But enough about you

I'm in San Francisco today for the ad:tech conference and the big announcement of the feature I've been working on for the last few months.

My product, Website Optimizer, used to be just a feature of AdWords. To get to it you had to sign up for an AdWords account and then click the link to GWO. As of today, you can now sign into GWO directly. I'm hoping that people will find the signup process a little more user-friendly now.

There was a lot of work behind that simple-looking login box, and I'm proud to be shipping this and moving on to the next thing. Whew!

I flew down to SFO last night and spent the night at a friend's house in Palo Alto. My friend and his girlfriend have a beautiful new house with some very interesting power- and water-usage micromeasurement features - my friend can see real-time graphs of what devices are consuming how much power and water. He showed me a recent graph of water usage in the master bathroom and there was a spike of water used by the toilet at 9:43am and then a smaller spike used by the "his" sink at 9:44am. "See?" he said. "I washed my hands." Very cool stuff.

I fly home this afternoon. This quick trip has been a really nice break for me - delicious dinner at a swank Palo Alto restaurant last night, Rock Band on the XBox afterward, the announcement today. I should probably do things like this more often.

Just spent seven hours at work on a Saturday playing Rock Band. I'm mostly lead guitar, but by the end my hands were tired so I tried out drumming and singing as well. The singing was not as much of a disaster as I feared.

I'm now solid on guitar at the medium level, and shaky but ok on hard.

Why is it that whenever you pick a mystery set list, it includes Green Grass and High Tides?

Tomorrow and Friday I'll be at Whistler on the Google Pacific Northwest ski trip. I lead a really rough life.

On the flip side, Jon's cat Oscar is doing poorly. He has lost two pounds in the last few months, which is a lot for a cat. We've moved him into a kid-free zone in the bedroom and Jon has been coddling him and feeding him ahi tuna and mackerel, which sounds expensive until you find out what the ultrasound and feeding tube were going to cost. It seems to be working, which is great -- but my bedroom smells like mackerel.

It's good to be getting away.

Here's what's happened lately --

• Elliott and I went to Minnesota for Christmas. Elliott had a bad cold the whole time we were there, which put a damper on things, but we had a good time anyway. My parents got me some Lego sets (at my request) and the excellent book Forbidden Lego, so I've been doing a lot of miniature construction work lately. Elliott is getting interested in "grown-up Legos" in addition to Duplos, which is great.

• For New Year's Eve, Jon and I hosted a small gathering at my house. Our friend David introduced us to a Spanish tradition of eating twelve grapes at midnight, one for each chime of the clock. A few of us pulled it off, which supposedly grants us twelve months of good luck and prosperity. I guess it's harder with the large, white variety of grape typically found in Spain at the end of the year -- but we were using little purple grapes that were easy to swallow quickly. David said it still counted.

• I've been re-watching Babylon 5, since Jon got me season one on DVD for Hanukkah. (My first Hanukkah!)

• I'm famous: I was on the Official Google Blog a few days ago.

• Over the past few months, I've been decluttering my house. A lot of stuff has gone to Chris' condo (or will soon) and I'm hiring a junk service to come and cart the rest away. I can hardly wait.

• I've decided that when I'm at home, I'm only going to cook vegetarian (mostly vegan) food. I get plenty of meat at work and at restaurants, and I've been wanting to expand my vegetarian cooking repertoire, so I'm going to try this for a while. Tonight I made spinach fettucine with basil-cilantro pesto and artichoke hearts -- a recipe from the Veganomicon -- and it was delicious. The pesto has almonds in it instead of cheese and I think it came out really yummy.

That's the roundup for the last few weeks. What's up with you, fair readers?

I use Google Reader as my feed reader, and I've started using the "shared items" feature. Here are the things I've marked as share-worthy so far. Enjoy!

A month or so ago, Charles Stross came to visit Google Kirkland for a reading. I took careful notes but failed to write them up promptly after the visit, so I could easily misremember or misrepresent something. Here's my best recollection of his visit, and apologies in advance if I get anything wrong.

Stross is a Scotland-based writer who manages to be jolly and superior simultaneously. Not superior to the audience - he was quite friendly to us - but he had a bit of that attitude that is so common amongst the geek in-crowd. He was dressed all in black and cast witty, wry aspersions on SCO, Microsoft, and various other tech companies.

He said he and Cory Doctorow were kicking around an idea about five years ago about massively multiplayer online virtual reality. There's been very little near-future science fiction written lately, maybe because it's so difficult. Stross is interested in gaming, MMOs, virtual reality, and in extrapolating Moore's Law accurately and then project the social consequences on top of that.

Stross read from the first three chapters of his latest book, Halting State, which he wrote 12-18 months ago. It's mostly a police procedural/espionage thriller, but also a thesis on the future of MMOs. It's written in the second person, which is the most natural voice for games. All games use this: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages," etc.

