I just need to make an announcement because that way I know I'll do it because I won't want to wuss out in public:
I just signed up for my first half-marathon, in five weeks.
I'm going to try to come under 2:30. We shall see if I succeed. My 10K race PR is 1:01:49 and my last 11m long run in April was just over 2 hours (not in a race, so I was slower than race pace), so I think I have a decent shot at meeting my goal.
This gal... OK, I forgot to actually do the thumbs part. But I had the blog title in my head and liked it so much I wanted to use it regardless :-)
Thank you, Ariel - it is super soft and comfy!
I can't wait until these babies arrive:
I've been reading http://www.microspotting.com ever since my coworker Alex (aka carpenter-turned-test-manager) was profiled a while back. Great writing, beautiful photography, fun quirky looks at a bunch of Microsoft employees.
Alex's profile is a great reminder of how many different backgrounds people have - he's not the only former carpenter in the team, for one. Another incredibly technical PM I've worked with for years majored in Zoology. Last year I hired a user researcher with a PhD in... well some kind of high-falutin' word I don't even remember, but his thesis was about some kind of enzyme in some kind of gland in some kind of songbird's brain [1]. And as for me, well I was a boring-old CS major... before I dropped out and came here instead. :-)
[1] Also important and worth mentioning: he's really, really, really tall [2] [3]
[2] 6'8"
[3] A fact of which the entire team has a few jollies about [4]
[4] Because tall jokes never get old [5]
[5] Especially when you report to a five feet tall shrimp
I couldn't say it better myself:
P.S. Kudos to the Live Writer team - pretty slick Insert | Video functionality!
Great post from Josh. Although I admit I'm biased about #4 on his list...
With the new 'green' effort with our kitchen supplies, they posted signs in every kitchen:
Outlook 2000:
Outlook 2007:
Breath with me now: Ahhhhh...
I was an Outlook tester during the 2000 release; when the icon was first released internally, we were harshly critical of it in a very public way - it sucks to be the product that gets 'yellow' as your family color because it just doesn't work well at smaller sizes. We were very envious (you might even say 'green') of Excel, and hopping mad (say 'red hot'?) at powerpoint that they got nice icons and we got baby poop.
I heard later on that the designer ended up quitting shortly thereafter (not sure if it's true, never knew her name) and always wondered if our vitriol played a role.
Dare has some good points on the debate around the scalability of twitter, relating it to some similar challenges Exchange has faced over the years. Another related issue is that in a single-instance model where you have a pointer to the content, this increases the number of read I/Os necessary to retrieve data - which could end up being net worse overall (running out of IOPs long before you run out of capacity) than if you just had multiple copies of each piece of data.
We've focused a lot on improving scale over the years but the number one factor in that scale, for Exchange's profile, has been disk IO - which is why we focused so heavily on that in Exchange 2007, reducing it by as much as up to 70% when you follow the configuration guidelines. We're like a geeky band of seven dwarfs, working and humming: "IO, IO, increase the scale we go...." For years I've heard people outside the company say "Exchange can't scale because it's on JET, Exchange needs to move to SQL" - which is just patently ridiculous. The version of JET Exchange uses has been carefully tuned over the years for Exchange's usage profile, which includes random IO and comparatively more writes as compared to reads as mail is constantly flowing in and out of the system; compare this to the IO profiles of many apps built on SQL which have a much higher mix of read vs write IOs.
Of course, I'm simplifying - like Dare says on the twitter debate, there are far more issues here at play. Thankfully there are a bunch of brilliant folks who work on this area in Exchange and do the heavy lifting of architecting the system properly so that customers can enjoy the benefits.
I can't wait until the law against using cellphones while driving goes into effect in Washington state.
Tomorrow is Mother's day. It was also a day on which I was planning to run my first half-marathon, which I have been training for for months.
Yesterday I worked out in the morning, and at the end of the day David and I decided to go bike and pick up the kids from school in the trailer to squeeze in an extra workout.
Like most pacific northwesterners, we actually pay attention to street signals and so during the ride there, we patiently waited until we had the WALK sign and right of way on a busy intersection.
When I was halfway across the intersection, an idiot in the right-hand lane pulled out, covering the entire crosswalk, chatting away on a cellphone and not even looking my way.
I braked fast in order to not slam into her car, fell down, and my bike fell on top of me. And in the process, I banged up my knee - which now hurts when I put pressure on it, so I can't @*#$(@#$ run my @#)$@ half marathon anymore.
