Family Moment: Not what you might expect, but having my entire family safe and sound in Jerusalem, when the #71 bus we had been riding earlier in the day was destroyed in a bus station bombing. Shock, fear, powerlessness, anger, relief, and lots of love in the space of about 35 minutes. Tie for second place – moving our daughter onto the University of Pennsylvania campus to start her college years, and seeing our son named to the All-Essex Conference Second Team offensive line.

Work Moment: Starting at Juniper Networks, I faced a fairly steep learning curve of networking protocols, industry standards, and internal code names. After a few months of non-recreational reading, I had a conversation with one of our senior engineers who specialized in network modeling, and we covered graph theory, network protocols, and bin packing algorithms in a conversation in which I finally felt that I was able to hold up my end. Thanks, Chris.

Reading: I’m declaring a tie between the ghost-written Clarence Clemons autobiography “Big Man: Real Life and Tall Tales” and Michael Kardos’ “One Last Good Time”. Both reflect a bit of Jersey life as seen through the last-summer spray that blows off of the ocean; both are full of fictional amalgams. And I miss Clarence Clemons.

T-Shirt: “Dr. Fluff’s Powerful Pills” shirt that I bought at a Phish show in June. In addition to being an amazing show with great friends, the shirt has enough subtle humor in it to make me laugh repeatedly, and remember the start of another one of ten true summers (bonus points if you get that reference, too).

Email: Seamus Burke asked me to co-write the foreword to Volume 2 of “Oh, Goodie” in print. Incredible awesome.

Nerd Toy: USB oscilloscope. Very useful for debugging guitar pedal problems. Probably the same quality as the old HP scope that I used in the EE part of my undergrad days, with multiple trigger options, plus the ability to save waveforms in image form to view on your laptop.

Thoughts for 2012: (1) Write on self-imposed deadlines. From blogs to emailing friends (more than requests for things I’ve forgotten) to working on one of three book ideas, it’s mental exercise. (2) Exercise doing things I enjoy: golf, swimming, ice hockey, roller blading, power walking. Phish shows make a great sound track for healthier living. (3) Support small-scale artists. I’m going to fund more projects on KickStarter, ranging from the King Tut City Gardens documentary (close to being in the can) to Seamus’ “Oh, Goodie Volume 2″ to other things that strike my fancy, I’m going to direct my money where my mouth laughs or smiles. (4) Spend more time with my friends. One of my hockey buddies said, on the occasion of his 50th birthday, that being surrounded by good friends was his mark of a life well lived.

Turning the pages on the 2012 calendar, I can look forward to any number of milestones: second (and last) kid into college, being an empty nester, embarking on the Peoplehood Project, hoping for a good Devils run, a solid close to the Giants’ season, and a fun finish to the high school sports experience. As I tick off the “lasts” that come with children entering adulthood, I’m equally looking forward to the continuous stream of “firsts” that those events enable, coupled with turning 50 and celebrating 25 years of being married.

My first year of managing a youth hockey team, one of the parents told me that his greatest fear was that someone would spill the beans about Santa Claus in the locker room. That’s what you worry about when they’re nine year olds; when they’re high school students the locker room is much saltier in every dimension.

About five years ago I got to be Santa Claus in Jamaica. One of the hotel staff asked if I’d play the part for the kids on property, and I agreed without realizing that Jamaican Santa rides a power boat up on the beach, and then has kids sit on his lap in 90-degree heat while wearing polyester vest, pants, beard and hair. It was the only time I lost weight on vacation. And it was worth it.

I was recently reminded of my all-time favorite Santa moment, though, when I received an email from a former co-worker. His son climbed up on my lap and announced a wish that was news to his parents; after changing back into normal nerd wear I told them they needed one more gift (an NFL checkers set; I won’t forget it). The Christmas morning surprise wasn’t the checkers set, rather, it was that Santa came through in the clutch. That kid is now in law school, and I hope that when he’s charged with representing someone else’s interests he remembers a little faith goes a long way.