After the reading, Stross took Q&A. These are all paraphrased from my notes and shouldn't be treated as direct quotes.

Q: How do you make sure your prose is accessible to those who aren't in the industry?

A: Why bother? I've had more complaints about Scottish dialect than tech talk.

Q: (A question about what Stross predicts for the near future.)

A: Mobile phones ten years from now will be as powerful as desktops today. Phones will have GPS and other location data. The internet will know where you are. The internet will come out of the computer and into the real world. URLs will be conjured up from GPS coordinates and as you move around, your phone will auto-fetch local data.

Start practicing being very polite to police officers - they will all be wearing cameras that will send video directly to locked down evidence servers.

Police will have Copspace - a VR overlay that shows criminal record and recent known activities baced on face recognition.

The general populace will have other types of VR overlays that project pregenerated textures onto the surfaces around us. Why have nice plain beige walls when you can see something else instead?

Canadian author Karl Schroeder writes about the far future of the same thing.

There will be an overnight change like that caused by the switch from slide rules to pocket calculators. Nobody today knows how to use a slide rule. Maps and street signs will go the same way. Soon we will see the first generation who has no idea what it is like to be physically lost.

Q: Did you get any resistance to writing the book in the second person?

A: Amongst readers - some people don't like it. It's important not to tell a reader something that's inconsistent with their view of reality. So in the second person, stay out of the character's head. Don't tell people what they think.

Amongst publishers - there was some pushback. Ace wants space opera for the second book in the contract.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I have two publishers, Ace and Tor. [Note: I got a little mixed up here and I'm not sure what projects he's doing for what publishers.] For Tor, I'm working on an ongoing series. I'm also writing a Heinlein tribute. Everyone is doing Heinlein tributes right now. Most people are writing in the style of early Heinlein, but not me -- I'm doing a late Heinlein! (Laughter...) There's a red headed sex robot with nipples that go sproing. It's set a hundred years after humans go extinct. Robots all around.

Q: ... some question I don't have written down ...

A: There is an easter egg in Halting State: the words "software" and "computer" are never used.

Q: What about "Google?"

A: Yes!

Also, the prologue and the epilogue both appear to be spam and aren't.

Q: What do you think of your own work?

A: High art is no good if no one wants to read it/look at it/etc. You can't be boring. I aspire to high art but also to entertain. I want to keep readers interested and amused.

Q: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

A: Write. Finish what you start. It takes practice. Often, it seems to take about ten novels to write something worth publishing. In my case, 20 novels. Zelazny said you have to write a million words of crap. It's harder than learning to write code: there are no compilers, books run on human brains, and they're all different.

Q: Like writing JavaScript!

A: [Stross chokes on his drink.]

Q: What do you think of personal publishing?

A: There's an illusion that you can short circuit the learning curve. The function of major publishers is to filter out garbage. There is a 500-1 rejection rate.

Q: What kind of hours do you keep?

A: I get up between 8 and 11 am. I make tea, read email, and look at the web until... 3 pm. [Unclear if he was joking about that time; he laughed when he said it.] Then I work. It takes self discipline. When I'm on a roll, I write seven days a week for several weeks in a row.

---

After the talk we were given copies of Halting State. I read mine and enjoyed it very much. I hadn't read any of Stross' books before but I would definitely recommend them. If you just want a sample, there is a free novel online: Accelerando. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Stross visited Google headquarters in Mountain View a few days later. The video of that talk was posted to YouTube.

12% done.

And this year, I'm using Google Docs. :)

One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, visited Google Kirkland on Tuesday of last week. I was lucky enough to have lunch in a small group with him, and then hang out with him for about an hour in the game room before he gave his 2:00 talk.

I did my homework and read his website before he arrived. He says a lot about how giving talks and doing tours and book signings is generally not a good use of his time, and that he would much rather be at home writing. He also links to an article about being an introvert and says it describes him quite well. I felt honored he had decided to come and talk to us at Google, and like we'd better have some pretty great questions to ask to make it worth his while. I think on the whole we did all right in the question-asking department.

In person, Neal (can I really call him that? It's not like we're on a first-name basis now, but "Mr. Stephenson" seems pretty stilted) is personable, thoughtful, and easygoing. He took all of our questions seriously and tried to give the best answers he could. He asked a few general questions about the Google Kirkland office and our relationship to Google HQ, but mostly he talked about whatever we asked about.

In the game room, he idly threw some darts with a Googler while chit-chatting with us. He was OK at darts but he really dominated once he switched to playing Robothon on the arcade machine. He managed to rack up a high score before it was time for the talk and he entered his initials. Granted, the office we were playing in had just been set up a month ago, so the pre-existing high scores had not had time to become truly impressive and entrenched yet. He says he doesn't play as many video games as he used to due to RSI issues, but that he plans to buy a copy of Halo 3.

So... on to the questions and answers!

