Craig's Musings

We moved back to Seattle 11 months ago, and in the process, my jumper cables got packed.  Our garage is full of packed boxes, and my jumper cables are still somewhere in there.  The only reason I know this is that I NEED them this morning as apparently I moved my lights from "auto" to "stay on all night and kill the battery".   And we have a big event in downtown Seattle today - naturally.  Gah.   My lovely bride is going to the hardware store to buy jumpers while I blog - er - do my email. 

On an unrelated note, Yahoo! just launched their hosting plan for $11.95 a month for unlimited storage.  I think there are upload limits of some sort to prevent people from totally abusing it, but for my purposes, it is unlimited.   I was on their legacy "standard web hosting" which was $19.95 for 10GB storage, but I switched over this weekend.  This new deal is screaming freakin' deal.  Aside from all theeislers.com subdomains having 403 errors for about 12-14 hours, it was smooth as a zipper, as my son would say.

Okay, back to email.  Still lovin' Live Writer!  Also lovin' the fact that Entourage supports accessing Exchange via https://blah.blah.com so no VPN required!  I have an Alienware gaming PC with a 30" monitor and one of the new 24" iMacs side by side in my home office, and so I spin 25 degrees in my chair to use one or the other - it is a pretty sweet setup.

Posted by Craig at 10:19 AM in Odds and Ends
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

Okay the photo's below have nothing to do with Live Writer, but Live Writer made it super easy to import them.  I stumbled onto Live Writer when I got a Live Messenger upgrade this morning, and I figured I'd give it a try.

I was pretty skeptical it would be useful for me - I assumed it would only target Live Spaces and Sharepoint.  I was wrong, wrong, wrong - I went down the "other weblog" path and after typing in my Movable Type info, not only did Live Writer do the right thing, it even went and detected my style so that my WYSIWYG editing is exactly in the style of my blog.  Very cool.

After passing the first test (configuring), next test was photos.  My pet peeve of all blogging software for Mac or Windows is the lack of good photo support (at least good photo support that also works with 3rd party blog solutions like Movable Type).  While seemingly easy, I have to date not found any software besides RocketPost that works well with photos and Movable Type.  My wish list is a simple one:

• Auto builds thumbnails and larger images (and remembers the sizes I want to use - I don't want to set them every time)
• Supports Drag and Drop  
• Supports effects for image presentation (like drop shadow) and for the image itself (sepia, black and white) (heck, this wasn't even ON my wish list before, but Live Writer put it there)

The only knock (and it is a small one) on Live Writer is that you can't change the default effect, so if you don't want drop shadow around your photo, you have to change it every time you publish a photo.   At first I thought you couldn't control the default sizes, and while you technically can't (the inline photo is always small and the larger photo is always medium), you can click on "advanced" when editing a photo, click on the triangle with a line under it, and then change the default maximum size of small, medium and large photos - which is the same thing, albeit a little hard to discover.

Other stuff I loved:

• As I edit this, I am marveling at how much I LOVE that I am editing in the style of my blog.  It is super, super cool. 
• Web Preview is also super cool - it shows you exactly how your post will look integrated into your full blog page.
• You can insert all the usual suspects (hyperlinks, pictures, maps, tags, video) but they also have plugins - I gave a Flickr plugin a quick spin, and it was pretty cool (albeit it wouldn't let me log onto my Flickr account and so I couldn't see any of my images as they are all private).  And the "Insert Current iTunes Song" plugin is nifty.  I click it, and out comes: While writing this, I was listening to "Lookin' Out My Backdoor" by Creedence Clearwater Revival

I've completely switched over - this ill-attended blog and my family blog are now being published via Live Writer on Windows.  While yes I work for Microsoft in MacBU, I use the best tool for the job I have at hand, regardless of who makes it - and Windows + Live Writer is a home run in my book.

I took the below photos Sunday afternoon before Macworld started. Our marketing team  did a fantastic job:

Posted by Craig at 12:25 PM in Odds and Ends
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

I ordered a pizza from Domino's just now and I'm blown away. Domino's hit it out of the park from a user experience perspective - everything was easy to find, fiddling with what I wanted was easy, changing my mind was easy, and I never wondered what was going on or where I was in the process. I was a bit annoyed by the upsell popup at the last minute (Do you want some cheesy bread? No, I don't want any freakin' cheesy bread - I was trying to place my order, thanks), but upsell is the name of the game so it is understandable.

