I apparently haven't had anything to say that's
longer than 140 characters lately. Sorry :-)
I was playing around with photos.live.com, added some photos… and clicked on the very nice large bolded “Upload” word twice before realizing that it was simply happy text, trying to guide me towards the upload button.
Aghhh.
I was trying to paypal some money to my sister a minute ago, and I sat at the payment page wondering what I’d done wrong. A one minute task suddenly took five minutes as I scratched my head and clicked around to see what I’d missed.
Here’s what I saw – can you figure out why I thought something was wrong?
The text on the “Send Money” button is gray! I instantly assumed it was grayed out because some required field or another was missing, or I’d skipped a step… but finally I decided to just try clicking on it and, yep, it worked fine.
...but the time has come. 11 years at Microsoft, all of them in the Outlook & Exchange teams, and now that's coming to an end. Next Friday will be my last day in Exchange, after which point I will be moving to the Mobile team, to be the lead PM for the photos & camera experience.
Holy crud, it's been a long time. Eleven years in this space - all of my time at Microsoft in these two teams. Nine years in Exchange. I was still a kid when I started in Exchange. Over the years I've grown up and the Exchange team has become my second family. A third of my entire life has been spent working in the messaging space at Microsoft.
My leaving has nothing to do with Exchange, of course, I still adore the product, the customers, the technology, the vision, the community, the funny blog URLs that some misguided people think was an accident[1], etc... I'm leaving because frankly if there is one thing that could tear me away from Exchange, it's the opportunity to get paid to work on the thing I've been passionate about in my spare time for the last ten years: I have a photo studio in my house that I pull out to do portraits for friends & family a few times a year & even considered quitting the company once to start my own photography business[2]. What I love about photography is making beautiful pictures accessible & affordable to more people... and now I get to do that for even more people, and get paid for it. I still can't quite believe my luck.
It hasn't quite hit me yet that it's real, that I'm actually leaving. On my last day I expect to be a useless crying blob, if you'll be seeing me that day, then consider this your fair warning, come bearing kleenex.
I don't know what else to say, so I'll leave you with a random list of fun memories from the years:
- Starting the Exchange team blog - (with a lame-o "first post") can't believe it's been five years already! In our three year anniversary post I mentioned some of my favorite posts, like the first one about the M drive, or our limerick contest. The four year anniversary post was fun too.
- MEC. I miss MEC.
- Paul Bowden's sense of humor. Cheers!
- Exchange lolcats
- The career site - check out the comic, we update it every couple of weeks.
- The team videos we did - sorry external folks since these are internal only, but softies can check them out here. In particular, last summer's ETARM is priceless. And if you were around msft in 2003 you must check out the office supplies one.
- The april fool's (I forget which year) that OWA made a Hello Kitty theme, made it the default theme for everyone in MSIT, and then blocked users from turning it off. What a day. :-)
- Steaming media and widows sever and um, a certain kind of folders that are not public.
- Getting an Exchange-branded v1 zune for our ship gift for E2K7.
- Having BillG's voice as the unified messaging auto-attendant.
- MAPI beers
- That good ol' coworker I never got to meet myself but heard many a story about, Olaf Ian Davidson
- Being married to a guy who sent me an email on valentine's day once that had an ascii art cupid.
- Making the tshirt for the 2006 version of Bedlam DL3.
- Getting active in the blogging community over the last few years and getting to know people like Raymond, Betsy & Eric.
- The internal newsletter called the Weekly Exchange that I did for 2.5 years. I quoted part of one of the april fool's versions here.
- Doing the press tour for E2K7 Beta 2.
- KC
[1] Nope, sorry folks. Very intentional. We've been making fun of that for over a decade now and I bought the domain name myself, snickering all the way. :-)
[2] What stopped me is when I realized being an entrepreneur is at least as much (if not more) about salesmanship than functional skills... not a strong point of mine.
[3] You know, it's really pretty impressive - in this most recent role, I lasted two and a half years, that's pretty impressive for me! :-)[4]
[4] No, [3] wasn't actually referenced anywhere else. Just messing with ya.
I had a discussion with someone today who said something like "It's amazing how much of the process of software development isn't about software, it's just about communication and cross-group collaboration". My response was that "Actually that's not amazing to me - what's amazing to me is how many people don't realize that's what it comes down to."
On that note, Mini's recent post about getting to level 63 at microsoft, and the resulting comments, are a must read. There's some great advice in the post and the comments, and it's also really interesting to read other people's stories of how they got to each level.
