Berkeley Blog

It Takes a Family to Feed One Athlete

t’s July and once again I’m sucked into the vortex of the Tour de France. In the first week of the race, a young rider from Toulouse who was in an early breakaway, won in on a steep but short summit finish in a drenching downpour. One of the race moderators, mentioned how the winner, Biel Kadri, used to raid his mother’s small grocery store after a ride and scarf all her remaining baguettes and cheese. This reminded me of feeding my former bicycle-racer son before and after a ride, and I thought of all the mothers, and fathers, who similarly fueled their children’s racing careers over the past century.

It takes a family to feed one athlete.

Back from New York City and upstate New York, a contrast in cultures. In the world’s ninth largest megacity, one hears a multitude of tongues and imbibes a global potpourri of cultures – an anthropological feast.

Upstate New York, a few miles north of Ithaca, is home to Cornell, where anthropologists are trained. Multi-generational dairy farmers coexist uneasily with newcomer vineyard growers, and organic farmers, not to mention the thousands of college professors and hundreds of summer city dwellers, whose opulent homes hug Lake Cayuga. In this part of the Fingerlakes, white is the dominant skin tone except for a what seems like a (self?) segregated section of downtown Ithaca. The language is English except for Mexican vineyard workers, who labor year round, even in the snow and subzero cold.

Aurally, NYC is the cacophony of machine noisemakers. Ithaca is birdsong and wave lapping, thunder and owl hoots.

Babies are a bellwether for the human condition. In NYC, parents and a bevy of nannies marshal solemn-looking babies through crowded, humid streets. Some babies wail, but most seem on mute, as if shrouded against the tumult by an inner protective shield. They had already become quintessential New Yorkers.

At the Ithaca Farmer’s Market, set up in a wooden arcade extending like a cross in two directions, babies yelped and gurgled as their parents stopped to talk with other stroller-bound shoppers. The babies reminded me of the spritely fawns that caper through the pastures in the surrounding area: free to roam but never far from mom, or dad.

Upon my return to Berkeley/Albany, just in the space of ten days’ absence, some drastic differences:

First, our beloved French bakery, La Farine, vanished. The windows are papered over with brown wrapping paper and a small sign on the door says because of an ongoing dispute with the landlord, the bakery did not renew its lease.

I ran into a friend on Solano, the street descending 200 feet from the tunnel in north Berkeley to San Pablo Avenue in Albany, and while bemoaning the loss of our culinary delights, she did see a positive return. “I might be able to lose some weight now,” she remarked.

Then, while cycling in the Berkeley hills today, I noticed that the descent down Grizzly Peak to Spruce was smoother than normal. Was it my tires? Then, I looked down and saw that the stretch of road up to Centennial, which descends to UC Berkeley, had been repaved. The joy – like its realization -- sank in slowly, and I’m still relishing that pothole-free descent.

And all my clients seemed to have survived despite my complete lack of attention to their needs, making me wonder whether I might not take more vacations in the near future.

Another Publishing Magnate Bites the Dust

A publisher whose print magazines, including Maxim and The Week, are still in full swing despite the detritus of print media, died this week. Felix Dennis, a gaminlike Brit and underdog of the ruling class, made his hundreds of millions by playing to the baser instincts of human nature....much as Shakespeare once did. He loved porn -- whether it was sex porn as in Maxim or computer porn as in Computer Shopper or pop music porn as in Blender -- and hired the best writers, like Charlie Cooper, to write great prose about porn for the people. A poet himself, he not only wrote thousands of rhymes, he also recited them at inebrious readings, much like orgies of old.

I met Felix inside a covered tent at an early Comdex...maybe in the late 80s or early 90s...while he was publishing Computer Shopper, a magazine whose 900-page heft yielded a google of product ads, which in those days were informative -- full of specs and functions -- rather than phantasmogoric. Someone introduced me to him -- I think it was Dennis Brothers, the author of MicroPhone, the telecom software for the Macintosh, which the company I worked for developed and sold.