The best part of the entire experience, though, has to be the Pizza Tracker - a real time page that shows the by the minute status of my pizza. Matthew put it in the oven at 4:27pm, apparently. And wait! while I was typing, I Got It Heatwaved - "we packaged you order and placed in a warm HeatWave bag at 4:33pm". And wait there's more - I Got It On The Way - "our delivery expert, Octavio, left the store with your order at 4:35pm". I can't blog about it as fast as it is happening, it would seem.

Damn cool.

Posted by Craig at 5:38 PM in Odds and Ends
Permalink

Comments

I came across this report of a child that was rescued from Word code last year.

We’re confident there are NO more children inside Word or any other Office code, for that matter.

:-) TGIF!

Posted by Craig at 3:53 PM in Humor
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

So little time! Macworld was a great launch for the Office for Mac team. We had a full house at our A Day at the Office event, we got a nice nod in the keynote (a brief thanks from Steve and then woven into the MacBook Air introduction), we had a way cool party at the Warfield with Devo, the blogger lounge seemed to be appreciated and was well used the entire show, and our booth kicked ass (of course, I'm biased ).

If I had to pick a highlight for the week, though (and it's tough), it was Macworld Live! with David Pogue. It is a funny highlight for me to pick given how much I stress before public speaking events, but once the time was there and I was actually talking to David, it was great - I really enjoyed our conversation.

Lots of cool stuff at the keynote - I'm excited to check out the new AppleTV interface and I'm really jazzed about the new iPhone update that lets me clean up my home screen. The new MacBook Air is a way cool achievement and a thing of beauty, although to be honest, I'm likely to trade my MacBook in for tricked out MacBook Pro - my poor MacBook already screams in consternation every time I run Civ 4 on it, never mind more demanding games. Keeping score, I got 4 out of 10 things in my keynote wishlist, which ain't bad. Still holding out for a 3G iPhone!

On an unrelated note, on Friday when I got back from Macworld I swung by the AT&T store and upgraded my Samsung Blackjack to a Blackjack II and it kicks some serious ass - but more on that for another post.

Posted by Craig at 7:04 PM in Microsoft
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

We are nine days from the Stevenote at Macworld .... here's the top 10 things I would love to hear (in no particular order, really)

1. Less than 3 pound notebook. I love my Macbook but it is 5 pounds!
2. Hi-def video content on iTunes
3. NBC shows back on iTunes
4. Hi-def DVD drives in the whole Mac line
5. Apple TV hardware refresh: 1080p out and a hi-def DVD drive. Oh, and an option to get the 300gb 2.5" drive, too. I dislike manually upgrading
6. Ability to access the iTunes store from my Apple TVs
7. iPod Touch with a hard drive - I want to be able to carry all my movies again!
8. 3G iPhone - please, please, please have mercy and get me off edge!
9. iPhone with 16GB or even better 32GB
10. Quad SLI ATI Radeon HD 3800 or NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra gaming cards in the Mac Pro (heck, throw terabyte drives in as an option too)

Can't wait to hear what's new!

Posted by Craig at 10:53 AM in Apple
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

I've been running Office on my new iMac at home for a while and it has been great – I love the performance and the new interface. Last night I decided to give some of my older machines a shot – I have a 1.43GHz PowerPC based Mac Mini and my very first Mac, my Power Mac G4, with dual 500MHz PowerPC processors. I paved my Mac Mini and installed Leopard, and left the Power Mac running Tiger. I installed Office 2008 on both and I was very pleased with the performance – especially on my Power Mac, which at 500MHz is the minimum processor required for Office. Works great on the newer Intel Macs, works great on older PowerPC based Macs!

The reviews of Office: mac 2008 have started to appear the past couple of days, and I think it is fair to say that folks generally like what they see. The below isn't a complete list, but it is a decent sample. January 15th here we come!

January 3rd:

• Walt Mossberg, Wall Street Journal: New Office for Macs Speeds Up Programs, Integrates Formats
• Stephen H. Wildstrom, Business Week: Microsoft and Mac, Happy Together

January 2nd:

• Macworld.com has a very detailed overview:
  • Jim Dalrymple: With release looming, Microsoft previews Office 2008
  • Tom Negrino: First Look: Entourage 2008
  • Rob Griffiths: First Look: Excel 2008
  • Franklin N. Tessler: First Look: PowerPoint 2008
  • Jeffery Battersby: First Look: Word 2008
• Michael J. Miller, PCMag.com: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
• Wilson Rothman, Gizmodo.com: First Hands On: Microsoft Office for Mac 2008

Posted by Craig at 2:21 PM in Microsoft
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

The first shrink-wrapped copies of Office 2008 for Mac made it to our office on Friday. I’m out until Jan. 2nd on vacation but it was more than worth the trip into the office today - they look FANTASTIC. I can’t wait to see Office 2008 in stores on January 15th!

