I am typing this from OSX on an iMac

by Stepto
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Got the home office redesigned and got the entire network back up. In addition I now have a new 24" iMac with the NVIDIA 8800GS card with a Viewsonic 24" secondary monitor up and running. OSX seems to handle my blogging software just fine and now I shall bootcamp Windows Vista!

[EDIT Installing Vista x64 on the iMac has become a horrible experience. Not because of Vista, but because Apple’s Bootcamp, the software that allows the install of Windows, refuses to support 64 bit Windows Vista on the iMac, despite the 64 bit processor on the iMac. When I call Apple support trying to get it to work, I was told A) the x64 version of Vista is well known in the industry to be unstable (which seriously made me lol, its by far the most stable version of Windows ever) and B) Microsoft itself refuses to support x64 Windows Vista on any hardware (um hello, I WORK THERE, I HELPED MAKE IT, I KNOW IT’S SUPPORTED)

What a horrible experience. All I hear from people is how great Windows runs on a Mac and my experience has been the exact opposite for the past 3 hours. Very, VERY disappointing. Going to bed now, maybe I will get it to work tomorrow. But I refuse to go back to 32 bit after running 64 bit Vista on all my machines for a year and a half now. I’ll return the iMac before I run 32 bit on it.]

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith

by Stepto
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Last night I pretty much finished Guitar Hero: Aerosmith in about 3 hours of play. From popping it in for the first time to unlocking all the songs and finishing single player on Hard.

The Guitar Hero series is what brought me to music rhythm games and I still have some affection for the series, but playing GH:A just reminded me of how much I love the innovations that Rock Band has brought. One of the most important being rectangular notes instead of circles, in addition to the other band roles.

But GH:A just felt incredibly short, and I can’t tell if it’s my stereo but the sound was incredibly muddy on almost every track, the exception being if you unleashed star power. Then the sound sounded normal and clear. Weird. Playing it, I just kept wishing it were Rock Band.

I doubt I’ll be picking up any future GH titles until I examine World Tour, and even then I will have to weigh, perhaps even physically, whether I want another set of plastic instruments in the theater room.

Sometimes, most times, it’s ok to play.

by Stepto
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There’s all sorts of rules in human interaction. Too often in the face of challenge we’re focused all on being human, or adhering to a societal set of rules that, really, is just invented for structure’s sake not for real purpose.

Animals can teach us much in this regard.

Over the past few days we’ve been dog sitting a puppy who’s parents were the victims of a recent arson fire in Seattle. The family has a child and is awaiting a temp apartment, and the shelter has no space for their dog. So we took her in for a few nights. This is Keira, in repose:

Fun with pups

You might notice the open mouth, the teeth bared with our Golden Retrievers. This might give you pause. Oh no, THIS might give you pause:

OH MY

Note the running and the play. This dog, a mere 24 hours ago, was thrown from an apartment complex that was on fire. Does she look shell shocked?

no.

Play means healing. She’s just fine. Having fun, and our dogs are the better for it too.

So remember, life can shove a fist up your ass, but it’s up to us, and the kindness of strangers, as to how we deal with it.

Primary Colors Part 7

by Stepto
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Despite the crowds flowing into the convention center main hall, and unlike every other Washington State democratic party event since february, there was plenty of seating. I was suprised since there were some rather high bill speakers in the morning slate. I spent some time hunting down my 45th LD homies and just being a fly on the wall for surrounding conversations.

What struck me immediately was the overall Clinton/Obama conversations. The Clinton people ranged from resigned to highly, *highly* pissed off. Someone had come into the hall and plastered key areas with hundreds of Clinton signs. In an interesting bit of floor drama I’ll get into later on, there was a new measure for the charter to utilize results from the Washington State primary results instead of the Washington State caucus results, which if made retroactive would have materially altered Obama’s delegate count since he won the primary by a more narrow margin than his caucus blowout margin.

As I mentioned previously the rather odd but fun parade had gotten people in the mood. Senator Patty Murray warmed the crowd up, so when Gov. Christine Gregiore took the stage folk were pumped.

fired up

They used her margin of victory after three recounts (133 votes) into a pretty snazzy campaign ad. Although I should mention that I’m getting sick of hearing U2’s Beautiful Day as a campaign rallying theme.

