November 16, 2005 – Generations

November 16, 2005 – Generations

As I’ve grown older, the relationship of the world and we human that inhabit it continues to take on different meaning. As a young man, I could not appreciate the cycle of life, the rhythm of birth and death that happened all around me in a constant and ever occurring cycle. I could not see the significance of birds giving birth in nests outside my home in rural Mississippi in the early 1950s year in and year out. Each set of births represented a new generation of chicks hatching, spreading their wings for the first time and taking flight. How many others were born during that same season who lived to make the first flight, would see the following year, what adventures would they have along the way, would they engage the world differently than their parents?... All these questions I failed to ask or perhaps better said it never occurred to me to ask.

Humans are no different than the animals around us. Some live far shorter lives than us, while a few others have longer life spans, the Galapagos Island sea turtles come to mind. The thing about humans that make them somewhat different than animals—though far less than we might imagine—is their ability to create unique culture. The culture of the French differs from that of the Chinese, for example. But, in these modern times, there is a unique culture being created with each new generation of humans that walk the earth. And this swiftly changing culture is been propelled by rapidly shifting technology.

My father grew up in the early part of the 20th Century in rural Mississippi. The airplane, automobile, electricity, and the telephone had all been invented by the time he was a young man in the early 1930s, but his rural home where my mother and I came to live with him in the late 1940s still lacked running water and indoor plumbing, though it did have electricity, a wonderful tube radio that picked up stations from as far away as New Orleans. And my father not only had a car, but a truck as well. We seemed to always have cars. The telephone came later when we moved to El Paso and though our house had indoor plumbing it had yet to be hooked up to the city’s sanitation system—we were in a built up subdivision too. In the early 1950s we did have gas, electricity, a television and a telephone, though we had a party line service—more than one household on a line each having a unique ring. Yes, nosey neighbors could listen in on your conversations. This was the technology that I recalled as a child.

My father grew up listening to Big Band Music on the radio: Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Paul Whiteman, Ben Selvin, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, and others. By the time I was growing up in the mid-1950s the Big Band were still playing but popular music was beginning to be dominated by rock and roll. Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed coined the term being inspired by the song "My Baby Rocks Me with a Steady Roll" in 1951. Radio had given way to television and major networks moved their programming from the radio speaker to the television screen and local radio stations had to evolve to survive—not surprisingly radio continues to prosper despite television and the Internet. As my father and I grew older I noticed that he began to take an interest in rock and roll, particularly El Presley and the other legends of the 1950s. My father and I shared an evolving change in music culture during my teens and early 20s.

By the time I came of age, electronics and the computer had become part of American culture and both were to drive my life until today. My father had a passing interest in electronics. He had a complete library of basic electronics books from the de Forrest Institute. Founder Lee de Forrest was one of the early pioneers of this new field—he attempted the first live broadcast of a New York Metropolitan Opera House production starring Enrico Caruso among other less than successful ventures. I would leaf through the books but they were always far too technical for a neophyte like me. I suspect my father found them equally difficult to get into. My father was a mechanic and spent his life from the time he owned his first car in his mid teens until today working on cars. He has been reluctant to purchase any car model later than 1970 because the electronics made them too difficult to work on. To his credit, he recently purchased a new Chevrolet—his first ever new car purchase.

While my father grew up believing cars were as much fun to work on as they were to drive, I grew up viewing them as basic transportation. And though, out of necessity, I worked on my earlier cars, I’ve never repaired one since becoming well off enough to hand the job over to others who make their living doing so. I became a technology gear head and as soon as the first PCs became available, I owned one. A couple of years ago, my sister purchased my dad a IBM PC desktop and she and I both tried to get him engaged, but without success. It’s now an unused decoration in the kitchen. The advent of the Internet only widen the gap between my father’s generation and mine—though there are numbers of my father’s age group who have gotten on the web.

My father’s generation knew air travel from a relatively early age. The war introduced it to him. He rode a train from the basic training to a ship bound for the Pacific theatre of the Second World War, but once their, he flew from island to island on at least a number of occasions. Flying was something my father needed to get from one place to another fast. In his older life, he has driven to distant destinations far more frequently than he’s flown. I cannot recall as a young boy ever riding the train any long distance. We were always driving by car. However, when I joined the service, I was constantly being moved from place to place on planes: from Seattle to Boot Camp in San Diego; from San Diego to San Francisco; from San Francisco to Dam Neck, Virginia—I took the bus from Virginia to New York City; from New York to El Paso; from El Paso to San Francisco; from San Francisco to Takegawa Air Base in Japan; from Takegawa to San Francisco, and from there back home once discharged. For all the leaves in between I hopped planes and going to and from home.