I don’t have internet access at home right now (a rant too long to take time for here) and I don’t have a camera with me, so no pictures – sorry.

Posted by Craig at 12:47 PM in
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

I've been silent on this blog the past couple of months. Like a lot of folks on the Mac Office team, I was working 12 hour days, so blogging fell to the wayside. I hope to be a little more frequent going forward, although with our launch at Macworld next month and a bunch of corporate stuff that I deferred to next quarter, my time isn't looking any more "free" the next few months.

Blogging woes aside, the good news is that we released to manufacturing last Wednesday. Hoo-freakin'-ray! And even more good news is that as of Friday, a fair number of boxes were already assembled and we are ahead of where we need to be at to have boxes in the hands of our distributors. Boxes go off to our various distributors late December/early January and then bam! On the shelves in the U.S. & Canada on January 15th. U.K. English, Japanese and French (other than Canada, who get it on the 15th) will be available January 16th, with other languages following throughout the quarter. If going to your favorite store on the 15th/16th it isn't your style, you can preorder it from your favorite online retailer (avoid the lines AND simplify your work, baby! )

Here are some pictures from around our halls (the whole set is here). You'll see similar signage (we've tweaked the language a little on some of these) at Macworld in January, if you go. See ya later!

It has been a hectic time the past few weeks - so much to do, so little time. Not only are we doing a massive push to get Office 2008 ready to ship, but we are also doing a huge amount of work around our launch of said Office 2008. And we are also ramping up our communications – not only on MacMojo, but with a broad variety of partners. If that wasn’t enough, we’re also preparing for our internal strategy review. So blogging has just fallen off a cliff for me. But I was wide awake in the Sheraton in Palo Alto late last night and I was mostly caught up on email and I couldn't bear to look at another strategy PPT, so I briefly rejoined the blogging world and wrote this post (slightly modified while I wait for my next meeting right now) (written in Word 2008, BTW!)

I have a 4 and a half year old boy named Duncan and an almost 7 year old boy named Angus and I love them both with all my heart. The demands of my job mean that I am only around them for about an hour and a half in the morning during the week – I typically don’t get home until long after they are asleep. And those 90 minutes are harried - we all tend to wake up around 7am, and then it is a mad dash of a blood test & insulin for Angus (he was diagnosed with type 1 (aka juvenile) diabetes last December), then KT & I have to create two breakfasts, two snacks, and two lunches and then I have to shower, shave, dress and roar out the door by 8:20 so they can be at school at 8:30. So on weekends the boys and I make up for lost time during the week by doing what I dubbed years ago "boys day out". We do things like go to parks & playgrounds, we ride the ferry, we explore the Seattle Center, we go to the zoo or the aquarium, we visit the Lego store (I should blog about my Lego habit some day. I have… um… lots), sometimes we go to my office so I can catch up, and oh yes… and sometimes we go to the Apple store.

This Sunday was one of those Apple store trips. Like anyone who paid $600 for an iPhone (for two iPhones in my case) and then saw the price drop to $400 a couple of months later, I was irritated. However, I realized that if I had it to do all over again, it was worth the extra money to experience the early adopter excitement - so I got over my irritation pretty quickly. And then I put two and two together and I realized that I had not one, but two iPhone rebates pending – so a brand spankin' new 8GB iPod nano was a now a freebie. As Mr. Burns from the Simpsons would say.... Exxxxxxcellent!

My spankin' new nano is cool – I love how surreally thin it is, I love the look of the anodized aluminum and polished stainless steel, and I love the bright screen. Oh, and I love that I can drop it in the parking lot and barely scratch it (a big oops! yesterday morning). But most surprising to me is how usable it is as a video device. I was skeptical – after using the iPhone for video, I swore I would never use my iPod again for video because I loved the screen size of the iPhone - and the nano’s screen is even smaller than my iPod. However, on my flight to San Jose yesterday morning, I decided to check it out and I watched an episode of CSI: Miami (gotta love David Caruso!) and it was great. The nano is so light that you can hold it forever, and the screen, as it turns out, is big enough. It's no iPhone or iPod Touch, but it is an OK size. I did get irritated by the fact that it was about a gazillion clicks to move between full screen and wide screen (and you have to stop watching the video to do it) when it is a double tap of my finger (without leaving the video) on my iPhone, but that was the only negative part of the experience.