Felix was a little guy... even sitting down that was obvious. Very little. With round, thick-paned glasses and smoking something, perhaps a cigar or a little cigar, which is what got him in the end.

He told me about the girlie magazines he published in the U.K., Australia, and other parts of the former British empire. He got into computer publishing because he saw a market for a compendium like Computer Shopper, akin to an Amazon storefront for all things computing. He loved publishing and we must have spent an hour talking about the industry. I didn't find him sexist, more like someone who missed out on love, loved to shock, and who made do with physical pleasure (He was said to have bragged about having dozens of mistresses.) and great wealth. And also, great timing. 

Fix-It Weekend

Things tend to break sequentially in my life, much like the Fukushima meltdown. This weekend, I had my first flat tire in years, high up in the Berkeley hills. Although it was a Sunday and lots of cyclists pedaled past asking if I had everything, I would have never asked for help. Cyclist’s Code of Honor: Fix Your Own Flats.

I remembered all the techniques my former bicycle racing coach, Mike Cox, had showed me for changing a flat, so I put the bike upside down, resting it on the seat, removed the front wheel, and got out my tools. While a single mosquito water-boarded me with its buzz, I pronged off the tire and felt inside to discover what caused the puncture. A tiny piece of gravel had gone through the rubber, which was getting worn from cycling around the pock-marked Berkeley roads.

Not everything in Berkeley is Elysian.

The scary part – which also proved the easiest task – was filling up the tube, once I’d nestled it back into the tire. That’s because I was using a newfangled CO2 cartridge, which I’d carried around for a few years but had never used. The illustrations on the instruction sheet were dead simple, and within 2 seconds, my tire was back to full pressure.

Later, I began to wonder if this cartridge emits the same CO2 that’s destroying the planet through global warming. On the other hand, it saved me the agony of 5 minutes of hand pumping plus the inconvenience of carrying a bicycle pump.

Sometimes, I can sympathize with the polluters.

So then, I got a new client who wanted me to Skype. I have an iPhone with an operating system so antediluvian, Skype wouldn’t have anything to with it. So I cycled (with my commuter bicycle, not the hill-riding vehicle) to the Apple store down on Fourth Street in Berkeley, and it looked like a Castro Street parade. Geniuses and whatever they call their salespeople all wore black and sported more ear and nose and lip rings, tattoos, and fluorescent hair colorings than you’d find backstage at a Cirque du Soleil dressing room.

I had brought along my computer, a 2008 MacMini, which I found out is nearly obsolete, just in case. It took the MacMini a really long time to download the current operating system for the iPhone and in the meantime, I realized I might as well get a new MacMini running the latest OS, Mavericks (what cool names Apple or its branding agency comes up with), so I could do things I couldn’t even imagine I could do.

And because I couldn’t even imagine what I could do with all these new operating systems, I signed up for a year of one-on-one tutoring at the Apple store for only $99.

The MacMini is way faster, and smarter, much like the CO2 tire pump eliminator cartridge. And the latest system on the iPhone emits some euphonious new ringtones plus a screen that lights up like a Van Gogh midnight blue sky. Alas, however, I still can’t install Skype, and will have to wait until I meet the Apple genius I signed up to meet next week will solve the original conundrum.

The final breakdown was my cracking a crown that clamped too harshly on a loose shard in a package of Trader Joe’s frozen steamed clams. (If I’d have finished law school – which I flunked out in the 60s -- I might have filed a civil suit.) I went to my dentist, whose children’s college tuitions were largely funded by the genetic deficiencies of my enamel and the lack of fluoride in Bremerhaven’s water supply, where my decaying teeth first emerged.

I was shocked when I walked into the familiar room, its walls absorbent with the tortures of thousands of patients past.

