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A few years ago, I had heard that Gabe had a blog. That information, as it turns out, was incorrect. It sounded a bit fishy too.

To put things in context, let me back up. I was in grad school for a long time, interminably long. About five years into grad school, I met a few people who I still have some contact with even now.

At the time, Gabe was in grad school presumably because his grades had been good, and he was advised to do so, even though grad school was something, as far as I recall, that he wasn't that familiar with.

Throughout, he'd waffle between wanting to finish his Ph.D., and deciding he should get a job, and finally, he waffled long enough that he had a Ph.D., then got a job in California, presumably doing some compiler optimization stuff, which was the topic of his thesis.

Now throughout grad school, Gabe liked writing programs for fun, whether it was something as small as a script to manage who owed whom money, to scripts that could do basic text analysis, which was used to automate grading, to writing a X-window based fighting program with miniature soldiers, which he would instruct en masse to go in this direction or that. We would call the scripts that he wrote "gabelets" after applets, which were these mini applications written in Java for browsers. The phrase "gabelets" continues to amuse me, even now.

Indeed, his scripting background came from a sysadmin kind of job he had had when he was an undergrad. I recall an amusing anecdote about how he got this job, which at the time, was perhaps not exactly attracting people by the boatloads, but he managed to try to reduce his competition to zero (no violence, really!).

Now Gabe's a pretty smart guy, but he probably had some insecurity going to a school that was not that well known (I believe its historical significance may lie with something in women's basketball, but I'd have to search for it on the web), and so there were competitors from much bigger named schools.

In particular, we knew this guy from India whose name was Sudipto. Sudipto had an odd situation. In India, at the top universities, the top students try to segregate their applications so they don't step on each other too much. Somehow, in this process, Sudipto managed to get in nowhere.

One of the Indian professors managed to hear about this, and was able to convince the admissions committee to select him, and he came for about a year, until he decided to reapply for Stanford, where he later received a Ph.D. in theory.

There was some problem set, I recall, and Gabe had asked him about a particular problem. Gabe, naturally, had his own ideas, but he wanted to compare with Sudipto, who was supposed to be pretty smart when it came to algorithms. He came away not entirely convinced that Sudipto was that smart.

To be fair, there could have been many explanations. First, perhaps on that problem, Sudipto didn't have the answer, at least, not there and then. And perhaps he was plenty smart, but just not that particular problem. For whatever the reason, it seemd to make Gabe feel better about himself. Of course, his grades also did that as well.

After Gabe received his Ph.D. and headed off to California, I didn't really keep in touch with him. I don't even think I had his email address (or more than likely, I sent him email via his university email address, which appeared to be doing just fine).

So, now back to a few years ago, and I hear indirectly that Gabe has a blog. He had, apparently, told a former roommate of his, Omer, about this, and who doesn't want to hobnob with someone that has minor celebrity, right?

Turns out it's not a blog per se, but a blog aggregator. It takes articles that bloggers have been blogging about, and picks out the important articles based on their buzz. This, like Google News, is done automatically, and updates itself fairly frequently.

The original website, Memeorandum, focused on political blogs. Then, TechMeme on tech blogs, BallBuzz on baseball, and WeSmirch on gossip.

Of the four, I only occasionally check out Techmeme. The others don't interest me as much, so I read it far less. These days, I'm rather hooked to reddit and its subreddit, programming.reddit.com.

I recently read an interview with Gabe from a week ago or so as the interviewer asks how Gabe does what he does. Gabe seemed pretty honest with the answers without hitting the key technical details, which I'm sure, are a little too involved to get into in an interview.

Gabe's basically a one-man shop right now. I'd hazard a guess that he'd feel uncomfortable even sharing the task he does with other people, and certainly, after doing things your own way for a while, you'd probably be loathe to want to work for someone else who you thought was less than capable.

Perhaps I'm mischaracterizing him, but then he used to accuse me of that too, and this is a poorly read blog in any case, and I'm not beholden to good journalistic practices, nor solid English, for that matter. I just thought I'd blog about him again, for lack of anything better to do this evening.