I also have a new 24” iMac (I frickin' LOVE my job!), but more on that later.

nano-nano!

Posted by Craig at 5:08 PM in Apple, Odds and Ends
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

We had a Science fair yesterday where different folks around our division showed off the cool stuff they had in the labs. I saw lots of cool stuff but all of it super secret. In fact, this blog post will self-destruct in 30 seconds by my merely mentioning that words "secret".

There were a couple of things that were not secret – like Microsoft Surface, which I have to say, is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. When I first came to Microsoft at the beginning of April, my temporary office happened to be right in the middle of the Surface team while they were assembling the hardware and getting ready for their launch event. I got a chance to play with it furtively late at night and I thought it was cool then even before they had it fully baked. It keeps getting cooler every time I see it – the interface is really a breakthrough idea.

The other not-secret thing was Microsoft Sync. Last time I had something in my car from Microsoft was the AutoPC back in the late 90s, which while a neat idea, was a little ahead of its time. Well it’s 2007 and Sync kicks ASS! I was blown away by how well everything just worked - I paired my iPhone in about 30 seconds, and suddenly my contact list was integrated into the car. The voice recognition is terrific - I didn't have to train it, it was a super noisy environment, and random names from the phone book worked great. If you plug in a Zune or an iPod/iPhone (or a 'Play From Device' player or even a portable USB harddrive), you get the same cool interface for music as for contacts – your whole catalog of music is available via voice control, including the ability to jump straight to an artist or song. I have a dealer installed iPod interface in my car and the interface is HORRIBLE. I really frickin' hate it, whereas the Sync interface rocks. All that, and the thing you plug your device into is USB and so your device charges while you drive. This is double-extra cool with an iPhone since you don’t have to worry about how long you talk and all your music is right there.

All that cool stuff, and I got a parking spot in the garage literally right under the science fair. It took me exactly 30 seconds to get from my car to the event. Sweeeeet!

Posted by Craig at 6:50 PM in Microsoft
Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

It's international Talk Like a Pirate Day. Avast, ye scurvy dogs! A bucko o' mine got me this t-shirt a while aft, and it seemed like a good shirt for talk like a pirate day. Yaaaarrrrr!

Posted by Craig at 11:53 AM in Odds and Ends
Permalink

Comments

Way, way back in the technology time machine - Christmas 2004, to be precise, I set up a Promise VTrak 15200 with 15 400gb drives for my digital media home. 4.8 Terabytes (RAID 50 with a hot spare) seemed like an infinite amount of storage. Given what it cost, it freakin' well BETTER be infinite was my thinking at the time. Fast forward almost 3 years now, and I'm down to 480GB. My infinite storage space has vanished - I'm hoarding media files on my media center PCs because there is no space on my darned server. I have a ton of DVDs to archive still and I'm outta luck. I have to spend time cleaning out old crap off my storage array. I am almost out of storage on my 'infinite' storage device - how did that happen?!

When terabyte drives were announced, I figured that was the milestone to upgrade my storage world. But having had a double drive failure in my RAID 50 config (and as luck would have it, one drive failed in one RAID 5 stripe and one failed in the other) and having sat around biting my nails for a day and a half hoping the rebuild would finish before another drive failed, I was unwilling to move to terabyte drives (with 3+ day rebuilds once they were full) until RAID 6 was available. RAID 6 in hardware is the ultimate in coolness for large drives - 2 parity drives instead of 1, so you can sustain 2 drive failures and keep on ticking.

Tonight I did my monthly troll of Promise's web site to see if they had a 15+ drive RAID 6 appliance available, and sure enough, they did - the M610p is out, with 16 hot swap slots and support for RAID 6 and the Hitachi terabyte drive. And with the terabyte drives being only $329 from ZipZoomFly (a great price), the 17 drives I'd need (16 + a spare) would cost a mere $5,593. So with the M610p around $4000, all I need is $9,600 laying around to have 13TB of storage (2 drives for parity + a hot spare - never leave home without a hot spare in your storage array).

So it looks like I'm just gonna be almost out of storage for the forseeable future. Sigh. I hate waiting.

Posted by Craig at 10:10 PM in Storage
Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

I may have mentioned I have a drunken version of the Saturday Night Live living in my head, chattering non-stop 24x7. One of the cast members living in my head has a tendency latch onto simple phrases and tie them to 80’s and 90’s music. Let’s call him Skippy.

