So, I’m a soft­ware engin­eer. I work for a large-​​ish com­pany that is a major player in the digital TV arena, and I think I’m con­sidered pretty good at my job. I think I’m paid slightly shy of aver­age for a developer of my age and exper­i­ence, but I like my job and my co-​​workers enough to let that slide. I have a reas­on­ably good income and no depend­ants, and if I wasn’t pay­ing out a stag­ger­ingly huge amount in debt repay­ments each month, I’d be very com­fort­able (rather than just pretty comfortable.)

So far, so aver­age. So can someone tell me how the hell I earn more than Wil fuck­ing Wheaton? This guy was in Star Trek for cry­ing out loud! And on top of that (or, depend­ing on your opin­ion of Wes, des­pite it,) he’s grown into one of the best, most nat­ural writers of the blog­ging gen­er­a­tion. Oh, and he’s a great spokes­man for unashamed geeks every­where too; I mean, did you hear his PAX key­note?

Hon­estly, it’s a sign of his tal­ent that it’s been years since I’ve thought of him as “that kid who played the annoy­ing one in TNG.”

So how come he writes enter­tain­ing, uplift­ing, even self-​​validating blog posts every day¹, pro­duces books that are truly a joy to read, is cap­able of whip­ping a con­fer­ence full of high income geeks into a frenzy, and yet is still wor­ried about how to provide for his kids, while I show up to an office every day, write code designed to make rich people richer, which may or may not ever be released, and some­how earn enough that my biggest worry is whether I can afford that new mon­itor this month without cur­tail­ing my pizza habit?

Is that fair?

Hell no. So here’s my plan. I bought “Just a Geek” ages ago, but have lost my copy some­where along the way. I bor­rowed “Dan­cing Bare­foot” once, and to my shame have neither bought nor Read “Hap­pi­est Days of Our Lives” yet. So I’m going to buy all three of them. This month. I’m not doing this as a char­ity thing; I genu­inely love his writ­ing, and want to own his books; I’ve just not got around to to buy­ing them. So I want the books, I’m sure he’d like the money. It’s a win/​win situation.

Because I know he’d hate the thought of people buy­ing his writ­ing out of char­ity, I’m not going to sug­gest every­one goes out and does the same, but I will point you all at his blog. Add it to your blog-​​roll (if you haven’t already.) Read it for a while. I’m pretty sure that, if you’re a geek or a gamer or just love good writ­ing, you’ll end up buy­ing his books for reas­ons he won’t hate.

Go. Now. Read.

1. I smile to myself, genu­inely cheered, when he writes about his kids — who I’ve obvi­ously never met — get­ting into role­play­ing, or Monty Python, or the right com­puter games, or any of the other things I love. [↩]

So, it’s not news to any­one by now, but Gary Gygax, who is widely regarded as the inventor of role-​​playing games, has died.

I think it’s safe to say that without the influ­ence of Gygax (and oth­ers like him; Dave Arneson,Marc Miller, and Kevin Siem­bieda leap to mind,) I would not be the man I am today. Reason enough to visit his house and make sure he’s dead, some might say. But that would be unfair — he did so much more than lead me to a life of geekery; he inven­ted a new type of game that, you could argue, fun­da­ment­ally changed our per­cep­tion of play, and led more or less to every game that came after it. From the kids (young and old,) who still meet weekly to eat pizza and playDun­geons and Dragons, through all of the other games that brought their own style and per­son­al­ity to the hobby he inven­ted and all the com­puter games that aim to recre­ate that same feel­ing through a key­board and a mon­itor to the global jug­ger­naut that is World of War­craft, they all owe a debt of grat­it­ude to E. Gary Gygax. Put simply: the world of enter­tain­ment would not be where it is today without his input.

OK; so right now I should be con­nect­ing my laptop to work’s VPN and check­ing up on a data­base I’m sup­posed to be dia­gnos­ing. Or, fail­ing that, I should be tidy­ing the flat, tak­ing the rub­bish out, or think­ing about cook­ing my din­ner. Or, fail­ing that, I have some server main­ten­ance, home dir­ect­ory house­keep­ing and CD rip­ping that I’m going to have to do even­tu­ally. But I’ve had an arse of a day and I’m feel­ing double-​​plus-​​lazy, so I’m going to write some­thing instead. A quick look back in time tells me that I’d prom­ised a second opin­ion on Mahalo once I’d had time to try it out, and since I’ve had time to try it out; here it is.

