“A company at a German trade show has attached tiny banner advertisements to flies and set them loose on unsuspecting visitors, in a bizarre yet effective marketing stunt.”

Someone passed this around at work and it was too weird not to share.  I’m not sure how I feel about it – it’s creative but it’s animal cruelty but it’s only flies and it’s amazing it works.  Our cats would have a field day if I set a bunch of banner-ad-flies loose in our place.

Pnina and I are back from our Round-the-World trip.  I was blogging about the trip on a separate site (http://honeysun.wordpress.com) and I still have a lot of work to do there: the last 3+ months of our trip still need to be written (yikes).  But in the meantime I also have some non-trip things to write about, so here goes…

While we were traveling, Obama won the election, took office, and after dealing with various burning issues (failing banks / auto industry / etc.), he took up health care as his major agenda item.  Pnina and I got tid-bits about his push for health care reform while we were on the road, but in many situations we were pretty out of touch (either because the internet was censored, or connections were unavailable, or connections were available but too expensive e.g. Tahiti, or because we just preferred to spend our time doing other things).  So, since we returned I’ve felt like I need to fill my information gap about the whole health care issue.

I happened to find a couple of really good sources on health care in America, so I thought I’d share them:
1. An article in The Atlantic magazine: How American Health Care Killed My Father.  By the way, I learned about this article from my friend Alex Rosaen who is a public policy consultant.
2. A couple of episodes of the radio show This American Life: More is Less, and Someone Else’s Money.

And in case you don’t have time to read/listen to them, here’s a summary of what I learned…

First off, it’s kind of strange that in America we use insurance to pay for most medical expenses.  Typically insurance is set up for emergency situations: lots of people pay money into the pool, but only a few people take money out, and only in unpredictable, expensive, emergency situations.  This is true of life insurance, home insurance, car insurance, etc.  But for some reason health insurance has grown to cover nearly all our medical care.  We wouldn’t think of using car insurance to pay for gas at the pump, but we think it’s perfectly normal to have our insurance pay for equally routine/predictable things like yearly checkups.  Even pregnancies are (typically) planned, and births are predicted many months in advance, but most of us couldn’t imagine paying for a delivery without insurance.

How did this happen?  Well, back in WW2 there were policies in place that forbode companies from raising salaries (I’m not sure why those policies existed; maybe the government was trying to prevent inflation).  At the same time labor was in short supply because so many men were off fighting the war.  So companies had to find some way to compete with each other to attract people from the small labor pool, and what they did was to offer all kinds of fringe benefits, including health insurance.  Then in 1943 an IRS beaurocrat made a ruling saying that, at least in some cases, employer contributions to employee health plans are tax-deductible.  This ruling was probably an accident and it was ambiguously spoken, but it was enough of a spark.  Accountants around the nation realized that they could save their companies lots of money by declaring all these health insurance contributions.  Companies decided that they should offer even more comprehensive health insurance because, hey, all these extra dollars are tax-deductable anyhow, right?  This became such a popular tax break that companies started demanding from congress to write this into law, which congress eventually did in 1954.  The impact was huge.  In 1940 only 9% of Americans were covered by employer-based health insurance, but this number grew to 63% by 1953.

OK, so we have this insurance-based medical system, but is it really bad?  Well, the trouble with our insurance-based system is that we consumers stop asking/caring about the actual cost of the health care we receive.  When we visit the doctor we may ask “how much is my co-pay?”, but it’s rare to ask “oh, and by the way, how much is the actual full cost?”  If we happen to see the full price on some medical bill, and if we notice that the portion paid on our behalf by the insurance company is very high, our reaction might be: “sweet, my insurance rocks!”  Instead, perhaps our reaction should be: 1. “umm, why is that so expensive?”, and 2. “if my insurance company pays fees like this for lots of other people, will my premiums rise?”  But somehow, I think, those thoughts don’t occur to us.

So, with a system like this, with consumers who are largely ignorant or apathetic, doctors and hospitals are relatively free to charge higher and higher prices.  We consumers won’t stop them because most of us don’t really see these increasing prices.

We often think of health insurance companies as “the bad guys”, but the truth is that they are actually fighting to keep health costs down.  How’s that?  Well, insurance companies sign separate contracts with each hospital system.  The contracts specify how much the insurance company will pay the hospital for each kind of service.  If the insurance company succeeds in negotiating a contract with low fees to the hospital, they can turn around and offer lower premiums to customers (so as to attract more customers away from competitors) or else pocket the extra profits.  If the insurance company is the big dog in town then it has the leverage to negotiate a good contract (it can tell the hospital “if you don’t agree to these lower prices then we will send our customers to a different hospital”).  Conversely, if the insurance company has only a small number of customers while the hospital system is the big dog in town, then the hospital system has the leverage (it can tell the insurance company: “either accept our high fees or else your customers will have to drive far to some crappy hospital, in which case they will probably scream bloody murder and abandon you for a different insurance company”).

