Gawker’s misguided 70-characters-for-SEO memo

Today, Gawker’s Nick Denton issued a mandate that headlines be 70-characters or fewer because of the “tyranny of the search and social algorithms.” The only actual example he refers to is Deadspin’s expose of Manti Te’o’s dead girlfriend hoax:

Why this drastic measure? Google and others truncate headlines at 70 characters. On the Manti Teo story, Deadspin’s scoop fell down the Google search results, overtaken by copycat stories with simpler headlines.

Deadspin’s headline was 118 characters. Vital information — “hoax” — was one of the words that was cut off. Our headline was less intelligible — and less clickworthy — than others. And Google demotes search results that don’t get clicked on.

Denton is right about how the headlines were seen and (likely) wrong about why the headlines rank so low.

He’s right that Deadspin’s headline is terrible for search engine users. The original headline was:

Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax

Here’s what happens when you search for Manti Te’o’ and some variation of “hoax” and “girlfriend” in Google today:

Screen Shot 2013-04-11 at 2.18.29 PM

So, if you’ve been told that there is a crazy hoax by Manti Te’o and you go to Google to find out, which of these headlines seem more interesting to you?

  1. Story of Manti Te’o’s Girlfriend Is Revealed to Be a Hoax – NYTimes …
  2. Story of Manti Te’o girlfriend and her death apparently a hoax – ESPN
  3. Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking … – Deadspin

So Denton’s advice to keep headlines to the point is pretty good advice, although I’d argue that headlines can be longer than 70 characters, if the meat of it (the proper nouns, active verb) are in the first 70 characters.

However, he is wrong in thinking that the less-attractive, less-clickedness of the headline was what makes it rank lower than the NYT and ESPN stories.

Though, again, we don’t know for sure all the factors in PageRank, one of the most-well observed signals is the order of the keywords. When you enter a search query, Google cares about the order of the words, so that “mexican restaurant in new york with good tacos” will bring back a different order of results (or even different results completely) than “mexican restaurant with good tacos in new york”.

In the same way, if these were page titles, Google might consider “mexican restaurant in new york with good tacos” a better “authority” on “Mexican restaurants in New York” than a page titled “mexican restaurant with good tacos in new york.”

So back to Manti Te’o. If you were searching for a story related to Manti Te’o and a hoax, you would query “manti teo hoax”. Notice where those keywords appear in each of these headlines:

  1. Story of Manti Te’o’s Girlfriend Is Revealed to Be a Hoax – NYTimes …
  2. Story of Manti Te’o girlfriend and her death apparently a hoax – ESPN
  3. Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking … – Deadspin

What’s especially wrongheaded about Denton’s memo is that he can have good SEO and good headlines, because SEO (and search results display) is primarily affected by the meta title of the article. It’s strange that Gawker, one of the more modern and most prominent publishing platforms, apparently has no way (or policy) to set the headline differently from the title of an article.

For example, the headline of this Gawker article is: “Feral, Thieving Mountain Men Keep Emerging from America’s Woods, Unwillingly.” This is the same as the title of the article, which is set in the meta tags of article’s HTML. It is this meta-title field that shows up in search engine results.

Presumably, this ranks highly for anyone searching for “feral thieving mountain men.”

But if you were looking for news on the actual “Troy Knapp, the notorious ‘Mountain Man’ outlaw”, you would probably Google for “mountain man outlaw” or “troy knapp outlaw”.

Apparently, even the staid old New Yorker magazine has more Internet savvy than Gawker when it comes to SEO. In this article about a Florida man’s curious trade in dinosaur bones, the headline gets to be all punny – Bones of Contention – while the meta title just lays down the facts for SEO-goodness: “Paige Williams: Eric Prokopi’s Curious Trade in Mongolian Dinosaurs”

The New York Times’ history of covering (up?) breast cancer

After Roger Ebert’s death last week, I picked up The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which was recommended during a discussion on how the war on cancer seemed hopeless. I’m not finished with the book yet, but I can already recommend it for being one of the best medical non-fiction books I’ve ever read.