In the intervening 15 or so years, it’s gotten much harder to be Santa. Google searches, amazon.com, Evernote, text messages – there are a dozen covert channels that tip off the mildly skeptical but technologically savvy. On the other hand, it’s not about who puts the boxes under the tree, but why those particular gifts were chosen in the first place. That’s the essence of being on Team Santa, captured wonderfully in this much-forwarded piece. It’s about finding that one way to make a loved one — or a complete stranger — break out in a smile. Team Santa does not discriminate based on religion, race, gender, age, sexual preference, economic status or geography. Anyone can join. It’s the only way to really go global.

Sun Microsystems co-worker Phil Rosenzweig

Princeton University and Colonial Club friend Karen Klitzman

I rented some pro-grade camera equipment last weekend, intent on enjoying every last minute behind the lens of our son’s senior year of high school football. I decided to take the long lenses out for a test drive, getting a feel for their focus, depth of field and weight, choosing to photograph the Eagle Rock Park 9/11 Memorial early on a Saturday morning. It’s taken five days for me to transcribe what I was thinking at the time.

Walking through the sculptures dedicated to the first responders who lost their lives that day, I headed toward the list of victims’ names on stone slabs that eerily reminded me of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC.  My first reaction was “That’s a huge number of names.”  I began to look for two of my friends who were killed that day, and realized the surnames near me started with “M”: what I thought was the beginning was only the middle of the list.  That’s when the enormity of the tragedy hit me again. I’ve always thought of my classmate Karen Klitzman sharing the ’84 surname with me, but her name was engraved with the age we all shared before ten true summers gone, to quote a Yes song.

There is a line of trees with memorial plaques that form a different kind of timeline of the day’s events, one tree for each horrific tick of the history clock. In fifteen years it will be an impressive wall of foliage, outward and upward, marking the transition to autumn. Looking over the steel girders taken from the original World Trade Center foundation, you see midtown Manhattan in the background. On 9/11 people gathered in the park to watch the events unfolding across the Hudson River, and today you look through the vestiges of that day toward a skyline that’s changing, again, in positive directions, mostly upward.

Eagle Rock Park, 9/11 Memorial, West Orange, NJ

What I realized watching the news stories and rememberances this weekend is that our entire country was forced to deal with sudden adulthood ten years ago, and I’m not sure we’ve made a smooth transition.

People are definitely more tense and afraid than before. Flying through London Heathrow in late 2001, I saw a man with a turban wearing a t-shirt that read “Don’t Freak, I’m a Sikh.” My fear then, and now, is that anyone who would appreciate the rhyme and reason behind the shirt already knew enough about Sikh culture to feel empathy that he needed a disclaimer. We’re more sensitive to religious headcoverings of some kinds, but not others – this is America, and whether you wear a hijab, a yarmulke, a priest’s collar, or a Red Sox baseball cap, you’re entitled to your freedom. I frequently tell people that an office near an old apartment of mine in Boston was the target of a terror attack – a gunman shot and killed one of the doctors working there for performing abortions. The enemy is extremism, of any form, at the fringe of any religion.

I click-staggered into “waking up full of awesome”. I’ll take it one level of abstraction higher: America is still full of awesome. You wake up every morning in this country with more freedom, opportunity, and out of the box protection than anywhere else. Sure, we have dysfunction in our politics, and we are dealing with bullying from non-sovereign entities with perhaps a bit too much of an emo attitude (it pains me to write that). But I’m reminded almost daily of my friend Larry, who wandered outside of our happy nerd confines to interview with a certain company down the street, and came back humbled and a bit pasty-faced. No matter how strange our engineering brew had become, we were still doing engineering and represented the flat-out best place to be for people of our bad-at-following-rules inclinations. That’s the way I think about our country – some things are broken, but spend some time elsewhere and rather than being upset that you have to call the cable company, you appreciate having four local carriers with a wide variety of unfiltered content from which to choose.

It’s easy to wake up full of awesome in America. It means being a bit more responsible for how we treat each other, and our neighbors, friends and partners, and to get over our own views of what’s best or right. So maybe in ten years we’ve gone from sullen teenager to an immediate adulthood that dissolved into a slightly slacker, mildly emo state. It’s ok – not just because those young adult stereotypes turn into wildly successful web comics, TV sitcoms, and movies, but because at the end of the show, they’ve gone on to something bigger and better.