So let’s review.  If we have a town with many small insurance companies and one big hospital system, then prices for medical care are likely to be high.  And if instead you have a town with just a few big insurance companies and many independent hospitals, then prices are likely to be low.  Again, many insurance companies = high prices, while few insurance companies = low prices.  This is nuts!  I don’t know much about business, but I thought more competition is supposed to be good for consumers.  Obviously the free market is not quite at play here.

But again, we consumers are generally unaware of all these back-room dealings.  Those of us who have company-paid insurance think: “well, my insurance premiums are already covered and my co-pays are small, so I may as well get all the medical care I want.”  It feels like we’re getting a great deal, but the money for our care has to come from somewhere.  Each year people get more medical care, hospitals charge greater amounts from the insurance companies, and the insurance companies turn around and charge higher premiums.  We may not even be aware that this is happening, but our companies definitley are.  And the increased cost of health insurance means that our salaries rise less quickly or that our companies can’t grow as quickly (or even have to let people go).

What if we had a different system?  What if we paid for our health care the way we pay for most things: out of our own pocket?  As an example, take LASIK surgery.  Most insurance companies still don’t cover LASIK, so when people choose to have this procedure done they largely pay out of pocket.  When it was first introduced, LASIK was a rare and very expensive procedure.  But with time more doctors offered this service.  More competition meant lower prices, and today you can generally have the procedure done for $1000 per eye.  Some doctors offer even lower prices while other doctors attract customers with claims that they offer better service (more experience, better equipment, etc.).  This is exactly how it should be: competition causes prices to fall and quality to rise.

So what am I saying, that I want there to be no public health care?  Well, I’m not sure.  I have to say that before reading/hearing the sources above, I was a regular left-leaning kind of guy, and I fully supported a social-style health care system.  I still think there should be some kind of basic safety net, but I also think there needs to be a lot more transparancy.  Consumers need to get in the habit of saying “do I really need this service?” and “is it really worth the money?”  I think a lot of consumers today understand that generic drugs are just as effective as the corresponding brand-name drugs, and that they cost much less, so in general it’s a good idea to go with the generics.  But drugs are just one part of our huge expensive health care system, and the other parts are still pretty opaque.

Well, that’s what I learned.  Let me know what you think.

Also, as an aside, this is my first attempt to compose a blog post using a Firefox plug-in called ScribeFire.  While Pnina and I were traveling (with a Windows XP laptop) I used Windows Live Writer.  But Live Writer doesn’t work on a Mac, so now I’m looking for an alternative.  I found a few other options (e.g. Blogo) but they all cost money, so for now I’m going with this plug-in.  If there are any other Mac-supported blogging softwares I should try, let me know.

Here’s a random list of things I’ll miss about Redfin…

• How excited everyone gets when Redfin appears in big media, like 60 Minutes, The New York Times, and Good Morning America.
• The all-hands-on-deck manner in which developers actually helped answer phone calls (gasp!) after the 60 Minutes appearance.
• That one listing with the photo of the huge dog.  For the following month, whenever we talked about our website traffic we’d say things like “not counting the spike caused by the big dog…”
• Our catered lunches on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday – especially when we have soups or Qdoba.
• Going out to lunch on Wednesdays and Fridays, especially Tat’s, Salumi, and Fado (but not Red Bowls – down with Red Bowls!).
• The Dim Sum and Burrito restaurants by the SF office.
• When Jamie and Arthur get into throat-clearing death matches after lunch.
• The way Jeff Yee yells “bug” whenever he discovers a bug.
• People jamming on Rock Band in the Savan Kong Commemorative Dining Area (hearing Yeah Yeah Yeah’s over and over, can we pick another song please?)
• The really intelligent things that Glenn says, and the totally random things he says (sorry Robert).  Also, the way he says “huge”.
• That one flying mokey.
• The various surprises I found whenever I returned from vacation, like the Shahasslehoff poster and the balloons (thanks Arpat!).
• How excited Lily got when I told her I was going to Burning Man.  And the costumes she gave me to wear there (pink fur, devil’s horns, and leather cuffs)
• Doing releases every couple of months (even staying up late to do them).  Getting thumbs-up emails from our customers.
• After expanding to a new market, finding out that we got our first deal there (e.g. Chicago – go Mark!)
• How everyone in the office is so cycling-happy (Cynthia, when do I get my Redfin jersey??)
• The “let Redfin decide” surveys on the white board in the kitchen (who’s responsible for those anyways??)
• Playing in the semi-regular Dave Billings Invitational poker tournaments.  Losing.  Repeatedly.  Then heading over to Currie’s Settlers of Catan table to see what the fuss is about.
• Wearing “spy gear” while dashing around Seattle in the treasure hunt.
• Daniel, breakdancing.
• Crissy getting drunk and picking everyone up, literally.
• Dan Fabulich’s incredibly high signal-to-noise ratio.  How I find myself imitating his mannerisms when explaining technical issues.
• Hearing about Fat Club and how Kevin won by shedding 20 pounds in less than a week doing hot yoga and eating nothing.  And how the rules changed to prevent that from happening again.
• Finding those discarded lab coats in the old office; wearing them on each release day (“ready to press the button Doctor DeMichele?”).
• Showing up at work with the same Costco-bought argile polo shirt as Kevin.  All the girls crack up.  None of the guys notice.  Kevin and I divi-up the week so it doesn’t happen again.
• The random chatter in the “dev chillout chit chat” skype room, like the home in Detroit that sold for $1.
• Participating in strategic discussions with executives about where the company should go (even as lowly entry-level manager).
• Watching our website traffic grow, grow, grow.
• Our wine sampling event, and Leo’s grilled cheese sandwiches (brilliant!).
• How nobody can out-drink Adam and nobody can out-eat McGarty.
• How I don’t have to remember where Chelsea sits — I can always follow the sound of her laugh.
• Kevin or Warren (or others) in front of a packed house whenever we do one of our real estate classes in the office.
• The little photos on our office doors that show which celebrity would play us when Hollywood finally decides to make Redfin: the Movie (especially Wilkins as played by Rambo and Yee as played by C3P0).
• Janelle getting plans together for the Redfin wrestling brawl (“who would you wrestle?”).
• Steve Markus dressed as a cheerleader
• Feeling like a VIP at Havana Social Club (“yeah, Angela and I, we go way back”)