The facts in Mukherjee’s “biography of cancer” seem to indicate that “no simple, universal, or definitive cure is in sight – and is never likely to be”, but Mukherjee also believes that medical science continues to make profound progress in understanding and treating cancer. And if anything, we might be farther along had we funded cancer research with the resources and commitment it requires.

After World War 2 drained interest and funding from cancer research, Mukherjee writes, “cancer again became the great unmentionable, the whispered-about disease that no one spoke about publicly.” As an example, he retells a story from the 2001 book, The Human Side of Cancer, in which a breast cancer activist describes being shunned by the New York Times:

In the early 1950s, Fanny Rosenow, a breast cancer survivor and cancer advocate, called the New York Times to post an advertisement for a support group for women with breast cancer. Rosenow was put through, puzzlingly, to the society editor of the newspaper. When she asked about placing her announcement, a long pause followed. “I’m sorry, Ms. Rosenow, but the Times cannot publish the word breast or the word cancer in its pages. “Perhaps,” the editor continued, “you could say there will be a meeting about diseases of the chest wall.” Rosenow hung up, disgusted.

The original source for Rosenow’s story – The Human Side of Cancer, by Dr. Jimmie C. Holland – has an upbeat coda:

However, [Rosenow and her friend] persisted, and their devoted efforts resulted in what is widely known as Reach to Recovery, a worldwide support program for women with breast cancer, administered today through the American Cancer Society.

Sixty-five years after the era of the Cleaver family, we’re still having serious debates over whether mothers should be allowed to breast-feed children in public. And Lady Justice herself was shamed about her wardrobe malfunction not too long ago. That the Times, still a stodgy paper today, would be too squeamish 65 years ago to print the word “breast” seems, well, self-evident. And so Rosenow’s story has been repeated in much of the major media coverage of Mukherjee’s book, including NPR, the Boston Globe, and even the New York Times itself.

What Ms. Rosenow described may have actually happened (it’s not like she or the Times society editor had Google or Lexis-Nexis back then), but a quick search of the New York Times digital archive shows that the Times had published articles about breasts and cancer throughout the 1950s.

For example, on September 24, 1950, the Times ran a story headlined “Movie Aids Cancer Detection:”

A color film designed to aid women in recognizing early signs of breast cancer is available for showings before Brooklyn women’s groups. Titled “Breast Self-Examination,” it was produced by the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute of the United States Pubic Health Service.

Besides running notices of which local theaters were screening “Breast Self-Examination,” the Times also wrote several articles about the movie’s educational impact: “Cancer Film Saves Lives”, the Times reported on April 22, 1951. And, a year after the film’s introduction, the Times reported its success: 911,000 SAW CANCER FILM; Year’s Record Cited in Showing Self-Test for Women. And of course, the Times found fit to print the obligatory self-back-patting hug-your-newspaper-today feature: NEWSPAPER AID PRAISED; Cancer Experts Say Sufferers Gain by Care Publicity:

Newspapers and the radio were credited today with helping doctors fight cancer by causing sufferers to seek early treatment.

“There is no question but that the information made public by newspapers, radio, and other news services is making it possible for us to see patients with breast cancer earlier than ever before,” Dr. J. Elliott Scarborough, Jr., declared.

In fact, the breast cancer advice that the Times printed in 1952 doesn’t seem far removed from what you’d find in any contemporary medical column:

SELF-EXAMINATION URGED: Women Must Detect Early Stage of Breast Cancer, Doctor Says

If breast cancer is to be detected in its early stages, it is the women themselves who must do it…Dr. Haagensen said the breasts should be examined at least every two months to be reasonably sure they are free of cancer signs…Physicians, Dr. Haagensen said, should teach women self-examination.

Of course, cancer is a far more common topic of public concern and media coverage today. As Mukherjee himself points out, that’s because until relatively recently, humans generally didn’t live long enough to die from cancer. One of the earliest mentions of breast cancer in the Times archive occurs in 1852, in its column titled, Weekly Report of Deaths in the City and County of New York. Between January 10-17, the Times noted 324 deaths, the majority of them children. The top killers are diseases we rarely hear today: 54 deaths from consumption, 28 to convulsions, 20 to scarlet fever, 18 to “Dropsy in the head.” In contrast, “Cancer” and “Cancer of Breast” accounted for 1 death apiece. That cancer has become medicine’s public enemy number one is almost a sign of wealth and progress. In impoverished countries, cancer doesn’t even rank among the top 10 in causes of death.