My daughters were born in the second half of the last century. Neither knew what life was like without television, radio, or computers, though the latter came as both were entering high school and their early introduction to computers were no where near the immersion today’s kids receive. Both daughters are the product of television going through incredible change from a handful of stations when they were born to tens of stations when both got cable after college to more stations than you can surf in a reasonable amount of time today. Furthermore, they have multiple TVs one in the living room and a couple more for the bedrooms. And at least one of the sets is on at all times during the day, constant stimulation from the outside world. Telephone communications has likewise gone through similar change with cell phones providing instant access 24-7 and instant messaging promising continually conversations 24-7. Between the web, television, radio, and telephone, there isn’t an instant during one’s waking hour when some form of messaging isn’t being presented. My wife IM and I and my father’s generation before spent large amounts of our time as children growing up playing outside or finding other amusements to occupy our time. I spent a good amount of time day dreaming. My wife IM spent a great deal of her time exploring the natural wonders along the banks of the Clyde River in Scotland with her younger brother.

I’ve tried to keep up with my daughters’ generation and for the most part, I’m current with their use of the technology. However, with my grand children, I feel I’m losing ground. All of them are media-addicted. There’s not a piece of video produced for their generation they haven’t seen more than once—from the classic Sesame Street DVDs to Baby Einstein, and all the Canadian discs produced for the younger age group and yes all the Disney DVDs. At one time, the Jesuits were the ones who gained control of young children and produced the finished adults. Today, I suspect corporate America, especially Disney has far too much influence on our children than they should have. I don’t say that to suggest that Disney’s morals are not the values of the society. However, they are putting their brand on every living creature alive. As a marketing guy, I have to admire what they’ve accomplished. As a jaded adult, I have to question their motives.

But, the point I’m trying to make is that each generation creates a unique culture unto themselves. The language of my daughters’ generation is different from the language of my generation and I feel out of place using their words. Simple words such as “totally,” “dude,” “cool”—a word my generation used but in an entirely different way—as well as a large number of other words. The language my father and I speak is different, too, and I suspect generations are divided by their lack of common experiences and the words that convey one generations world view to the other. My father is tied to the 20th Century which was dominated by two World Wars. The wars of my generation were entirely different from the wars of his and it’s as difficult for him to understand my experience as for me to comprehend his. His had an easily identified villain, mine didn’t.

The one culprit I cited earlier responsible for changing the culture of each generation, is technology. With each successive generation, the earth has gotten smaller, made so not only by the jet plane that can transport you anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours, but also by telephone and television. The latter brings events happening at the farthest reaches from us right to our living rooms. And telephones allow you to call to that very spot and speak with someone experiencing that event immediately. The mysteries of the world that confronted my father as a young person are not mysterious to every generation afterwards. My generation heard then saw a U.S. president and his assassin gunned down on television, and saw a man walk on the moon. Today’s generations are seeing inside the human body, the depths of the oceans, the tops of the highest peaks on earth. There are few places on earth that this generation cannot view on television either live or recorded on DVD.

The more a generation knows, the more it can change itself and I suspect that is what is happening at an accelerating rate. The trick for us old guys is to find some way to remain relevant through such rapid changes in culture and enjoy the generations that have come after ours while there’s time.

November 13, 2005 – Relinquishing a Stake in Orange County

November 13, 2005 – Relinquishing a Stake in Orange County

My wife IM and I are about to complete the sale of a home we purchased new in Orange County, California a couple of years ago. The selling process is a long and difficult process that is not unlike hunting. Your hunting party is all decked out in their camouflage hunting outfits loaded for bear and you begin your foray into the forest of real estate selling. I liken the process to sitting in a blind waiting for ducks to appear on a lake—which I’ve never done, but my friend Don Steele who was into hunting described to be me at length just before we sat down to a dinner of roast duck which his dear wife Evie prepared for us one evening at their lovely home in the Diamond Heights District of San Francisco.

Our wait in the duck blind has been ongoing on for the past five months with nary a duck to be seen. In an effort to keep our spirits up so that we wouldn’t loose patients in the process, our realtor would send us the latest statistics on the number of vacant homes in the Irvine section of Orange County, where our town home is located, what the asking price for each was, which homes had been sold, which had price reductions. Selling real estate is a difficult undertaking at which few who embark on the venture succeed. It’s a job done on evenings and weekends, though you’re expected to be available during regular business hours as well—the result is you never had any time that entirely your own, especially if you are anxious to succeed.

