RIP, Michael O'Connor-Clarke

A good friend of mine died on Saturday. For those who didn’t have the opportunity to meet this man, I feel compelled to tell you a bit about him.



I first met Michael O’Connor-Clarke at the Hilton New York in 1999 when we were in marketing for competing software companies. He at Hummingbird, the industry-leading document management software company, and I at iManage, the upstart nipping at Humminbird’s heels. I remember thinking it must have annoyed him that I was invited to share the stage with him; his company, after all, had more than 70% of the market, and iManage had been none too subtle in painting their product as yesterday’s technology.



But he wasn’t annoyed. No sooner had our panel wrapped up that he invited me to lunch. We hit it off, though we lost touch as our careers went in different directions. I stumbled across his blog several years later, and got reintroduced to what a cool guy he was.



And our paths crossed once again in New York, at another conference, this time in 2005. I was with FeedBurner, and Michael was at a tech company that was complementary to what we were doing. We reconnected over another lunch, and resolved that this time we'd stay in touch. We did.


We never went more than a few months over the last seven years without some e-mail exchange, and though we didn’t see each other too often, our lunch at SXSW a couple years ago was a highlight of that conference for me. By then I was at Google and he’d returned to agency life after some time with a tech firm, and we spent a good 90 minutes comparing notes about our families, our careers, and life in general.



Michael loved his job, and loved PR. He reveled in finding the story worth telling, and anyone who spends more than a few minutes browsing some of his blog posts will see a man who even loved those who practiced bad PR. (“Loved” might not quite be the right word: adored, maybe? Enjoyed? He took a perverse delight in their ineptitude, because even in their poorly targeted e-mail blasts, their terrible turn of phrase, their poor choice in tactics, there was a story there, too. Here’s but one example of countless exchanges he and I had over the years documenting this.)



This past July 4, I was driving my family north for a long vacation weekend. Early in the drive I got a call from one of my best friends, who was calling to tell me his wife had cancer. It hit me hard, and I spent much of that six hour drive predictably thinking about what’s important. Family. Friends. Legacy. As we neared our destination, it was dinner time. Rather than try to cook in the house we’d rented after a long drive, we found a local pizza joint that was open on the holiday. While I waited for our pizza to be finished, I checked my e-mail.



I didn’t recognize the name of the sender of the latest e-mail received, but I recognized the name in the subject line: Michael O’Connor-Clarke. The sender was Michael’s boss, sending to contacts in his address book, letting his extended network know that Michael was battling esophageal cancer.

Michael died Saturday, 48 years old, leaving behind a wife and three children, and an online and offline community of thousands whose lives he touched.



Last fall he and I were e-mailing about a YouTube problem a client of his was having. I asked how his family was doing, and his reply spoke volumes about who he was:

Things here are utterly wonderful, thanks. Actually in love with my job ... Great team, fantastic clients, and we're kicking 31 flavours of arse every single day. Family growing like weeds and eating us out of house and home, but all happy, healthy and (even more important) the kids all still like each other. La vita e bella.

It seems simplistic to reflect on a friend’s passing and say that we should cherish every moment, treasure the time we get with those we love. But the story of Michael’s life is, in the end, actually rather simple: love your family, find your passion, apply that passion to making others’ lives better while you can, and know that joy isn’t hard to find if you know where to look. I liked Michael the day I met him, and over the years grew to admire that here was a man who had his priorities firmly set.



Another of Michael’s friends recounted that Eamonn Clarke posted this on Michael’s Facebook page earlier today:


Enjoy life.
Hug your loved ones tight.
Be happy that he lived.
and raise a glass to him tonight

I’m raising a glass right now. Here’s to Michael, a man whose story I’ll remember for many years to come.

A family photo server

Earlier this year I asked for suggestions on Google+ about dealing with increasingly large image collections. In our house, we have two DSLRs, four phones that take pictures, and two point and shoot cameras. The images from these are scattered across several hard drives and online backup accounts; over the past several years they've been inconsistently backed up. We have a network attached storage device that houses all images, but due to poor backup processes in the past, we have several cases of duplicate images.

Adding to the complexity, we paid Scandigital to scan years of print photos – everything from our honeymoon to our first cross-country drive to our first house. This added several thousand images to our archive – a good thing, to be sure, as we now had electronic copies of pictures we hadn't looked at in years. But the challenge of managing those images – now numbering close to 50,000 – was getting insurmountable.