Redfin – I’ll miss you guys.  Keep kicking ass!  See you in a year!

In April 2007 I left Redmond-based Microsoft to join Redfin.  Before leaving, I wrote a little tribute to my time at Microsoft, listing the things I liked and didn’t like about the 5 years I spent there.

In a few days I will be leaving Redfin, and this time it’s not to join another company but rather to travel around the world for the next year with my wife Pnina.  My departure from Redfin is a temporary one as I have every intention to return to Redfin when we come back from the trip.  Nonetheless, this seems like a good time to reflect on my 1.5 years at Redfin, the things I liked and didn’t like, and how it all compares to my time at Microsoft.  Here goes.

First the good stuff…

Agility

Redfin definitely feels smaller and more agile.  We release new “major” versions of the website roughly every 2 months, and numerous “dot releases” in between, so you get to see the fruits of your labor more often.  You also get feedback more frequently and more directly.  By comparison, my former team (Virtual Earth), which moves pretty fast by Microsoft terms, generally released every 4+ months.  And the team before that (SQL Server) had a multi-year release cycle.

Proximity to Customers / Customer Focus

At Microsoft I was several levels removed from actual end users.  At Redfin I see emails from our customers on a daily basis, and often I’m called upon to help solve those issues and to be in touch with the customers directly.  As an extreme example, in the summer of 2007 when the TV show 60 Minutes aired a segment about Redfin, it was “all hands on deck” – engineering folks, like me, sat side-by-side with real estate agents as we all answered the flood of phone calls late into the night.

And we’re not just closer to our customers, we really care about them.  When we have our twice-monthly company meetings we always go over certain stats: we always look at profits/losses in each market, we always look at website traffic, and, most importantly, we always look at customer satisfaction (CSAT).  We measure CSAT using a metric called net promoter score, which indicates the degree to which our customers are likely to encourage their friends and family to also use our service.  The metric itself isn’t as important as the fact that we’re constantly measuring and trying to improve CSAT.  Similarly, when customers contact us for technical help (e.g. by emailing TechSupport (at) redfin.com), we always respond.  The responses generally come within 24 hours and always from one of us devs/pm’s/testers, not from some random call center in who-knows-where.  We do surveys and focus groups, red carpet events and open houses.  We’re constantly working to do what’s best for our customers.  Our philosophy is to spend very little a “customer acquisition” (AKA advertising); we figure if our customers are insanely happy, they’ll drive more customers to us.

Transparency

Glenn (CEO) has developed a culture of transparency in the company.  It affects how we do business with our customers: we try to show as much information about homes for sale on our website as we can, and we don’t hide any details about the revenue we receive from each transaction.  It also affects how we do business in other ways.  It surprised me to see Glenn blogging publicly about our financial model, about our occasional screw-ups, or about his fear of inciting riots if he were to forbid us engineers from using Yammer.  It also surprised me to see the degree to which our execs are willing to share the financial state of the company in our all-hands meetings, down to some pretty detailed numbers – they trust us to be responsible with this data.  It took me a while to get used to this level of openness; it really was a kind of culture shock.

