![[Photo: House, minus some siding]](house.gif)
In which Larry calms down... A tour of a biotech start-up... A tour of MicroSoft through the eyes of a MicroSoft hater...
Seattle 1998 Jul 30 Thursday
I was travelling to Seattle to sail. But first I would spend some time in Seattle visiting with friends and family. My original plan had been to stay with my friend Ron, who worked at amazon.com, close to the Amtrak station; he often worked late. I figured that I could walk from the station to his office. That way, if the train was a couple of hours late, Ron wouldn't mind the wait so much.
That was the original plan, before amazon.com decided to send Ron to Dallas for the week. I was getting into Seattle Thursday night--but Ron wasn't getting in until Friday night. I felt sorry for myself, but sorrier for Ron--Dallas was experiencing a heat wave, with temperatures consistently above 110 degrees.
With Ron's place unavailable, I'd asked my cousin Nancy if, instead of just visiting for lunch on Saturday, I could stay at her place. She'd said fine and asked when my train was getting in. I'd said it was scheduled for 9:00pm, but that I should probably make my own way to her place--after all, the train was likely to be hours late, and the Seattle Amtrak station is not a fun place to wait. As it happens, I was wrong--the train was scheduled to arrive at 8:00pm, not 9:00. Still, it arrived at 9:00. And when I stumbled from the train and into the Seattle Amtrak station, I heard a "Larry!" and there was Nancy. It turns out that she and/or her husband Cedric had checked the Amtrak web page, and had thus found out how late the train was running. They had come to pick me up. I was so glad. I was so tired. Soon I was at their house in the Greenlake district, getting acquainted with their cats, drinking my volume in juice, and bedding down on the wonderfully-still guest futon.
1998 Jul 31 Friday
I awoke to the presence of cats. I'm allergic to cats, but I didn't have any problems while I was at Nancy and Cedric's. I began to halfway suspect that I was no longer allergic to cats. But really I think that Nancy and Cedric had just done a really good job of vacuuming before I arrived.
It was late in the morning, yet Nancy and Cedric were both around. Nancy had worked a long day on Thursday, and was taking the morning off. Cedric's office was being moved, so he was taking a two-day enforced vacation. I drank some coffee and walked to the local grocery store. I bought ingredients for sandwiches and every single roll of Shock Tarts that they had.
Back at the house, I made sandwiches while talking to Nancy. She worked at Corixa, a biotech startup. She put her immunology knowledge to use and ran a lab. We exchanged management stories. This was something on my mind. My manager was getting ready to move to another department; soon I would have to play manager again. We exchanged stories of dicey situations avoided, lessons learned. Nancy was a technical girl, slowly but surely getting edged into a management role, scrambling for time to do technical things between management duties. And she was thriving. Maybe I'd do okay in a similar situation. Standing around a kitchen and talking about it, it seemed less scary than it had earlier.
That's not all we talked about. We talked about the construction going on in her office. She showed me the garden, with its cherry tree, beans, lemon verbena, berries. Gardens are very soothing and restorative, and I recommend visiting people who have them.
Cedric drove Nancy to work, and I tagged along for a tour of her office. What does a bio start-up look like? Software start-ups hunker in business parks and office buildings. They could be any other mess of cubicles except that everyone's got a powerful computer and there's more Tevas than you'll see at the local health food store. Corixa had taken over a few floors in the old Fred Hutchinson Building. (The Fred Hutchinson organization was some cancer research outfit which was in the process of moving to new digs.) Corixa was taking up the institutional linoleum and putting down institutional carpeting. They were putting in an atrium. In the halls, I saw large metal rings dangling from the ceiling, suspended by chains. I idly reached up a hand to tug on one. My cousin warned me that these triggered the chemical showers to wash off people who'd been splashed by dangerous biological things. I retracted my hand.
We entered the lab. Here were counters, shelves, busy young people hunched over devices whose purposes I couldn't fathom. I looked around for people pipetting, and saw none. "What, no pipetting?" I whined. Nancy smirked at me. She said that when photographers come through the lab looking for images for PR, they always look for pipetting because that's the most photogenic activity. "Pipetting, and they also like it when you're holding a slide up to the light. They always want you to pose with the slide in a really awkward posture, though." Jeez, I'd bought this photographer's vision of bio labs hook, line, and sinker.
Nancy introduced me to a tech named Patrick. Patrick, I learned, was an expert at "Mass-Spec HPLC," a process which was at the core of Corixa's business plan. Patrick had recently done some research which showed that this process was useful for something, and thus Corixa's business plan was looking more sound than it had a few weeks back. I looked at Nancy and Patrick, smiled and nodded, wondered if I made this little sense when I talk about computer operating system software. Later, in a small voice, I asked if "Mass Spec" was short for "Mass Spectrometer." It was. I preened.
I'm pretty tall. Nancy is, nevertheless, taller than I am. Cedric is even taller than her, just shy of seven feet. In the hall, we ran into a Corixa worker who was taller than Cedric. The three of them stood around talking about the hazards of being tall. For once, I felt like I had nothing to contribute to such a conversation. These people were out of my league. They regularly bumped their heads on things I could only dream about. At one point I burst out: "I feel like I'm standing at the bottom of a gawddammed well, here!" They looked upon me with gentle pity.