I hadn't gotten around to actually implementing a solution – we had a busy summer and I wasn't convinced I really wanted to tackle this. Then my son had a school assignment last week requiring him to find a dozen pictures to share with classmates from his childhood... and actually finding pictures for him was a nightmare. After more than an hour of poking through our archive, we hadn't found more than 5 he was happy with. I was frustrated, he was annoyed, and it became clear this wasn't sustainable. It was time to dive in.

The solution I more or less settled on was what I documented this summer: dedicate one desktop computer to organizing the image catalog. This past weekend, I picked up a computer at Best Buy, and I'm already happy with the progress (though I expect it'll be months before I will feel like I'm done). Here's what I did:

The computer

Bought a Gateway desktop with a dual core Intel processor and a 1TB hard drive. Total cost? $350. (Twenty years-ago me will stare at that line for a long, long time. It's OK, me-from-the-past; computers are commodities but gas is now $5/gallon.) It features an HDMI port, so I parked the computer behind the television in our family room and plugged it into one of the TV's available HDMI connections; when I want to display photo albums easily, I can just pull them up on the TV. (Note: when I first connected the computer to the TV, the computer's display extended beyond the boundaries of the screen. This blog post helped me figure out the problem: I had to adjust the TV's settings to stop zooming in; once I did that, I was all set.)

I added a Logitech wireless keyboard to the computer so I could operate the computer from the couch; it includes an integrated trackpad, and so far I'm pretty happy with it.

The images

Copied over all of the images from the NAS drive to the PC. Installed Picasa, and let it find all of the pictures. All told, there are slightly over 50,000 images taking up 200 gigs of disk space (I think there might be more, actually, but I haven't finished confirming that everything made it over yet). Thanks to the fast processor, indexing these images took Picasa just a few minutes; last time I tried this with a laptop it took hours and didn't complete. Hardware matters!

The faces

This is where it started getting magical: after just a couple hours, Picasa had found thousands of faces across our images, and grouped them very accurately. All of a sudden, I could see photos of my six year-old daughter, from her birth to this past summer vacation. There's my twelve year-old son – at his third birthday party, on his first day of kindergarten, leaving for his first overnight Scout camp – in one place. And my ten year-old son – the day he was born, his first airplane ride, the day he learned to ride a two-wheeler. It wasn't just the kids: my wife and I are there too, as are the grandparents (including my grandparents, both of whom have died), extended family, and friends.

What's next

Like I said, I'm nowhere near done. This is a solid foundation, but I have a long way to go. Here's what I think I need to do to get this under control:

• De-dupe the catalog. Picasa has a nice "show duplicates" feature, but since it shows both copies of the picture that's duplicated, removing the dupes while leaving one copy is a time-consuming affair. This article from Digital Inspiration looks like it'll help; according to Picasa I have more than 4,000 duplicates.
• Confirm I have all the pictures. I haven't done a full audit of where all of the family's pictures are hiding; in my Picasa account, in my wife's, on the kids' SD cards, etc.
• Simplify synchronization from those sources. Once I have all of the images, the next step is to ensure that going forward the new images will get included in the master Picasa collection. Crashplan on the Mac will likely satisfy this for both my wife and I; I'm looking into solutions for Android (Dropbox with its instant-upload option may be a good go-between here, though I haven't started looking at how best to do this across several devices).
• Install VNC on the photo server. While I'm able to operate the computer from the couch, that's not the most useful way to do actual work. It's great for lean-back viewing of the pictures, but doing lots of manipulation can get tedious. I'm going to install VNC so that I can access the computer from my laptop when I'm at home, which should make it easier to do the heavy lifting when needed.
• Turn on cloud sync. I've got a lot of unused disk space on my Google Drive account, so once I have the local catalog in a good place, I'm going to enable Picasa's cloud synchronization, which will not only give me reliable backup of all images, it'll also give me an easy way to share all of these images. For the most part that means sharing with my wife, but I'll probably also share with family who may like the ability to browse through all of our images.

PS: The assignment

Even without all of that yet-to-be-done work completed, when it came time to find pictures for my son's assignment, it took all of about 10 minutes. The combination of a fast computer, large display, reliable face-tagging, and simple interface meant that we were able to very quickly find a handful of pictures from nearly 10 years in a matter of minutes. I'm encouraged, and feel like I've got a pretty good path forward.