Career Growth

I definitely grew as an engineer more quickly at Redfin than I would have by staying at Microsoft another 1.5 years.  Part of the reason is that I was exposed to the world of startups and to a whole set of non-Microsoft technologies (Linux, Java, Eclipse, etc.).  But another reason is that in a smaller company you are naturally asked to “wear more hats” – to do whatever needs to be done, regardless of whether it’s in your job description.  As an example, at Microsoft I wrote software but relied on other people to actually package it or deploy it to production, whereas at Redfin I’m regularly involved in managing deployments.  In addition, at Redfin I was able to step into a lead position just a few months after joining the company.

Seriously Hard-Working People

I don’t mean to imply that at Microsoft people don’t work hard.  But I can say without hesitation that I never worked as hard in my life as in the first few months after joining Redfin (when I was ramping up) and several times since.  And I don’t think I’m the hardest working person at Redfin, not by a long shot.  Our Real Estate agents are maniacs – you have to be in order to complete 10x the number of deals in a year that a typical agent does.

Worth noting also is that Redfin takes the mantra “hire slowly and fire fast” very seriously.  At Microsoft I didn’t actually know anyone who was let go of their job – I only heard stories (like that one guy who made money on the side by selling company-store software in the Fred Meyer parking lot, and then created a website to show off “the house”, “the cars”, and “the women” he got with his fortune).  The general consensus at Microsoft was that you have to work pretty hard at getting fired.  I don’t mean to say that people regularly took advantage of that, but I do think that at a big company you can choose to sit back once in a while.  Not so at Redfin.  In just my 1.5 years here I’ve seen several people let go.  It’s never a fun thing and we don’t feel good about it, not least because we’re all partly responsible when an employee doesn’t succeed.  But Redfin doesn’t dance around the issue – it takes action.

On the hiring side, Microsoft has the luxury of a huge pipeline of incoming resumes (and the corresponding headache of sifting through them).  Redfin has a far more modest share of incoming resumes.  And our hiring bar is high, likely higher than at Microsoft, which in turn means that we hire very very slowly.  During most of my 1.5 years at Redfin we tried to find another developer to join my team and we never found a match (until just now – luckily we found a good replacement for me; welcome Dave!).

OK, now for the stuff that could be better…

Less Long Term Planning / More Randomization

Because we’re so agile, we don’t spend as much time on the long-term plans and we often change even our short-term plans.  Of course, in many ways this is a good thing – we’re a startup so we need to learn and evolve rapidly in order to compete.  But as a downside, when you look at our codebase you find traces of various efforts that we started implementing but didn’t quite finish, things that we never fully cleaned up.  I was really surprised by this – I actually found more “legacy” code at Redfin than I did at all of my projects at Microsoft (my case at Microsoft was unique as I mostly worked on new projects, but still).  I think our CTO, Mike Young, does a pretty good job of giving us time for cleanup/refactoring efforts, but of course it’s a balancing act – you have to weigh time spent on infrastructure against time for new features, and when you have competitors that are also moving fast, it’s not an easy call.

More Passionate People = More Stubborn Disagreements

People are extremely passionate at Redfin.  Of course this is mostly a good thing – you need people who really care about making the startup succeed.  But as a side effect, passionate people are less likely to give up a fight when they disagree with you.  And since there are a million ways to skin a cat when developing software, this means that you are more likely to butt heads with other engineers at Redfin than you would at Microsoft (at least that’s what I noticed).  BTW, I don’t mean to say that this happens every day and I don’t mean to say that I dislike my fellow Redfin engineers – I have the highest respect for them.

Fewer Resources

There are benefits you find at a big company that you simply can’t find at a small company.  At Microsoft I could open the http://mste website and look up which interesting lectures are happening today around campus.  At Redfin we occasionally do brown bag talks (and often they’re pretty good), but it’s just not the same scale.  Also, at Microsoft if I ran into an issue with some technology, I could often look up the owner and give them a call (or even walk to their office).  At Redfin we use lots of open source technologies and the documentation/support is oftentimes sketchy (though, again, sometimes it’s surprisingly good).  We have to rely on ourselves a little more.

Modest Benefits

I hesitate to say this because Redfin’s benefits aren’t necessarily worse, just different.  Microsoft definitely has the edge when it comes to health insurance – no debate there.  Also, after a few years at Microsoft I had a nice steady income with stock grants vesting every year.  I took a bit of a hit in terms of income when I came to Redfin, but of course I also have stock options and if/when the company succeeds, they will be worth a lot – it’s a startup so that’s the tradeoff.  Also, we have various smaller perks like catered lunches three times a week, but we don’t have a health club membership.

Risk

There’s a non-zero chance that Redfin won’t be there by the time I return from the trip.  Do I really think it’ll fail?  No.  There are way too many positive signs, even in light of the back-to-back whammies we’ve faced recently – first a falling real-estate market and then a falling mortgage market.  We’re small and scrappy, our customers love us, and the real-estate pie is gigantic so there’s a lot of room to grow.  Still, it could happen.  You have to accept this kind of risk in order to get a shot at the excitement that comes when you create something new and radical and beautiful.