The time to evaluate where we’ve gone as a country isn’t ten years after 9/11, it’s twenty-five years later, an entire generation, giving us the time it takes to build a firm footing as an adult.

Pep experiences transportation in a bimodal distribution – she owns one of those really fast cars and is a also serious bike racer who somtimes bikes to work. “Serious” as in century rides comprising a staple of her bicycle diet, riding through the mountains of Northern California with the most literal definition of aplomb (modulo the French derivation, of course – no pep story is complete with self-reference and mathematical terms).

Pep rides in the Best Buddies Hearst Castle Challenge each September, 100 miles of biking through fog and hills in support of a very solid charity that helps people (of all ages) with learning disabilities. She’s been one of the top fund raisers the past few years, rewarded with a reception at the Castle and a dip in the Neptune pool. You can read details about her training and biking regime on her blog, or on the page detailing her previous Best Buddies rides, where you can also make a donation. It’s the financial equivalent of being able to throw her in the pool.

It’s my annual pep talk.

Enough preamble. Father’s Day is a Hallmark Holiday of the first order and an excuse to celebrate being a father. I don’t think you need to take a day out to say “Hey, I’m a Dad” but I won’t give up the opportunity to share what I think are the best things you can do as a father. I’ve been blessed in having a father that is and always has been young at heart (and in action; whether learning something new or telling my college friends that no, he wasn’t a dealer when he’d show up on campus in a leather jacket).

In no particular order, here are four things my father taught me, that I’ve tried to pass on to my own kids.

• Understand games of chance. One of my friends remarked that he felt like a bad stereotype because he didn’t know how to play dice. At the other extreme, when our son’s nursery school teacher attempted to introduce basic math into their morning and asked “What is four and four” I don’t think she expected him to answer “Eight the hard way.” I’m quite serious – you need to make sure your kids understand the mathematics of any game or business problem governed by game theory. My father taught me how to play blackjack and poker; I just bought him a pile of no-limit poker books to fill his summer reading hours. If you can’t calculate the odds, expected payoff, and house advantage, you’ll always be a mark for schemes that promise more than they can deliver. Not withstanding poker’s rise from late-night basement ring games to prime-time coverage on ESPN, it’s a great way to learn how to read people’s behavior. What are they holding, why are they acting aggressive, what is their expected return from a play: all questions answered daily in the business world.
• Use basic tools. You should be able to take something apart and look inside, re-attach a loose or missing part, or compromise a physical object that’s causing a problem. Using tools usually means you decipher the mechanics of objects using the right amount of force. My first experience installing a doorknob was a command performance at one in the morning on a road trip to Vermont. A co-traveler managed to lock herself into the bathroom when the doorknob came off in her hand, and I had to disassemble the knob, let her out, and then give us a functioning bathroom again. Philips head screwdriver, flat screwdriver to pop the latch, and we were in business. And yes, I traveled with a small tool box at the time; I still keep at least one Swiss army knife with screwdriver blades in the car at all times. My father’s tools go back at least two generations in the family, including a hand auger and bits that could build an Amish frame house. The day I knew I had reached adulthood wasn’t when I put my first dent in the car, it was when my father let me take his small tool box to college for a few weeks to “work on some projects.” Use and respect those tools.
• Read the liner notes. Probably a dying art and oblique reference in the age of the CD and DVD, but reading liner notes occupied a large number of hours for me, mostly spent in a combination of Sam Goody, Third Street Jazz and Rock, and the Princeton Record Exchange. Liner notes are the first social network in recorded form; they tell you who produced, who played saxophone, what the artist and band were thinking. Read Gary Burton’s notes to Pat Metheny’s “Bright Size Life” for a lens on Jaco Pastorius that’s both touching and still funny. My father got me listening to jazz, and you had to read the liner notes to put names to sounds, match styles to stars. Through those cryptic credits I got a smile from the back references when I found out the Brecker Brothers played on Bruce Springsteen’s “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” and that Sonny Rollins wails in the background of “Waiting On A Friend” by the Stones. Reading the liner notes in real life means paying attention to little details, to grokking how groups come together out of necessity, and to appreciate how and why your manager, an executive or your kid wants to convey information. The corrollary to reading the liner notes is to splurge on books and music, to absorb as much as you can, discover what you like, and be open to new expression.
• Take liberties with all of the above. I have no idea how or why this image got impressed into my brain, but I vaguely remember an electric train set in our living room. My father and I set up a track and used a box of wooden blocks to make trestles and inclines of various grades; that turned into seeing how steep a grade we could get the engine to climb. I don’t remember playing with that large-gauge train after that night, possibly because we burned out the electric motor, or more likely I’m only remembering one specific night in many spent with the train (before we built a full-sized layout with mountains, proper bridges, and switches in the basement — my first wiring project was hooking up the switches). What was most fun about the train and our incline to nowhere was that it wasn’t prescribed by any set of rules – we just started with an idea and ran with it. If we did burn it out I was too young (and tool-less) to take it apart, but I’m sure my father went looking for user-serviceable parts inside. What I learned is that you should have fun with things; it’s acceptable and encouraged to take them apart and put them back together in better ways, to color outside the lines, to think differently about problems. It’s been one of the strongest influences on my professional career, causing me sometimes to preface an email or whiteboard drawing in front of my manager with “This is a heretical thought.” So was Unix (it’s a pun on “Multics”, which just proves the point).