Our realtor had a track record of success with the company he works for—salesman of the year, etc. for several years. This is one good marker for picking a realtor—hiring someone with a track record of finding ducks and a rifle stock notched with lots of kills. IM has no patients with sales people of any kind and especially real estate agents. We’ve had only two others to compare our current agent against. Our first was particular good, by which I mean, “lucky,” barely a month after we listed with him, our home was sold. And he even kicked back some of his commission to make the sale work. Our second was a sales person from the home builder we purchased the home from. We liked them because they agreed to resell the house for a third the normal real estate sales commission.

Our second real estate experience had a couple of years ago when the market was experiencing a surge of growth and we had decided to sell just after the market peaked in the fall. The home went onto the market and languished for several months before we had anyone even showing interest. And just as we were about to give up, someone made an offer, slightly lower than our asking price, and we came to terms. The sale was completed six weeks later after a lengthy process of overcoming the buyers’ remorse as they applied for and eventually received creative financing to acquire the property.

This latest real estate transaction tested our patients to the limit as weekend after weekend of open house seemed to produce no results, lots of buyers viewing the property but none with any serious interest. Real estate markets are similar to all other financial markets. Buyers all get the notion to purchase at the same time and descend on realtors and new home builders en masse. It’s the same principle at the supermarket. Everyone converges on the market and ends up at the checkout lines at the same time. During the week, the phenomena is explained by normal business hours, but on the weekend when people all have the choice of when to descend on the supermarket or department store, they all converge at the same time.

Just as months before, buyers converged on Orange County property as soon as it became available. As a result there was little housing inventory on the market for any length of time. Now the same was happening in reverse. Seemingly all the buyers en masse decided to wait for the overheated market to cool down. Thus, we were stuck in our duck blind and all the ducks were well out of reach.

However, the lack of activity gave us reason to enjoy the property we had purchased and hadn’t lived up. We would drive south and rather than stay in a motel, we would live in our town home. It had a bed in the master bedroom, which we made up with linen, bedspread, and pillows. The water, gas and electricity were all active, as we needed to show the home. All that was missing was cable TV, a landline phone connection and high speed Internet. But never mind, we had cell phones and instead of TV we had a notebook PC with a DVD drive and plenty of DVD content to enjoy in place of TV. And we had books and magazines to fill the time when we weren’t playing with our grandkids and enjoying our daughter and son-in-law.

We bought bathroom towels and kitchen items for after dinner or early morning coffee and tea all in paper dishware for easy clean up. We had a broom and dustpan for indoor and outdoor maintenance. The bed was comfortable and IM and I discovered the joys of living somewhere different after over 30 years of living in San Jose and Irvine was a welcome change. The neighborhood was quiet and the rhythm of life was entirely different. We shopped at Albertson instead of Safeway, ate out instead of cooking at home, drove freeways we only knew as visitors but now for the moment perceived as a resident—they are more crowded but do move, though we’ve only seen them on weekends and holidays.

My jogging path was different as well: starting at San Canyon Avenue and Quail Hill Parkway then proceeding east and slightly south until it intersects Laguna Canyon Road, then south on until Laguna Canyon Road intersects Highway 133 and return the way I came. It’s shorter than my normal hour run by about 15 to 20 minutes, but it’s sidewalk all the way along Quail Hill with town homes and apartments on either side of the road, set back from the road by a 100 feet of greenbelt up a slight incline to my right on the outbound segment of my run. In fact the entire subdivision is on the side of a slight rise leading up to the mountains of the coast range that separates Irvine from the Laguna Beach on the Pacific Coast Highway, a 10- to 15-minute drive west on Highway 133. While the mountain side is rugged and covered with the brown flora of Southern California, baked by the rainless seasons of summer and fall, the well groomed flora along either side of Quail Hill Parkway is lush green thanks to the generous daily watering the development’s homeowners association. I judged places by the running paths and this was one of the best I’ve ever ran.

Near the beginning of November, our realtor finally found a buyer who made a bid on the property. It was less than we were asking and we suggested an alternative between their bid and our asking price and they accepted. It was a moment of both joy and relief mixed with a small amount of sadness. The buyer was anxious to move in and provided good-faith money and financing, while the escrow company acted swiftly to provide all the necessary paperwork to consummate the deal. Unlike a stock trade where the seller places an order and the trade transpires in a matter of seconds once the price is agreed upon, a real estate transaction involves overhead. The deed transfer from seller to buyer is a single notarized piece of paper signed by me. Beyond this one document however is at least a ream of paper if not more that must be initialed and signed.

