Carscafmoo

I am not a professional book critic. Aside from a few grade school book reports, I’m not even an amateur book critic, come to think of it.  However, the power of the reaction I’m having to Ron Chernow’s “new” (2017) biography of Ulysses S. Grant has compelled me to come out of blog-retirement and try my hand at this critic game.

Let me preface this review by saying that, if there is a target audience for Grant, hoooooo boy am I it. Not only am I just generally into history, as someone who grew up in a town burned to the ground during the conflict, I am specifically into the Civil War. Plus, everyone loves a story where the good guys win, and the good guys won that war, and Grant won it for them!

And, while I recognize the flaws in the “Great Man” theory of history, there is just something inspirational about the idea that a single person can, through sheer force of will, manage to leave an indelible mark on the world that can be recognized as truly their mark. And there can be no doubt that Grant left his mark. The idea that a relative nobody, flawed in every way, dismissed from an army known for inebriation for his excessive inebriation, would rise to the rank of Lt. General, effectively secure the second election of Abraham Lincoln (“With malice toward none, and charity for all…” — ah, so great!!! So almost didn’t happen!), and defeat not just Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy but slavery itself in a war of brother against brother in the very land I grew up in, well… let’s just say that could be quite captivating.

I am the kind of person who thinks — regularly — that he doesn’t know enough about Reconstruction. It sorta gets skipped over in school along with the rest of the second half of the 19th century. Certainly there must be a book about it somewhere that might be pretty good? Oh, hey, luckily for me, Grant was President during Reconstruction, he did that too. So yes, there is a book, and it’s called Grant, and I’m going to read it now, thanks.

And, having read it, here’s the verdict: if you’re like me, and you live for this stuff, then don’t read it. Read literally anything else — it doesn’t even have to be about history. In fact, you’d be better off never reading again than reading this book. If you really want to read something about the Civil War, I cannot recommend Battle Cry of Freedom enough, but just don’t read this book. It is, just, like, really bad.

There are so many things wrong with it that it’s hard to know where to begin, but I’ll start here: I’ve been reading it for the past 6 months, and his presidency just finally ended. It’s something like 1400 pages (unclear how much of that is endnotes), and maybe two of those pages are interesting? I am not one to give up on a book — especially after 6 months — but if he doesn’t die soon I’m going to kill him.

If I had to pinpoint any one thing that makes the book such a slog, it’s the hamfistedness of the writing. This is partly organizational: the book unfolds pretty chronologically, which means that the major themes have to be woven into the book as they come up. Unfortunately, most historical figures don’t go through thematic phases in life, painters excepted, so that means themes are randomly interspersed and have to be called out explicitly when events supporting them happen. So, we find out that Grant pushed for black soldiers to be allowed into the Army during the war, which shows his ongoing commitment to civil rights for former slaves; 250 pages later, we find out that he sent federal troops into Louisiana to put down the Klan and secure black voting rights in 1871, which shows his ongoing commitment to civil rights for former slaves; and another 200 pages down the line, we find out he met with a delegation of black southerners at the White House in 1875, which shows his ongoing commitment to civil rights for former slaves. Not only is each instance called out exactly like that, each one needs a few paragraphs of introduction with callbacks to previous instances. It’s infuriating, and honestly, it’s boring, which is frustrating because I think if it was organized differently, it could be really interesting (not to mention, shorter).

Mr. Chernow, if you’re reading this (hahahaha), here’s a suggestion: rather than weave themes throughout the book which need to be called out so explicitly and repeatedly, start each section with a chronological history of what happened. Then, spend a chapter or more on each of the themes so we can see how they evolved during this section of Grant’s life. To re-use the above example: before the war, Grant marries a slave-owner and has an ambivalent relationship to slavery. During the war, he forms the opinion that slavery must be crushed in order for the rebellion to be put down and eventually grows to believe that it was wrong in the first place.  He spends his presidency passionately and aggressively defending the rights of the newly freed, but ultimately the tactics of southern whites and northern fatigue make continued defense politically insupportable, and the descent to Jim Crow begins. After his presidency, well, I don’t know because I haven’t gotten there yet. Anyway, it’s not hard to weave a compelling narrative out of this, but the narrative that is woven in this book is hardly compelling.

Here’s a good example of why this is so infuriating: just last night I came across a 1-paragraph description of a more-likely-than-not apocryphal “Grant is drunk” story while he was on his post-presidential world tour in India. It starts after a completely unrelated sentence ending, “reflecting his lifelong concern for the dignity of women,” (because that needs to be called out explicitly too) and begins, “One high-ranking Briton whom Grant met in India… left a damaging account of a drunken Grant making an utter fool of himself.”  The paragraph ends a page later, “This was the sole allegation of Grant’s getting drunk on his extended trip, despite numerous temptations,” before starting a new, completely unrelated thought with “From India the Grants penetrated east to Burma and Singapore” (Grant, 877-878). This is a central theme in the book! Why is it getting a single paragraph in the middle of his world tour? Why isn’t this story simply referred to, I don’t know, when we were actually talking about Grant’s drinking problem? Oh right. Because this book is bad. Sorry, I forgot.