If you’re interested in taking a depressing trip through medical history, type “cure for cancer” into the Times’ digital archive. You’ll find headlines from every decade – if not every one or two years – since 1852 touting a promising development in the fight against cancer:

If the war against cancer seems like an unending series of misguided schemes and false hope – much like our ongoing wars against terror, drugs, and poverty ‐ it’s because, like those wars, the enemy was never just one monolithic opponent that one kind of “weapon” (and lots of it) could ever defeat. So it’s fitting that the facts may be more complicated than they seem in Ms. Rosenow’s anecdote – because that’s the case with everything related to cancer. One of the most interesting things about Mukherjee’s attempt to write a “biography” of cancer is how, when the literary framing is inadequate for describing cancer, it serves only to more fully illuminate the scope of this war.

Louis C.K. on success: “It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life”

The NYT had a great Q&A with Louis C.K. on Saturday about how successful he’s been in taking control of his own distribution: “The Joke’s on Louis C.K.” (the editor who thought up this headline deserves a bonus).

A key exchange about how “easy” it was for him to achieve success:

NYT: Does it matter that what you’ve achieved, with your online special and your tour can’t be replicated by other performers who don’t have the visibility or fan base that you do?

Why do you think those people don’t have the same resources that I have, the same visibility or relationship? What’s different between me and them?

NYT: You have the platform. You have the level of recognition.

So why do I have the platform and the recognition?

NYT: At this point you’ve put in the time.

There you go. There’s no way around that. There’s people that say: “It’s not fair. You have all that stuff.” I wasn’t born with it. It was a horrible process to get to this. It took me my whole life. If you’re new at this — and by “new at it,” I mean 15 years in, or even 20 — you’re just starting to get traction. Young musicians believe they should be able to throw a band together and be famous, and anything that’s in their way is unfair and evil. What are you, in your 20s, you picked up a guitar? Give it a minute.

In 2010, Louis talked about how he was learning to shoot and edit Louie his own laptop. It probably wasn’t a smooth process to coordinate with actually directing, writing, and acting the show early on, but the ability to exert control over the entire creative process seems to have paid off.

Roger Ebert, the mind-opener

My first exposure to Robert Ebert was two decades ago from his reviews which were packaged in Microsoft’s CD-ROM product, Cinemania. There were a few other reviewers included in that computerized film compendium, but none were as memorable or captivating to me when I was a junior high kid with no real appreciation for art or writing. It seems silly now, but back then it really made an impression on me how an eloquent reviewer such as Ebert could give four stars to seemingly-shallow blockbuster films, the kind that other reviewers would pretentiously dismiss as beneath them. For example, here’s his four star review for Dawn of the Dead:

But, even so, you may be asking, how can I defend this depraved trash? I do not defend it. I praise it. And it is not depraved, although some reviews have seen it that way. It is about depravity.

If you can see beyond the immediate impact of Romero’s imagery, if you can experience the film as being more than just its violent extremes, a most unsettling thought may occur to you: The zombies in “Dawn of the Dead” are not the ones who are depraved. They are only acting according to their natures, and, gore dripping from their jaws, are blameless.

The depravity is in the healthy survivors, and the true immorality comes as two bands of human survivors fight each other for the shopping center: Now look who’s fighting over the bones! But “Dawn” is even more complicated than that, because the survivors have courage, too, and a certain nobility at times, and a sense of humor, and loneliness and dread, and are not altogether unlike ourselves. A-ha.

Ebert judged movies not by his own personal preferences or ideas of what a proper movie should be, he judged them by what they purported to do within their means, and whether they did so with passion and wit. If only more critics, movie or otherwise, had such open minds.

R.I.P. Roger.