So I’m writing a mail to my team last night and I used the phrase “Ship it”. Well, all hell breaks loose with Skippy and he starts singing a variant of “Whip It” by Devo in my head NON STOP last night and through the day. So for your (quasi-)amusement, Skippy, the drunken SNL cast member living in my head, brings you “Ship It”, with apologies to Devo for my abuse of the lyrics. Oh, and for those of you young 'uns who don't remember Devo, you can hear the song and see their stylin' hats and outfits on this video.

I gotta stop staying up until 2am the nights before I fly to SVC.

Posted by Craig at 6:02 PM in Odds and Ends
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

My anniversary date at Microsoft is complexified by my leaving and coming back, so I don't really have an anniversary date so much as I have an anniversary Excel formula. It occurred to me this weekend that my 7 year anniversary might be coming up, so I worked out my anniversary Excel formula:

=DATE(2007,3,30+(7*365.242199-(DATE(2000,2,1)-DATE(1993,6,28))))

It turns out I missed it: it was August 24th. (Technically, it was August 24.69539, but I'm going with the 24th)

Happy 7 years to me - it only took me 14 years, 1 month, 26 days and 4 hours (or so) to get there.

Posted by Craig at 8:26 PM in Microsoft
Permalink

Comments

About two weeks ago, something magical happened. The spamtards figured out how to slip by the Movable Type 3.3 and 3.2 spam filters, and suddenly my blog and KT's blog have been getting hit with about 80-90 "not-spam" spam comments every 24 hours. Sometimes there's a break, and then the fricktarded spamtards shovel a whole bunch more in.

I have tried to find the gold in the pig dung, but I apologize if I deleted a comment that came from a human instead of a fricktarded spamtard.

I did love vmark's theater comment once again - you crack me up, dude! And yeah, you can get at Exchange via imap, but imap doesn't pass the security requirements of our and no doubt other IT departments - we require that the device be able time out to a password after a certain amount of time (and that policy needs to be a requirement that IT can enforce, not a voluntary thing), and that you are able to remote wipe your data from the device if you lose it. Given the confidential nature of the mail I get, I fully embrace and support this kind of requirement - it would be a pretty big disaster if I lost my phone and someone could get into my email. That's what makes Windows Mobile + Exchange so cool, really - you get secure real time access to your corporate directory, email, calendar. I dig it. I hope to see those features on the iPhone someday, so I can dig it there, too.

Posted by Craig at 10:01 AM in Odds and Ends
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

Yesterday I was in meetings on main campus (our offices are in one of the not-main campuses… West? Lakeridge? Northbridge? Antarctica? I actually have no idea) and had 90 minutes between meetings. I was supposed to only have 30 minutes, but I found out I had missed yet another freakin' calendar change because my iPhone doesn't have Exchange Active Sync support. That was the last straw, so I caved and went to the AT&T store to get a Blackjack.

It did not start well - I had 5 minute "discussion" with the kid working in the store over whether or not my $30 a month family SMS plan I signed up for covered the iPhone. It started innocently enough, I just wanted to make sure the plan was in place and confirm that it covered up to 5 phones. And then it degenerated. To paraphrase:

Kid: Oh no, sir, you don't understand, the iPhone is magic and you have to pay 20 dollars a month for each phone for unlimited SMS.

Me: How can that be, the unlimited SMS plans was specifically offered to me online as an upgrade for my family plan. And an AT&T rep let me sign up for it for my iPhones.

Kid: Oh no, sir, you don't understand, the iPhone is magic and you have to pay 20 dollars a month for each phone for unlimited SMS.

Me: So are you telling me that not only am I going to get billed $30 bucks for this month, I'm going to get billed $180 for the extra 1800 text messages we sent above the 200 per month per plan?

Kid: <pause> Well, yes, but it is only an extra $10 a month for the two $20 plans and I can sign you up for those and make them retroactive.

Me: But what about this new phone?

Kid: <pause> Well, that is an extra $20 a month too.

Me: This can't be right. I can't understand why the iPhone is any different and wouldn't be covered by the family SMS plan. Which an AT&T rep signed me up for. That the AT&T web site said was something that worked.

Kid: Oh no, sir, you don't understand, the iPhone is magic and you have to pay 20 dollars a month for each phone for unlimited SMS.

Me: Why don't you check my account and see if I'm being billed for each SMS sent by my wife's and my iPhone?