Dr. Olson had gone high-tech. Lighting the corner was a cheap screen, and protruding from the wall like a nubile dancer’s leg was a new x-ray machine. The last time I went to see Olson, a descendant of dentists whose daughter is continuing the line, he had pulled out a tattered manuscript, handwritten pages documenting my dental history. Now, everything was to be on the Internet. Or perhaps the Dental Cloud.

During the three hours I spent in the chair – for a root canal, insertion of a titanium pin, cauterization of the gums, and a temporary crown – the x-ray machine was put to use at least six times. And immediately after each x-ray, the screen displayed a vision of the latest iteration of my mouth. It finally felt as if dentistry – or at least my dentist – had leaped from the Middle Ages into the 21^st century.

While waiting for the cement to settle, Olson wistfully asked his assistant, who told me the staff had spent more than a day in training to operate this equipment, whether she thought one day they both might be replaced by robots.

Frankly, I hope we’ll find a technology to prevent cavities and eliminate dentists, robotic or not, completely.

From a Service to a Step 'n Fetch It Economy

The other day I was walking down San Pablo Avenue in Albany, where just 160 years ago gold miners used to carouse away their earnings at French bordellos and bars, when I saw a Google maps car with the camera mounted on top parked in the lot of our Goodwill store. So a Google maps driver can only afford to shop at a thrift store?

And now, on my bicycle rides around town, I’ve had to avoid collisions with Spoonrocket food delivery cars speeding along my bicycle streets and sprouting red flags like the horns on stampeding bulls.

Another disruptive service: I signed up for a private driver to take me to the airport at 3:45 a.m. and pick me up 10 days later at 12:30 a.m. – hours when public transport doesn’t exist here in the SF Bay Area – through a new online site called Wingz, which undercuts taxi fares significantly. I even got photos and phone numbers for my drivers, who look like young, clean-cut immigrants from Afghanistan and China, respectively, both displacing their licensed taxi-driver brethren from an earlier immigration .

The promise of a service economy heralded in the 80s by Alvin Toffler has yielded a step ‘n fetch it economy for some. For those who create these digital delivery alternatives, on the other hand, it’s a far better world.

This weekend, the night before the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in SF, I went to the MacIndie party hosted by my longtime BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh Users Group) friend and Mac developer, Chuck Soper, at Jillians, a restaurant located across the street from the Apple event. The place was packed with young, gawky men in t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, most eating voluminous amounts of pizza and chips.

I walked around asking people what they did and it was a retinue of one app maker after another. Co-founder of Odyssey Translator, Marty McDonough showed me the neatest iPhone app: it produces audio translations of tourist-like touch-screen queries, such as Where is the bathroom? After a while all the app hype began to merge into one long refrain. I needed to get out.

Remember, I’m a Berkeley type: no car, no TV. So I hadn’t seen any of the new HBO TV series, Silicon Valley. But I signed up to see the last two episodes of this series at an event sponsored by Techcrunch the same night as the Macindie party and it took place at the Metreon theater, located in the same building. I brought along another old BMUG friend, Chris Allen, who has an app, Infinite Canvas, which does a whole lot of things that digital publishers will appreciate.

The two last Silicon Valley episodes were eerily accurate in their depiction of the geeks I had just talked to at the party. It was as if Mike Judge, the creator, had dragged some of the MacIndie developers onto his Hollywood set. The storyline was raucously hilarious and also quite plausible. In fact, my friend Chris thought that the fake apps presented in the fake – with cameos by tech digerati Kara Swisher and Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington -- Techcrunch Disrupt contest depicted in these episodes represented real startups.

You know you’re living in a reality distortion field when it’s almost impossible to distinguish satire from reality. 

Return of the Spanish Inquisition: Happy Hour Fitness

Xabier Zapata is arguably the zaniest spinning instructor in the world. Equal parts drill sergeant and pantomimist, Xabi, as he’s affectionately called by his enthusiastic devotees, uses exaggerated body gestures to instruct sweaty spinners at his Happy Hour Fitness on Ensenada off Solano Avenue in north Berkeley. The gym is strategically located a block away from La Farine, whose morning buns replenish about half the 500 calories Xabi claims one burns up in his 40 minute workout, which is followed by 15 minutes on the mat.