Ruby MiniTest Cheat Sheet, Unit and Spec reference

Ruby’s standard testing suite, MiniTest, is in dire need of a quick-and-handy reference for its syntax. I’ve put one together comparing the unit syntax (assert/refute) and the spec syntax (must/wont). You can see it below or download the Google Spreadsheet I made and roll your own sheet (HTML, XLS)

Test syntax

Unit Spec Arguments Examples

assert_empty
refute_empty

must_be_empty
wont_be_empty

obj, msg=nil

assert_empty []
refute_empty [1,2,3]
[].must_be_empty
[1,2,3].wont_be_empty


assert_equal
refute_equal

must_equal
wont_equal

exp, act, msg=nil

assert_equal 2, 2
refute_equal 2,1
2.must_equal 2
2.wont_equal 1


assert_in_delta
refute_in_delta

must_be_within_delta
wont_be_within_delta

exp, act, dlt=0.001, msg=nil

assert_in_delta 2012, 2010, 2
refute_in_delta 2012, 3012, 2
2012.must_be_within_delta 2010, 2
2012.wont_be_within_delta 3012, 2


must_be_close_to
wont_be_close_to

act, dlt=0.001, msg=nil

2012.must_be_close_to 2010, 2
2012.wont_be_close_to 3012, 2


assert_in_epsilon
refute_in_epsilon

must_be_within_epsilon
wont_be_within_epsilon

a, b, eps=0.001, msg=nil

assert_in_epsilon 1.0, 1.02, 0.05
refute_in_epsilon 1.0, 1.06, 0.05
1.0.must_be_within_epsilon 1.02, 0.05
1.0.wont_be_within_epsilon 1.06, 0.05


assert_includes
refute_includes

must_include
wont_include

collection, obj, msg=nil

assert_includes [1, 2], 2
refute_includes [1, 2], 3
[1, 2].must_include 2
[1, 2].wont_include 3


assert_instance_of
refute_instance_of

must_be_instance_of
wont_be_instance_of

klass, obj, msg=nil

assert_instance_of String, "bar"
refute_instance_of String, 100
"bar".must_be_instance_of String
100.wont_be_instance_of String


assert_kind_of
refute_kind_of

must_be_kind_of
wont_be_kind_of

klass, obj, msg=nil

assert_kind_of Numeric, 100
refute_kind_of Numeric, "bar"
100.must_be_kind_of Numeric
"bar".wont_be_kind_of Numeric


assert_match
refute_match

must_match
wont_match

exp, act, msg=nil

assert_match /\d/, "42"
refute_match /\d/, "foo"
"42".must_match /\d/
"foo".wont_match /\d/


assert_nil
refute_nil

must_be_nil
wont_be_nil

obj, msg=nil

assert_nil [].first
refute_nil [1].first
[].first.must_be_nil
[1].first.wont_be_nil


assert_operator
refute_operator

must_be
wont_be

o1, op, o2, msg=nil

assert_operator 1, :<, 2
refute_operator 1, :>, 2
1.must_be :<, 2
1.wont_be :>, 2


assert_output

must_output

stdout = nil, stderr = nil

assert_output("hi\n"){ puts "hi" }
Proc.new{puts "hi"}.must_output "hi\n"


assert_raises

must_raise

*exp

assert_raises(NoMethodError){ nil! }
Proc.new{nil!}.must_raise NoMethodError


assert_respond_to
refute_respond_to

must_respond_to
wont_respond_to

obj, meth, msg=nil

assert_respond_to "foo",:empty?
refute_respond_to 100, :empty?
"foo".must_respond_to :empty?
100.wont_respond_to :empty?


assert_same
refute_same

must_be_same_as
wont_be_same_as

exp, act, msg=nil

assert_same :foo, :foo
refute_same ['foo'], ['foo']
:foo.must_be_same_as :foo
['foo'].wont_be_same_as ['foo']


assert_silent

must_be_silent

-

assert_silent{ 1 + 1 }
Proc.new{ 1 + 1}.must_be_silent


assert_throws

must_throw

sym, msg=nil

assert_throws(:up){ throw :up}
Proc.new{throw :up}.must_throw :up

Test Setup

Unit Spec
setup() before(type = nil, &block)
teardown() after(type = nil, &block)

Mocks

via MiniTest::Mock

  • expect(name, retval, args=[]) – Expect that method name is called, optionally with args or a blk, and returns retval.

