There’s a drug rep riding up in the elevator with me to Doctor Schott’s office, a pretty young woman in her 20s. I know she’s a drug rep because in addition to a shopping bag with a big box that says Protonix on it, she is carrying a tray with four different Starbucks beverages on it. These will be offered to various receptionists she will encounter in the different medical offices in the building. She’s probably memorized the Starbucks preferences of her best clients. From what I can tell in my brief encounters with modern medicine, Starbucks is a huge factor behind the marketing of pharmaceuticals.

I don’t see Doctor Schott very often, but the last time, 3 years ago, I saw more drug reps than patients, and today was much the same. “Another day of free samples and Starbucks, eh?” I inquire conversationally, just as the elevator door opens. She smiles and raises an eyebrow. I feel like I’ve offered the secret handshake.

When we exit the elevator on the 3rd floor, another drug rep is waiting to get in, and the two reps smile and greet each other by name. Even though their employers are probably direct competitors, they always seem very friendly with each other. There seems to be a kind of code-of-conduct with drug reps, and one of the codes is that you are friendly with other drug reps, and give them a certain amount of space.

The Protonix rep enters the first Doctor’s office on the hall, while I continue down the hallway to Doctor Schott.

The receptionist is only mildly irked that I’m 15 minutes late, and has me fill out a short form. It’s been three years since I last saw Doctor Schott. For the past three years I’ve been on a crappy HMO — one of the things that sucked about being a consultant — and I had to see a different doctor, in a lower-rent building with a lot more patients and more bad smells in the waiting room.

I remark about the preponderance of drug reps and Starbucks in the hallways to the receptionist, and she nods and sighs half-jokingly that they never bring *her* any Starbucks. Sure enough, when the elevator drug rep finally reappears, the tray of Starbucks is gone. I don’t know if the first medical office on the floor is a more desirable client for Wyeth, her employer, or if that office simply benefits from being closer to the elevator, or if maybe Doctor Schott has declared his office a Starbucks-free zone. Who knows?

The drug rep leaves a display box of Protonix brochures on a table in the lobby, and chits chats with the receptionist. Another code-of-conduct I’ve noticed about drug reps is this: they never actually talk about their drugs with the receptionists. It’s always personal chit chat — trying to establish or maintain a connection. In this case, the drug rep just got back from vacation and they talk about her trip. The receptionist seems genuinely happy to talk to her, but I wonder. She must have ten or twelve of these conversations a day. At the end of the conversation, she manages a quick “Can I leave you with some Protonix?” hands over the goods and that’s it.

I don’t know how long the Protonix brochures will last in Doctor Schott’s lobby. I don’t see other brochures touting specific drug brands left on the tables – most of the brochures he chooses to keep are about healthy lifestyles, or services, rather than specific drugs. Doctor Schott’s employees probably have to sweep the lobby of marketing material every evening.

Eventually, I get admitted to an examining room. I really like Doctor Schott — and it pissed me off that the crappy HMO I’ve had for the past three years wouldn’t cover him. He’s a nice guy with a slightly gruff exterior. He doesn’t come off as harassed and tired, the way my HMO doctor sometimes did. Doctor Schott is kind of like Wilfred Brimley’s younger, more well-informed brother. He gets lots of patients through positive referrals, and I can see why the drug reps like to visit him.

Doctor Schott’s nurse comes and takes my weight. I close my eyes as I step on the scale so I won’t have to see the result. Doctor Schott’s scale always make me twenty pounds heavier than my scale at home. Doctor Schott gave me some free Protonix samples a few years ago. It’s an acid reflux medication. As someone who continually battles with my weight, I’ve noticed that my incidence of acid indigestion is higher when I’m overweight. As I wait to see him, I wonder if a company which sells medications which treat an ailment which is worsened by obesity has an interest in keeping people fat?