So there you have it.

I guess the natural question to ask is: “Are you glad you chose to switch to Redfin?”  Absolutely.  The main reason is that I feel I learned more and advanced my career much faster at Redfin than I would have by staying at Microsoft.  Would I work at Microsoft again in the future?  Definitely – it’s still a great company and I still feel pride when I see my old teams release new versions of their products.

]]> http://shahaf.wordpress.com/2008/09/26/redmond-to-redfin-to-monde/feed/ 7 shahaf http://shahaf.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/honeysun/ http://shahaf.wordpress.com/2008/09/16/honeysun/#comments Tue, 16 Sep 2008 08:38:47 +0000 shahaf http://shahaf.wordpress.com/?p=99 ]]>

On October 6 Pnina and I are leaving everything behind and heading out on a 1-year trip around the world.  We’re going to be posting about our adventures on a separate blog…

http://honeysun.wordpress.com

I probably won’t use this blog (shahaf.wordpress.com) while we travel, but I’ll pick it back up when we return.

The influential startup blog TechCrunch is currently hosting their big TechCrunch50 event, where 50 new startups are launched to much fanfare (among a pool of more than 1000 candidates).  You can view presentations about these companies and vote on your favorite.

At the moment, the startup with the most votes is www.otherinbox.com, a service that helps you manage email spam.  Here’s a video that explains how they do it.  The basic idea is that instead of using your regular email address (joe@hotmail.com) when you register at various websites around the web, you instead create a bunch of different email addresses: flickr@joe.otherinbox.com, ebay@joe.otherinbox.com, facebook@joe.otherinbox.com, and so on.  If you suddenly start getting email from Netflix addressed to ebay@joe.otherinbox.com, then you’ll know that ebay shared your email address with Netflix (or that Netflix somehow got that address in other ways).  You can then choose to call up ebay and say “WTF?” or to simply block emails going to that address.

I’ve been using this technique for a few years now.  I have my own domain (let’s call it ShahafRules.com — I don’t want to post the real one here) and I create various addresses when I register around the web: flickr@ShahafRules.com, blockbuster@ShahafRules.com, etc.  Emails that are sent to any of these addresses are forwarded to my regular email account (currently gmail).  But since they all have different “To:” addresses, I can define various rules to filter out spam.

I originally created this setup not as a way to block spam but rather as a way to avoid being too attached to a single email provider.  If one day I decide that I don’t like gmail, I can create an account elsewhere and start forwarding my emails there (and I don’t have to tell my friends and family to update their address books!).  But fighting spam was an added benefit.

In the few years that I’ve been using this system, I haven’t had many situations where I register my account with company A and they share my email address with company B who then starts spamming me.  I try to be diligent about unchecking all the checkboxes that might cause extra spam to come my way (“email me special promotions”, etc.), and for the most part I’ve found that websites are honest.  If they weren’t their reputation would suffer, and reputation is the hardest thing to fix (I still dislike Real Player for all the crap it placed on my computer when I installed it years ago).

One issue I ran into with this multiple-email-address strategy has to do with unregistering from email lists.  Hypothetical situation: let’s say I created an account on Time Magazine’s website (time@ShahafRules.com) and request a weekly email with headlines.  After a while I decide that I don’t have time for these emails so I want them to stop.  No problem, the emails all say “to unsubscribe, simply reply to this message”.  The trouble is that if I reply, the reply will come from my gmail account (not from time@ShahafRules.com) so the unregistration process doesn’t work.  To fix this, I need to somehow get my gmail account to send an email as if it came from time@ShahafRules.com.  Luckily this is doable, but it’s a bit of a pain to manage.

Another issue is that I don’t always remember exactly which email address I used.  Was it time@ShahafRules.com, time.com@ShahafRules.com, or TimeMagazine@ShahafRules.com?  It used to be that I had a single email address but several passwords that I used for all my accounts around the internet.  Now I have both different email addresses and different passwords.  It’s getting harder to keep track of it all.

UPDATE

The folks from www.otherinbox.com noticed my post and decided to extend to me an invitation to their private beta.  I just created my account on their site.  Here are my thoughts.

First off, to be honest, I’m not sure how much I will my otherinbox account.  Why?

1. Like I said above, I already have a system like this in place to fight spam so why change?
2. I really don’t have a spam problem at the moment, so why spend time trying to fix a problem that doesn’t exist?
3. If this otherinbox company fails and goes away then I’ll be up a creek.  Why?  Because I will then need to go to each merchant separately and tell them to no longer send emails to ebay/time/flickr@ShahafRules.otherinbox.com and instead to use some other address.  What a pain.