    Example:

    @mock.expect(:meaning_of_life, 42)
    @mock.meaning_of_life # => 42
    
    @mock.expect(:do_something_with, true, [some_obj, true])
    @mock.do_something_with(some_obj, true) # => true
    
    @mock.expect(:do_something_else, true) do |a1, a2|
       a1 == "buggs" && a2 == :bunny
    end
    
  • verify – Verify that all methods were called as expected. Raises MockExpectationError if the mock object was not called as expected.

Other syntax

  • def flunk(msg=nil)
  • def pass(msg=nil)
  • def skip(msg=nil, bt=caller)
  • def it (desc="anonymous", &block)
  • i_suck_and_my_tests_are_order_dependent!() – Call this at the top of your tests when you absolutely positively need to have ordered tests. In doing so, you’re admitting that you suck and your tests are weak. (TestCase public class method)
  • parallelize_me!() – Call this at the top of your tests when you want to run your tests in parallel. In doing so, you’re admitting that you rule and your tests are awesome.
  • make_my_diffs_pretty!() – Make diffs for this TestCase use pretty_inspect so that diff in assert_equal can be more details. NOTE: this is much slower than the regular inspect but much more usable for complex objects.

Tutorials

Reference

Google might remove search box from atop its results page

I noticed an interesting thing in Chrome Canary this morning (Chrome Canary is the bleeding edge version of the Google Chrome browser for early adopters to try out) – when you perform a search using the browser omni-addressbar, you’re taken to the standard Google search results page. However, the search bar that has been at the top of the Google results page since seemingly forever, is gone.

In the above image, the Google Canary is using the dark blue theme. Apparently, the Google designers think that if you’re savvy enough to do a search via address bar (instead of going to Google.com to do your searches), then you’ll always do it from the address bar.

The light-gray subnav bar (“Web Images Maps Shopping, etc”) is bumped up to the top of the results page. Removing the search bar (and button) adds a good 30 pixels for more search result real estate. Here’s what 30 pixels looks like on a 500 pixel-high browser window:

What 30 pixels looks like on a Google Search results page

What 30 pixels looks like on a Google Search results page

(note: The black-bar top-nav is also removed in Chrome Canary, though I’m not sure if that’s the result of a different UX decision. That also frees up more screen space)

It’s a sensible design choice; for all I know, this change could’ve been enacted a year ago and I probably wouldn’t have noticed. The search bar as-part-of-the-browser-app is a design pattern that’s only become more entrenched with how search is done on native apps (on Google and on any other service that has full text search), where the search is accessed through a fixed widget or special button. Perhaps this will increase the rate of click throughs for Google search results that aren’t among the top two returned, now that there’s a little more real estate? It may seem like a sliver, but slivers can matter: Google’s and Amazon’s tests famously showed that imperceptible delays would have a significant negative effect on user engagement: in Amazon’s case, every 100ms cut sales on a given page as much as 1%.

Note: at the time of this post, Google Chrome was at version 26.0.1410.43. Canary is at 27.0.1454.0.

Update: Just noticed that Google Operating System (an unofficial blog) covered this issue last week. In his March 16 post, Alex Chitu has these complaints:

Closely integrating Chrome with Google Search breaks a lot of things. For example, you can’t edit the URL to tweak some parameters, the “I’m feeling lucky” feature is no longer available and the omnibox doesn’t include visual spell checking, enhanced suggestions and probably other features.

I think all of these complaints are likely seen as minor:

1. I bet Google’s A/B testing shows that a very negligible part of their user base tries to manually tweak the URL parameters. Hell, I don’t even do that and I’m a developer. When teaching data journalists how to navigate government websites by futzing with the params (which are much more straightforward than Google’s), I’ve found that many of them are amazed that you can even do that. I’m guessing that is very much the same for most Google users in general.

2. Spellcheck is not needed for Google searches. Google spends a significant amount of resources and academic talent to get past user input errors. In fact, Google probably wants to train users *not* to spellcheck their queries, as it slows down the search time (from the user’s perspective). Better to have Google bend over backwards for the user, I suppose.

3. “I’m feeling lucky” is more or less unneeded with how Google has refined its search experience. And it doesn’t seem like a much used feature anyway, though it is a cool quirk.