This problem is particularly pernicious when discussing Grant’s drinking, as the evidence Chernow provides often seems contrary to the conclusion that is drawn, which is all the more painfully obvious when the conclusion is stated in such certain terms (didn’t anyone ever tell Chernow to show, not tell?). This disconnect leads to some of the more hair-pulling sections of the book.  I wish I had read this with the intent of writing this book, because I’d love to be able to pull out quotes here, but I’m not going back over the thousand-odd pages I’ve read just to ragepost about this into the void, so you’ll have to make do with hearsay and paraphrase. He’ll say something like, “Grant basically had his drinking under control during the war. Here are three instances where he got just wildly, crazily drunk, which shows his commitment to sobriety,” or my favorites (yes this one comes up more than once), “Grant didn’t have even a sip of alcohol at the event, other than the ale prescribed by his doctor and the champagne that was opened in his honor.” It is hard to get lost in a book when you’re constantly questioning if you read something correctly. Of course, if this was laid out in a sane way, you could paint the picture that his drinking was largely under control, in the span of four or five years he went on three disputed binges and never near an active front or command, and you can go into detail on why further accusations are unsubstantiated and likely politically motivated, and you can sort of tick them off one-by-one rather than constantly introducing new instances of him drinking, or not drinking, or maybe drinking, but how much did he really have to drink, and does it count anyway?

I use Grant’s drinking as an example here because it really is one of the key themes in the book, the purpose of which seems to be simply to rehabilitate Grant’s image. It’s almost as though Chernow, having successfully rehabilitated the image of Hamilton, is looking to recreate that success with another downtrodden figure from America’s past. The problem with that idea is that Hamilton is both a more sympathetic and more unjustly downtrodden figure. You can cast his story as either a rags-to-riches tale of gumption and pluck or as a wealthy coastal elite exercising his power over the little man, so he has some dynamic range. He’s a great character who, depending on the current narrative around him, can be redeemed as the embodiment of the American dream or cast down as the embodiment of American greed and hubris, and it happens that prior to that book coming out, he was mostly being cast as the latter.

Grant, on the other hand, is… well, he’s well-understood.  The principal themes in this book seem to attempt to redeem Grant across three broad areas: his drinking problem, his reputation during the war as a “butcher” and an inelegant strategist, and the corruption that hounded his office as president. The problem with this approach is that Grant either didn’t really need redeeming or isn’t redeemable in these traits.

Take his drinking problem, for example. It is well-documented and beyond serious doubt that Grant had a bit of a problem with the bottle before the Civil War. This problem would hound him during the war and after (as mentioned above), but this book makes a pretty solid case that his drinking was mostly, if not completely, under control and never an issue on or around the battlefield or during his time in office or thereafter — which would be redeeming if Grant hadn’t already been redeemed in that regard: “Recognized today as an illness, alcoholism in Grant’s time was considered a moral weakness. Grant himself believed it so and battled to overcome the shame and guilt of his weakness,” says James McPherson in Battle Cry of Freedom in 1988, who links to a footnote detailing the current (mind you, now 30-year-old) debate about the state of Grant’s alcoholism.  McPherson then to come down firmly on the side that Grant’s alcoholism was not a problem during the war: “Grant stayed on the wagon nearly all the time during the war. If he did get drunk (and this is much disputed by historians) it never happened at a time crucial to military operations,” going so far as to say his alcoholism may have even helped him: “…his predisposition to alcoholism may have made him a better general.”  I’d consider any redemption on the subject provided in Chernow’s book to be, oh, about 30 years too late.

On the subject of his strategic prowess, Chernow seems to chafe at the description of Grant as a butcher and someone who simply brought to bear an overwhelming superiority in men and materièl.  He quotes people at length comparing Grant’s Vicksburg campaign to Napoleon at his height.  Here’s the problem with that analysis: Grant’s army at Vicksburg had about 75,000 men and the campaign covered somewhere around 200 miles in the Mississippi Delta.  Napoleon’s Grande Armée at its height had about 10 times as many soldiers and had to march from the Atlantic coast of France a thousand miles away to Austerlitz, defeating along the way the entire allied force of all of the professional armies of Europe. So, those are a bit different?

Regardless of how Napoleonesque the Vicksburg campaign may or may not have been, the true test of Grant as a butcher comes during the Overland Campaign. Here’s how that breaks down, even in this book. Basically, Grant makes ready to cross the Rapidan River, and Robert E. Lee looks at his army from the other side and says, “He can’t cross the river, if he does we’ll pull him into this wilderness here and just ravish his army.” Grant looks at the same wilderness and goes, “Man, if I were Lee, I’d try to pull my troops into that wilderness to neutralize my superior numbers and arms, and I’d ravish my army.” Grant then proceeds to cross the river, Lee pulls his army into the wilderness, and Grant’s army gets ravished, much as Grant fears and Lee hopes for. And when it’s all over, Lee melts away, having done his worst (and his worst was really bad you guys — the descriptions are truly horrific for both sides), and the Army of Northern Virginia gets to fight again.