Expecting better from our candidates

Those of you who follow me on various social networks know of my involvement in a Congressional race in my new Congressional district. In what the National Journal has called one of the most interesting races in the country, 40 year incumbent Pete Stark is being challenged by 31 year-old Dublin city councilman Eric Swalwell. I've been fortunate to get to know Eric over the last 9 months, and have found him to be one of the hardest working, most committed candidates I've met. (And I've worked with a few!)

While interesting, the race has also been disappointing. Congressman Stark, running for his 21st term in Congress, has lobbed unsubstantiated bribery accusations at Eric, has threatened the livelihood of a former supporter who now supports Eric, wrongly accused a reporter of contributing to Eric's campaign (he later blamed his 16 year-old son for the mistake), and refuses to debate Eric again because the press asks "stupid questions". Now that we're in the final 60 days of the campaign, Rep. Stark has taken to blatant misrepresentations of his own background in the hopes that he can eke out a final victory before retiring. We deserve better.

Last night, Rep. Stark's campaign posted this picture to Facebook:

It's the caption that strains credulity:

I was pleased to have the opportunity to address members of the Alameda County Democratic Lawyers Club and to express my long-standing opposition to Citizens United and big money in politics.

There are two claims in that paragraph: 1) he's been a long-standing opponent to Citizens United, and 2) that he's long opposed "big money" in politics.

In the same debate in which he accused Eric of accepting "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in bribe money (a claim he later had to rescind and apologize for), Rep. Stark was asked point blank whether he supported Citizens United or not. His answer:

"Corporations are treated as people, and they should... be... under the Constitution. The answer there is that if a corporation does something that a person could be prosecuted for, like Mr. Swalwell, if a corporation takes a bribe, the head of the corporation should be responsible criminally for that act, just as a person would be, so that every corporation must have an individual who is responsible and has to answer to the law for any crimes committed." (You can watch the debate here; this particular question comes up at 39:32 in the video.)

Setting aside the personal attack that he later admitted was without merit, let's look at Rep. Stark's answer. His answer affirms that corporations are people, which was a part of what Citizens United was actually about. (You can read Wikipedia's summary here; the entire Supreme Court opinion is here.) Citizens United addressed the question of whether corporations had the same First Amendment right to free speech that people do. In an article this spring, Slate explained the practical effect of Citizens United:

After Citizens United, the courts (most importantly in Speechnow.org v. FEC) and the FEC provided a green light for super PACs to collect unlimited sums from individuals, labor unions, and corporations for unlimited independent spending.

When someone asks a candidate whether they support Citizens United, they're asking whether the candidate believes that it's OK for "super PACs to collect unlimited sums... for unlimited independent spending." What Pete Stark said was, yes, corporations are people, which suggests that he's comfortable with the Supreme Court's reasoning. Hard to see any opposition to Citizens United whatsoever.

Which brings me to the second thing he said last night, where he spoke of his "long-standing opposition ... to big money in politics." I pulled the campaign contribution data from OpenSecrets.org for Rep. Stark, and the data tell a very different story than his Facebook post does. Going back to 1998, here are the amounts Rep. Stark took from PACs, broken down by campaign cycle:

2012: $330,141
2010: $436,700
2008: $615,035
2006: $315,689
2004: $285,470
2002: $307,127
2000: $297,923
1998: $203,967

Over that time, he took a total of nearly $2.8 million from PACs. Over the last 23 years (OpenSecrets does not contain finance data prior to 1989), Rep. Stark has taken just under $3.7 million, which represents more than 4x the money he took from individuals in the same time (contributions from individuals accounted for just 15% of all money received). Here's a graphical break-down of the money he's taken (again, taken from OpenSecrets.org):

I'll let you decide whether Rep. Stark's claim of "long-standing opposition" to "big money in politics" holds up. For me, Rep. Stark lost my vote long ago. This latest charade just reinforces my commitment to Eric Swalwell's campaign.

Full disclosure: I consider Eric Swalwell a friend, have donated money to his campaign, have knocked on doors for him, and periodically advise his campaign staff on various things related to technology. I wrote this post on my own without any input or assistance from the campaign.

ImportHTML and Google Spreadsheets

We're getting ready to go on a family vacation to Alaska, and one of the big questions in the months leading up to the trip has been what the weather will be. Last week my wife and I were reviewing our trip todos and I stumbled on a great feature in Google Spreadsheets that I'd never used before: ImportHTML.

Before each trip, my wife and I work from a shared spreadsheet. We list out the packing details, transportation, itinerary, etc., and then divvy up the tasks. (I should point out that my wife almost always shoulders the vast majority of these tasks.) As of a week ago, the long-range forecast at Accuweather.com was showing rain for the entire time we'd be in Alaska. Not awesome, but at least we'd be prepared.