Put the phrases together and that’s my song for my father. It’s the Horace Silver standard and Stevie Wonder’s sampling and Steely Dan’s phrase-lifting. It makes me raise an eyebrow at any deal that seems too good to be true, and to reach for a screwdriver as soon as something appears not quite right around the house. It makes me smile when jazz musicians tuck in a “Salt Peanuts” phrase in the middle of a solo, or Phish drops into Coltrane’s “Love Supreme” during a “Down With Disease” jam (June 3, 2011, Clarkston, Michigan). It sends my kids their allowance in the iTunes store. It’s a tune worth playing out in whatever musical style works for each generation.

Many people ask me (and Toby) if we think it’s safe for Elana to travel to Rwanda. The horrors in that country are now more than 15 years past; fearing Rwanda today would be like fearing the New York City subway system during the Wall Street boom of the late 1980s because of the crime rate in the early 70s. We want her to go, to teach English, learn some new dances, and come back richer for having given of herself.

Personally, this trip ties together so many of the things I personally believe in and support that it’s taking every ounce of my mental strength to not meet the Young Judea Year Course chanachim when they land in Kigali. It’s about physical sustainability and truly local community building, like projects run by Cameron Sinclair (a former Sun customer, visionary, TED prize winner, and great guy) and his Architecture For Humanity team. It builds on the notions of microfinance and boot strapping economic systems, which is why I was thrilled to join the board of the Microfinance Information Exchange. It’s engineering of the most constrained, and therefore most fun and rewarding kind, working on issues of sustainable power, water, and logistics (Read about the Tufts University engineering students involved in the Mango Tree Project tackling the electricity issues). And finally, it’s about tikkun olam, healing the world through hard work and “good deeds”, giving those things that are in perpetually limited supply: time and love.

Read Elana’s call to action on her blog (no, I couldn’t get her to use WordPress), or cut to the ask: Elana and her trip-mates have committed to raising $5,000 for the village before they arrive in February.

If you want to add your support, you can donate online, but please add the comment that your donation is “In support Young Judaea Year Course Social Action Rwanda (SAR)” so that Elana’s team gets credit for the fundraising and you get a heartfelt todah rabah (thanks) from them (and us) for it.

[Update]: Here’s how to get your donation attached to Year Course’s SAR. Make sure you select “ASYV in Rwanda” as the donation program. Under tribute type, select “Other” and then copy and paste “Young Judaea Year Course Social Action Rwanda” into the text box below it where it asks for details. You can honor whomever you like on the next page. Again, thanks for building hope where less than two decades ago none existed.