I couldn't help but think of Frank who finished 65% of a marathon recently...
Argh. Argh. Argh.
Saw this recently on a web signup form and it took me several seconds to figure out that it wasn't a mistake that the same thing got listed twice:
Following on to my short rant yesterday, I wanted to share some information from a survey we did about a year ago. We surveyed ~1400 people[1] about their email management habits, how overloaded they felt, if they used conversation views, folders, filters/rules, sorting, etc as well as asking them to self-report on how much mail they receive/send/have filtered by rules/etc per day.
We tried very hard to find some something different in the behaviors of the people who felt overloaded vs those who didn't - e.g. surely people who get a lot of email are more likely to feel overloaded, right? Or surely people who take advantage of management features like rules and conversation view feel more on top of things than those who don't?
The answer: Nope. No correlation. From the report written by a researcher on my team: "Crosstabs and frequencies analyses indicate that perceived effectiveness at mail management does not relate to use of Outlook/OWA features (Sorting, Search Folders, etc.), to types of mail received (messages sent by coworkers, thread-related messages, etc.), or to use of Outook/OWA views (primary view, secondary view, level of Conversation View experience)."
Here are the answers for how overwhelmed people felt, one chart for those who worked at microsoft and another for those who didn't:
Another quote: "Factors relating to volume of mail are not as strongly related to mail management effectiveness as might be expected. The strongest “volume” factor is “daily time spent managing mail”: 74% of respondents who find mail management difficult, as compared to only 58% of respondents who manage mail effectively, spend more than 2 hours per day scanning, reading, composing, and organizing mail."
Of course all self-reported data (# of hours spent managing mail, # of messages received) is not necessarily accurate but the lack of correlation between these users' perceptions of their overload and their usage of mail management techniques is very interesting. We also kept the ranges quite broad, for example when we asked about messages received per day the options were spaced as follows: 0-50, 51-100, 101-300, 300+.
[1] Note that the participants were heavily tilted towards a more technical audience - half internal microsoft, half external but the external folks tended to work heavily with software/technology in some way.
I am so tired of reading blog posts that point the finger at email and imply that the problem is that we have too much email and that the solution are other technology streams, 1:many communication, etc.
Guess what folks, email has 1:many too, call them groups or mailing lists or distribution lists or whatever you want, but they are a contributor to the information overload, not a solution.
What we have is a human problem, not anything inherent to email. The lower the barrier to entry for a communications channel (+ the ease of reaching others - i.e. is the audience out there listening) the more it will be used. It doesn't matter if it goes over SMTP or SIP or HTTPs or whatever the Next Big Thing will be.
This is the first rational post I've seen about this issue. We need 'goldpan' solutions - and not just for email but for all these newer communication streams.
And to be clear, I don't think Microsoft (or anyone else) has goldpan solutions yet. We have pieces of sieves, but we still ask users to put them together and come up with their own goldpan. I do believe we'll get there eventually, but progress seems like molasses at times.
That's right - Luke Skywalker. Or, as Jared describes it, "LUCK SKY WOKR". Not too freakin' bad for a four year old!
"An S the best I can try, R2D2, C3P0, TK-41, and Battle Droid"
"Lord Vader" (yes, he calls him Lord Vader. It drives me nuts. "Darth" would do, boy.)
I helped put together a video for Interact that gives a glimpse behind-the-scenes of the Exchange team.
Please don't be scared off by the high production videos and think we're corporate shills - it's just because we got the marketing team to pay for it (score!).
Near the end of the video they have a few shots of various people including myself laughing. I've always wondered what they tell people to make them laugh on camera. So I went in for my interview and at the end, they said "OK we need a shot of you laughing - Joe, tell them your joke" but me being me, I interrupted and said "Oh man, you need a joke to make people laugh, have I got a great one for you."
So I started telling them my joke:[2]
A pirate walks into a bar, with a steering wheel in his pants...
And the entire room erupted in laughter, because apparently that was the exact same joke that Joe had been telling people all day in order to get them to laugh.
So what you see is not me laughing at Joe telling the joke, but me laughing at me telling the joke that happened to be the same joke as Joe's joke. But everyone else, of course, was laughing at Joe's joke.
Capisce?
[1] Actually, I lie - there are no tacos in this blog post. That is simply the name of a store nearby msft campus that I've always found funny. "Two great tastes that taste great together!"
[2] I don't know where I first heard it - it may have been from Eric's blog, but I think I first heard it around some Talk Like A Pirate Day. Man, I love that joke.