This Saturday we received the paperwork showing the estimated closing costs which I had to initial and return. No where is the overhead involved in selling a piece of real estate more glaringly obvious than in the estimated closing statement. The first image that came to mind when I saw the estimated closing statement was a lion’s wildebeest kill on the Serengeti. It appeared to be a feeding frenzy of various predators and scavengers each taking a bite out of the carcass: 6 percent of the total sales price going to two realtors—the buyer’s and mine, the state of California taking a whopping 10 percent of our proceeds—they’re ensuring we don’t skip to New Mexico without paying them before leaving, and small bites from everyone else in the food chain in the form of fees and expenses.

In the end there was nothing for it but to accept what I could not change or affect in any way and be thankful that we profited from the transaction. I learned long ago that life isn’t fair and equitable, but rather capricious. The Victorians were of a mind that life was comprised solely of suffering and death—for the likes of the middle and lower classes that is—and if you experienced any good fortune or happiness, then you should count yourself fortunate. IM and I count ourselves fortunate.

November 10, 2005 – The Primitive Being Within Us All

November 10, 2005 – The Primitive Being Within Us All

Why is it that some people around you seem to have more of something than you possess? In my days in the Navy there were at least two people I came across that had incredible appeal to women. Both were the most emotional transient individuals I’ve ever met, continually looking for fresh conquests. Others I’ve known have been blessed with the ability to find fortunes where everyone else around them sees nothing. Still others I’ve known have the incredible skill of making everything they do seem easy, playing a musical instrument, gambling in Vegas, skiing, basketball, rhetorical debate, etc. What provides them their innate natural ability?

It’s hard to fathom the source of this special gift, but I suspect it has to do with that other being that is part of us all, that none of us recognizes for his/her true worth. It’s the primitive being that is who we are when we’re born. It’s the entity that the logical reasoning being struggles to subvert and assume control of the person we become. I know this sounds otherworldly, but bear with me while I endeavor to explain. The baby that comes into the world looks frail and helpless, but if you’ve held a newborn child as I have held my two daughters and grandchildren for long periods of time, you begin to see something. All of those little beings are studying you as intently as you’re beholding them. Fresh from the womb, their sense of smell, touch, and hearing are the main source of their knowledge of you, and when their eyes begin to focus, they take the measure of you visually.

In the world before the reasoning being takes over, the world is a place of nameless forms distinguished by shape, texture, sound and location within the surrounding space. Some objects are stationary while others move, produce sound, have different smells at different times, even change their appearance. These small creatures instinctively know friend from foe. They know who will provide sustenance and who will only provide comfort and will complain when they are given comfort when they want sustenance. Notice too the muscles of these small creatures, they are not soft and pliant but firm and hard—made so by the continuous struggle within the womb: months of isometric exercising.

We talk to these creatures and they hear the words but read and respond to the body language, laughing when we laugh or make a funny face, serious as they listen to us recite rhyme to them about “Winking Blinking and Nod,” “the Gingham Dog and Calico Cat,” and my favorite “The Mountain and the Squirrel.” Their watching the movement of mouths and jaws and the expression of our eyes, studying the facial expression as one reads the signs in a continuously changing landscape. They are learning who we are by the signatures of our unique expressions.

That primitive creature is even more obvious once he or she begins to ambulate. As awkward as they are when taking their first steps, they instinctively comprehend the space around them, know where obstacles are they need to circumvent, know that they need to crawl to go under a low hanging object, know which space will accommodate their small size and which won’t. This suggests that this incredible creature comprehends his physical form in relationship to the world around him or her. For a being that has yet to utter an intelligible word or demonstrate an understanding of numbers, this is a remarkable ability.

Once ambulatory and even before, the infant has a keen sense of emotion, chase a child and they instinctively know to run. Pretend to be monster and they become apprehensive though knowing at the same time that the act is a pretense and not real. Replace the pretension of a beast with a growling dog and the response from the child is one of real fear. The sight and sound of sorrow in an adults face will engender sadness in the child, while the expression and sound of laughter will incite the same in the infant. Do something the child does not comprehend and a question mark clouds his or her face. Watch them master a task like taking their first step, crawling up a flight of stairs, or even more daunting coming down a flight of stairs and watch the sense of accomplishment spread over their expression like the sunshine piercing through a cloudy day. It’s a miraculous sight.

This magnificent creature is slowly sublimated as he or she grows older. His or her instinctive skills are overshadowed by his or her logical ability. The body language and guttural utterance by which they made themselves understood give way to formal speech. It becomes evident when the infant turns five and he or she begins to describe the world in rational terms. Everything in their world has a name and a purpose including themselves—a girl like mom or a boy like dad.