Eventually, Nancy had to get some work done and shooed Cedric and me out of the office.
Back at the house, Cedric and I put new siding up on the roof, where the old stuff had rotted. I'm not really up on my woodworking skills, and jumped at a chance to hammer in some nails while on a ladder. No, really. Hammering's a skill worth learning. The year before, I'd been pounding some fence posts with a hammer. I wasn't a very good hammerer, and I hadn't been able to get much force into my blows. Thus, it took many strokes to drive each fence post, and with each stroke there was a chance of breaking a friend's hand as he held the post in place. Now I was hammering at strange roof-determined angles, using strange footing. And I was getting better. Carpentry is a great way to focus your energies, especially if the house you're working on is not your own; you've got a chance to experiment.
That evening, I was to dine at the house of Joon, an ex-coworker who had moved up from California to the Seattle suburbs. Cedric kindly drove me out into the boonies, and into a cul-de-sac of condos. I walked up some stairs, knocked on the door. There was no reply. I looked down at the ground. There was a newspaper lying there. Uh-oh. Maybe I should have called first. Which I would have done except that, of course, I didn't have Joon's phone number. I knocked again. I looked over at Cedric, who'd just driven me through several miles of heavy traffic to this benighted spot. Was there some way to kill an hour around here? It didn't really look like it. "Why don't you leave a note saying that we'll be back in an hour or two," Cedric said, "and I can give you a tour of the MicroSoft campus."
This was not the first time that Cedric had suggested that he give me a tour of MicroSoft. Each time he did, I'd bristled a little bit. I've had a hard spot in my heart for MicroSoft for a more than 10 years now. I remembered setting up a MicroSoft Excel spreadsheet for my parents using some X.0 version of Macintosh Excel. I'd encountered an obvious bug, something that should never have gone into a published piece of software. It had stymied me for hours. I made my dad promise that the next time he got a spreadsheet, he'd get a better one. And I'd figured that this "MicroSoft" company would surely fold soon, publishing crap like this. Since then, of course, I'd watched MicroSoft grow huge, watched it continue to publish crappy software. Did I want a tour of MicroSoft's Redmond campus? I looked around at a parking lot surrounded by condos; beyond these were fields, a business park. We weren't in Seattle any longer; there was no cute little cafe within miles. "Yeah, let's go check out MicroSoft," I said, "that would be cool." I'd left my fat permanent marker in my suitcase; I'd left my knife there, too; I wasn't exactly sure what I'd find to do at the MicroSoft campus.
Redmond
Cedric drove us a few more miles through traffic-ridden back roads of the boonies surrounding Seattle. We approached the MicroSoft campus. There are a few roads into it. Cedric mused aloud: "How can we make the most dramatic entrance?" I glumly thought to myself: Does it involve a bazooka? Soon we were driving through a business park, the MicroSoft campus. On a lawn, the "Research" group was holding a picnic. I'd thought that MicroSoft's "Research" group was sort of like a new Xerox PARC, with lots of academic types doing ivory-tower research--there had been a few months when I'd kept hearing about various big-name CS academic types taking sabbaticals from academic positions to work for MS Research. Cedric had done some contracting for them. Now I learned that the "Research" group was also the group working on NT5. Wow. They were working on a core product? Could this group perhaps contain enough brains to pull MicroSoft's head out of its low-quality ass? I looked around at all the buildings. There were many people here. Brains could get pretty diluted.
Cedric worked for a company called Meridian, which in turn contracted for MicroSoft. Cedric wrote scripts, maybe in the Visual Studio group. We walked through the Visual Studio building. Cedric pointed out a room full of computers on desks, each with streams of text scrolling through windows. These machines were in charge of compiling Visual Studio. Each time an engineer installed some new source code, these machines would jump into work to generate new executables. There must have been at least 30 of them. It made me glad that I worked for a company that doesn't write such bloated code. I could change and re-compile a copy of my company's product in a few minutes with just one PC. I took that for granted.
We walked past a table with some writeable CDs with some slips of paper on them announcing that they were masters of the latest version of Visual Studio, which was now in Beta. Cedric chuckled that I should be careful not to knock over those disks, they were worth millions. I considered breaking them, but figured that it wouldn't really cost millions to replace the CDs. My thoughts turned even more dour at this--how could I fight a company that succeeded though it did everything wrong?
We took in the sights. We saw Lake Bill. We saw the feeding cannister for some rooster mascot. We watched nerds skitter through the late afternoon light. Some people walking away from the Research group picnic, one of them carrying a hula hoop which had been given away. I thought of walking up and demanding, "Give to me the hula hoop, you scoundrel, unless you can tell me the name of four Quality Assurance techs who have gone over your code." I kept my mouth shut. This place was making me crazy and I was just going to have to make sure that nobody noticed.
We visited building 8, home of the executive offices. Here was an atrium full of art. A glass sculpture by some guy out of a place called, so help me, Pilchuck, hung from the ceiling looking blue, ornate, and expensive. Sculptures nestled in nooks and strutted on little tables. A prissy-looking executive walked past. I wanted to pull off my shoe, bang it on a bannister, yell, "We will bury you!" Of course, I didn't. Of course.
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