all hard-wired to use it, on both Mac and Linux. Click on the image below to see the full-size version (Stupid Blogger image upload insists on resizing my images).



I'd love to find an actual vector font that looks just like 9x15, but I've yet to find one, despite quite a bit of hunting.

What's in it for Me? How Your Company Can Benefit From Open Sourcing Code

One of Ben and my latest Google tech talks is now up on YouTube. It's not as fun as our Poisonous People talk, but it's sort of a sequel as it continues to talk about social issues and open source, but aimed more at companies and organizations looking to open source code.

The abstract for the talk is:

As the open source community continues to clamor for more companies to open source their code, more and more executives are asking themselves just what open source can do for their company. There are a number of ways for a company to open source an internal project: from tossing code over the wall on the one hand to running a fully open development project on the other to any combination of the two.

This talk will discuss the costs and benefits associated with each method as well as how to successfully launch your new open source project.

You can also grab the slides.

The Art of Storytelling

I love stories. When I choose books or authors, I lean towards science fiction, but if I know that an author is a good storyteller, I'll read just about anything that they write, up to and including dishwasher manuals. I love the feeling of being carried off by a good story, regardless of length—I'll tend to lose track of all time when absorbed in one, forgetting to eat, drink, and even fending off sleep as long as possible. I also love telling stories, but that's a story for another time.

Fifteen years ago when I lived in Rome, a friend offered me his entire Stephen King collection if I would read the first 100 pages of Lord Foul's Bane, the first book of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever trilogy (which actually had a second trilogy after the first). Given that English books in Italy were a commodity more valuable than gold, I gladly took him up on his offer. I mean, how bad could 100 pages of any book be?

Well, it turned out that it was pretty bad—the story was extremely slow to advance and the main character did something so totally reprehensible that I really didn't think I wanted to read any further since I hated what he had done. Yet, greedy for over a dozen Stephen King books that I hadn't read (and King's early stuff is some great storytelling), I trudged on, taking almost eleven days to read up to page 90.

Then something happened. The author finished his lengthy introduction and, with the stage set, he took off with an incredibly compelling story. I realized that the awful thing the main character had done was vitally important to understanding his weaknesses, his guilt, his conscience, and above all, the inner pain and conflict that made him who he was.

I read the rest of the book and both trilogies in one week.

Six books—over 3,000 pages— in one week. I pretty much did nothing but read, sleep, eat, and drink (in that order) for the duration, and when I came out of my reverie, I felt like I'd been on a year-long vacation. I'd practically lived the life of a fictional character for seven whole days of my life.

So I often look for new and interesting stories, and every so often I find one that really grabs me by the shoulders and engages me, for however briefly. And in fact, the tiny gem that brightened up this dreary Chicago November day was a blog post from a fellow Googler in Australia, titled Engineers should not wear suits, and it started like this:

It's against the laws of nature. If God had wanted engineers to wear suits, he would have given us social skills and motor coordination. I violated this law on Tuesday night, and woe befell me.

And with that, he had me hooked. I was dying to find out where this was going, and even more thrilled when I got there. Click through to read the rest.

Reason #891 I Don't Miss Condo Living

The Marina City Towers Condo Association in Chicago aims to require permission for anyone to use the likeness of their building:

"Because of the architectural significance of our building, the Condominium Association holds a common law copyright on the use of the Association name and building image. This means that under Federal and Illinois law, advertisers, movie makers and others cannot use the Association name or image without first obtaining express written permission from the Association ..."

They've left the wording unchanged, but apparently their lawyer claims these rights under trademark law (uh-huh) instead of copyright law (after all, copyright law is federal, and doesn't restrict pictures taken from public land). Whatevah

I walk (or roll) by Marina City every day on the way to and from work, and I can't wait to take some pictures of the buildings (which I absolutely love, architecturally) and post them here.

Morons.

Photo by Ashley Crum