One of the themes I saw in some of the commenters I agreed with the most was the emphasis they put on the value of "soft skills", aka those dirty words: communication, collaboration, etc. In particular, this comment stuck with me, and how he talked about his transition from being a star IC (individual contributor) but a jerk in his behavior - and that he hit a wall at level 62 and wasn't able to make it to 63 until he "finally figured out how to play well with others and was able to show some major cross-group gains in addition to my own leet prod dev skills".
I've worked with plenty of jerks over the years - the persona of the 'prima donna developer' used to be nearly universal. I distinctly remember the "trial by fire" I went through ten years ago when I got an "interpersonally challenged" developer to finally respect me by making a point he hadn't already thought of (gasp!). At the time, I was so proud of myself. Only years later did it occur to me that that shouldn't have been necessary.
But I've noticed recently - there seem to be far fewer 'jerks' at the company now than there used to be. And many times when I see jerk-ish behavior, it really just ends up being a case of miscommunication[1]. A year ago, I got an email out of the blue from someone who had been particularly challenging to work with many years back, explaining that he'd grown up a lot in the intervening years, realized he was really difficult to work with and apologizing for his behavior. That mail made my day - and boy was I glad I hadn't burned that later bridge by flaming him back during the days while he was a thorn in my side :-) (not to say that I've never been a jerk, of course - we all have moments we're not proud of).
I'm not sure what to attribute this gradual change to - are we as a company (finally) moving towards a culture where that kind of behavior is not rewarded? I'd like to think so. As a people manager I try to encourage steps in the right direction. Change at this level is slow and gradual... but I like the direction we're headed in. This year marks ten years for me at Microsoft - I was a kid when I started, and in some ways I think the company still was so childish as well.
[1] I often do what I call an "MRI", or Most Respectful Interpretation - I forget who I picked this up from, but it's a useful tool. When someone does something jerkish, ask yourself: what's the MRI? Maybe her kid's in the hospital. Maybe he has a newborn at home and got 3 hours of sleep last night. etc...
The Seattle PI recently posted about recent changes in the numbers of unique visitors for the major email services such as hotmail, yahoo, gmail, QQ, etc. According to that data, hotmail lost some users. From the first comment:
I can't say I'm surprised. I have email accounts with hotmail, yahoo and google. Hotmail is the WORST at filtering spam. I only use it when I sign up for free samples and things, because I know I can just go in once a month and delete everything, since it's all crud.
Let me guess - he probably had that hotmail account for many many years and well, there have been a lot of free samples over the years... But hey, he'd never give away his shiny new Gmail address for those free samples because he values it too much for that. And wouldn't you know it, his gmail account also gets less spam. Yay technology!
It's all about technology, of course, and nothing at all to do with user behavior. Right?
...
To be clear, I don't mean to suggest that our spam-filtering technology is flawless, I have no idea how it specifically compares to our competitors[1] - for all I know, gmail might actually have a phenomenally better spam engine[2]. This comment just reminded me of one of my favorite axioms - User behavior will always (eventually) trump technology:
- If your email software forces you to save .EXE attachments to disk with a scary dialog, you can be darned sure that the next virus that comes out is going to be advertised as "A fix for the latest virus, just save it to disk and then run it!". Or why even bother going to that much effort, just pretend it's a $300 bill that's overdue. Or if you just block the .EXE filetypes outright and don't let users access it, the next virus will come in a .ZIP file. And if you add support for scanning within .ZIP files, the next virus will come in a password-protected .ZIP file that tells the recipient what the password is in the body of the message.
- If you create an email address on a popular email service or at a large company that has only a few characters in it, you will get more spam, regardless of the quality of your spam filters, because you will be subjected to dictionary attacks.[3] Gmail doesn't even let you create an address with fewer than 6 characters - kudos for them for that small attempt to prevent users from shooting themselves in the foot.[4]
- If you build the most awesomely secure website for your credit card with checks and balances up the wazoo, and ensure that no user will ever be able to make a purchase online without also sharing that doubleplussecret code on the back, you'll have to cross your fingers and hope that the minimum wage employee accepting your users' credit cards isn't careless or holding a grudge... and boy howdy I hope that nobody ever calls one of your users claiming to be you and telling them "Your account has been hacked, and can you please share your credit card number and expiration and secret code because that way we can verify we are talking to the true owner."
- If your email service requires super strong passwords, see how many of your users will give up their password in exchange for the rich reward of a free pen or some chocolate.
[1] My gmail account is full of thrice-a-week emails from buy.com, I think because three years ago, I turned on google checkout in order to get $10 off when making a buy.com order, and apparently missed a checkbox that must have been checked by default begging them to spam me.
