Palo Alto Joe

Palo Alto Joe Meets the Great Satan

It is little known in this column that among his many talents, Palo Alto Joe is a pretty good coder. Exploiting this ability, I recently went undercover to bring to light another aspect of the seamier side of life in Palo Alto. It all happened at the Garden Court Hotel on Cowper. Do not worry poor reader. Although as a small boy I did have dreams of becoming the Vice-President In-Charge-Of-The-Fourth-Button-In-The-Second-Row-Of-The-Microsoft-Word-Toolbar, I never considered the idea of really working for the Great Satan at any time during this interview. Like so much of my work, this was done solely to bring you, the reader, the inside story.

The interview started out plain enough. Some guy named George let me know how great he was and feined a minor interest in some of my past experience. He asked me to write some recursive subroutine for an algorithm that we collectively determined to be of order log base three - about what you'd expect from Microsoft. But then the fun started.

"Now, imaginge Microsoft wanted to get into the appliance business. Suppose we wanted to run a microwave oven from the computer. What kind of software would you write to do this?" George asked.

"Why would you want to do that?" I asked. "I don't want to go to my refrigerator, get out some food, put it in the microwave, and then run to my computer to start it." I said. "Sell all Microsoft stock immediately!" I thought.

"Well, the microwave could still have buttons on it too."

"So why do I want to run it from my computer?" I asked.

"Well, maybe you could make it programmable? For example, you could call your computer from work and have it start cooking your turkey."

"But wouldn't my turkey, or any other food, go bad sitting in the microwave while I'm at work? I could put a frozen turkey in, but then it would drip water everywhere." "This is a really dumb idea", I thought.

"Well what other options could the microwave have?" George knew the "right" answers, he just wasn't gonna tell me.

"Well, as far as I'm concerned, the microwave was perfected with the invention of the sensor reheat button. I haven't touched another button on a microwave in years."

"Well, for example you could use the computer to download and exchange recipes." said George ignoring my lack of enthusisam.

"You can do that now. Why does Microsoft want to bother with connecting the computer to the microwave?" I asked. "Hello?" I thought.

"Well let's not worry about that. Just assume that Microsoft has decided this and it is your job to think up uses for it." George shouted.

"Enlightening." I thought.

"Now, maybe the recipes could be very complex, like cook food at 700 watts for two minutes, then at 300 watts for two more minutes but don't let the temperature get above 300 degrees . . ." George was on a roll.

"This is idiotic.These guys at Microsoft spend way too many late nights at work eating microwaveable burritos from 7-11" I thought.

"Well there is probably a small niche of people who would really love that, but most people can't program their VCR." I tried to calm George down.

"Yes, but the recipes could just be downloaded and they wouldn't even have to be understood by the user." George was getting emotional.

"Ok"

And now with the wide availability of this technology, master chefs all over the world will spend their time developing great microwave recipes! Soon the general public will be able to enjoy the great cuisine, that, until now, has only been enjoyed by late night computer dweebs at Microsoft!

As a revenue enhancement, Microsoft will get into the microwave recipe business. Each frozen burrito at Safeway will come with a 3.5 inch floppy containing the cooking directions! Future microwaves, rather than just working out of the box, will require the full Windows97 operating system . . .

"Well it was nice to meet you, Palo Alto Joe. Good luck with your job search." George had had enough of me.

"Yeah, thanks." I said.