Bruce Campbell

Actor Bruce Campbell signs a book for me. This wasn't the best picture, but his assistant didn't follow the directions on how to use my camera. Campbell came to Microsoft for a question and answer session followed by a book signing.

Old Code

I opened up an application in PowerBuilder today. It was one I wrote back during the Heatherstone days that I started in 1997. The first piece of code I saw included this comment line at the top: Created: ALO - 10.19.98. This is an application that is still in production and in daily use by clients.

I did a rebuild of the application and when it completed successfully, I just sat there grinning to myself. It's just so cool.

When was the last time you came across something cool you did a long time ago?

Uncertainty

While driving back from yesterday's hiking trip, Gaurav and I were talking about various topics relating to marriage, starting with the idea that he's feeling ready to get married. I don't know how many times I've heard the theory that almost all disagreements between married couples have to do with either money or sex. It occurs to me that this is looking at the symptom, not the cause. The cause is uncertainty. Thinking about money, for example, couples that know from the outset what they are each allowed to do with money, what requires approval of their partner, and what's out of the question are probably going to have better marriages.

I've discussed undocumented expectations in this blog before, which is another way to describe uncertainty. What problems do you have in your life that you've thought were caused by a particular factor, but are in fact caused by uncertainty? What could you do to establish certainty and perhaps finally fix the problem?

Foggy Bearhead Mountain

On top of Bearhead Mountain in the fog - Gaurav and I hiked up Bearhead yesterday and while the hike was a good one (6 miles out and back, 1700 foot elevation gain), unfortunately there was no view to be had. The sky completely cleared two hours later as we were driving back to Bellevue.

Unrated Versions

A lot of movies on DVD are now advertised as the "unrated" versions, "including scenes not in the theatrical release!" I've seen a couple of these and realized that the unrated versions are advertised as such, not because they necessary include more of the stuff that gets the movie a bump from one rating to the next (PG to PG-13, PG-13 to R, or R to NC-17), but more often because it gives the casual movie watcher the impression that this version moves along the scale toward the NC-17 end. Apparently, this sells or rents more copies of that version. Not that viewers have much choice in whether to rent the theatrical release over the unrated DVD release in many cases, at least at Blockbuster, as usually all the copies of a movie are of the same version, rated or unrated.

Based on the movies I've rented, I'm guessing (I have to guess, since I generally haven't seen both versions) that this is almost entirely a marketing ploy and has nothing to do with the content. I suspect that the unrated version is no better and possibly worse than the theatrical release and that the scenes left out were left out for good reason - they didn't make the movie any better, especially when the theatrical release was mediocre.

Personal Scorecard

I've started a personal scorecard. I posted it on a personal bCentral Sharepoint site I have so I can get to it from any of the three computers I regularly use, or really any computer with an Internet connection and PowerPoint installed. In it, I will give myself a daily grade, like those you get in school, A to F, on each of the five areas I've decided to set as my initial focus. I'll also retain the accumulated previous week's grade.

I've decided to start with these areas: Diet, Exercise, Microsoft, Heatherstone, and GTD System. The first two are obvious. Microsoft is a representation of how well I'm doing my job at Microsoft. Heatherstone is a catch-all for my progress with my personal, generally financially orient projects. GTD System is how well I use David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology for time and project management.

I've also added to my calendar a recurring "meeting" from 8:55am to 9:00am to update the scorecard. This will push the update into my attention every day as I try to make it habitual. I graded myself for today immediately (rather than tomorrow morning) since I was already in there setting it up at the end of the day. For those that are curious, today I gave myself a "D" average (C, F, B, F, F).

With an average of a D today, I already feel an internal push to do better tomorrow - which is of course the point.

First Stint with a Customer

At this very moment, one of our internal customers, Gary, is using our newly launched product on his laptop in my office. One of my coworkers is here, too, helping him.

Our product has two websites, one a customer-facing site (that is, at connect.microsoft.com for people participating in our Beta programs) and the other an administration site for internal people to set up those programs and the content that will appear on the site.

Preparing for v1.0, our team set the site that is presented to customers as the highest priority. That meant that as we got close to delivering, if we saw a problem with the customer site we fixed it, if we saw a problem with the administration site, we usually let it go to a future version. So, the internal site has a lot of open issues.

Now, Gary's using this for the first time as the first person to use our administration site. While he does stop occasionally to say we have done a great job overall, as he's trying stuff, he's also rolling his eyes, groaning, and giving endless ideas on how we can improve it. It's pretty entertaining, pretty illuminating, and generally a great time finding out just how hard it is to please a customer, especially a Microsoft employee.

If I Had Time

I've decided to remove "if I had time" from my vocabulary. Instead, I will recognize the reality: I have time, but choose to spend it elsewhere. In accordance with the actor/prop metaphor, "if I had time" is prop language, "I choose to do something else" is actor language.

Because of that, I've dropped out of an activity I was participating in on Monday nights. It just wasn't worth the time.

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink

I've just returned to work from a week's vacation. One of the things I was able to do while off from work is read several books. Since I like to post book reviews to my blog, I have some writing to do!

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, is his followup to The Tipping Point, but now focused on those first few seconds or less when a person is confronted with a new situation and makes a judgement about what is observed. He discusses many examples, from art forgery detection to John Gottmann's divorce prediction where people use what he calls "thin-slicing" to quickly make highly accurate decisions with what appears to be minimal or insufficient information. Gladwell also covers how to know when to trust or not trust such insights.

The book is a good read overall, flowing well from topic to topic, example to example, with one exception. This book could have been about 20-50 pages shorter if Gladwell had left out the repetitive references to material previously covered, and would have been better for it. Despite this shortcoming, there's more than enough interesting material to keep the reader engaged throughout.