Nontheless, I created my otherinbox account, mostly because I was curious to see the details of their UX.  So far I can say that the UI is very clean and slick, with an Outlook-style layout.  There are buttons at the bottom that let you change the layout, but it appears that they are not implemented yet.  Also, the “compose mail” button is at the bottom (not the top) which is an interesting and non-obvious choice, and when you click it you get a new tab to actually compose your email (which seems like a fine choice to me).

There’s a lot of upcoming functionality that isn’t implemented yet.  It looks like in the future they will automatically recognize emails that have receipts, coupons, and meeting invitations, and they will give you a specialized UI to manage those things — but none of this functionality is available right now.

If you want to check out otherinbox, you can use the same invitation URL that I used.  They say it’s good for up to 25 more accounts, so first come first served:

http://beta.otherinbox.com/signup/Shahaf

Last week I attended Burning Man with Pnina and her sister Miriam.  This was the first time at Burning Man for all of us.  It was a pretty amazing experience, difficult to summarize in a post, but here goes…

First off — look at the photos.  That’s the best way to get a feel for what goes on there:

• Shahaf’s Photos
• Pnina’s Photos

The festival is held in Black Rock Desert in Nevada, about 100 miles north of Reno.  Incidentally the festival wasn’t always held there — it started on a beach in San Francisco in 1986, but by 1990 it grew too large and it had to relocate.  Also BTW it used to be a summer solstice festival so it was also relocated in time to the week before Labor Day.  There’s a pretty interesting Burning Man Timeline on the main BM website.

We drove Pnina’s little 4-door Mazda.  I’m still amazed we were able to pack everything into the car.  You really need to bring *everything* with you because there’s little available for purchase at the festival — only ice and coffee.  We brought 25 gallons of water, which took up about half the trunk.  Our tent, sleeping bags and sleeping mattresses consumed the other half.  And our clothes, food, booze, costumes, and other random stuff were tucked into the back seat and in every imaginable gap.  Also, we had three bikes hanging off the trunk.  The car has never seen so much weight before and its little 4-cylinder engine felt it — it was difficult to pass those slow-ass RV’s en route.

Incidentally, the drive to BM from Seattle was pretty nice.  We stopped at my parents place in Portland.  We also went through Crater Lake National Park and passed through a few other forests.  The view was pretty constant trees, mountains, and lakes…until we hit the desert.

The Burning Man festival keeps growing from year to year.  I don’t know how many people attended this year but it must be over 50,000 people.  Check out this photo of “Black Rock City” from above.  The city is arranged like a clock, with the man-to-burn in the middle, then a buffer zone of empty desert (“playa”), then concentric arcs of tents and campers reaching from 2 o’clock to 10 o’clock.  The temple (which also gets burned) is located at 12 o’clock.  And the whole space around the man, the temple, and beyond (north of 12 o’clock) is dotted with art installations.  Also, there are people walking, on bicycles, and on “art cars” (AKA mutant vehicles) pretty much everywhere.

We didn’t have a specific place to camp.  We showed up late on Tuesday so it was hard to see where we were anyhow.  We randomly ended up at 6:20 and Hummer (the arc roads had alphabetical names with the theme of cars).

The place you choose to camp is very important for several reasons.  First off, it’s your neighborhood — you’ll end up making friends with the people around you.  We got to know Ray and Dave, our immediate next-door neighbors, Casey and Carla, the next neighbors over.  More than that, we became close friends with Camp Burner Brown, which was a few doors down and had a much better setup than we did — RV’s, big shade structure, long table, BBQ, etc.  Also, your location determines how far you have to go to the porta potties, to center camp, and to the parties.  And it determines how easily you can sleep at night (if you choose to sleep that is) — you really can’t get away from the techno beat completely, but it gets louder as you approach 2 and 10 o’clock.

The hottest time of day is shortly before sunset (perhaps 100 degrees) and the coldest time of day is just before sunrise (not quite freezing but not that far).  It took us a day to realize that you need to arrange your daily schedule around that.  The first day there we spent a good 5-6 hours walking around the playa looking at the various art installations during the hottest part of day.  It really drained us.  Over the next few days we mostly chilled out at center camp during the hot hours, listening to random performers, meeting random people, learning how to knit (no joke), etc.  The best time to go around the playa is in the morning.  Unfortunately we never woke up early enough to enjoy that time because we were generally up pretty late partying (a couple of times till sunrise).  Also, around 8:30 AM our tent became stiflingly hot.  We kept playing this dance where the first person to notice the heat would wake up, remove the rain fly, and open all the windows, then go back to sleep.  Later, before leaving the tent, we would close all the windows and put the rain fly back up because you never really know when that big dust storm is going to hit.