But as I looked at the spreadsheet with our itinerary, I was annoyed that I had what we'd be doing listed out, but not the weather (which could dramatically affect what we'd pack, and what we'd need for various days). That's when I found ImportHTML and fell in love.

The premise behind the function is simple: in a cell, type =ImportHTML("[URL]","[query]","[index]"), where "query" is the element within the HTML that you want to import, and "index" is which element within the page you want to import. Here's how it works:

I found this page at Accuweather.com that lists out the month's extended forecast for Anchorage, Alaska. Conveniently, it's laid out as an HTML <table>.

A quick look at the HTML source from that page confirmed that the table containing the weather data is the first table in the page, so in Google Spreadsheets I entered this:

=ImportHtml("http://www.accuweather.com/en/us/anchorage-ak/99501/august-weather/346835?view=table","table",1)

That parses the HTML data into individual cells in the spreadsheet; and from there it was a trivial matter to associate an individual day's weather (high/low/forecast) with its entry in the itinerary, giving us one screen that shows where we're staying, what we're doing, what the weather will be on each day, and what we'll need to pack. Here's a snippet of the spreadsheet:

Best news of all? Now that we're just a week away from our arrival, the forecast is getting increasingly positive: a week ago all of these cells showed rain for the entirety of the trip; today when I opened the spreadsheet, just two days show rain and several days look to be pretty warm and sunny!

Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez

One of the first "grown-up" books I read was Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. He wrote it in 1969, while he was a medical student at Harvard Medical School. I remember not just loving the book, but admiring his attention to detail. My Dad worked at Millipore at the time, and I was surprised when I saw Millipore referenced in the book. It was obvious Crichton knew what he was talking about; though Andromeda Strain was a fantastic work of fiction, it was rooted in reality in a way that few books are.

I had a similar reaction to early Tom Clancy, and later Scott Turow. There's something about an author who can both write a great story and who's intimately familiar with the intricacies of the space they're writing about. And it's exactly why I adored Daemon the first time I read it; here was a book that came from someone who knew technology. More importantly, it was clear that the author had given serious thought to the implications of technological developments. At its core, it was a book that wanted you to think about where these things were headed, and what that might mean for society.

That author is Daniel Suarez, and it's been a privilege to get to know Dan over the last several years. (More on that here.) I'm hardly an objective observer at this point: I consider Dan and his wife Michelle to be good friends, and those who've known me for a while are likely tired of my enthusiastic recommendations of Dan's books.

Couldn't be more excited for Dan that his newest book comes out tomorrow. It's Kill Decision, and if like me you love a good story that's rooted in an intimate understanding of its subject matter, you will adore it. Many others have written great summaries of the plot, so I'll let you read those rather than try to retell it.

I read Kill Decision a few months ago, and what's stayed with me ever since was a deep unease at how present the book is. Where Daemon and Freedom™ were both far-fetched enough in plot that you could safely admire the technical accuracy while discounting the likelihood of seeing something like it play out in real life, I've had no such ability to do so since reading Kill Decision.

Great authors give you a good story while leaving you with something to chew on. That's what made Kill Decision such a joy for me: Dan's written about something deeply unsettling: as the tools of war become less expensive and more anonymous, the very nature of warfare has changed (and continues to change). And as technology drives cheaper, smarter, and smaller devices, the potential to deploy those devices as instruments of war – particularly when they're autonomous and anonymous – is intellectually intriguing and simultaneously terrifying.

Here are a few of the articles over the last several months that make the technology discussed in Kill Decision very, very present:

• A future for drones: Automated killing, Washington Post, September 19, 2011
• New drone has no pilot anywhere, so who's accountable?, Los Angeles Times, January 26, 2012
• Why Autonomous Drone Tech is Advancing so Quickly, John Robb, March 5, 2012
• If You Have a Smart Phone, Anyone Can Now Track Your Every Move, MIT Technology Review, April 20, 2012
• Drone Use Takes Off on the Home Front, Wall Street Journal, April 21, 2012
• Iran Says It's Copying US Drone, Herald Tribune, April 22, 2012
• U.S. military embraces robots with greater autonomy, Reuters, May 9, 2012

With this, it won't surprise anyone that I highly recommend Kill Decision if you're looking for a thrilling, thoughtful read. Pretty sure that Dan will be a household name in a month or so as Kill Decision cracks the summer bestseller lists. It's that good, and most importantly I'm eager to see the conversation that develops as more people get exposed to the issues Dan raises.