The language barrier presents itself because Xabi – who came to this country from Spain in 2000 -- speaks a kind of Basquerized English. Given the pumped-up volume of the music, the sound of pumping lungs, and Xabi’s accent, I usually can’t hear whether he’s telling us to increase or decrease the resistance on our wheel. Instead, I watch which way his hand turns the resistance wheel or wait until someone in the class yells out “up” or “down?”

One word I do understand: relax. When between double-time sprints, he tells us to “Relax,” I know from experience that he wants us to go fast but not at thrombosis-inducing speeds of double-time.

Spinning instructors are like DJs on steroids. Xabi spins a savvy selection of old rock standards, from the Clash to Bob Dylan as well as a scary riff on Ravel’s Bolero, which portends 9 minutes of increasingly more difficult resistance while standing up the entire time. During slower parts, he converts us into fitness fanatics by delivering a series of hypnotic daily homilies.

There’s always a different screed against sloth: “You feel happier when your body is strong, when you exercise every day.” Xabi’s gospels are truisms, but the thing about a truism is that most of the time, it’s true.

And like Mother Teresa, he lays on the personal touch. He knows every spinner by name, as well as each person’s physical abilities, injuries, and fitness goals. If your form is out of whack during a session, he’ll shout out, “Thomas, relax your neck,” “Patricia, not so much resistance, you need to spin faster.” And if you’re having mechanical issues, he jumps off his own bike and runs over to fix yours while barking orders at the rest of the spinners.

The crazy part of the class is Xabi’s showmanship, which is borderline gay, or could just a form of Basque humor. Today, on a slower number, he shook his shoulders from side to side as if he were doing a striptease. Once he pulled off his fluorescent orange top to reveal a matted, hairy chest. “This is why I make a big sweat,” he expounded, as if he were teaching a biology class.

When, near the end of an arduous routine, Xabi emits his soccer-field whistle – in decibels equivalent to announcing a 5-alarm fire – my eardrums seem close to exploding. Some day I know this class will make me deaf.

Is there happiness in Xabi’s spinning sessions? During the class, it’s more like self-imposed immolation, a Spanish Inquisition of the Fittest, but afterwards, there’s a 24-hour surge of happiness, which slowly dissipates until the next class. That's why I think of Xabi's studio as Happy after-an-Hour Fitness. 

Hiding the Past Is the European Way

Google’s going to have a hard time assessing whether – under the new EU court ruling -- it needs to bury the links to people in the 28 EU nations who want the world to forget about their past infidelities, indebtedness, incarcerations, and mass incinerations. 

There’s a lot of history there, including crimes committed during WWII, which won’t pertain to the new ruling because that conflict took place before the creation of the Internet. Too bad, because I sure would have liked to have seen email exchanges between Adolf and his squadron, although investigative journalist Edwin Black only a little more than ten years ago dug up records of IBM's Watson supplying Nazis punch card technology so they could whip through census records to identify and transport Jews to their death. The Nazis even organized their concentration camp train schedules using IBM punch cards and software.

Well, I’m sure this kind of information would evaporate from Google and other search engines were IBM to request a ban based on the irreparable harm these then-nonexistent links might inflict on its reputation, perhaps not in Europe but in the U.S. Well, maybe not even in the U.S., where it’s dubious whether IBM’s reputation as an innovative technology company could descend even further since it sold its hardware assets to the Chinese and hoards even more stillborn patents than does Intellectual Trollers (Ventures?).

WWII exacerbated the European’s need for privacy. Actually, it’s more like a passion for secrecy, which implies you might have done something morally awry or just plain illegal. Privacy just means you’d rather not share your life’s activities, such as the fact that you sprinkle high-fiber flakes on your scrambled eggs each morning and you love watching slash-and-burn flicks.