The bigger picture, though, is that greater visibility for the third or fourth search result is likely to be something that benefits all Google search users than the features listed above.

The Google death and resurrection of Amy Wilentz

Author Amy Wilentz has a fun piece about how Google listed her as “dead” in the rich snippet search result for her name. Her untimely death apparently came from her Wikipedia entry, which was, to say the least, unconventionally created:

(is there a conventional way for Wikipedia entries to come about?)

Google picked up my facts from my Wikipedia entry. My Wikipedia entry, oddly, was put up by Cousin Joel, who has a genealogy obsession, and has assembled an astounding dossier on our family, finding members of it in places as far flung as Dvinsk, Latvia, Hollywood, California, and Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

So it’s not too surprising that my original Wikipedia entry, as conceived by Joel, was — let’s be honest — more about my father (a famous New Jersey judge) than about me. Joel began the entry with my connection to my father, and immediately mentioned my father’s birthdate and the date of his death.

Google is not a subtle thief. If your name on Wikipedia is followed by a birth and death date, apparently those belong to you from that day forward, no matter whose dates they may be. Seen that way, I suppose I should just be glad that I’m not related (as far as Joel knows) to King Solomon, another judge.

The problem was probably not Google’s fault: natural language processing across the entire corpus of the web is a tricky thing. But Wilentz tackles the technical topic of search indexing from a layperson’s standpoint, which, in my opinion, makes it a particularly valuable read as she details the impregneable process of how to correct Google. I understand the technical theory (I think) of Google’s searchbots but I’m not sure that even I know how to get something fixed in the search results. More importantly, I don’t even know that if Google wanted to improve things, how they might do so that wouldn’t crimp the technical workflow. Anyway, Wilentz’s anecdote is well-worth reading, and as you’d expect from an author deserving of a Wikipedia entry, nicely written and entertaining.

At some point after Wilentz wrote her post, her search result correctly lists her as alive (for now). It’s likely a result of her Wikipedia entry’s first line listing her birth date – “Amy Wilentz (born September 1, 1954) is an American journalist and writer. – as opposed to: “Amy Wilentz is an American journalist and writer.”. Note/Update: this theory is wrong, as the corrected birthdate format didn’t happen until today. Matt Cutts responded to the post on Hacker News.

But who really knows the machinations behind Google’s search results? Wilentz’s fixed lifespan reminds me of this entertaining anecdote from (Steven Levy’s “In the Plex”) (non-affiliate link) on how Google engineers fixed a vexing problem of a garden gnome that wouldn’t go away:

But one problem was so glaring that the team wasn’t comfortable releasing Froogle: when the query “running shoes” was typed in, the top result was a garden gnome sculpture that happened to be wearing sneakers. Every day engineers would try to tweak the algorithm so that it would be able to distinguish between lawn art and footwear, but the gnome kept its top position.

One day, seemingly miraculously, the gnome disappeared from the results. At a meeting, no one on the team claimed credit. Then an engineer arrived late, holding an elf with running shoes. He had bought the one-of-a kind product from the vendor, and since it was no longer for sale, it was no longer in the index. “The algorithm was now returning the right results,” says a Google engineer. “We didn’t cheat, we didn’t change anything, and we launched.”

Someday, a Google engineer may find it easier to just ressurect someone than algorithmically fix a search snippet…

Update: Google search engineer Matt Cutts responded on Hacker News. He doesn’t say how it was eventually fixed, but says that the “Feedback / More info” link really does lead to a reporting tool that gets reviewed “and that’s the fastest way to report an issue”

Something worthwhile from the Adria Richards PyCon blowup

The senseless, polarizing feud sparked by a “dongle” joke at PyCon had nowhere to go but to the bottom-feeders. Adria Richards’s artless public shaming of two joking developers led to one of the developers being abruptly fired by his employer, PlayHaven. The firing predictably led to a vicious, cowardly backlash by misogynists, which could only force moderates, whether or not they agreed with her initial reaction, siding with Richards against the ugly attacks.

Now Richards’s has been fired by SendGrid, almost as a ritual sacrifice to the DDoS crowd.