And here’s where Grant really shines, because to his credit, where prior commanders of the Army of the Potomac would have turned and run because they just got absolutely manhandled by the bogeyman Robert E. Lee, Grant looks at the carnage, shrugs, and stays where he is because, hey, the Confederates pulled out. Grant has the field. He doesn’t need to run, all he needs to do is replace the men he’s lost with available, fresh troops and continue fighting. He knows two things; he can win a fight simply by staying in the fight longer (he’s done this before, for example at Shiloh), and he can wear down the enemy with a never-ending supply of fresh troops and provisions, while the enemy has almost nothing and men are deserting in droves. So, his strategy — and an effective strategy it is — is to just throw men into the grinder and replace them with fresh troops. So, does that make him a butcher? Yes. Does it make him an inelegant strategist? Yes. But is he an effective strategist? Sure! His strategy is probably why the Union lost almost twice as many men during the Overland Campaign as the Confederacy despite outnumbering them significantly, but it’s also why that campaign is considered a Union victory — and it’s probably also why the Union ultimately won the war.

Having dwelt so long on the other points of Grant’s abortive rehabilitation, I won’t belabor the third. Suffice it to say that it is a central theme in the book that the scandals plaguing Grant’s presidency (and his life before and after) were due to his only flaw: being too honorable himself to believe that others might ever attempt deception. That is — no joke — how it is presented in the book, repeatedly. It is beyond wild to me that Chernow defends Grant’s presidency by saying he just wasn’t that good at picking people when that is most of the job of being President; also please remember that we are talking about how the mind of the world’s most incredible military strategist since Napoleon is incapable of believing that someone might attempt to deceive him.

The unnecessary and unsuccessful saving of Grant from his own reputation in this book is all the more infuriating given the very real, not to mention currently relevant, role that Grant played in defeating the Klan and protecting the newly-freed black vote during Reconstruction. You could write a pretty good book just focusing on the balancing act that Grant has to play as political support for northern occupation dwindles and he has to compromise his principles to placate his wearying power base while the seeds that will create Jim Crow begin to germinate in the south, but instead we are treated to an exhausting sideshow about annexing the Dominican Republic and an assurance that it wasn’t Grant’s fault that his administration was full of crooks and criminals, it was his strength.

Ultimately, Grant is a somewhat captivating, if flawed, character who had an outsized role in American history, and I believe there is a place for a shorter, better organized, more nuanced exploration of that character. It’s unfortunate that Chernow spends so much of his book trying in vain to reclaim someone who never needed reclaiming in the first place, and that he does such a bad job of it at that. In the end, though, there is no place for this. At least, don’t make a place for it on your bookshelf.

Hey there team! Gosh, it sure has been awhile — it’s probably not worth reading anything below this post, since that was the old me, and I’m much older and wiser now.  Seriously, just ignore anything you see underneath this post, it’s the mindless ramblings of a child with a tiny, tiny brain.

Anyway, since there’s a link to this site on my resume, and I work in data-heavy fields, I just thought I’d drop a quick post in here to talk about how great Big Data is in case there are any future employers reading! Anyway, it’s pretty wonderful, and you should try it out.  Here’s three reasons why:

1. Data — it helps you make decisions, and it’s never wrong. How could it be? It’s literal facts, and facts can’t be wrong. Or even misinterpreted in any way. So, do what the data tells you to do. It is your master and you have no choice but to obey.
2. I really like working with it.  Some people get annoyed by the fact that data can be messy and hard to work with, but for me, it’s just another mystery to solve.  And I love mysteries!
3. Working with data makes you smart.  Like, really smart.  Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory probably works with data, and think about how smart that guy is!  (Love that show btw, super funny, not derivative and caricaturish.)  If you work with data, you’re obviously extremely capable, and you should probably be paid a lot of money for whatever you do — and get hella benefits too.  Like 401(k) match and primo healthcare at least, plus probably a sizable chunk of equity and maybe a gym membership and like free massages and stuff.

Anyway, that’s why I love big data! Stop reading now, please.

Full disclosure, I work on the Analytics team for a large Internet company in San Francisco.  Members of my team and the teams I work with have T-shirts or office signs that say things like “I <3 Big Data” and “I love it when you call me Big Data.”

This post is going to be … controversial… to some of them.

As you have no doubt gathered from the title, I’m not a big fan of what tends to be called “big data.”  For the uninitiated, big data refers to extremely large datasets (think hundreds of millions to billions of records, if not more) that reveal patterns, most frequently about how users are interacting with a product or metadata about users.  Examples might include click data from Facebook — essentially a list of every mouse click any user has performed on a Facebook page, including e.g. the location on the page and the link URL target and the time of day and the location of the user, among other things — or information about phone calls — the metadata the NSA is so interested in keeping tabs on, which might include things like phone numbers, locations, dates, times, durations of calls, etc.

Let me tell you right off the bat (250+ words in…) that I don’t hate big data because I’m afraid of being snooped on or I’m paranoid the gummymint or The Facebook is after me, or tracking me, or… anything me, really.  Honestly, they don’t give a flying duck about me.  No, I can break my hatred of big data down into three distinct reasons, none of which have anything to do with paranoia.