Kid: <long pause> Huh, you aren't being billed for the SMSes.

Me: Great, now let's set up that Blackjack!

The good news is that after that, the kid was great - helpful, friendly. Actually, he was always being helpful and friendly, we just got off on the wrong foot because he (like everyone from AT&T I've talked to so far) isn't completely clear on how the iPhone plans/services really work. I guess you can chalk it up to growing pains, but unfortunately the customer feels the growing pains.

The other gotcha was that when I said I was going to use the Blackjack for Exchange, suddenly my data plan was $45 bucks a month because it was for "Exchange". Ah, well. And of course, in classic fashion, AT&T disables the ability to use the Blackjack as a bluetooth modem, which is what I have used every Windows Mobile phone for since they got bluetooth. At some point, I will have to buy a non-operator specific Windows Mobile phone so that I can use all the features.

The good news is that I now have access to my calendar/email/corporate directory again. The Blackjack is a very nice Blackberry replacement. I really like Windows Mobile as a mobile Exchange device - it is awesome. Plus I can use my bluetooth GPS & run my GPS enabled mapping software on it which I can't do on an iPhone.

The bad news is that I am now carrying two devices - because by God, you can take my iPhone when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

Posted by Craig at 9:05 AM in Wireless, Wireless Devices
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

CNN noted the 25th anniversary of the CD yesterday. Man oh man - it was 1982, and I was still reeling from the magic of a dual 5 1/4 inch floppy disk we had for my Commodore PET at school. That was a cool floppy drive because it was powered by a 6502 just like the PET, and the uber nerd (ahem) could program it turn it's activity light on and off and spin its motor like a some kind of possessed disco ball. A year later, I blew most of my savings from my summer job loading and unloading boxes in a warehouse on a CD player. Two years after I bought my CD player, I was working as a programmer for the Bank of Montreal, and we were all abuzz about our new GIGABYTE!! IBM DASD ("Direct Access Storage Device" - aka hard disk) - and only the size of a refrigerator and only cost about $100,000.

Now it is 2007, they're shoving 50 gigabytes onto the same size disc as that first CD, there are terabyte drives for 400 bucks, and you can get a gigabyte in something that weighs as much as a frickin' M&M for nine bucks. Time flies.

Posted by Craig at 7:48 AM in Odds and Ends
Permalink

Comments

Posted by Craig at 12:49 PM in Odds and Ends
Permalink

Comments

I've been a little quiet on this blog as I had my hands full the past few weeks. Once it became clear that we needed to adjust our Office 2008 ship date to ship the suite with an acceptable quality level, I've been pretty busy making sure all the right people knew and that we were on a path to deliver product in retail in January. This culminated in a series of press briefings that I did last week and a blog posting on Mac Mojo. Sometimes you need crash helmet and a flak jacket to do this job, I tell you.

Anyway, it's a new week, and my week started off like a little kid who's been told that Santa was really just their mom and dad and that the Santa in the mall is just an old fat guy in a red suit - Fake Steve Jobs has been outed in The New York Times. Turns out it was Dan Lyons, a technology writer at Forbes magazine (the good news is that Forbes will be picking up Fake Steve).

Sigh. What next - is someone going to out the Tooth Fairy and tell me that it was really my parents leaving quarters under my pillow? Bah humbug. Happy frickin' Monday.

Posted by Craig at 12:29 PM in Odds and Ends
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments

Today I tried a really unlikely, impossible to imagine scenario for a wireless operator – a family member (my wife), after seeing my cool new phone and using it, wanted one herself. That would NEVER come up. Edge case. Million to one shot. No one could possibly be expected to plan for that unlikely scenario.

I bought KT an iPhone a week and a half ago, and I finally had time to activate it today (I've been just slammed at work the past bit). I plugged it in and iTunes told me that I can't switch to a family plan throught the software, that I have to call the iPhone activation number. Okay, sure, why not - I call. The polite rep tells me that because I want to add a line, I have to talk to their "add a line" people (even though the number I was told to call was specifically because I wanted to add a line - but whatever). I wait on hold, waiting, waiting, thinking, man - too bad there isn't a machine that could automate repetitive tasks so that people didn't have to sit around waiting while other people did a bunch of repetitive tasks. Some day, maybe. And maybe a man on the moon, too - but I know I'm out there in my thinking. Anyway, I wait on hold, and get the "add a line" person. After explaining that I want to activate my iPhone, she tells me that she can't do iPhone activations. I had to ask - then why did I call the iPhone activation line if you can't do iPhone activations? I get back a very polite "we can't do iPhone activations from here". But I'm told that if I go to a store, that they can do it there.

