myShoggoth

Decision made! Huzzah!

I just realized that I hadn't posted any kind of update here on my work status, so...

I made my decision on what I'm going to do next, although I'm going to be a bit coy about it for the time being.  I'm extremely excited and working hard at it, I look forward to being able to talk at great length about what it is.

In the meantime, I'm more likely to talk about the technologies I'm working with (like Ruby on Rails, which I'm quite impressed by overall) and less about the specifics of the work.

Winding Line through London Heathrow

I'm writing this at London's Heathrow airport, a little over two hours before the flight is due to leave, and I've got a rant building up.

We've made it through security, and here's what we had to do to get there:

1. Take the Heathrow Express train from Paddington Station to the airport.  This went very smoothly and I highly recommend it.
2. Get off the train and look for information on our flight.  We were there three hours and ten minutes early.  They assign check-in zones to each flight, which is the first insanity.  If you're at the airport too early, they haven't assigned a zone yet and you can't check in yet.
3. Go through the line to get our VAT (Value Added Tax) refund.  Short line, long wait.
4. Head down to our 'zone' once it was assigned (D), find the right place to get into line to check in, and have two (2) guys standing there to tell us to go use their convenient self service kiosks that were back where we had come from (the border of zones C and D).
5. Get into a short line at the kiosks (but longer that it would have been if the two (2) guys hadn't directed us away from the checkin stands) and punch some numbers into the kiosk, get boarding passes printed.  Worth noting that these kiosks were manned by approximately one BA employee per 3-4 kiosks.  However, since we had bags to check...
6. Find the entrance to the line for the "Fast Bag Check" line (very long, not fast), which was also guarded by two (2) people who had to check our tickets and I assume provide assistance of some sort (in fact all they successfully did was annoy me).
7. Get to the end of the Fast Bag Check [sic] line, there was the normal guy at the head of the queue to point you to the next available counter.  Get to the counter, hand over passports and ticket, get bags checked by counter attendant.
   
   So far we've interacted with 2 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 1 people (that's 7 for those of you who wondered when all that math stuff would be useful in real life) in a process that used to take maybe 3 (one to help direct people, one to point people at the next counter, one to man the counter).
   
   The Fast Bag Check [sic] line did not move any faster than the checkin queues of old, nor was it smaller.  This seems more like a make-work scheme for BA than any way to make the checkin process more pleasant and efficient.  In cases where the kiosk system is done well in the States I've seen that process go down to two personel.  Plus they don't have to assign checkin areas, something I've seen around Europe.
   
   Now for the security fun...
8. Get into the security line, where they ask you if you have the gels, liquids, etc. in a winding line that was basically empty.  Get passport/boarding pass checked at a counter, which then lets you through to... another winding line.  Note that no one had opened the tape things in the winding line to let people walk straight through easily since the number of people going through was so low.  That would probably require thinking a little bit about passenger convenience.
9. Go through security, fairly typical.
10. Arrive on the other side a little more than two hours ahead of flight time, look for which gate the flight will be out of and... it isn't set yet.  In fact, it won't be set for quite a while, so now we need to keep our eyes on the time to make sure we notice the gate assignment and head out there at the right time.

The Winding Line -> Choke Point -> Winding Line thing has happened a few times in Europe so far.  It is like people are going out of there way to create jobs through stupid inefficiency.  This was particularly bad in Italy, and in that case I truly believe it was just an attempt to keep more people uselessly employed.

British Airways obviously has put no thought into how to make the checkin process truly more efficient and pleasant for their passengers.  In fact I saw a man who was a 'premier' member or Europe Club or some kind of rewarded frequent traveller ask what he was supposed to do (that's not a good sign by itself) and was told to go through the same annoying thing we did, and we're in Cattle Class Plus.

I've heard complaints by friends and family during this trip about how Britain is stagnant, caught up in its own rules, and comfortable with mediocrity.  The only exceptions I've seen are from immigrants, and at this point I think they're the country's only serious hope at remaining competitive.

It is worth noting that once we got onto the airplane (after more silliness at the gate) everything was great.  British Air does a very good job at that point, it was a very pleasant flight and the staff in the air were great.  Getting to that point is an amazing display of strange corporate decisions, though.

End of the trip

We're on the final non-travel day of our vacation, hanging around London (currently Camden Gardens area doing light shopping).  Yeah, the shopping in Paris was much better.  Every time we do these trips it strikes me that for pure shopping they're less and less relevant.  I can do more and better shopping on the Internet, be more organized, and less impulsive.

I'm trying to organize my thoughts around my wardrobe with that in mind.  Shopping for clothes on the net is still a little iffy, but I haven't tried it for a while so maybe things have improved.  There's also a problem with shooting a moving target if I actually start losing weight again.

Lastly, it seems that while everyone was very nice and helpful in both Italy and France, it got much cooler (and not just weather-wise) as soon as we hit the UK.  We haven't been able to decide whether it was really that people are less friendly here or that, being able to understand the language, it was easier know when they were acting poorly.  It also may just have been the areas we're going in the different places.

Tomorrow we spend a long day travelling back to Seattle.  We've had a great time on this vacation, but it will be good to be home.

At the French Laundry

Okay, at a French Laundry, specifically one near the Eiffel Tower.

I have used that joke 3-4 times in the last half hour and I'm still not sick of it.