The first is that as someone who works with data a lot, I can tell you it’s messy.  This is true of “small” data provided by people paid to give you data.  You’ll get a CSV that should have 24 rows, and it has 23.  Maybe it has 25.  Maybe a row or a single cell is blank for some reason; maybe it’s ASCII-encoded and they have to report a name with an accented letter, or, God forbid, an emoji, so it just shows up as “?”.  This stuff is actually really complicated, and you usually won’t know you have a problem until suddenly you have one, which could happen at any time for any reason, no matter how stupid, esoteric, or obvious.

Now imagine you’re getting data not from a paid vendor but from users clicking on things.  Maybe they have a spotty Internet connection, so the click event doesn’t get logged.  Maybe you accidentally send the click event twice.  Maybe they clicked on the wrong thing.  Maybe the team who’s in charge of ingesting click data and mapping it back to users is at their offsite in Acapulco when their server goes down, or they changed the event code just before they left and didn’t tell anyone.  So you pull the data the next morning to find out how many links were clicked, and you see the number is way down — is that because of a new feature that was just pushed?  Is it a holiday in some large portion of the world so people aren’t using your website?  Is there a bug in the website?  Or is the bug in the mobile app, or the click event firing, or the click event ingestion, or in the query used to pull the click count?  Who can even say?

Related to this, typically from datasets this large, you can even find patterns that have nothing to do with what the dataset originally set out to record.  For instance, a dataset might simply tell you how long a user has your application open in a window.  From this information, you might be able to infer how “engaged” a user is with your website.  But this is a potentially terrible proxy; for instance, just now I got up and wandered into the kitchen for 5 minutes; I was not engaged with www.carscafmoo.com during that time, even though the window was open.  In this case, your most engaged user is the one who literally dies after loading your site and isn’t discovered for days.  So you get around this by developing other heuristics (scroll actions, click actions, page views, having the window open for a certain time window, etc.) that, if you’re really lucky, are based on a broad survey of user interactions, but are still messy, and probably aren’t actually based on anything you could remotely describe as “scientific”¹.  Basically, without access to the user’s laptop camera to see what they’re actually doing, you’re screwed, and no matter what Zuckerberg does you can’t actually turn on the camera without turning on the indicator light on a modern Macbook unless you are able to physically reinstall the camera, so that’s pretty unlikely.

To sum up, you’re generally measuring proxies that correlate with or approximate whatever actual metric you’re searching for, and you’re constantly asking yourself, “How well are we answering this question?” The answer is almost always, “Not very well.”

The second reason I hate big data is because it is descriptive of general trends, but frequently applied to specific people.  Here’s an arbitrary example of a dataset that might shows the behaviors of two groups of hypothetical users:

You can see visually that group 1 tends to be higher than Group 2; indeed, group 1 has a mean of ~10.4 and Group 2’s mean is down at 8.7; unsurprisingly (by construction) the difference between the two groups is statistically significant².  Let’s say Group 1 is users of my website with webbed fingers and Group 2 is normal people, and the value we’re recording is logins per month.  Here’s how this information would typically get reported (imagine this is part of an infographic; note the arbitrary heights of the bars):

Except that as you can see, several of the points from Group 1 are actually pretty low — in fact, 21 of the 100 points in Group 1 are actually below the mean for Group 2.  What is actually true is that on average from our particular sampling of the dataset a user with webbed fingers will login 18% more often than a user without webbed fingers.  Any particular user will fall within a pretty large variance, so just because I have webbed hands doesn’t mean you should start targeting me as a high-login user; I may actually behave much more like a non-webbed-hand person.  That’s neither a compelling nor pithy narrative, so we distill it as much as we can in order to tell our particular story (with our particular spin — “Hey, webbies love our website!”); but from my point of view that’s not sound statistics or data science or big data analytics, it’s marketing.  Sure, that’s a role that needs to be filled, but every time I see an infographic or a headline like the one above, I immediately wonder about the actual shapes of the underlying distributions.  I would propose a WAG that 90+% of the “big data” roles at tech companies fall into support of marketing or sales and involve exactly this sort of broad-strokes “analysis.”

Of course, there are great insights to be gleaned from proper analysis of big data — in particular, recommendation models based on grouping users’ actions or preferences and then extrapolating to what other members of that group have liked or done tend to work pretty well (think Netflix recommendations), but even then there’s so much individual variance that it’s very difficult to present a great set of predictions for any individual user.

So if big data works for generalizations but isn’t great at specific, individual insights, what is it good for?  This brings me to my third problem with big data — that it’s really a misnomer.  “Big data” datasets actually are potentially great for individual data, messiness aside.  But per our definition above, that’s not actually what big data is — it’s more than an enormous dataset, it’s about using that dataset to reveal patterns.  And if you’re looking at an individual, say, their cell phone records, you’re not really looking for patterns and thus not really performing “big data” analysis.  You’re just looking stuff up.  If you want me to look up the metadata around your phone calls between 8 AM on the 9th and 10 PM on the 10th, I can do that with just your data.  Hell, I can do that if the only data I have is your calls between those specific hours.  That’s not big data, that’s just data.