What was most interesting about her speech is that she did all but tell Clinton supporters to "get over it". Her speech was very much focused on the silly attempt by Republicans in the state like her challenger Dino Rossi to remove the word "Republican" from the ballot next to their name and replace it with "GOP Party" (Grand Old Party Party?), electing Obama, and telling people to get past the primary season now that the party had a nominee.

Given the majority of the group were Obama supporters it wasn’t a suprise to hear cheering for this speech.

Senator John Kerry was due to give the keynote however he was attending a funeral of a soldier killed in Iraq. I feel bad retroactively for joking that he didn’t make it because he figured out they were sending him to Spokane instead of Seattle. I feel worse because another soldier died in that senseless war. Senator Amy Klobuchar filled in instead and gave a really good speech that was designed again to rally support behind Barack Obama. She had several personal anecdotes about the Senator and the fact she’s a freshman in the 110th.

Amy Klobuchar

She was a perfect choice I think as her talk really worked to humanize Obama to the more hostile of the Clinton supporters.

Ah but after all the speeches are done, there’s the incredible boring work of convention business. A collision of Robert’s Rules of Order, a long church service, standing in line at the DoMV for your license plate tags, doing your taxes, organizing 100 hyperactive children to form a straight line, listening to Ben Stein give an 8 hour lecture, and punching yourself in the stomach repeatedly. The seats started to empty.

yawwwwwwwn

Which isn’t to say I didn’t have a good time watching it all. In fact aside from the drama of the new motion to allocate delegates using the results of the primary (it was never clear to me if that motion would have been retroactive to the February results) which failed, the job of state delegates at the convention who were not running for state elector or national delegate was to show up, maintain quorum, vote the charter, go home. So I spent a lot of time just listening to people.

One thing was clear, the Clinton supporters in general are completely mystified as to her loss. I watched one Clinton supporter, an older woman, tearfully talking to a younger woman with an Obama button about why in the world she had not supported Hillary after all that Hillary had done for women. The younger woman was mystified at the very line of the argument, saying "but I support Obama because of his plan. I don’t like Clinton’s plans at all!" The Clinton supporter just had a blank look and no response to it. It was an incredibly telling exchange.

During the good of the order call at the end, a Clinton support took the mic to promise a floor fight in Denver, and that they would never ever give up. While one at the other end of the floor spoke about realizing Barack had won, and really, was she going to support pro-life John Mccain just to spite her own party?

So as the convention wound down we Wa 45th LD delegates headed out to dinner to rehash the convention, talk about the election, and just have a good time. A few were running for National delegate the next day, but I left the next morning to take Rochto some Schlotzsky’s.

This marks the end of my participation in the primary process this election and I think it’s been probably one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in a while. I encourage everyone to get involved in the electiont this year no matter what your politics. You’ll meet interesting people, silly people, scary people, and awesome people all in your own political belief sphere. And it will force you to really know your candidates positions and plans far more deeply than simply reading a position paper on their website.

My obligatory Bill Gates post.

by Stepto
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As everyone has already jumped the gun and spent all week posting about Bill Gates retiring from his role at Microsoft I’ll jump in too. I was going to post this on Friday but hey whaddya gonna do.

I joined Microsoft as a contractor in April of 1994, and was hired full time by the company in January of 1995. So I’m of the Microsoft era where Bill really tipped from being the 60% technological/40% business, to 60% business/40% technological as the company ramped up and exploded in all directions with products and technologies. Oh and went from a small company to a ginormous one. (it’s a word!)

Back in those days Microsoft had about 12,000 employees, but even then the presence of Bill was often felt in everything you did. Even when you’re an entry level support engineer in a satellite site (we weren’t even really called a "Campus" then because we leased two buildings). Bill was famous in the company for his unforgiving nature of mistakes.

Product support had a really outsized role in the shipping of products for Microsoft. Back then, the processes and procedures for shipping software meant that the developer team handed off a release candidate to support, and support would "Sign off" on the build. That "Sign Off" was an actual formal document where support said "We’ve documented the known issues and we agree that this product is supportable and we will be on the hook to support it and the associated costs". So after getting an RC build, support would then spend days "bug bashing it". Anything we felt was a bug that would impact customer satisfaction or dramatically increase support costs was filed and support would withhold sign off (meaning release could not happen) until it was fixed. In the end a contentious sign off process always got escalated to the development and support VP’s to reconcile if development thought support was being over cautious or support thought development was being blinded by ship fever.