For a shorter version of the basic concepts, Business 2.0 published an article called "How to Think With Your Gut" by Thomas A. Stewart in November of 2002. I'd read that article at the time, so Gladwell's discussions of a group of Marines wargaming with guys that work the trading floor on the New York Stock Exchange was already familiar.

I've never read The Tipping Point, but after reading Blink, I will.

Learning by Teaching

Next week, while I’m on vacation, I’m going to visit with a long-time Heatherstone client of mine. While I’m there, I’m going to provide some coaching to two of the employees on using David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology.

Of course, I’m personally not nearly as good at GTD as I would like to be. Trevor and I talk about it quite often, and I have slowly, painfully slowly, improved at using the system, but I feel I have a long way to go to be truly effective in this way. My hope, however, is that since I understand the principles, coaching others on the subject will help me learn more about it myself. Teaching another person helps the teacher organize his thoughts and solidify his own thinking on the subject.

When I was a freshman in college, I tutored other students in the math lab in business calculus. I had taken calculus as a junior in high school and done very well, but I think that at the end of the year after tutoring others for several hours every week I knew calculus better than at any other time.

This opportunity to teach others about something I’m still learning therefore seems like a great one I’m excited to have.

Remember Solutions

I just finished reading Angels & Demons by Dan Brown, the well-know author of The Da Vinci Code. Like The Da Vinci Code, this book seems to be as much about passing on the fruits of his research as it is about the storyline. The city of Rome, the artifacts of the Illuminati, and the (possibly real) revelations about mysteries hidden in plain view are the real meat of the story rather than the characters.

Here and there, though, a reader finds a concept more applicable to daily life. Early in the book, the prominent female protagonist, Vittoria, is trying to figure out the solution to a problem that seems hopeless. She mentally changes modes of thinking into one of remembrance rather than the more usual dependence on creativity and imagination. The idea is that by tricking your mind into believing you already know the answer, that solving the problem is a foregone conclusion, and that all you need to do is remember what to do, the stress that comes from the part of your mind that insists there is no solution is relieved.

Brown refers to this, through Vittoria’s inner monologue, as a Buddhist invention. If there is more to be read on the subject, I’m going to do so once I’m not on an airplane as I am as I write this.

Ship It! (OK, Almost)

The product I've been working on for the last year at Microsoft, called Microsoft Connect, is off for final privacy and security audit! Soon, the beta programs for MSN's Messenger and Hotmail and Windows Longhorn will launch at connect.microsoft.com through the web property we've built. We've been on death march for weeks, putting in long evenings and weekends to get the thing out the door by a set date. That is finally over. The three days of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday had me at the office for about 35 hours dealing with final bits and pieces, along with most of our team of about 18 people.

I say about 18 because I'm not actually sure how many of us there are. Our test team is mostly in China and has had so many staff changes I haven't been able to keep up with how many people are on the team. This way of handling testing has many pitfalls and has been the most difficult, frustrating, and ineffective part of our project. The good news, though, is that we also now have a test lead in Redmond who also speaks Chinese and will be here for the next version.

Within a couple weeks, the audits and rollout to production will happen and the shipping of the product will be truly complete. As I'll be on vacation for a bit, my part is done. When I return, I'm on to work for version 1.1, such as the addition of web forums and an Outlook toolbar that lets our internal program administrators send mail through our system directly from Outlook. The toolbar part is especially interesting, since that will be a true innovation to how Microsoft people communicate with customers.

In the meantime, what a relief to be done!

The Italian Internet

The code for our new website at Microsoft is about to be locked down and we're doing final testing of version 1.0. As such, I'm running my browser in Italian. I'm sure many Americans aren't familiar with how you change the language preference in your browser. For Internet Explorer, you do that through Tools Internet Options, then select the Languages button on the General tab. I've set mine as Italian, then English.

When I open up the test version of our site, all the menus and such appear in Italian. It also gives a (Resource Not Located) message when we're missing an Italian version of a particular piece of text. I can log that as a bug so our localization team will know to fix it.

What's more interesting is to then go to other sites and see which ones are presented in Italian. For example, I'm typing this on the Blogger website and about half the text is in Italian, such as "Consenti nuovi commenti su questo post", which I think means, "Allow new comments for this post". However, the link for "Recover post" still just says "Recover post".

I may leave my browser this way for awhile and see if it teaches me any new Italian. Now I'll go click "Pubblica post" and share this with you, the reader.

Davey Crockett on Government

http://www.stanley2002.org/crockett.htm

I had cause today to refer someone to the link above. It is a book excerpt quoting Davey Crockett from when he was a U.S. Congressman from Tennessee on the limits of governmentally funded charity. I find it inspirational and wish modern politicians were more like him.

Actor or Prop?

At lunch the other day, Adam was talking about something he had heard from someone else whose name I don't recall, but was pretty interesting and I'll repeat despite my lack of attribution.

Some people are naturally actors and will describe an event in terms of what they did, whether good, bad, or indifferent. Others are naturally props and will describe an event (event the same event) in terms of what happened to them outside of their control. Of course, no one is really all one way or all the other, but we generally have tendencies toward one or the other.

For example, a prop might say, "I thought we were friends and then he stole money from me. Trusting people sure can get you kicked in the head." In the same circumstances, an actor might say, "I really blew it that time. I put my trust in the wrong guy and paid the price. I'll need to keep a closer eye in the future, especially when money is involved."

Although this conversation wasn't really directed at me (there were several people at this particular lunch), it got me thinking. How often am I an actor? How often a prop? Am I comfortable with the ratio between the two? In answer to that last one, well, in a word, no. Or at least, not until now. My future will be one of acting rather than being acted upon.