With two martyrs, I don’t have hope that the discussion to become any more rational and less reactionary. But I almost forgot the ex-PlayHaven developer’s apology two days ago, after his own firing and before Richards’s.

In the annals of gracious responses on the Internet, “mr-hank’s” ranks at the top. Of all the ways he could’ve criticized Richards, with an angry Internet mob behind him, he not only called for peace, but killed Richards’s accusation with kindness:

Hi, I’m the guy who made a comment about big dongles. First of all I’d like to say I’m sorry. I really did not mean to offend anyone and I really do regret the comment and how it made Adria feel. She had every right to report me to staff, and I defend her position. However, there is another side to this story. While I did make a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male, no sexual jokes were made about forking. My friends and I had decided forking someone’s repo is a new form of flattery (the highest form being implementation) and we were excited about one of the presenters projects; a friend said “I would fork that guys repo” The sexual context was applied by Adria, and not us.

My second comment is this, Adria has an audience and is a successful person of the media. Just check out her web page linked in her twitter account, her hard work and social activism speaks for itself. With that great power and reach comes responsibility. As a result of the picture she took I was let go from my job today. Which sucks because I have 3 kids and I really liked that job.

She gave me no warning, she smiled while she snapped the pic and sealed my fate. Let this serve as a message to everyone, our actions and words, big or small, can have a serious impact.

I will be at pycon 2014, I will joke and socialize with everyone but I will also be mindful of my audience, accidental or otherwise.
Again, I apologize.

Only Richards and the joking devs know what was said at PyCon, how it was said, and the intent behind it. But mr-hank avoids even the slightest hint of misogyny and instead pleads with Richards to use her “great power” more responsibly in the future.

No accusations of man-hating. No calls for vengeance. Just a straightforward apology and an appeal for everyone to learn the importance of patience in confrontation. Besides the loss of the two jobs and the needless fear and hate generated by this incident, my greatest disappointment is that Richards didn’t get (or ignored) a chance to respond to “mr-hank”, whose gracious apology will likely be forgotten in the angry debate that will continue for the next few days.

Update: Richards messaged me to point out that she did respond to the HN commenter. I do remember reading this and fault myself for not mentioning it, as it was a civil response. I guess what I was disappointed in not seeing was a full-blown dialogue, but it’s hardly Richards’ or mr-hank’s fault that that didn’t happen amid the fallout and the Internet’s rush to judgment.

Richards’ response is posted below:

Thanks for speaking up, contributing your viewpoint on HN and not attacking me.

I’m sorry to hear your employer deciding to not to work with you on this and I hope they reconsider, bring you back on and dealing with it constructively.

For context, I’m a developer evangelist.

That means I’m an advocate for developers, male and female. While I hear abou demanding bosses with impossible deadlines for product launches, I also hear about the experiences of women working at startups.

In both cases I offer suggestions, ideas and mentoring to help the developers become problems solvers. Sometimes the answer is our API or not answering email after 7pm while other times it about being assertive and shedding impostor syndrome.

The forking joke set the stage for the dongle joke.

Yes, this time I decided I didn’t want to argue my perspective. I decided instead to accept it bothered me and took action based on the PyCon Code of Conduct. It sounds like if I’d said something about the forking you would have denied it having a sexual association. Not sure if I smiled but I’m also unsure what facial expression you would have expected.

I just got done writing my blog post you can read here: http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont…

See you next year.

Catching Ernest Hemingway for Vogue

I’m done buying physical books – except when I go to The Strand in the East Village, where I seem to never leave without buying something.

Vogue: The Editor’s Eye is my latest purchase. I have enough photo books but I liked that this one is purportedly about the influence of the fashion editors on the magazine’s photography. As a photographer, I’ve come to realize that editing is as important as the actual on-camera skills. Maybe even moreso in this day of near infinite film rolls.

For every hour I spend taking pictures, I probably spend five to ten hours picking out photos, organizing, and then publishing them. Even on my Flickr account, where I dump photos for archival purposes, I probably upload fewer than 1 out of 50 photos that I actually take.