I ask the nurse, who is now taking my blood pressure this very question. This throw her off, because she is trying to count. I ask her again when she’s finished. She gives me an odd look (I have to admit it’s an odd question) and says she doesn’t believe a connection is likely. I suppose I’m just being paranoid, I say. She says that although obesity *is* a contributing factor to acid reflux disease, it’s not the main factor. She treats lots of skinny people who have the condition. I ask her, “Is Starbucks a contributing factor to acid reflux disease?”

“Oh yeah,” she nods.

It’s the damn lattes, I think.

I’m seeing the good Doctor because I have a chronic cough. It’s the same ailment I saw him for three years ago, and he prescribes much the same things for it: an Allegra-like anti-histamine, an acid-reducer (not Protonix, this time), and some Flonase for my nose. He warns me that the insurance company probably won’t cover the Allegra, because they think the over-the-counter versions are good enough, although in his experience, the over-the-counter versions are not as effective as the prescription versions. I ask him why, is it the dosage? He says he’s not sure – it may simply be the placebo effect of a prescription drug versus an over-the-counter drug. I hope that his telling me this won’t reduce the effectiveness of the drug, which I’m probably gonna pay thru the nose for.

He also gives me a one-sheet entitled “Heartburn Hints” and circles the headline that reads “Make these lifestyle & dietary changes:” The list of 10 suggested changes begin with a) avoid fatty foods, b) avoid chocolate, c) avoid coffee. Fortunately, I don’t see Starbucks Mochas anywhere in the list. Thank god! In the bottom right corner of the one-sheet is a big logo for Prevacid. There’s a phone number at the top where I can get a free information kit: 888-558-ACID.

As I leave, there are three people waiting in the lobby.

Two of them are drug reps.

Check it out! Paul Bausch, the author of Amazon Hacks and Yahoo Hacks,
had one of my posters laminated! I think this means he likes me!

Well, that, and he agreed to co-write the forthcoming Flickr Hacks from O’Reilly, with me. I’ll be
working on some of the more technical hacks, and I intend to share a lot of my techniques and source code behind such goodies as the Flickr Colr Pickr, Collaborative Posters, Mosaic Portraits and The Flickr Chia Pet. Plus I’m gonna make a few new toys & gizmos for the book. This means I won’t have as much time to
blog about my other nerdly hobbies for a while. Has anyone seen my pencil?

George Pendel’s Strange Angel is about pioneering Rocket Scientist Jack Parsons, who played a pivotal role in the creation of Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). A self-taught explosives expert, Parsons also led a double life: He was fascinated with the occult, and was chosen by Aleister Crowley to lead the local chapter of the Ordo Templi Orientis, an alternative religious sect which was practicing “free love” in the late 30s and early 40s.

Parsons roomed for a time with L. Ron Hubbard shortly before Hubbard wrote “Dianetics” and founded Scientology. Hubbard eventually ran off with Parson’s girlfriend and much of his savings.

The book contains fascinating early 20th century histories of Los Angeles, Pasadena, CalTech, JPL and the alternative religious movement. Numerous LA-based science fact and science fiction luminaries, such as Theodore von Kármán, Ray Bradbury,
Forrest J. Ackerman and John W. Campbell appear in the book.

Andy Hertzfeld, one of the creators of the original Macintosh computer,
recently published a book, Revolution in the Valley, about his experiences at Apple in the
late 70s and early 80s. The book is full of fascinating anecdotes and valuable lessons
about software management, many of which seem awfully familiar to me. Andy’s love of small
teams, and his disdain for authoritarian project managers will elicit sympathy from geeks of all stripes.

Andy talked about the Mac, the Open Source movement and “Programmer personality types” in the last installment of Geek TV – check out the podcast. His website, Folklore.org, written in Python, is intended to be a collaborative repository for this kind of anecdotal history, and is a wellspring of information about the early days at Apple.

Meet Fubuki (Ty Siscoe), one of the most prolific and talented photographers on Flickr, the photo-sharing service. I constructed Fubuki’s portrait out of thumbnails from his large collection of excellent photos, using the Flickr API. My software is written in Perl, using the ImageMagick library.

For more of my mosaics, check out my flickr stream.