Now, if you’ve read all of this (and why would you), what you’ll hopefully see is that I don’t actually hate big data — I think data is messy and hard to work with, and I think that “big data” is a term that is frequently mis- or over-applied, or that it’s poorly defined.  The technological capability to store and process enormous amounts of information, and the resulting ability to glean both broad patterns and individual insights from that information, is a capability that can and does drive enormous value.  Even the Big Data Lite broad generalizations serve a real and necessary marketing and sales function, especially in a world of high-level (and frequently somewhat innumerate) decision making.

I just wish I didn’t know enough about the term to cringe every time I see it.

Apparently some people don’t realize that the “Millennial” generation encompasses pretty much everyone born from 1980-2000.

While I might shave off a few years on either side of that definition, one of my biggest pet peeves is when Millennials badmouth Millennials in the third person, because they don’t realize that they themselves are Millennials.  For example, I was at a career fair and getting lunch with some of the other recruiters — all of whom were under 30, including all but two under 25 — and this guy starts off the conversation with, “Man recruiting these Millennials, amiright? It’s like all they care about is what you can do for them.”  We gave him an inquisitive stare, and he responded with, “What? You remember how it was in our day, we were all ‘what can we do for you,’ y’know?”  So I asked him how old he was.  He was 28.  This was two years ago.  He was a Millennial.  He didn’t find that hilarious.  I did.

Of course, being born in 1987¹, I am a Millennial, and that will not stop me from railing against my own kind.  We, as a generation, are really into ourselves², and of the many criticisms that have been thrown at us, self-congratulation is probably one of the fairest.  We are the generation who invented participation trophies³, and the “like” button ⁴.

And to be clear, I’m against all of it.  I vividly remember in fourth grade at our end of year awards ceremony, when a third of the class got something called the “Technology Award,” and I realized that it was the third of the class who didn’t get any other awards.  I was shocked. I was appalled.  I thought the recipients would want to know that they had sham awards⁵, but I wasn’t sure how to break it to them; my mom told me not to, so I didn’t.  And today I have friends!  Thanks, Mom!

Today, when I look around, where other people see “Generation Why?” or “The Me Generation,” I see the cumulative effects of over-recognition manifest in the Circle Jerk Generation⁶.  What I mean by this is the mutually reinforcing cycle of engagement with content on social media.  Those italicized words are indicative of the buzzwordification of (and associated substitution for) concepts that ought to contain actual meaning.  Where I might legitimately think that someone has done an excellent job or created tangible value, I would have to know the person in order to communicate this to them.  However, someone can produce content on social media that is highly (and measurably) engaging — even if it is of no value at all⁷.  In exchange for your congratulations and recognition at their grand feat, they offer their engagement, through likes and comments and shares, and if I like your post will you like mine, oooh just comment on this right here — yeah yeah now like that post like it so hard — ooh yeah your content is great let me like that right there for you yeah you like that?

But if I think my generation is bad, man is the next one worse.  Did you know that teenagers don’t have sex anymore, they just like things on social media?  Did you know that while our generation had burn books, the mean girls of today are not liking your selfie on Instagram even if you like theirs⁸? Did you know that all of the problems of this generation are worse in the next one???

Which is why another, greater pet peeve of mine is when people from previous generations badmouth our generation, because remember how annoying it was when the generation before you did that to you?  There’s a (Gen-X) trainer at my gym, and he’s always ragging on Millennials — “You’re all working so hard today, and what are those Millennials out there doing?”  I shaved my beard in March, and he commented on how young I suddenly looked.  I told him I’m 28, and I swear to god he said that I “don’t act like a Millennial.”  Yeah, and you’re not high as a kite and wandering aimlessly through your cynical post-Ridgemont High life, what a goddamn miracle.  Sure, my generation lives disproportionately with its parents, but then, so did yours.  Remember when loud music and video games and recreational drug use were going to melt your brains and make you dysfunctional subhumans?  Thanks to the Internet, surviving ’80s references, and older cousins, I do!

But wait, there’s more!  Sure, the Boomers ragged on your generation really hard, but what about them?  Oh, that’s right — they were a bunch of juvenile delinquents who were being led astray by comic books and Elvis Presley, of all things.  Remember all of the crazy progressive things they did in the ’60s, like peaceful protests in favor of civil rights, women’s equality, and ending the wildly, incredibly pointless and wasteful war in Vietnam?  Remember when the Greatest Generation declared that they were a colossal disappointment for not doing their duty and maintaining the status quo?  How thoroughly selfish of them.  And don’t even get me started on jazz — what did the Lost Generation think that was doing to the Greatest?

Yeah, so it turns out that pretty much everyone thinks that the generation after them is a total selfish wreck about to doom the world, but that’s not the case.  At least, so far — and I would wager our generation, and the generation thereafter, and the one after that, etc. etc. will turn out OK too, no matter how selfish and doomed they may appear to be right now.