The U.S. had its own witch hunt periods as well: the Salem witch hunts for uppity women and the McCarthy witch hunts for labor union leaders, progressives, and people who today might be part of the Occupy movement. My first week at Reed College in 1963, I learned how to write a pamphlet with Bob Mandel, a fellow student and son of KPFA commentator and Soviet expert William Mandel, who challenged the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1960 by calling they themselves un-American: ”men who sit here in violation of the Constitution.”

So I have my own experience with witch hunts, but because I have always supported the hunted rather than the hunters, I would prefer to keep the records of their transgressions forever open. Otherwise, without a record of our crimes, albeit some might prove to be merely embarrassing peccadilloes, how will we be able to preserve history? And without history, how can we possibly continue to create a wise future?

The new EU ruling on link killing in search engines could kick our collective memory into a coma from which it would never again awake.

Obits: Showcasing Deaths Shows What Still Lives

Here’s why I read obits in The NY Times everyday. Not for schadenfreude, because people my age and even younger are dead and I’m still breathing. Not because I used to edit obits of dead professors for the University of California so I can infer what’s been deliberately left out of the story (debts, drinking, and depression). And not because I’m secretly drafting my own obit, which I’m sure won’t extend beyond the hyperlocal Berkeley news site.

It’s because obits tell stories that reflect what matters in our culture and in our past. They surprise me by demarcating the differences between then and now, and also the similarities. They define what makes us human and also what makes some of us inhuman.

Obits put a life in perspective. Imagine Monica Lewinsky’s obit half a century from now. Her Scarlet Letter capers with Bill Clinton (and his with hers, which have already been stashed beneath his piles of eponymous Global Initiatives) might appear insignificant should a future U.S. president engage in even more scandalous behavior:  group sex parties with the Brazilian ambassadorial entourage? Gang rapes of visiting White House Girl Scout delegations? The imagination is perverse.

Obits are histories of war, memes, art, music, movies, race, gender, the law, sports, business and crime. If you collected all the obits from the Times since its beginning in 1851,  you’d have a chronicle of U.S. history more compelling than the stuff they make you read in the fifth grade about why Washington crossed the Delaware, which is all I can recall from fifth grade U.S. history. In fact, I can’t even recall why he crossed that river, although I can see a painting of him with his hamantaschen-shaped hat and white knee-highs standing in the front of an open rowboat that looked ready to keel.

Of course, there are all the people you’ve known who didn’t make the obits of The NY Times and who should have. Like my friend Eckhart Wintzen, a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur whose company, Origin (bought by Phillips) was the first to include an environmental impact assessment in its annual investor reports. Eckhart tried to get the Dutch government to make such assessments mandatory for large companies because he believed early on that our planet was in trouble and businesses should take responsibility for protecting it.

He was the first funder of Wired magazine, and bought a copy of the first issue for each of his thousands of employees. He built the Expression College of Digital Arts in Berkeley, San Jose, and San Francisco because he believed that working in the arts could not only save the planet but also inspire its people.

Eckhart was a child during WWI in the Netherlands, which was occupied by the German military. He told me the last year of the war – 1945 – his family subsisted on tulip bulbs. “Was it hard?” I asked. He roared with laughter and grinned in his disconcerting yet beckoning Dionysian way. “They were delicious,” he said. And smacked his lips.

What I Want on My Home Page of The New York Times

I’m one of those page turners who likes a tactile read, one that connects my fingers as well as my eyes to the printed word. Reading stuff online doesn’t make a lasting imprint on my cerebral cortex as does a physical engagement with each section of the daily paper. I’ll admit, my reading habits are ingrained-peripatetic: I browse first the front page of the business section, find the obits, then the arts, special sections like science, the editorials, and finally front page news.

To lure me into become a digital-only subscriber, which I tried for a year, I’d want to be able to design my own home page:

--Obits of anyone except for athletes (bicyclists excepted), rock musicians, politicians, and real estate developers.

--Book review of the day, especially if the review is written by critic Dwight Garner, whose literary talent is equal to or greater than most authors whose books he critiques.