Currently my sudoku software does a very crude job of estimating puzzle difficulty. There’s an especially wide range of difficulty levels in my “super tough” puzzles – some of them are pretty easy, others are genuinely “super tough.”

My experience shows that most other computer programs do a pretty poor job at this too. The Los Angeles
Times puzzles, for example, are rated very inaccurately.

I’m launching a little informal research project which should help my software do a better job at this. The
basic idea is to find out how difficult real humans find the puzzles, and use this information to improve
the software.

If you’d like to help out by solving a few puzzles and sending me your results, then read on….

If you don’t already use bookmarklets, del.icio.us or an RSS reader, then the last few paragraphs of this post will be difficult to decipher, so I’ll start with some background:

del.icio.us is a tagged bookmarking service (with a clever, hard-to-spell, and now much mimicked URL) that makes it easy to share bookmarks among multiple computers, group them according to tags, and find similar sites being bookmarked by other people. I use del.icio.us mainly to make it easy to share bookmarks between the three or four computers I use frequently, but it serves other purposes as well.

The bookmarks I add to del.icio.us appear on a public page, del.icio.us/jbum that I access frequently. That page has an RSS feed which I’ve added to the menu on most of my browsers. But other people can read it too.

I monitor an RSS feed of the most popular links on del.icio.us, which can be found at del.icio.us/popular/. This is an excellent way of keeping a pulse on the Internet. Many useful sites will show up in this list well before they appear in the handful of blogs I monitor.

Like most del.ic.ious users, I keep a bookmarklet on my Firefox toolbar which makes it easy to add new sites to my del.icio.us/jbum collection. If I’m on a site I want to remember, I click the bookmarklet, and voila, a pop-up form appears that allows me to describe and tag it.

Often when you add a page to del.icio.us, it has already been added by other people. Nonetheless, you still have to manually add the obvious tags, even though other people have already done the work of tagging the page many times. It makes sense that this behavior would eventually be harnessed to make del.icio.us even easier to use.

Today, Lazy Sheep appeared on the del.icio.us/popular page, and it’s popularity is rising quickly. The service creates a custom bookmarklet that adds new links to your del.icio.us collection, and automatically annotates them with the tags created by others. This makes adding new links to del.icio.us much more painless.

It also raises some interesting questions. Lazy Sheep has the potential to significantly reduce the diversity of tags in del.icio.us, if a lot of people start using it. If the first few folks to tag a site use misspellings in their tags, Lazy Sheep will cause those misspellings to propagate. Will this script ultimately reduce the utility of the service it was designed to improve? We’ll see, but for now, I’m a happy sheep.

UPDATE: This feature hasn’t proved to be as convenient as I had originally hoped, mainly due to some problems with the implementation. It would probably be better to auto-fill the tag field in a pop-up, rather than silently adding the link with no feedback. New links added with Lazy Sheep automatically get a “todescribe” tag. Check out delicious’s todescribe tag to see all the unedited links produced by lazy sheep.

Like seemingly everyone in LA, I have recently been bitten by the Sudoku bug, a craze which swept England last spring. The Los Angeles Times started publishing these puzzles a few weeks ago.

Like many geeks, this addiction not only involves solving them with a pencil, but solving and generating them with a computer. I started by writing a Sudoku solver in Flash, which uses human-style techniques such as X-Wing and Swordfish.

Then I discovered Don Knuth’s remarkable paper on Dancing Links, and wrote a brute-force solver in Java which is significantly faster, and is the basis of a puzzle-generator I am working on.

If you’re like me, you can’t get enough puzzles and it is tedious to print them one at a time.

I made these printable Puzzle Books with my puzzle generator.

Enjoy!

When we say things like:

“That picture is too noisy”
“The room is too cluttered”
“This song is boring”
“That script has good pacing”
“Put some reverb on that mic”

We are unintentionally invoking the spirit of Claude Shannon, who first described Information Theory in the late 1940s, at the dawn of the information age.

I wrote about this subject recently for the online magazine Mung Being.

Check it out!