I scored my first ever ice hockey goal in November 1983 on a pass from my left winger.

I have been fascinated by the P=NP Problem for more than a quarter century.

OK, so I win today’s non-sequitur prize. But there’s a common purple thread in those three statements, one tied to my good friend, former roommate, one time left winger, and eternal Dead Head Tom Chatt. He introduced me to the Dead, played ice hockey on our intramural team (after some coaxing) and was one of the few people in Dick Lipton’s (yes, the book author) theory of computation class to completely knock the ball out of the park. He’s also openly gay, and had the strength and courage to be pretty frank with me about it while we were roommates. As I think I told him at the time, I was more upset that he didn’t like Led Zeppelin playing on our shared stereo system. His preferences make him no more or no less of my friend, one that I know I can call (or visit from 2,500 miles away, unannounced, which we have each done to the other) at any time.

Rush’s Nobody’s Hero neatly captures what life was like with Tom:

I knew he was different in his sexuality
I went to his parties as a straight minority
It never seemed a threat to my masculinity
He only introduced me to a wider reality.

Tom also writes a blog called Crap People Believe, which is largely about the power of the internet to circulate rumor and half-interpreted facts.

Politics pales compared to the crap people will believe, propagate and promote when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identity. Hate, bullying, and censorship only separate us from that wider reality, whether it includes obscure lyrics by John Perry Barlow (Estimated Prophet, look it up, net-heads) or the mathematical foundations of all of computer security.

In honor of a 28-year old friendship with Tom I’ll be wearing purple on October 20.

The two-by-six month grid is a periodic table for time, grouping months and setting agendas. March is the beginning of the warmth series; spring is in the middle and summer is at the most exciteable end. Sepetember is the beginning; between school, Rosh HaShanah and my birthday, it’s how I’ve always marked time. But starting the mental year in September means Thanksgiving is square in your sights, the first milestone of the year, just 10 weeks after new books and teachers. That may explain my life-long fascination with the holiday. Winter holiday season is just past the mid point, but by looking down a row you know you’re exaclty halfway to the official start of the next summer. February is the mid point. I never thought to look below February and see August, summer smiling back at me but also the on-ramp to a new school year. There’s a comfortable reason that February is short – you’re eager to start the next group in the table.

Conversesly, it makes sense that July and August are tag-teamed months of 31 days. You don’t want them to end. It’s getting to the last pages of Tales from the Jersey Shore and Deep Tank Jersey. August 31 is a carriage return (if you ever used a typewriter) up and to the left. Back to the northwest corner, as my band director would say. The first page, the beginning, the best of times, the worst of times, and other allusions to formal education.

Here’s the deal: even without the visual calendar cue, you know it’s coming. The end of summer isn’t just ticking off those last few boxes, more scared of losing them than the last three squares of toilet paper in a public bathroom. When you wake up, you need a sweatshirt before the day gets warm and humid. You can smell fall in the air; it smells like leaves that are ready to hit the ground. You see cars laden with the accoutrements of a Long Beach Island summer driving off the majors into your neighborhood, some early immigrants back to reality. The seagulls lose their black feathers, going all white to match the weather. A friend once pointed this out to me, on the very last day of summer, motioning to a gull that was working the salt and pepper feathered look. She knew because she spent most of her life at the shore, for a few years even when school was in session, and yet she still had a mental last day of summer. The gulls mocked her loudly with their squawks and silently with a whiter shade of pale on their heads.

Growing up, any day that you could steal from the beginning of September was a huge win. You’d take one of those beckoning early September days and stuff it right back in your pocket. If you could break free of school clothes shopping or cleaning your room or band camp (before the days of summer reading lists) maybe you could sneak in a day in flip flops, or jury-rig the antenna on the living room FM receiver to pick up WJRZ from Ship Bottom, NJ, or play whatever board game you discovered that summer spread across the floor, completing a perfect hat trick of a summer recap. It was perfect, until you heard the gulls, chased inland from the shore by an approaching storm.