The first thing to say is that it’s no google, and I’m guess­ing they’re not even going for that mar­ket. I’ve found it to be close to use­less for any search I carry out in the course of my work­ing (as a soft­ware engin­eer) day. Past­ing error codes into the search form just throws out a ran­dom selec­tion of (usu­ally bio­graph­ical) pages. The google res­ults at the bot­tom of the page are as good as you’d expect, but they’re slower to load and less obvi­ous on the page than if I’d just used google in the first place. Search­ing for inform­a­tion on unix com­mands leaves it scratch­ing it’s head in bewil­der­ment, and, per­haps more ser­i­ously, even rel­at­ively well known com­puter soft­ware can leave it sim­il­arly speechless.

And it’s not just tech­nical searches, it’s any­thing … overly spe­cific. If I search for “cat lifespan” it gives me a few options for pages about cats, but noth­ing that is obvi­ously going to tell me what I want to know. Google, by com­par­ison, gives me the answer in it’s first link (although it’s second one is to a cor­por­ate web­site.) I guess expect­ing answers to spe­cific ques­tions is just too much to ask of the site’s human index­ing engine.

That use of humans to build the entire index is both Mahalo’s biggest weak­ness and it’s greatest strength, since while I’ve been fairly dis­ap­poin­ted in the breadth of sub­jects it is know­ledge­able on, I’ve been hugely impressed with the qual­ity of the res­ults it does return. It’s hard to describe the joy of enter­ing a search term and hav­ing the res­ults come back, free from spam or noise, in a neatly cat­egor­ised list of high qual­ity links. I don’t know, re-​​reading that last sen­tence makes me won­der if I’m over­re­act­ing to this, but I can’t help it; it just reminds me of what the inter­net should be; a place where I can get access to inform­a­tion quickly and eas­ily, without hav­ing to know the tricks of avoid­ing spam­mers and scam­mers, and without hav­ing to trawl through a moun­tain of ‘sponsored links’ or unin­formed twaddle to get to the actual inform­a­tion. Of course, there’s a place for the unin­formed twaddle as well (else I’d have to shut up shop,) but I don’t neces­sar­ily want a whole load of con­spir­acy the­or­ies pol­lut­ing my screen when ‘m try­ing to research the moon landing.

This leads me to believe that the term “search engine” might be some­thing of a mis­nomer. Cer­tainly, you can search Mahalo, but it’s hardly it’s strongest suit; con­struct­ing a search term for a spe­cific piece of inform­a­tion is rarely sat­is­fact­ory, and that’s what people expect to be able to do with some­thing called a “search engine”; it’s sort-​​of implied by the name. Where Mahalo really shines, con­versely, is on suf­fi­ciently broad searches for well defined sub­jects (say, ‘Evol­u­tion’, or ‘Egypt’,) in those cases it’s hand-​​built nature and high qual­ity put me more in mind of an index, or a guide than of a blind search algorithm. It’s like going back to Yahoo in the really old days, but with a somewhat-​​useful search fea­ture, and links you actu­ally want to fol­low. I guess there’s value in the term “search engine”; people know what it means, but I can’t help won­der­ing if they might help dif­fer­en­ti­ate them­selves, as well as com­mu­nic­ate their unique strengths, if they used a dif­fer­ent term.

So, regard­less of what it is, would I recom­mend Mahalo? Yes, abso­lutely, but not unre­servedly. It’s not com­plete yet; that much is pain­fully clear in daily use, and I end up fall­ing through to wiki­pe­diaor google at least as often as I get the answer from Mahalo, and there are types of searches that I don’t think it will ever be any good for (but then, I think there’s an argu­ment for spe­cial­ised search engines for many of those any­way.) For the searches it’s designed to handle, though, I think the value of it is well worth the ini­tial incon­veni­ence of hav­ing to con­trib­ute to the index myself. Sug­gest­ing links is quick and easy, and the more people that use it reg­u­larly and add the pages that it didn’t find for them, the sooner it’ll be com­plete and really useful.