Like I said, million-to-one scenario - who would have thought that a user might want to add an iPhone to an existing account and turn that existing account from an individual account into a family account? But maybe it will come up a few times, and AT&T will figure out they should support it instead of leaving a p*ssed off customer without a working iPhone. Yeesh.

Posted by Craig at 2:21 PM in Wireless
Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

I'm experimenting with a variety of travel times to our SVC office - I tried "fly in at 9:30pm the night before" trick my first time - that was good for not being tired the next day, but had the downside of using the San Jose rental car buses when they are completely off schedule. I waited for over 20 minutes to ride a bus. I tried the "fly at 9am, get in at 11ish" trick last week - I liked that one, I didn't have to get up any earlier than normal. The downside is that it isn't a good travel time for a single day visit - you lose the entire morning. Today I wanted to try a day trip, so I took the early flight. I have to say, the "4am wake up to catch the 6am flight to get in 8:30ish" trick sucks the most so far. I am so tired my eyes literally can't focus properly. And I have a fairly important meeting with a key partner today, too. Gah!

On the plus side, I got to use my giant gray goiter with my iPhone on the way down and watched a couple of episodes of 24. The iPhone is a KICK ASS video iPod. The screen is super bright and easy to see even if the person beside you has the shades up, and the size is awesome - I can't go back to my video iPod, I won't!

P.S. Note the single space after each period in this post.

Posted by Craig at 12:39 PM in Odds and Ends
Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

On a recent blog posting I made on Mac Mojo, a commenter railed on my use of two spaces after a period. This one took me by surprise – I'd never see so much passion about the number of spaces after a period before. I am definitely an old school typist - while I didn't learn on a typewriter (or DOS, for that matter), I learned on a Commodore PET in 1980, then I did a ton of Unix and MVS work in the mid to late 80's. Then I discovered DOS Land in 1989, Windows Land in 1991 (where yes, there were proportional fonts), Web Land in 1998, and finally I discovered Mac Land in 2000. Up until today, no matter what Land I was in, two spaces after a period is just what I typed. Publishing content in Web Land made them go away, of course - put as many as you want, it doesn't matter. That never bothered me much - I never thought to care one way or the other. But my thumb hits two spaces as part of my hard wiring – I'm typing this entry right now trying to put only one space after the period, and it is hard to fight my thumbs.

Personally, I like the extra spacing between sentences – it improves readability for me. I tend to consume things in chunks when I read, and so more spacing helps - much like a paragraph break improves readability, too. So off I went to the World Wide Web to discover what all the hub-bub was about.

Apparently, my thumbs liking to hit space twice after a period brings me dead in the middle of a controversy: this archived discussion on Wikipedia is similar to a bunch of other debates I saw. This spawned more curiosity - of all the things for people to flog each other about, two spaces vs. one after a sentence didn't strike me as a top priority for flogging.

I did a little more digging, and it looks like I'm going to have to reprogram my thumbs:

• About.com cuts people like me a little slack, summarizing with "Professional typesetters, designers, and desktop publishers should use one space only. Save the double spaces for typewriting, email, term papers, or personal correspondence. For everyone else, do whatever makes you feel good." I wasn't so sure about the whole "if it feels good, do it" motto, so I kept searching.
• The Chicago Manual of Style says "In typeset matter, one space, not two (in other words, a regular word space), follows any mark of punctuation that ends a sentence, whether a period, a colon, a question mark, an exclamation point, or closing quotation marks." However, in the Q&A, they do cut the two space folks a little slack, but not much.
• The AP Stylebook Ask the Editor section, when searched for the word "space", will reveal that "AP uses a single space after a period at the end of a sentence."

So there you have it - one space, not two, if you are publishing something professionally. Apparently, in personal writings using two spaces is somewhat kinda sorta okay - but you'll get frowned at for doing it.

Posted by Craig at 6:01 PM in Odds and Ends
Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

Comments

I've fallen behind on this blog - the last three days have been a blur. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in our SVC where I had a ton of 1:1's. I had a list of folks I wanted to see, and last time I was out there (2 weeks ago), I tried just "dropping by". That was a disaster - I only managed to sit down with a couple of people. Turns out people are in meetings or coding away like mad fiends… aka working. During work hours. Go figure . So this time around, I got time on people's schedules, which was a much more effective way of actually getting time with people. (yes, it is true, I am a time management genius). But that meant that I was completely booked up for two straight days, followed by today's marathon - back-to-back meetings from 9:30 to 5:30, followed by a mad dash in rush hour traffic to my father-in-laws 70th birthday gathering.