Well, a bug was found during testing of a side technology of a product which in this story shall remain nameless.

Development balked as it felt the product issue was an edge case, it got escalated, and the product ended up shipping, but not before we in support studiously documented our projections on impact and our rationale for getting it fixed.

That particular product experienced a record number of support costs due to issues involving this particular technology, way beyond projections. Of course, that type of thing reaches Bill and he called a meeting of the support and development people.

With laser like intensity Bill lit into the support people. How could this happen? Who was responsible? What kind of way was this to run a support business? The support folk, well armed with the documentation from the sign off process, handed it over to Bill. Bill looked it over.

He then pivoted his chair over to the other side of the table and lit into the development people. "How could this happen? Who was responsible? What kind of way was this to run a development process?" Needless to say the dev people had no documentation, and no defense. The support people felt good after that meeting. The Devs, not so much.

Not many people have had practical experience with just how overwhelmingly smart Bill is. He can take a completely new technical situation and dive to the deepest part of it quickly to find out things you never thought of.

When the vulnerability that resulted in MSRC security bulletin MS03-026 was reported (the vulnerability that criminals exploited with the Blaster worm) we determined this was one of those we wanted to make sure the executives were fully briefed on. Mike Nash, then Vice President of the Security Business Unit, wrote up an email summarizing the vulnerability, fix plan, communications plan, etc. to Bill and the executive leadership. That mail was sent on a Sunday afternoon and I was on the cc line as the technical contact/MSRC owner for the bug.

45 minutes later Bill replied to the email (I confess I let out a geek squeal of excitement. Bill replied to an email that I AM ON!). The jist of the email was "I’ve read the technical breakdown and understand it. One question: What happens if [detailed technical scenario involving attack that none of us had considered]"

Bill had, just in a few minutes of reading some high level exec summary stuff, uncovered a deeply technical edge case we missed.

I kind of turned pale(r). My cell phone rang, it was Mike Nash. "He’s right isn’t he?" Mike said. "Yeah." "But as I understand the scenario, the fix still blocks it." Mike said. "Yeah, it does. But I wish I’d thought of it in the vectors section of the mail." I replied.

Mike laughed, "Do you want to reply?" "Uh no Mike, I’ll let you tell him."

So Mike replied and told Bill he was right but the fix addressed that and the scenario didn’t affect our timelines to get this out ASAP. Rochelle came into my office cause she knew I was working this thing and I just sat there gobsmacked. And tried to describe to her that someone eight levels above me was engaged enough at the technical level to turn a problem inside out like that so fast.

You hear Bill is smart, but rarely do you realize the level at which he’s smarter than almost everyone who works for him, at almost every level in the company.

The last thing I will say is that when you’ve been a long time Microsoft employee from the pre-Steve Ballmer presidency, you kind of take for granted at how approachable Bill is. People are often shocked by it. Couple of years ago I was looking into getting a SPOT watch. I liked the idea, and the screen, but it just seemed so clunky and heavy to have on the wrist. Then it hit me late one night reading about them, hey what if you made a SPOT watch that was a pocket watch? The form factor works much better, and the screen could be a bit larger and perhaps you could even integrate touch to it. So knowing Bill was a huge booster of SPOT watches I sent him an email. "Have we looked at doing SPOT watches in the ‘Pocket Watch’ form factor?"

People kind of freak out when they hear that, "you just what, emailed the CEO? Out of the blue?"

Yeah.

You could do that. Not some long winded email about convoluted topics, but a quick idea involving something of interest to the company.

Bill replied almost immediately (at night!) saying yes indeed they looked at the idea, but not enough partners wanted to make them, pocket watches being a niche market, and he cc’d the SPOT watch market research executive to give me more info if I wanted it.

And that was Bill, first and foremost he was a lover of technology. He loves interesting ideas and never wants to wall himself off from them.

I could say I’m going to miss his influence at Microsoft, but that would be remarkably shortsighted. His work at the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is going to end up changing the world in far better ways than his work here did.