[2] Although, come to think of it... I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a spam message in my inbox for my work email. I've got my fair share in my junk mail folder, with almost zero false positives - and no false positives that I care about. And I even see some messages in there advertising VSLive that I certainly don't remember signing up for. Awesome. It's great to see the industry making progress in this area. It makes me slightly less embarrassed about how Bill said at a conference in 2004 that spam would be gone by 2006.
[3] I used to work with a guy that got randomly assigned an alias @microsoft.com with only four characters in it. He got gobs of spam, way more than anyone else at work. Once he changed his alias to a longer number of characters, it magically stopped and never came back.
[4] Hotmail seems to support addresses of four and higher characters. I will send this suggestion to that team.
[5] "Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study"[6]
[6] Footnote #5 wasn't referenced anywhere. Did I just blow your mind or what?
Well, OK, not everywhere. It's missing in this bathroom. See if you can spot the design flaw in this bathroom stall at a local restaurant:
I must have missed the sign on the door:
I have been a fan of CakeWrecks for a long time, I am mighty tempted to start up a similar blog for a hall of shame/fame for design.
Gee. That image just immediately brings home to me that here I am at the front door of the company store, where I can buy Microsoft products at discount prices. :-) Look at them kaaaraaaazy, wacky kids, talking about Microsoft software!
Raymond's recent blog on strange things that happen when you let people choose their own name (part 3) reminded me to check if my favorite old email address, kclemson5 AT exchange.microsoft.com was still working: yep, still there.
As to the history of why I can be reached via that email address, it goes back to the months before we shipped Exchange 2000, when we were heavily dogfooding public folders. I had a public folder with my alias (kclemson) that I used to store various messages and documents that I wanted to share with others in my team.
At one point, something somehow happened in MSIT ops [1] whereby somehow all of the public folders somehow got email enabled, and there was a collision (because gee golly, there already was a kclemson AT exchange.microsoft.com, aka me) so it couldn't give the public folder that address... and somehow it ended up following a codepath that then stamped a 'kclemson5'[2] on my user object. No kclemson4, 3 or 2. Don't ask me why. Ahh, I love software. :-)
So because there's an (understandable) reticence on IT's part to ever remove an email address from a mailbox, it has persisted on my user object ever since.
Also collecting dust on my user object are some additional addresses that are a nice little traipse through memory lane of former Exchange codenames, the history of mail at Microsoft as well as hint at some of the forced complexity we put in our environment in order to ensure that dogfooding Exchange for Microsoft helps us find and fix enterprise-scale bugs before RTM:
Let's see:
- msg.microsoft.com - I don't actually remember what this is for - any takers?
- titanium.microsoft.com - titanium was the codename for Exchange 2003
- windows.microsoft.com - the Windows team has their own forest for deploying early builds of windows server builds - although I don't know the reason for the kclemson2
- platinum.corp.microsoft.com - platinum was the codename for Exchange 2000.
- APPS-WGA: No, WGA isn't Windows Genuine Advantage. It was the acronym of the org I was in at the time (Outlook) but I can't for the life of me remember what it spelled out.
- Xenix_users: Who doesn't love a good throwback to good ol' xenix_users? I love how this has even trickled into documentation.
And while we're enjoying the many uses of the "E-Mail Addresses" tab when looking up a user in Outlook, here's a fun bit of Exchange trivia: notice how the "smtp:" prefixes on all of those addresses are all lower case? There's a separate proxy address which has a prefix of "SMTP:" in upper case - but only one. The upper case nature of the prefix is how Exchange knows that that proxy is the default proxy address for the user (e.g. the one to use on outbound mail by default). This isn't purely a handy trick to make the item stand out more in the dialog - the code actually looks for the upper case letters.
I wasn't around when these concepts were first implemented in Exchange, but I assume it's one of those pieces of code that was written 15 years ago and well, there really wasn't a compelling reason for changing it because It Worked Fine. If it ain't broke...
[1] And this is where my memory is fuzzy on the exact details so forgive the number of "somehow"s.
[2] kclemson5 is alive![3]
[3] I used that same reference recently to a room full of blank looks.
Dare and his wife welcomed baby Nathan into the world last week.
It sounds like it was a pretty stressful week too. Being a new parent is such a stressful experience, sometimes I wonder how the human race survived at all. When I struggled through it myself, I remember my mother (who had five children in 11 years - 4 of them in a span of 6 years!) telling me to just repeat to myself: "This to, shall pass." Fortunately she was right.
Dare's post about human nature touches on UAC in Vista:
How do you design a dialog prompt to warn users about the potential risk of an action they are about to take if they are so intent on clicking OK and getting the job done that they forget that there was even a warning dialog afterwards?