--Any high-tech news unless it’s about big data, cybersecurity, or the doings at tech dinosaurs like Microsoft, Dell, IBM, Cisco, and Hewlett Packard.

--Any article written on any topic by Natalie Angier, science writer, and Kim Severson, who used to cover the South and now writes about food. Also, Patricia Leigh Brown, who writes about anything that interests her, usually some cultural aspect of life in Northern California. Yes, these are all women writers…is that a surprise?

It’s also important to delete sections I almost never read, like any news about baseball, hockey, soccer, tennis, skiing, and football, although I did read about that guy who owned the Clippers and made racist remarks, and I also read about the concussions among football players, but those stories are about racism and sports injuries rather than football per se.

(The Times used to have a wonderful reporter, Samuel Abt, who covered the grand tours of cycling, but he’s gone and so is the coverage except for newswire service bites.)

My personal home edition would take into account that I also skip anything to do with real estate and news about kidnappings (unless it’s 200 girls kidnapped at once), rapes, conflicts in Africa, South American jungles, and Chinese cities, self-immolations, train crashes in India, climate-change deniers, the Pope, most politicians, and natural disasters such as tornadoes, floods, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, mudslides, and avalanches. Well, I do read about avalanches in areas where I used to go mountaineering, just because I feel glad I’m not there any more.

Dave Winer came up with the concept of the river of news, as in having your news delivered fresh in a constant stream, like a running body of water.

Right now, The NY Times digital home page is more like a cesspool. At least, it would be nice if I could make it my personalized cesspool.

Elder Rights Advocate Linda Jacobson Offers End Game Options

I always knew she had terrific acting chops – in the 90s she was the voice of a puppet in an all-women’s music group, d’Cuckoo, that made music and just plain weird sounds using high-tech tools and props. Now, Linda Jacobson, former virtual reality whiz at Xerox PARC, is a senior care consultant for folks planning out their end game. In a way, applying lessons from high-tech to designs for aging well seems logical since assisted living could certainly get an assist from tech, including VR.

Today, Jacobson gave a talk with slideshow to the Last Friday Ladies Lunch, a monthly event I host at the Hillside Club, just off the gourmet ghetto section in north Berkeley. There’s always one man present, and today, Raines Cohen, a leader in the senior cohousing movement who used be a leader in the computer user group movement (A leader is always a leader.), participated in a lively discussion about options for aging as ourselves, not as patients, inmates, or defective beings.

What we learned was enlightening: if you’re poor or if you’re rich, there are lots of great options for assisted living, a business created recently, in the 80s, and run mainly by profit-making entrepreneurs. If you’re in the middle of the inequality seesaw, you’ll need at least $60K a year to book a room – or part of a room – in an assisted living place within the East Bay. More, if you want to live out in Walnut Creek or Danville. And don’t expect Medicare to foot any part of that expense.

Assisted living just covers room, board, and housekeeping functions as well as some community and cultural activities. If you need medical care, drugs, and anything else related to health, expect to pay extra.

Jacobson brought up alternative options to assisted living residences that are popping up all over, such as granny pods – little houses one can erect behind one’s house that in many states don’t need to follow zoning and building restrictions; senior villages, such as Ashby Village in Berkeley, which offer at-home services; small, assisted living houses, many of which are run by Filipinos in the East Bay; and senior cohousing.

Of all the choices for commercial residences, Jacobson waxed rhapsodic about Bayside Park in Emeryville. "It's like a cruise ship in port." But it can take years to get into a place like this, so if you feel the mind is starting to need a reboot, it might be time to sign up or at least talk to Jacobson at info@elderstogether.com. 

Why Would a Woman Want to Code?