Speaking of dust storms, there were two of them in Burning Man 2008.  The first one happened on Monday, and fortunately we missed it because we arrived Tuesday night.  We heard it was a total “white out”, and that entrance to the festival was halted for a good 5 hours.  The people stuck in line on the road must have thought it was pretty shitty, but at least they were in their cars — it was probably worse for the people stranded randomly somewhere in Black Rock City.  The second dust storm happened on Saturday, the day the man burns.  We experienced this one, and man what an experience.  The storm arrived around 1 PM and it didn’t let up until night-time.  We tried to take refuge in Center Camp, but there was really no way to get away from the dust.  Our hair was saturated and we looked like old folks.  At some point Pnina decided she had to use the rest rooms so we braved the winds outside and walked to the porta potties.  Then we went to our tent to have some dinner.  The wind was so strong that it put a continuous bulge in our tent (though the tent did stay up — thank you rebar!).  Also, I’m really not sure how this happened but even though we had all the windows closed and the rain fly up, we still got a 1/3 inch layer of dust in the tent — still blows my mind.

So the storms, the heat, and the cold — those are some of the harsh realities of life in Black Rock City.  Also, for us there were no real showers, just baby wipes.  But whatever.  It’s worth it for all the art, the parties, the performances, and the wonderful people we met.

To see the art you need to get around the playa, and the distances are huge — that’s one thing that definitely surprised me.  I don’t think the art pieces need to be quite that far apart so it must be a concious choice by the artist or by the BM organizers.  Perhaps the artist likes to see his audience make an effort to see his art; it’s not enough to drive all the way to Burning Man, you also need to hike way out into the desert.  Of the three bikes we brought, two broke down the first day.  We didn’t bother trying to fix them — it was too clumsy trying to ride and hold up an umbrella (for sun) at the same time, so we ditched our bikes at our camp and spent the week walking.  The great thing about walking is that you end up having more conversations with random people along the way.  The tough thing is that after a couple of days you’re exhausted.  So, one alternative is to hop on an art car — most of them are very cool about letting everyone come aboard.  On the other hand, you just don’t know where the art car is going to go.  We had a few situations where we hopped on an art car, hoping to see that one art installation way out in the desert, only to have that car turn around and take us further back towards camp.  Ugh! 

The art pieces definitely take on a completely different character at night.  Or, at least, that’s true for the ones that involve either fire or neon lights or both.  But that’s most of them.

I mentioned before that other than ice and coffee, you can’t purchase anything at Burning Man.  People often hear that there’s a barter system at Burning Man – you bring stuff to trade with other people.  That’s not really true.  It’s actually a “gift” system, which is a pay-it-forward concept.  We brought extra chap stick (recommended by Matt Longest – thanks Matt!), extra ear plugs, some leftover booze from the wedding, and some random candy.  And we gave it to random people along the way.  We received booze, food, costumes, necklaces, belly dance lessons, knitting kits with yarn, and hugs – lots of people were big on hugs.

BTW, the candy we brought was occasionally difficult to give away — people were suspicious of what was in it (“it’s just jelly beans, I promise”).  Drugs were everywhere.  The first night we met this guy Darren at John Cougar Mellen-Camp.  He took three mushrooms and went on a huge trip, both figuratively and literally.  He ended up somewhere past the The End (which was the last art piece), and eventually he was picked up by the law enforcement people.

But what about the burn?  It took place Saturday night after the dust storm subsided.  *everyone* crowded around the playa and it was a complete party atmosphere (except for Pnina who by this point was so exhausted that she fell asleep waiting for the fire to start; which caused several people to stop by and ask “is she OK?”).  The burn started with fire works.  During the fire works, a few plumes of fire got the burning man tower going.  I don’t know how long it took — perhaps an hour or two — but eventually the whole burning man tower collapsed, and there was much rejoycing.  I’m told that at this point the crowd rushes in towards the ambers, but we were too far to see that.

The man-burn is not the only burn.  On Sunday night they burn the temple, and apparently that’s a quiet and spiritual affair.  But we were far too exhausted to stay another day.  We stayed up all night partying after the man-burn, then we packed up our stuff and headed out.

I’d say that the burn itself is pretty cool, but it’s not the main highlight for the week.  Lots of cool things happen all week long and each person at Black Rock City makes their own experience based on which art/camps/people they happen to meet.

Update (Sept 26)

We finally got around to posting Pnina’s photos.  Take a look – they’re really good (link above).

From a random Skype chat at work…

[2:40:54 PM] Christopher Currie says: $1 homes in detroit: http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080813/METRO/808130360/&imw=Y

[2:44:15 PM] Thomas Young says: I especially like the sentence: The company hired to manage the home and sell it, the Bearing Group, boarded up the home only to find the boards stolen and used to board up another abandoned home nearby.

[2:47:59 PM] Aditya Acharya says: you could play monopoly with real property in detroit for about the same price as buying one of those nice monopoly boards

I also like this line: “The agent did say that the buyer agreed to pay the full list price of $1, and planned to pay cash.”