So, go on — check it out. If you use fire­fox, you can con­fig­ure it to use Mahalo as the default search engine, if not then it might be a little less con­veni­ent, but I think it’ll be worth the effort.

Well, the trip’s over (for me, at least; Mike’s out here for at least another day,) and I’m wast­ing a few minutes wait­ing at Ben Gur­ion Inter­na­tional Air­port, by post­ing a few things that have occurred to me while I’ve been here.

• I don’t care, what any­one says — in the post 9/​11, post 7/​7 world, the UK is one of the most stu­pidly para­noid nations I’ve been to. I’m a Brit­ish national, but get­ting out of Heath­row was unbe­liev­ably pain­ful — I had to throw away all my toi­letries in case they were some form of highly advance chem­ical explos­ive, I was sub­jec­ted to a full body x-​​ray and frisked by a not so friendly secur­ity guard. Get­ting onto a plane here in Israel, by com­par­ison, was no prob­lem. They weren’t lax or any­thing, just sens­ible and effi­cient. Which is pretty much the exact oppos­ite of the secur­ity pro­cess in the UK.
• I won­der if it’s a stand­ard check they do; when the group of us fly­ing out were talk­ing to the girl at the secur­ity point she waited until I was look­ing at one of my fel­low fly­ers and then asked, “Wil­liam?” When I looked round at her she held up my pass­port as though veri­fy­ing the pic­ture. Per­son­ally, I think it was more likely a test to see how I reacted to hear­ing my name. I bet people respond dif­fer­ently to their own name than to one they’re pre­tend­ing is theirs, and I bet you can be trained to recog­nize the difference.
• Just before sit­ting down to read this, I went to a cof­fee place to grab a drink, and the girl serving me was clearly a goth; dreads, black stock­ings, New-​​Rocks (yes, at work,) and it struck me that she’s the first goth/​metaler/​alternitive-​​type of any kind I’ve seen in Israel, either time I’ve been here. I won­der if that’s just a dif­fer­ence between Jer­u­s­alem and Tel Aviv, or if it’s just extremely rare here.
• Relatedly, why is it every air­port I’ve ever been to seems to be pop­u­lated by incred­ibly beau­ti­ful women, but no mat­ter what class you sit in on the plane, you’re always next to a middle aged business-​​man or an eld­erly couple going on hol­i­day to “the home­land”? Ser­i­ously, what’s that about?

I didn’t get to fly El-​​Al this time, which wasn’t the most aus­pi­cious start to the trip since it meant that I got jammed in BA cattle-​​class rather than El-Al’s business-​​class, which made the last trip entirely worth­while on it’s own. Luck­ily, I slept the entire flight, except for a brief period of wake­ful­ness, to eat the Chicken Curry they gave me for break­fast, so the lack of com­fort wasn’t really a major factor in my day.

Once I arrived in Israel, get­ting through pass­port con­trol was a doddle just like last time — a few curs­ory ques­tions, but I very much got the impres­sion they were more to fill the silence while the machine read my pass­port than an actual attempt to dis­cern any­thing about me (but then, maybe that’s the skill of the questioner.)

When I got out into the air­port proper, I couldn’t see a driver with my name on a sign, so I thought I’d take the oppor­tun­ity to go and buy some toi­letries to replace the ones they kindly threw away for me at Heath­row (which is a dif­fer­ent story entirely,) and while I was at the ATM get­ting some money to cover the cost the taxi driver came and found me — it was the same one who’d driven me a year ago and he recog­nised me.

There was another guy from NDS, who I didn’t know, shar­ing the taxi back to the hotel and, unlike me, appar­ently he had checked in bag­gage, so I had a while to wait and, with some help­ful dir­ec­tions from my friendly driver, rushed off to get some toi­letries while we waited. I got to the shop­ping area upstairs found a phar­macy and got what I needed. On my way back to where I’d left the driver, I walked passed a music store and could hear the music they had play­ing in there; Thun­der­child from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.

I smiled to myself and figured that this busi­ness trip might yet turn out OK.