Anyway, The Editor’s Eye is still worth it for the photography alone. The book covers eight fashion editors and devotes a few pages of text to their biographies. But the process of editing – it being more a confluence of personality, experience, and temperment as much as it is skill – is hard to capture in words and the book doesn’t shed any particular light on the work. It’s not a surprise, then, that fashion editors were uncredited until Anna Wintour took over in 1988.

The above 1950 photo by Clifford Coffin of Ernest Hemingway and Jean Patchett is one of my favorites in the book. The fashion editor then, Babs Simpson, said she was sent to Havana to “catch” Hemingway, without even a single phone number to reach him at. She went to the Ambos Mundos, one of his favorite drinking spots, and got his phone number from the manager.

Simpson described the circumstances of the difficult photo session to writer Dodie Kazanjian:

We wanted to start early in the morning before it got hot. When we got there at eight o’clock, as agreed, nobody was in sight. Two champagne glasses were bubbling away, though, and finally Hemingway appeared, with a very young and good looking Basque priest.

Hemingway took a great shine to Jean, of course, and I got on very well with the Basque priest…but it got worse and worse as the day went on, because Hemingway and the priest got drunker and drunker…Isn’t [Hemingway] revolting? They wanted us to go and see the pelota or something or other with them afterward. They wanted to spend their lives with us. So we got the first plane we could out of there.

You can order Vogue: The Editor’s Eye from Strand’s Website. Apparently HBO did a documentary with the same title a few months ago.

The cost and benefits of being a bellman

I’m currently reading “Heads in Beds” by Jacob Tomsky, a purported insider’s account of the hotel business. Besides being pretty entertaining, it’s full of interesting facts (it costs $30 to $40 to turn over the average hotel room), helpful advice (speak out the employee’s name when making a request you don’t want said employee to forget), and unpleasant anecdotes, such as what happened to a pro athlete’s bottle of cologne when the athlete stiffed his bellman.

The worth of a bellman is a recurring topic in the book. Even in the age of wheeled suitcases, a good bellhop can still make a living. While the wages are low – the median salary is $20,880, according to current Labor Department statistics – a Manhattan bellhop who’s a “real hustling bullshit artist” might make “well over a hundred thousand dollars” annually, Tomsky claims, from an endless stream of ones and fives. And a guest who is too cheap to spare a couple bucks? Tomsky writes: “He shouldn’t use his toothbrush that night (or ever again, really).”

So when Tomsky, then a recent college graduate and college loan debtor, is offered a promotion to be a bellman or a manager, it’s not a straightforward decision. The bellman position pays much better for fewer hours. But his general manager frames the tradeoff in a memorable way:

(emphasis mine)

“I trust you, Tommy. I’m going to offer you a choice. You’re done with the front desk. I heard you’ve started to loosen up down there, started in with the jokes.”

“Oh, well, I hope I haven’t—”

“Not to worry. It’s natural. You’ve outgrown the position. So I’d like to offer you two opportunities. Whichever one you want is yours. As you are aware, there is a bellman position recently available. Extremely recently. It’s yours if you want it. You are fantastic with the guests. Or.”

“Or?”

“Housekeeping manager. Management, Tommy. Take over the evening position down there. You’d be in charge of turndown, scheduling, purchasing, and a thousand other things. A staff of 150.

“Let’s talk money. Housekeeping means ten-hour shifts or more, on salary. When you break it down hourly, you will make less than you are making now. You’ll have to purchase your own suits. The work is physically demanding, the staff is large and can be difficult. It’s a very challenging position. Bellman? You’ll double your money immediately and keep the eight-hour shifts. Zero responsibility.”

“You think I should take the bellman position?”

“Do that, and you’ll never be anything else in your life. Hate to say it, but it’s true. I’ve seen it my whole career: Show me a twenty-year-old kid getting his first job as a bellman, and I’ll show you a seventy-year-old bellman who started fifty years ago. You grow accustomed to that pay grade, and taking a step forward will always mean cutting your money in half. No one takes that step.”

“Housekeeping,” I said.

Not a bad lesson, for the hotel business or any business.

Excerpt via: Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality (non-affiliate link) by Jacob Tomsky (2012).

A relevant 2001 essay: “How to Correctly Tip a Bellman