You know why?  Because eventually they’ll have kids.  Everyone talks about what a total life-changing event having kids is⁹, how it makes you completely reorient your life around that of another human being in a way that, for example, simply being married does not.  And of course your kids are your legacy, so you’ll do anything to give them a leg up in this world.  For instance, you might tell them that they’re special, that they’re smart and wonderful and deserve praise — you might even give them the Technology Award or like their post on Instagram or give them a participation trophy so they feel good about themselves.

So while each successive generation will be fine in the end, they will start off as total self-absorbed screw-ups, largely thanks to their parents.  All I’m saying is, let’s just keep in mind that they’ll be fine while we judge them loudly for their mind-boggling iniquity in the meantime.

This weekend marks the official celebration of Eric’s upcoming nuptials, and as best man (TM) it’s my official and sacred duty to plan the event.  Since I am incapable of planning an event without a themed playlist (R) (and incapable of doing any other event planning), I proudly present to you The Annotated Guide to The Official Eric Hall Bachelor Party Themed Playlist (R, TM).

High School

Friendtimes

• “Purple Stain” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers: On a trip to Cancun after freshman year, Eric introduced me to Californication; this is the song I think of when I think back to that trip and the adventures we had with Maria, Esteban, and a gaggle of 12-year-old girls.
• “Smells like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana: Another great aspect of that trip was the amount of conspiracy theory-laden documentaries we watched about Kurt Cobain.
• “By the Way” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers: This album was released right after that Cancun trip, which made it the soundtrack to all of sophomore year.  In college I would decide it was a “fine, but not great” album, which would lead to a heated argument and a well-timed and highly confusing out-of-the-blue text message from Tyler asking me if I remembered how great that album was.
• “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina & the Waves: Braves win!  Braves win!!
• “American Girl” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: There was a time in high school when the Tom Petty greatest hits album was all anyone would listen to; this is about the only song on that album I could ever stand in bulk.

Cross Country / Track

• “My Band” by D12: The invention of the iPod allowed us to listen to this on the way back from pretty much every track meet and to sing along to it, much to everyone else’s annoyance.
• “Gimme Some Lovin'” by the Spencer Davis Group: this song played every Friday at 5:00 on 96 Rock, which during cross country season would be after practice but before spaghetti dinners.  To this day, this song means that the weekend has started to me.
• “American Idiot” by Green Day: I didn’t like American Idiot very much until Eric convinced me to listen to it on the way back home from the Wendy’s meet in Charlotte junior year.  After that it was one of my favorite albums.  Alba?  “Holiday” and “Letterbomb” are better songs, but apparently have been combined with their mediocre neighbors on the album in Spotify, so screw you Spotify.

Wrestling

• “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” by Billy Joel: This song somehow ended up on the radio on our way to every single tournament junior year, becoming the “official” Westminster JV Wrestling song of 2004-2005.
• “Boombastic” by Shaggy, “Faded” by Soul Decision: Two of the best songs on the inimitable T.H. Leet’s wrestling mix tape, which we listened to ad nauseam our entire freshman season.  Nothing gets you in the mood to wrestle like the opening lines of “Faded”: “When I get you all alone, I’m gonna take off all your clothes.”
• “Love Shack” by the B-52s: In a brilliant move, Eric chose this as Patrick Hickey’s intro song when he neglected to choose one for himself.
• “The Boys are Back in Town” by Thin Lizzy: Eric’s wrestling intro song junior year; “Break on Through” by the Doors was his song senior year, which doesn’t lend itself to rad partying.

Band

• “Birdland” by Weather Report: We played this song in jazz band and later saw it performed by a jazz vocal group from Spelman College, and to this day I’d swear that Gary Coleman played in Birdland.

College

Friendtimes

• “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” by George Thorogood & The Destroyers: In what may have been our first experience drinking bourbon and / or scotch, Mike, Eric and I ordered the Thorogood special at Sati’s.  It wasn’t the best experience we’ve ever had.
• “Sir Psycho Sexy” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Probably the dumbest song on my favorite album, we listened to this whole album on the many trips between Atlanta and Durham that we took over our four years in school.
• “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” by Simple Minds: Eric, Grady and I used to meet every morning in the Great Hall, where I’d have a goooooood morning camper! from Alpine bagels, and we’d lament the fact that we had to be there because we taped a guy’s butt cheeks together in the locker room.
• “Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart” by the Stone Temple Pilots: When we saw STP play the NCAA Final Four in 2010, this was their encore.  Everything about that trip was fantastic.
• “The Greatest Man that Ever Lived” by Weezer: On my 21st birthday, while Chris was repeatedly asking what the score of the game was, Eric was testing how drunk I was by making me recite the spoken word section in the middle of this song.  I was very drunk; it didn’t go well.
• “Superman” by Lazlo Bane: The theme song from Scrubs.  I think I watched the entirety of that show in Eric’s dorm room and apartment, and I think it’s the reason Mike became a doctor.
• “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by the Dan Band: Classic moment from Old School, which I think Eric gave me for Christmas once.
• “Running on Empty” by Jackson Browne: Eric and I sat in the nosebleed seats for a Jackson Browne show that devolved once he started taking requests into a competition to see who could request the most obscure B-side.  This was the only song we recognized.
• “Rude Boy” by Rihanna: Eric loved this song.  Everyone else found that hilarious.
• “China Grove” by The Doobie Brothers: Played every time we drove through China Grove, NC about halfway between Greensboro and Charlotte.
• “Statesboro Blues – Live at the Fillmore East” by The Allman Brothers Band: Eric and I used to drive a shuttle for my fancy neighbors’ parties (they live on a big hill); said fancy neighbor then invited us in and told a story about being a lawyer in Georgia in the ’60s, the punchline of which was that he maybe represented Gregg and / or Duane Allman at some point.
• “A Praise Chorus” by Jimmy Eat World ft. Davey Vonbohlen: Riding around Durham in David Hershey’s Cabrio with Christmas lights strung up along the roll bar and this song on the radio is a seminal memory of freshman year.