Last night, I went to a gala fundraiser for a documentary called Code (www.codedocumentary.com) about women in technology by director Robin Hauser Reynolds. It was held at Pinterest headquarters, located in what has become a tech forest encroaching San Francisco’s formerly seedy south of Market district. The interior of this venue – monumental ceilings embroidered with a mezzanine for offices and a gleaming concrete floor – was festooned with paper lanterns and a huge screen, where the director showed a teaser for the film, basically talking heads stating the obvious: few women, little diversity in tech jobs.

Megan Smith, VP of Google X, was asked to speak after Reynolds gave Google dubious credit for having been the first to make public its poor record in diversity hiring. Smith said the problem wasn’t the “fault” of technology companies. Rather, it was a historical condition, and one, that she, “a card carrying optimist,” was sure could be remedied.

The director is not a coder, which is OK. She’s a documentary filmmaker. But except for Megan Smith, a former coder, and Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, a former coder who was also present, I didn’t encounter a single coder in the voluminous crowd. However, all were enthusiastic about the film and the need to encourage women to code.

OK, as I told the filmmaker, I used to code Fortran – which you had to learn on your own because there weren’t comp sci classes at Reed College in the 60s – and found it useful but tedious. Maybe it’s because there weren’t apps in those days, so my coding just helped me do regression analysis to prove a central point in my senior thesis, that Senator Wayne Morse, who had been one of two senators to oppose the Vietnam War (specifically, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution), would get reelected anyway because voters cared more about state than foreign policy issues. Turns out, I was wrong, but not because of the coding.

In the 70’s, I oversaw a project at the University of California, where I worked in the Office of the President, to computerize a directory of all employees, including professors, in the UC system. Although I didn’t do any coding, I worked with a coding architect, and learned from that experience as well. It was far more exciting to edit obituaries of university professors, which was also part of my job as assistant editor.

When I joined a small software company in the 80s as marketing director, I asked the CEO if we could hire at least one female programmer. Our team, of course, was all male, except for the receptionist, an international sales director, and myself. So I placed an ad with a local community college, and we hired a woman who graduated in comp sci top of her class.

The first thing Melody did was place a deodorizer on top of her Macintosh to let the programmer sitting next to her know she didn’t like his body odor as well as the wafts of rancid pizza on top of his Macintosh. Within a year, Melody quit, and the downstairs programmers’ den reverted to testosterone status.

In the 90s, I started a networking group for women in tech called Gracenet, named after Grace Hopper, who wrote COBAL and was the first woman admiral of the U.S. Navy. We didn’t necessarily want more women to code; we just wanted women to receive equal treatment and opportunity in tech firms. And with our DisGraceful Award in Advertising campaign, we wanted the media to stop portraying women as tech ninnies.

I had lunch with Larry Page in 2000, and he wrote a check to help support Gracenet and to encourage women to apply for jobs at Google. His mom, he told me, had taken up comp sci after his parents divorced, and he wanted to have at least half his technical staff be women. I think he’s done better with the AI goals he mentioned to me then than with achieving gender parity among his staff.

OK, now it’s 2014, and nothing seems to have changed. Women are still not into coding but there’s a resurgent effort to make women want to code. My question is, why would women – or men – want to code? I asked this at INFUSION, the monthly lunch I host at Berkeley Repertory Theater, when Ali Partovi spoke earlier this year about Code.org, which is promoting the universal acquisition of coding skills in early education.

I’ll admit, several professional coders spoke about the power and joy computing gave them. They sounded like some soccer fanatics I know, although instead of a ball, they move bits. So there can be pleasure in the task itself, but that’s not the main argument Code's director would argue: by 2050, we’ll need lots more coders, so women should get into the field.

Taking this argument backwards, there were lots of jobs for engineers in the 50s, so should women have become engineers? Or miners in the late 19^th century, when mining jobs were plentiful?

From my personal and professional experiences dating and working with programmers (respectively), I don’t find them the happiest people in the world. In many cases, it seems like a fallback profession for smart people who can’t find a job doing what they’d really like to do, like building machines, or running a company, or shooting a documentary film.

OK, I get it. Coding is a way to make money. But why would a woman want to code?