Things I particularly wanted to know, or that friends asked me to ask:

Q: What's up with the Diamond Age miniseries?

A: He said something along the lines of, "I wish I could give you a better answer than this, but unfortunately the only thing I can say about that right now is that it is 'in production.'"

Q: What are you working on right now and when will it come out?

A: He's writing a science fiction novel unrelated to Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. It's set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It's really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books. He's nearly finished writing it, and if he doesn't finish by the end of the calendar year he'll have to give some money back. If everything proceeds according to schedule, it should be available in stores in about a year.

Q: Would your earlier books have been longer, or were they kept short by editorial pressures?

A: No, the earlier books were about the length they were meant to be.

Another interesting tidbit that came out in response to someone else's question is that Neal has really gotten interested in swordfighting lately and has taken it up as a good form of exercise. "Much more interesting than jogging," I think he said. It came about as he was researching a fight scene for one of the Baroque books, in which the characters are fighting with rapier and dagger. When he went to write the scene, he realized he didn't know what he was talking about, so he started to read heavily on the subject. Soon he was practicing the moves himself. Now, a few years after publication, he's still swordfighting. He didn't say how he finds practice partners.

One last anecdote. About 40 minutes into the one-hour Q-and-A session, someone asked about Neal's characteristic "sudden and unexpected" style of ending books. In response, Neal said, "It's been a pleasure speaking here at Google" and made for the door. He was only kidding, of course; he was just making a sudden and unexpected ending to the talk. He quickly returned and gave the more serious answer that he likes his endings just as they are, and that while they are apparently not to everyone's tastes, it's not that he just gives up and stops writing. He dislikes pat endings that explain everything and tie everything up with a neat little bow; in real life, there are no convenient termination points. On his website, you can find a longer version of what is surely a standard set speech for him on this topic, so I will suddenly and abruptly end my paraphrasing of it, and of this entire blog entry, here.

Here's today's announcement of new features in my product, Website Optimizer:

New Features in Website Optimizer

Item #3 on the list was my stuff. Hurray!

If you run a website and you try to get your visitors to do something on your site (like buying something, or downloading something), consider setting up a quick A/B test to try out changes to your content or presentation. It's easy and free and you might be able to improve your conversion rate substantially without a lot of effort. And you'll make me happy.

Things are going really well here. I've been attending a lot of classes on the basics of engineering at Google, eating a lot of amazing delicious free food, and soaking up sunshine. But most of all, I've been running into people I know. It seems like the world really only has about 50,000 people in it, and you keep running into the same ones over and over again. It's been a huge amount of fun reconnecting with people I knew from various parts of my life and finding out how their lives are unfolding.

I found out what I'll be working on when I get home: it's called the Website Optimizer. The basic idea is this: you run a web site, and you are trying to get your visitors to do something when they come to your site. Maybe you want them to buy something, or fill out a form, or download a document. Everyone who comes to your site and completes the desired action is called a conversion. You want to maximize your conversion percentage.

When someone comes to the front page of your site (the "landing" page), they take only a few seconds to form an idea about whether your page is worthwhile to them. If they don't see what they're looking for, they move on very quickly. So the exact layout, headline phrasing, color choices, and other design decisions about that landing page really matter.

That's where the Website Optimizer comes in. You can try out variations of your landing page -- different headlines, different images, whatever. The website optimizer will try out these different combinations of headlines and images on a portion of your site traffic, and then measure the conversion rate for each combination. It's really pretty nifty.

It's a small but growing project, so there should be plenty of opportunity for me to build some pretty cool features if I stay with this project. I'm excited about it. I think it will be a great first project for me.

But, the real work on that won't start until I return to Kirkland. I have a few more days of hobnobbing and mainlining pineapple smoothies before I buckle down and get to work.

In Mountain View and all's well so far... tomorrow I begin the official brainwashing, er, I mean, orientation.

Joel Spolsky linked to this fabulous recruiting ad by Meetup the other day. It cracks me up.

A quote from the ad, referring to the fancy toilets at Google headquarters:

At Google, after you consume all the Google Food you can eat, you will enjoy Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Dryer, and Oscillating options.

You will not be forced to interact with those without ample access to Rear Cleansing, Front Cleansing, Dryer, and Oscillating options.

My job search is over! I accepted an offer from Google last week. I couldn't be more thrilled! Google was very much my first choice. I don't know yet what I'll be working on; Google doesn't usually hire people for specific projects. I will find out my project assignment closer to my start date.

I'm starting on June 11th, once co-op preschool is over for the year and Laura has graduated from college and is free to nanny full-time.

I'll be working in their Kirkland office (not moving to California). For those who don't know the area, Kirkland is just across Lake Washington from Seattle. The commute across the bridge is going to be nasty, but I should be able to join a carpool.

If anybody wants the inside scoop on my interviewing experiences at Google, Amazon, Zillow, and a few others, send me an email. I'll tell you all about it.