Running

• “Bang a Gong” by T-Rex: Without this song stuck in our heads for the entire winter of 2006-2007, there is no way I could completed our long runs training for our first marathon.

DUMB

• “Freeze Frame” by J. Geils Band, “Vehicle” by the Ides of March were two of my favorite songs to play in the Duke University Marching Band.  Also “Vehicle” is kinda creepy AF if you listen to the lyrics.
• “Closing: I Can’t Turn You Loose – Live Version” by The Blues Brothers et al.: The best version of this song I can find (the Otis Redding version is too slow and doesn’t do it justice); this is the version the DUMB imitates to introduce the team.  Here comes Duke!
• “Devil With a Blue Dress” by Mitch Ryder: This song, when performed correctly, takes exactly one minute for the band to play.

LDOC

• “Bitches Ain’t Shit” by Ben Folds: Ben Folds probably wasn’t the best LDOC performer we had, but he did play this song; in his words: “I haven’t played this song in years, but you guys look like you might be drunk enough for it.”
• “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind: TEB definitely was the best LDOC performer we had, and this song is nontrivially super great.  So yeah, it’s on the list.

Gen’l

Friendtimes

• “Take a Walk” by Passion Pit:  Passion Pit played before the 2015 NCAA Final Four, spawning a really dumb Twitter joke theme that mostly just exasperates Eric.
• “Ninja Rap” by Vanilla Ice; “Turtle Power” by Partners in Kryme: This could go anywhere — from watching the first two live action Ninja Turtles movies together senior year during wrestling season (omg pizzaaaaa) to the flight I took to Wisconsin just to watch the first Michael Bay Turtles movie to the fact that he reads the comics, the Turtles are a running theme through pretty much everything we do.  Cowabunga, dude!
• “Your Love” by “The Outfield”: “I’m going now, and I’m leaving the door open…”
• “Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)” by Robert Palmer: A) Robert Palmer is amazing, and B) Eric is a doctor.
• “Party Hard” by Andrew W.K.: Because that’s what we’re going to do this weekend, obviously!
• “Ridin’ the Storm Out – Live” by REO Speedwagon: Eric once told me that when he took road trips with his dad, an REO Speedwagon album was one of the only things in the car to listen to.
• “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash: If you stay there will be trouble, and if you go there will be double.  Seems like an obvious choice to stay, then?

Bachelor Party Participants

• “Fireflies” by Owl City: I remember this song drifting through the air one summer morning at Diki’s parents’ old place; for some reason it always reminds me of him.
• “Clocks” by Coldplay: You know how I know Wade’s gay?  He likes Coldplay.
• “The Power of Equality” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Keegan once drove all the way from Athens to Durham and back in one day to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers play in Raleigh with Eric and me on a weeknight.  They accidentally played “Under the Bridge” for their encore, but that’s not a song that’s conducive to partying.  They also played this song at the behest of drummer Chad Smith, because “they hadn’t played it in awhile.”
• “Roll with the Changes” by REO Speedwagon: Every time I visit Mike, he spends at least two hours just mindlessly riffing on his keyboard.  I think at least an hour and a half of it is this song.  Remember: you can tune a piano, but you can’t tuna fish.
• “Wait (The Whisper Song)” by the Ying Yang Twins: A hard call to go with this instead of “By The Way” for the aforementioned text message, but I have fond memories of Tyler preparing us to see his dick before Diki’s wedding in Kiawah.
• “Miss You” by The Rolling Stones: David won’t be at the bachelor party because he has better things to do, so we’ll miss him.
• “Danny Boy” by Happy Ol’McWeasel: Grady Daniel “Boy” O’Brien actually mumbles this song in his sleep.  This is the only version I could find that maintains the party vibe without utterly ruining the song — it only ruins it a little bit.  O Danny Boy, the Danny Boys are … Danny boys.
• “Black Skinhead” by Kanye West: Patrick loves Kanye West.  This is the first song off Yeezus I think.  OK?  Happy, Patrick?
• “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” by The Offspring: I accidentally let it slip that my favorite band for along time growing up was The Offspring.  Sue me, I was 12.

Conclusion

That’s it folks! You can check out all of these songs in order on my Spotify playlist “Eric Hall Bachelor Party 2K16,” which should differentiate it from all of the other Eric Hall Bachelor Parties we’ve had and will continue to have.