Building Character with the Boy Scouts

"The Boy Scouts of America provides a program for young people that builds character, trains them in the responsibilities of participating citizenship, and develops personal fitness."

That's how the Boy Scouts describe themselves at scouting.org. I support that mission wholeheartedly; it's why I've encouraged both of my sons to participate in Scouts for years. Both boys joined Cub Scouts as Tiger Cubs, my oldest is just a few requirements shy of advancing to a Second Class scout as a Boy Scout. My younger son earned his Webelos badge earlier this year, and plans to bridge to Boy Scouts this winter to join his brother in his troop.

Today, the Boy Scouts completed a two year program reviewing their exclusion of homosexuals, and affirmed it. Deron Smith, the Boy Scouts national spokesperson, said that the committee that reviewed the policy "came to the conclusion that this policy is absolutely the best policy for the Boy Scouts."

They're wrong. Excluding committed, engaged individuals who want to help my sons grow is the antithesis of building my sons' character. What this decision tells me is that the Boy Scouts of America are more interested in pursuing their own exclusionary morality ahead of my sons' personal growth. Last month, the Boy Scouts clarified their policy in a post on their blog:

The BSA policy is: “While the BSA does not proactively inquire about the sexual orientation of employees, volunteers, or members, we do not grant membership to individuals who are open or avowed homosexuals or who engage in behavior that would become a distraction to the mission of the BSA.”

Scouting believes same-sex attraction should be introduced and discussed outside of its program with parents, caregivers, or spiritual advisers, at the appropriate time and in the right setting. The vast majority of parents we serve value this right and do not sign their children up for Scouting for it to introduce or discuss, in any way, these topics.

The BSA is a voluntary, private organization that sets policies that are best for the organization. The BSA welcomes all who share its beliefs but does not criticize or condemn those who wish to follow a different path.

I'm a parent whom the BSA is supposed to be serving. My opinion was never sought, nor am I aware of any effort to solicit input from any of the parents in the packs/troops we've been involved in.

That said, whether we continue with the Boy Scouts is a decision for my sons to make, not a unilateral conclusion to be handed to them. A hallmark of strong character is choosing the company you keep. My wife and I will be sharing this information with both of them, and giving them an opportunity to decide what to do about it. Because they are already strong, moral children, they know that we don't exclude others simply because they're different than we are. It's possible that they'll decide that they want to work within the organization to change it. If so, they will have my support. If they can't support the decision and wish to leave Scouting, I'll support that too.

But what I won't do is let this decision go unnoticed, or let my sons ignore the implications of what it means for the organization they (currently) belong to. That is how you build character.

My war on phone distraction

At the risk of turning into a blog-stalker that only talks about his boss, I wanted to write up something I did in June as a direct result of watching a speech Joe gave on our "culture of distraction". Joe's entire speech is worth listening to, as it touches on a number of issues that I've been thinking a lot about lately:

Joe identifies that much of the reason we're so distracted of late is the increasingly powerful devices we carry in our pockets — our phones:

1. all of us have a device in our pockets that is a very potent, addictive distractor
2. the more we train our brain to pay attention to this distractor, the more distracted we become.

Immediately after watching this, I radically changed how I use my phone: I turned off all notifications for everything except my calendar and Google Voice (for SMS messages). That means my phone no longer proactively checks my e-mail, it no longer checks for Facebook activity, it no longer checks for G+ updates, no longer alerts me when I have new @replies on Twitter. This doesn't mean I don't read e-mail, post to Facebook, or catch up on G+ or Twitter. When I want to do those things, I can manually update the apps — it takes just a few seconds to do. But what it does mean is that my phone is no longer constantly interrupting me to tell me I have new mail, new comments, new posts to read.

The result? I decide when to pay attention to the phone. I pull my phone out of my pocket when I want to engage, not when the phone demands my attention. I have more time to think, I spend less time being interrupted by my phone, and I am much less likely to get distracted. I pay more attention in meetings, I'm never tempted to open my phone up while driving, and as a bonus, the battery on my phone lasts much longer now that it's not checking for new data every few seconds.

I shared this idea with Brian Fitzpatrick a few weeks ago, and he pinged me this morning to tell me that not only is he far happier with his phone, he's also stayed at inbox zero for longer than he's ever done before. That's been my experience too: turns out when you decide when to focus on your inbox, you control it instead of the other way around!