Interesting article that argues that public transit is not energy efficient:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

It gives me the warm fuzzies to learn that our Yamaha Vino is actually far more energy efficient then any kind of public transit.

Here are the interesting parts…

How can this be?

A full bus or trainload of people is more efficient than private cars, sometimes quite a bit more so. But transit systems never consist of nothing but full vehicles. They run most of their day with light loads. The above calculations came from figures citing the average city bus holding 9 passengers, and the average train (light or heavy) holds 22. If that seems low, remember that every packed train at rush hour tends to mean a near empty train returning down the track.

Transit vehicles also tend to stop and start a lot, which eats a lot of energy, even with regenerative braking. And most transit vehicles are just plain heavy, and not very aerodynamic. Indeed, you’ll see tables in the DoE reports that show that over the past 30 years, private cars have gotten 30% more efficient, while buses have gotten 60% less efficient and trains about 25% worse. The market and government regulations have driven efforts to make cars more efficient, while transit vehicles have actually worsened.

In order to get people to ride transit, you must offer frequent service, all day long. They want to know they have the freedom to leave at different times. But that means emptier vehicles outside of rush hour. You’ve all seen those huge empty vehicles go by, you just haven’t thought of how anti-green they were. It would be better if off-hours transit was done by much smaller vehicles, but that implies too much capital cost — no transit agency will buy enough equipment for peak times and then buy a second set of equipment for light demand periods.

Transit planning is also driven by different economies. Often transit infrastructure (including vehicles) is paid for by state or federal money, while drivers (but also fuel) are paid from local city budgets. This seems to push local city transit agencies to get bigger vehicles and fewer drivers where they can, since drivers tend to be hired full-time and can’t be kept idling in low-demand periods.

“There is a bit of a paradox within these numbers. In spite of them, it is always the green move for any individual to take existing mass transit over their car. That’s because the transit is running anyway, so the incremental cost of carrying one more passenger is indeed less than just about any private vehicle. It is similarly green to carpool in somebody else’s car that’s going your way.

As such, these numbers should not make you feel better about taking your car instead of the train. Particularly solo, since solo drivers are what make the car’s average efficiency worse while carpoolers make it better”

Yes, you should still take transit

There is a bit of a paradox within these numbers. In spite of them, it is always the green move for any individual to take existing mass transit over their car. That’s because the transit is running anyway, so the incremental cost of carrying one more passenger is indeed less than just about any private vehicle. It is similarly green to carpool in somebody else’s car that’s going your way.

As such, these numbers should not make you feel better about taking your car instead of the train. Particularly solo, since solo drivers are what make the car’s average efficiency worse while carpoolers make it better.

These numbers instead are there to guide policy. What sort of transportation infrastructure should we build to be green? And, to a more limited extent, what sort of transportation should you support? The math should influence your decisions, and those of city planners who work for you, on what new transit to build, and what to keep running.

Pnina and I had dinner at Kabul the other night with a few of her friends from U of W.  One of them, Ryan McElroy, said that he participated in the Critical Mass ride on Friday, July 26, the one that went horribly wrong.

If you didn’t hear the story, here’s the brief summary.  The riders were going up Aloha Street on Capitol Hill. A couple of riders parked themselves in front of one car to keep it from trying to enter the lane until the rest of the riders went by — this is called “corking”.  The driver was running late to a dinner reservation so he was not amused.  There were some words exchanged between himself and the two cyclists (eventually a few more riders came along, including Ryan).  Then the driver did something stupid — he backed up the car and then drove it forward into the two cyclists.  One of them got out of the way, but the other wasn’t so lucky — the driver rolled over his leg (amazingly, no bones broken!).  Another rider jumped onto the hood of the car as it tried to get away (he used the roof-rack to hang on).  Then other riders came along and mob mentality set in — by the end, the car had four slashed tires, broken windows, and the driver was bleeding from his head.  By the time the police came around, Ryan says that the situation was pretty much defused.

The police report was very one-sided — it made it appear like the cyclists were responsible for inciting violence and the driver was simply acting in self defense.  Ryan tried to stick around and explain the real story, but the police (most of them) weren’t interested.  The first newspaper stories were based on the police report so they were similarly one-sided.

In response, Ryan wrote a blog post explaining what he witnessed.  His post got a lot of hits, was linked to, and eventually he started getting calls from local news: The Stranger, Seattle Times, The PI, Kiro 7 TV.  Then Q13 Fox called him up to do a story and he suggested meeting them at the site – at Aloha Street.  Q13 sent a cameraman but no interviewer, which he said made it difficult/awkward to do the interview.  No matter.  He walked the cameraman through the scene and told the story.  In the piece that aired, they ended up using only one of his quotes: “Yeah, I guess someone had a knife”.  After all the time he took to explained what happened, it was yet another completely one-sided story.