On Thursday night, I lost my phone.  On Friday night, I got it back.  This is the horrifying story of the intervening 24 hours.

The actual story of how I lost the phone is pretty much right out of a bad movie script — I’m on the company bus from Sunnyvale to San Francisco, where normally I’d be listening to podcasts and minding my own business with my phone literally connected to my face (i.e., impossible to lose), but this time I’m talking to someone on the ride — for the sake of this movie script, let’s assume it’s a fly lady and there’s hella sexual tension and not, say, a French dude — and I walk off the bus into the late evening drizzle and I’m like, “Nice riding with you, fly lady who’s definitely not a French dude!”  Then I go to put my headphones in and realize that lost in all that sexual tension with this lady who definitely exists¹ is my phone, sitting on a table on the bus, which is at a red light not 50 feet away.

No problem, I think naively, I’m sure the bus driver will, like, look over at me before the light turns and I can just get it.  Of course he does not, and the light turns before I can bang on the door to get his attention, and off he goes.  I immediately resign myself to a phoneless life and start heading back home, thinking about how sad I am not to have a phone and to be walking back in the rain, and how I have to walk so far because I got off a stop earlier than I used to before the bus switched routes and started going 5 minutes out of its way before getting to the stop I usually get off at…  And in one fluid motion I both facepalm and turn around, running the half mile to the next stop, uphill in the rain, with my backpack on and my gym bag in my hand, elbowing people off the sidewalk in my haste.

A block away from my destination, the light at the intersection is turning yellow and the little red hand has counted down to zero as I approach. I run into the street and am almost immediately run over.  I have no choice but to wait for traffic as I watch the bus pull around the corner and stop a block away.  The light turns, and I sprint up the street with my hand out waving frantically hoping to get the bus driver’s attention.  I don’t get it.  He pulls away, and with my phone, he drives right past me.  I have failed, my phone is gone, everyone who’s just gotten off the bus is staring at me, and right then it starts just pouring rain.  I walk home, sopping wet and dejected.

I’m an adult; I can handle a little loss of connectivity, and it’s a company bus not the Muni, so I know I’m gonna get that phone back.  This is not the end of the world.  When I get home, I’ll just call the dispatcher and tell them I left my phone on the bus.  No problem.

Except I don’t have a phone, so I can’t call them.  OK, not a big deal, I’ll email them. I still have my computer.  I’ll just check the bus app and find out what their email address is.

Except I don’t have a phone, so I can’t check the bus app.  OK, not a big deal, I’ll check the wiki, I’m sure it’s there somewhere.

Except I don’t have a phone, so I can’t generate a two-factor authentication token to access the VPN so I can access the wiki.

Balls.

I did what any normal person would do: I vented my frustration by tweeting about it:

Left my phone on the bus… flipping out wondering what important sexts I’m missing but will get it back and definitely have no new messages

— Carson Moore (@Carscafmoo) March 11, 2016

In the end I got in touch with the dispatcher by texting a friend at work and asking them what the email address was² and got in touch with them; they’d have it for me in Sunnyvale on Friday morning, I could have someone pick it up and bring it back to SF for me. Which I did — super huge shout out to the French dude for bringing it back and then waiting for like a half hour for me to show up at the bus stop, he is the best.

But in the meantime, I ran into about a dozen other ways in which not having a phone is inconvenient — from finding something in my apartment that I could make beep at a certain time to wake me up, to adding stuff to my grocery list, to badging in at the gym — and one way in which, it turns out, having a phone is essential.  As I mentioned earlier, at my company we use two-factor authentication to remotely access the company network.  We also use it for, basically, everything else.

Two-factor authentication (or 2FA) requires you to have a password and another piece of information, typically served from a device that the server knows and trusts.  You then authenticate with both pieces of information — “factors,” you might call them.  This is pretty obviously more secure than just having a password, but you may be wondering why having a password isn’t secure enough — after all, you could lock your door and brick it shut, but most people just opt for the locks.  Without going into too much detail, it is possible that if a bad actor has access to our network, he or she may be able to access a list of passwords, and even if they are stored in some hashed form they may be able to look up the password plaintext in a rainbow table and, long story short, they then have access to everything.

Two-factor authentication is more secure because even if the attacker has access to everyone’s password, and even if they’re able to get their hands on a device or two, they can only log in as a person whose device they have, and not, y’know, everyone.  Plus getting access to the devices would be, presumably, difficult.

It’s so great and wonderful and secure that, as I mentioned before, we use it for basically everything.  It’s pretty common to use 2FA to access VPN, but even inside the VPN we use it.  We have automation software running on a server that requires 2FA to access.  Didn’t get to do any work with that yesterday.  We use Okta to manage access to internal apps.  We’ve configured Okta to use 2FA.  I was lucky that I hadn’t been signed out of Okta (which seems to happen about once a week), because if I had been, I couldn’t have used the wiki even from the office.  Or viewed my pay checks.  Or seen my calendar.  Or used email.

In the end, this whole miserable ordeal wasn’t much more than an inconvenience, but that was lucky.  If I had truly lost my phone, I’d be in huge trouble — and probably in even more ways that I know now.  I guess what I’m saying is…