by Stratoscope | 2025-05-12 11:56:15+00:00
Oh yes, that's me! It's fun to revisit those stories.

Some notes on the first one...

The photo of me with the wild hair is actually from September 1977, when I took my mom and family flying from San Jose in my favorite Cessna, N20100. So just over a year after Steve and I first met.

Here is the uncropped photo:

https://pbase.com/geary/image/120224799

Don't look up that tail number unless you want to shed a tear over what happened many years later to that airplane and the pilot and instructor flying it. :-(

The health food store in Palo Alto was Country Sun on California Avenue, which is there to this day. Steve and I met at their old location, just down the street from where they are now.

This was also the summer when I adopted my hippie nickname Truetone Stratoscope, after seeing an old radio in a garage sale across the street, with this on the back:

EQUIPPED WITH TRUETONE STRATOSCOPE ELIMINATES AERIAL AND GROUND

Diplomat wasn't an email client, but a service to connect different email systems to each other, with a Forth-based scripting language to handle the details of each email system and convert it to another. At that time, every online service had its own unique protocol.

The Los Gatos health food store was Richard's Natural Foods. They went out of business many years ago, and their building is now Summit Bicycles.

Strangely enough, Steve and I ran into each other at the produce aisle there, just as we had at Country Sun.

The restaurant where we met in 2011, the last year of his life, wasn't in Menlo Park. It was La Strada on University Avenue in Palo Alto. The reason I didn't want to interrupt him was that he was having dinner with his daughter.

I do regret that when Steve's daughter left the table for a few minutes (presumably to use the restroom) I didn't take a moment to reconnect. I am sure he would have enjoyed hearing the story about the disassembler.

The second article seems to be behind a paywall, so here is an archive link:

https://archive.is/hcTNa

An odd coda to that article...

Much more recently, I spent a year and a half at Wing, the Alphabet drone delivery company. A friend associated with the company pinged me for some urgent work on airspace data importers. This was right up my alley!

The cool thing was that would hire me as a "temp", so I wouldn't have to go through any of the usual Google interview process. And then if things worked out, they could convert me to an FTE (full time employee) position.

The "interview" was lunch with the team lead and manager. They knew I could do the job, I knew I could do the job, so we got started right away.

A year later, Google changed the rules. Temps could no longer convert directly to FTE. They would have to go through the standard Google interview process, with one specific requirement: No one on the team you had been working with, who knew your work and your contributions, could be involved.

You would have to interview with a panel of strangers who had never heard of you, who had no idea of the work you were already doing at Google/Alphabet for the team you were working for.

It would be as if you were just some random person off the street who applied for a position at Google/Alphabet.

It would not matter in the slightest that you were already working for a Google/Alphabet team who valued your work and wanted to keep you on the team.

The great irony in the email that announced this change was that interns were eligible to convert directly to FTE. It explained that interns were already Google employees, unlike temps like me.

I try to avoid swearing, but this was the most fucked up HR directive I have ever seen.