There are a lot more examples out there but the fundamental message is the same; if you are designing a system that is going to be used by humans then you should account for the various ways people will try to outwit the system simply because they can't help themselves.
After reading this, I thought to myself "Oh yeah, I should write up that blog about the first time we did the security patch in Outlook 98 which forced users to save dangerous filetypes like EXE/COM/etc locally before they could run it"... and then I realized that I already did:
The history of attachment security in Outlook, part 1
Attachment Security, Part Deux
It makes me laugh now to think back to the days of that very first patch, and all the hours I spent testing various scenarios, ensuring that the user was forced to save them to the filesystem first. The next email virus that came around after we released that patch, I kept track of all the copies I received from people inside Microsoft, and I looked at what version of Outlook they were running - and many of them were running that patched version. So they got the BillForNecklace.exe, saved it locally, and then ran it. Gotta love humans!
I've gotten completely hooked. My username is 'whoosp', and thanks to EA's fantastic web integration, you can see all my creations and sporecasts on the web (there's nothing quite like the first time you see a pristine new planet, and populate it with naked homer simpsons). The whole experience is really phenomenal - although a bit buggy with the sporepedia management, I'm sure it will improve over time.
If you haven't played it, and you're a fan of any sim game whatsoever, I highly recommend you try it out - don't form an opinion until you're done with Space stage, because parts of the earlier stages are a bit lame.
And of course, like any good app these days, it has a vibrant community... where you can see artists at work like this guy, who made a spaceship that looks like an iPhone (see the creation video). :-)
A while ago, I did my civic duty and upgraded my XP box at home to SP3... and then immediately noticed that my beloved addressbar on the taskbar, by far one of my most favorite features of the OS for many years running, was missing. The bar itself wasn't there anymore, nor was the option available on the right click menu to add it back.
I was busy at the time so I didn't get around to finding out what happened to it, I just assumed it was a bug and went about my business. Today I got around to looking into this, only to find out that this was by design, according to this thread. There seems to be some confusion in the thread, so I don't know the official story... all I know is that I want my addressbar back.
Fortunately the second listing in the search results was to this post, which in turn pointed me at Muvenum's freeware addressbar replacement which I just installed, and it works just wonderfully. Although it's freeware, using the addressbar is one of those things that's pretty core to my experience, so I was happy to donate. I was also amused at the last step of the MuvEnum installation wizard which features that donation step quite prominently:
Kudos to them for quickly building and releasing such a useful app, and making it free. And because of the usable-but-not-annoying integration into the app, I also happily donated. If not for that I might have gotten distracted and moved onto something else :-)
I posted a couple of months ago about signing up for my first half marathon... and I ran it last week. About 2 hours, 20 minutes... didn't stop running the entire time[1]. I'd like to say that two hours later I was out on the town wearing high heels like Katie Holmes, but that would be a lie: I was passed out in bed.
Here's me about 8 or 9 miles in:
And afterward... this was taken shortly after I kissed the ground, I believe, and my daughter promptly plopped down into my tired, sore[2] lap:
I think that running a half marathon is like getting married. While at the reception, people congratulate you on the wedding... and then promptly ask you when you're having kids. It was only a few hours after the HM before I got my first "So - that was nice and all, but... are you going to run a full marathon now?"[4].
[1] I am not counting the 5 seconds at each of 5 water stops where I walked long enough to chug my cup of water, a strategy I chose after running through the first water stop and nearly choking.
[2] Achy[3]
[3] Insert another form of pained adjective
[4] Because you know, anybody can go run 13.1 miles, that's practically wuss-ville, but it's only the real runners who run 26.2[5]
[5] Knowing full well that the day I finish my first full marathon, I am going to be asked if I'm going to sign up for an ultra.
I saw this sign while on vacation. I think this sign should be in a graphic design puzzle book, one of those "Can you find everything that's wrong with this picture?".
Two weeks later, my eyes are still hurting from the maniacal number of fonts, colors, sizes, single column vs two column, left justification vs centered, caps vs non-caps...aghhhh!
On the bright side, it's nice to have a reminder from time to time about how valuable professionally-done graphic and print design is.
And I admit - I was so disgusted with the sign that I actually forced myself to read the whole thing and marvel at its ugliness. Perhaps that was their devious goal from day number one... naaah.
I was reminded of this sign today because we're having an internal debate about a certain piece of UI that currently has no icons on it, and some people believe that adding icons will make it more aesthetically pleasing. It's so difficult to talk about such subjective things as aesthetics - and while in general icons and imagery can be useful and add value to the user, everything on a page has a potential of contributing to visual overload, and so we need to carefully balance several different (and all highly subjective) criteria to make these kinds of decisions.