Our vacation is going great even though it is more than halfway done.  We just spent a week in Tuscany with a native tour guide and now are on our own in Paris.  Tomorrow we train it up to London and spend a few more days there to finish out.

Boy did I need this vacation.

I'll write up more details later, doing so on a shared laptop while drying clothes is a good way to get my arm punched.

Ow.

Weight gain

Not sure exactly how it happened, but after gaining back around 15 lbs. from my major diet a few years ago (in which I lost 30-40 lbs. over a couple years) I have over the last week or two suddenly gained another 5.  I never had to do anything like a food diary to figure it out in the past, but I'm starting to think that setting calorie targets per day and tracking consumption is the only way to really do it.  For the last week I thought I was eating a lot less food than I had been previously, but the size of my gut and the fit of my jeans says otherwise.

Based on a little bit of research I'm looking at 2100 calories per day, so my next step is to find an efficient way to keep track.  I created an excel spreadsheet but I'm not sure if that's the best way, although I can put it on my little USB drive and carry it around with me.

I found a good site for getting calorie amounts for different foods (http://www.thecaloriecounter.com/) but whoever runs that missed the boat on actually helping you count it.  Obviously their big thing is trying to generate ad revenue from the Google AdWords, but can you imagine how much more traffic they would get by helping you track your food, adding up calorie counts, giving you charts, etc.?  Not only that but the AdWords based on all that per-user content would be very valuable.

Instead they basically have a simple database with an ugly web interface.  Well... done?

Update: My friend rfrancis pointed me at http://www.fitday.com/, which is exactly what I needed.   Thanks!

Reflections on Microsoft

I've now been out of Microsoft for one work week, and I'm spending a little time reflecting on the 6+ years I spent there and where things went right and wrong.

I didn't actually look to work there.  My first job out of college (I had a couple during and between college stints) was at Quark, in Denver.  I left there in '98 to found a software company that morphed into pure consulting.  We did quite well, although nothing like what we had talked about when we started.  Weird ambitions, no solid business plan, just the financial backup plan with consulting gigs that ended up being the mainstay of the business.  Lucrative, gave me a number of skills (such as public speaking, teaching, professional writing) I might not have picked up otherwise, but it didn't have a future as a company per se.

When Microsoft contacted me in 2000 I was very comfortable working for myself, negotiating with clients, and managing my own destiny.  I was a Unix/Linux type who had to say the least a poor view of Microsoft.  You know the type.  After a particularly good set of interviews it took many rounds of negotiations before they finally came up with an offer I could not reasonably refuse.

Things started out quite well (indeed my first year rocked), although I did have my second boss two weeks after I started.  This would become a common theme as re-orgs and other changes had me report to something like seven different managers in the first two years, and make my way from one division (which got axed when its product was cut) to another (Office) to another (Windows).

After finally shipping real products to real customers on the Windows Shell (at the time I was the dev lead for Windows Messenger due to more organizational weirdness) while that org was in the midst of the doomed Longhorn throes.  I went to tackle what I thought was one of the biggest problems the company had in Windows org developer productivity by joining the Windows Build Engineering team.

Later I talked to my favorite former manager (the one I moved to two weeks after my start), and I agree with him that it was a good move, although the changes I tried to make were killed by large scale organizational politics.  He asked the most obvious question asked ("why weren't you able to convince them?"), and since I have spent more time working on communication and consensus building skills.  Painful growth, but good growth.

After a relatively short time I decided I was a product guy, not an infrastructure guy, and went to a new (to Microsoft) graphics product code named Acrylic (Developer Division, I officially made the rounds).  I believe the working name now is Microsoft Expression Graphic Designer, but it changes all the time so YMMV.  I spent a year there getting the product ready to ship under the parameters given to me in by far the most dysfunctional team I have ever seen, let alone been apart of.

My review that year did... not go well.  So I looked around the company again (this is when I met with my favorite manager I mentioned above), and based on advice and opportunities decided by best fit was with the MSN Messenger team.  I joined them as a senior engineer in charge of everything but nothing specific.

And that's how I spent the last year.  I think I made a pretty big impact on that team, my review this year went well (better than I expected), but given how the 2-3 years before that had gone and the re-orgapalooza that was my first couple years with the company, I decided to get back to my real nature and get out of the massive company and see what else was out there.

When people talk about Microsoft they often talk about the echo chamber, and how you get so caught up with what is going on internally that it is easy to forget there's a world outside that isn't centered around org politics and the bleeding edge technology being written as you speak.  There was a conscious effort to improve that in the time I was there, but it is definitely still true.  I got to meet with real live customers and external partners a small handful of times when I was with the company.  I can only imagine how bad it was before I got there.

Overall I think Microsoft is the best big company in the world to work for.  The benefits are just incredible, when they have enough office space the working environment is very good and helps productivity, and the people (especially in the product groups) are top notch.  I would work there again under the right circumstances, I didn't leave out of bitterness, just to force myself to take risks with my career and to make sure I grow.

Furthermore, I learned a ton during this whole process.  I'm a much stronger developer, I have an end-to-end understanding of what it takes to ship world class software to the mass market, and I can work well with many different types of people.  I don't regret taking the job, I love the Seattle area (except for the driving...) and overall it has been very positive for my life and my career.

I just hope the next stage is as good or better!