Gabe and a Muppet

Somehow this seems borderline offensive as if he were being interviewed by Jar Jar Binks. Even so, Gabe seems pretty happy.

Road Warrior

This is one of those journeys that happens at random.

I was at a reheasal dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I was approached by an elderly gentleman who told me that he was my father's (and my uncle's) cousin. I had no idea they had cousins in the US. I asked him where he lived. He said he lived in Montclair.

Ding, ding, ding!

Let me explain.

Maybe 13 years ago minus a few months, I was in year 5 of grad school, something that took utterly too long. It was during grad school I met Gabe who would go onto some minor fame as founder of his website. Gabe's slightly paranoid. He was reluctant to say which university he had gone to, but eventually said he went to Montclair State.

Now, New Jersey isn't known for its powerhouse universities, save one, and that's Princeton. Second place, I'd imagine is Rutgers, and I don't know what follows after that. Given the number of people who live in Jersey, it's surprising they don't have a more famous college system. Indeed, many Jerseyites go to New York or Massachusetts or Maryland or any number of nearby states to get a college education.

After checking it out on Google Maps, I realized good old MSU was only about half an hour away.

Here was my game plan. Eat lunch at a Malaysian place that I saw on the way back to the hotel. Then, head to MSU for an hour or so, then head back to the hotel to get ready for the wedding.

Although the morning was sunny, by the time early afternoon came around, it was rainy. I was trying to find the Malaysian restaurant despite the mess that is New Jersey traffic which isn't conducive to left turns. I asked my GPS to find the restaurant, Penang, under Asian restaurants, and the closest one it found was some 20 miles away, which I knew was untrue.

When I adjusted it to all restaurants, it managed to find it. Fortunately, I distrust the data that comes with GPS enough to do that.

The restaurant was pretty nice, looking initially like one of those Bugaboo, Famous Dave's, I'm in a Canadian hunting lodge feel. Stare at the back, and you could see the numerous chefs cooking in the back. I looked over the dishes and got some kind of roti with chicken curry. Malaysian chicken curry is the kind of curry that Indians probably laugh at, as not being quite authentic enough, yet the Brits and Americans love it. Still, it was good enough for me. The roti was particularly oily, but agai, that was fine with me.

I got a beef curry noodle dish, as Malaysia is one of those countries that eat huge bowls of noodles. This one had beef, with enough beef tendon or some other internal glue to make it taste authentic. The soup itself was swimming in coconut milk, though the taste of coconut was not that strong.

After being stuffed, I headed over to MSU.

Despite being only about 20 miles away, it isn't 20 miles of highway. I took a path that went through this place and that, and as I got closer, there was no indication that there was even a university nearby. It wasn't until I practically got on campus that I saw it. Not good for people visiting.

Alas, the weather was rainy and I had no umbrella. I was relying on maps nearby. The campus was pretty much abandoned. Graduation appeared to have happened at least days earlier. Few people were on campus. I went into some facility where kids were playing Suzuki songs, songs I recall since I played them as a youth. Amazing how resilient the Suzuki method has been.

So I was running hither and thither, seeing what little there was to see. It felt very much like an oversized high school, though I suppose many universities have that feel. Only the University Hall looked something more than blah.

This is one of those things where the last time Gabe was likely on campus, parts of it looked, I'm sure quite different. It seems, for example, the computer science department is only 10 years old, which means Gabe graduated after it opened up.

As it was, since I had to get back for the wedding (it's in 45 minutes from now), the 25 minutes back put me just before 5 PM.

Oh yes, oddly enough, as I was driving back, I was behind a very large SUV whose vanity plate read "Hamburg". The finals of Hamburg was just played this morning, with Nadal showing his mastery of Federer, winning in three sets. I thought it coincidental, yet fascinating.

Rivera Unleashed

Words don't do adequate justice to how frightfully bizarre this is.

Juice

Ah, Gabe, how did you get stuck doing this interview?

I suppose it's already over a year old. I think I like the hair better in this interview than other ones.

Gabe It My All

Here's another "Gabe" interview.

I wonder if Gabe ever thinks "Why doesn't someone ask me anything else besides 'How the hell does Techmeme' work?". Perhaps he'd like to be asked about dwarf tossing. Or maybe whether he's hotter than David Heinemeier Hansson? Geek hotness, now there's a market Gabe could corner. Somehow people are always kissing him. Doesn't this deserve a booty call? Use that Ph.D!

Oh yeah, he's never referred to as "Dr" Rivera. No one asks him what his Ph.D. was all about. No one asks him about grand Chau-Wen-ges. Or about Joshua Burdick. Or Clyde Kruskal. Or how it was like pumping gas for the first time in Maryland.

Instead poor Gabe is subjected to the usual humdrum of questions. I think this should motivate him to create a completely different site. Perhaps it can be finding good restaurants. That still needs lots of work. The real problem is there's no good audience to go there. But the great news is that Gabe already has an audience that is technically literate. Maybe he could get them to do stuff.

Does anyone ask him why he has no middle name? Or how he loves making chocolate cake? Or why he likes Frank Black?

No, it's always "What algorithm do you use?". Even Sergey Brin seems to get spared these kinds of questions. (What algorithm does Google use for search?).

How about "Gabe, can you say 'WeSmirch' three times without cracking a smile?'. I think not.

Beet It

Is Gabe really 34 already? I guess I'm a few years older so it shouldn't be so surprising.

When I knew Gabe, I wouldn't have thought he'd be so interested to be in the public limelight as he is now. Gabe used to be far more hesitant with his speech as if he were thinking about what he was saying and saying it at the same time, with his brain occasionally reining in his speech, so that the result was half-stumbled, half-said. If you hear him in early interviews, you get that sense.

You can see, even in the interview above, that Gabe is often on the verge of cracking up, as if there's some inside joke that he's in on, or perhaps he finds the tie the person is wearing oddly amusing, before he goes back and tries to answer the question. You can tell, of course, that Gabe is pretty guarded about how he does Techmeme and related sites. That makes sense, I suppose, since it is how he's currently making a living. Would someone, hearing just snippets of what he does be able to piece together something comparable?

I'm sure Gabe would think "no", but even so, he's not going to spill the beans on how it's done.

Techmeme, in case I haven't mentioned it, is news headline aggregator. As Gabe points out, it's a bit like Google News because it's automated, but where Google applies some other algorithm, Gabe uses blogs to determine what is newsworthy.

For some reason, every interview he has seems obsessed with finding out how he does it. Perhaps it's because there's not that much to ask? If you check out Flickr, you'll see that Gabe apparently gets kissed a lot. Lipstick and Gabe's cheeks seem a perfect match.

It's surprising to me, given his interest in photography, that he hasn't posted more to his Flickr account.

In any case, Gabe seems to be improving his interview skills. I doubt he'll ever get to that super polished stage (the guy who is interviewing him is almost slimy smooth, not like, say Steve Jobs who somehow surpasses that, and doesn't seem quite as slimy).

Next time you meet up with him, ask him about dwarf tossing. He probably won't get it entirely, but it's a bit of an in-joke.

Web Star

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.