I started off by talking about what makes some of us luckier, more talented, etc. I believe it is primordial person within us: the remnant of the primal creature that remains after a million years of evolution. On the savannahs of Africa those many years ago, that primitive fought for survival in a vast primeval world filled with countless predators. It was he who found food and water, shelter from the rain and cold, escape from the attacks of predators including rivals who would seek to overwhelm his own kind. On the freeway of the modern world, he’s the one who instinctively senses danger and swerves to avoid a crash or intuitively knows to turn into a spin to gain control. It’s that same primitive creature that knows who around to defer to and who to overpower.

That primitive creature is the one that takes control in front of a crowded room when the spotlight comes on and the microphone is in your hands and you have to perform. It’s the creature that tells you the player with four cards of the same suit who just raised you last bet is bluffing. It’s that creature who picks the woman or man you’re going to marry, that tells someone close to you is hurt or safe after a disaster, tells you your now dead parent or loved one just touched you from the afterlife. It’s that creature who accounts for all the unaccountable things that happen to you in your life and the one that will accompany you on your way out of this world, too.

November 9, 2005 – A Silicon Valley Turn-of-the-Century Tragedy

November 9, 2005 – A Silicon Valley Turn-of-the-Century Tragedy

The cycle of birth and death means a great deal more to me as a 60-year old than it did to me as a 30-year old and thankfully I’ve seen precious few of the latter among the people I have known since arriving in California in 1974. What I have seen a great deal of though is the birth and death of companies and corporations. The greatest mass extermination of legal entity “enti‘cide’” occurred at the end of the last century when silicon valley experienced an orgy of red ink spilling off income statements and balance sheets as from the body of speared animals. While most were left to die, others were eaten by larger corporations that were able to survive waiting for the weaker ones to become easy prey.

Every day in the newspaper were ads for auction houses selling off assets of a Internet enterprise that failed. These companies all came into being when financiers were willing to invest $50 to $100 million in a business plan with no clearly defined business model for producing revenue. Most of these ventures simply set up a web site to build traffic and hoped to sell advertising or hoped to divine a business plan to make money afterwards. Who remembers Boo.com, Toysmart and CraftShop.com. These companies spent lavishly on office space, furnishings and equipment, servers and workstations for their staff of round-the-clock workers who busied themselves hacking code to establish a compelling web presence.

I didn’t work for an Internet company back then, but rather a company that fed off the Internet’s booming business. My company sold pricey software to companies building chips to sell to Cisco, Nortel, and Lucent among others. These in turn, sold equipment to companies building the Internet infrastructure. When the web-based businesses began to starve for lack of renewed investment and no income, everyone in the food chain, including our chip company customers curtailed their spending, the nourishment that had been feeding my enfant company rapidly diminished until there was little to sustain its existence let alone foster its growth. Being in marketing, I was an early casualty. To husband what cash it had in hand, the company cut special deals with suppliers whereby it paid a smaller portion for a good or service promising to pay the remainder when it began to generate revenue. Suppliers booked the cash upfront discounting the transaction to make the sale—they were as hungry as their customer and would take less rather than risk losing even the meager amount being proffered.

I left in October 2001, a few weeks after the Twin Towers had been devastated—a metaphor for the economic meltdown that followed; Bin Laden attacking a symbol of capitalism and wrecking his intended havoc. I contented myself doing odd jobs disheartened at the prospect of looking for full time employment. As the year drew to a close even the small supply of odd jobs was being consumed by others like me eager to earn a fraction of their salary to keep the bill collectors at bay and to salvage some modicum of their self-respect. By the New Year 2002, I had gotten lucky and landed a new full-time job, with a small start-up who miraculously continued to prosper in these terrible times.

My old company had managed to make it into 2002 after jettisoning all those not directly involved in producing new product. The company had also completed the sale of a substantial part of their assets thus providing funds to last through the year. I began to believe that the struggling enterprise might have the wherewithal to survive the famine. But as 2002 drew to a close, the signs of economic starvation once again began to appear. Unknown to me at the time, the emaciated legal entity had made a bold attempt to raid a rival in an aborted attempt at a leveraged buyout backed by long suffering customers of the rival.

In the hostile takeover my old company president had made a last desperate bid for a controlling interest in the stock of his archrival at a point when the rival’s stock had sunk to under a $2/share. Customers tired of poor response to their requests and exorbitant pricing passed the hat and made the offer with my old company’s president as the leader of the effort. Somehow news of the hostile takeover began to leak in advance of the offer and the stock price rose abruptly putting the acquisition out of reach and the attempt fizzled leaving my old company no alternative but death. When the weaker predator puts all its strength into one attempt to deal a fatal blow and the blow misses the mark, death is the only recourse. And so it was that the little entity slowly bled to death: one of the many Silicon Valley turn-of-the-century dramas.