So to make a long story even longer, finally after 3 days I now have a chance to catch my breath and blog about something that really matters - the hideous four hundred foot long Belkin iPhone headphone adapter. Mine showed up while I was at SVC. Has anyone seen this thing? It's friggin' HUGE. It's over 2 inches long (okay, so it's not 400 feet). It makes my iPhone look like it sprouted a giant gray goiter. But at least it's bendy. I can bend it over 90 degrees, like a Gumby doll.

On the plus side, thanks to my iPhone's giant gray goiter, I can now use my Bose noise cancelling headphones. I can't wait for my next flight - I can retire my video iPod at last!

Posted by Craig at 10:27 PM in Odds and Ends
Permalink

Comments

Program management is an interesting discipline at Microsoft – it was when I first joined the company, it remains so now. It is a role that requires good "soft skills" ("I'm a people person"), good prioritization skills, good analysis skills, good presentation skills, and being able to walk that Zen line of "good enough" when shipping product. It's half art, half science, half Buddhist monk, half evangelist (arithmetic skills aren't really a requirement, though). It is a neat role that you don't see at a lot of other places – you'll see the title Program Manager, or Project Manager, but it is rare that you see Microsoft Program Management in action (although, as Rick points out, occasionally the more feature-happy Program Managers need to be put in their place).

I was never a Program Manager at Microsoft, I started as a Technical Evangelist (technical marketing) and then transitioned to a software development role and worked my way from there. I made the jump to general management in April of 1998, but I was still fairly heavily development biased in my thinking. My self-selected career track of leaving Microsoft to start a company really threw me into the realm of Program Management for the first time. Investors, customers, employees – that list of skills I mention up front turns out to be REALLY handy. Over the past 7 1/2 years, I've found that one can Program Manage anything to get the results one wants. I'd been doing it unconsciously for the first 35 years of my life, but once one is doing it consciously, watch out. It helped me navigate everything from raising money during the most hostile environment to startups in a long time to navigating the halls of a media company.

About seven months ago, my (just turned) six year old son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. We got lucky in that he didn't end up hospitalized – normally, how you find out your pancreas has stopped producing insulin is that you start to lose weight and you get really sick. But he had his six year checkup a week after he had started to wet the bed out of the blue, so we mentioned the bed wetting to the doctor, and bam – one urine test and a trip to the hospital later, we had our diagnosis. His blood glucose levels were north of 450 (60-120 is normal for non-diabetics) and his A1C result was 8.2% (<6% is normal for a non-diabetic, good control for a diabetic is < 7%). Point blood glucose tests tell you how you are doing at any given moment, but they tell you nothing about the hours in between. A1C really is the ultimate metric – it is your body's memory of how your blood sugars have been behaving. So the 8.2% showed us that while his initial blood glucose reading of 450+ was wildly high, it hadn't been wildly high for the past 3 months – just way too high.

Anyway, after the initial shock was over, I set about in a methodical way to understand how his body used carbohydrates and how it consumed the injected insulin, and to put in place a discipline and a methodology to really manage his diabetes. I did a ton of research up front (and continue to this day). An Access database was born, along with a tightly watched and tweaked rhythm for eating and exercising. Far more than the suggested minimum number of daily blood glucose readings became part of the program – after all, the pancreas does it continuously, so the more the information we have to help us substitute for the pancreas, the better. Part of the fun along the way was the evangelism of doctors and nurses to get the extra supplies we need (I am a huge fan of redundancy and long term planning). A lot of questioning and pushing back against medical advice that didn't fit what I was seeing in the patterns of the numbers was a big part of the fun – although we have switched to Children's Hospital in Seattle where the staff seems much more knowledgeable and much more willing to listen to reason, so I'm having to deal with less crap now. Every day is a day that something could go wrong and every day requires careful attention, but we are really in the zone now.

Once every 3 months, we have to take our son to Children's for a checkup. Today was that day. The travel and the appointment take about a half-day all told, and they poke, they prod, they ask questions – oh, and they measure his A1C. Today it was 5.8%

You can Program Manage anything.

Posted by Craig at 7:15 PM in Odds and Ends
Permalink | | Leave a comment

Comments