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April 01 10 YearsI joined Microsoft 10 years ago today.
That's more than a quarter of my life. Scary thought.
Yes, April 1st, 1997, was my hire date. I replaced my orange contract-staff badge with a blue one, and joined the ranks of the Internet Products & Tools Division. I still have a coffee mug somewhere with the IPTD logo on it. Somebody (Andreas, I'm talking about you) obviously forgot to tell me they were just kidding about hiring me, so I stayed.
The Internet had rekindled my interest in computers (I cut my teeth on a Commodore VIC 20 back in the early 1980s, you may have similar memories of using cassette tapes as non-volatile memory, and laboriously typing 200-line programs from computer enthusiast magazines only to find out you had a typo somewhere and no debugger). I still remember my first online experience. My friend Mike had a CompuServe account and logged on and showed me around, using DOS software as I recall. OK, so CompuServe was a "walled garden" online community, like AOL, not the true internet, but I was fascinated. My passion and interest in the internet space has never faltered since that moment. I bought a 14.4kbps modem, got my own CompuServe account, borrowed a Mac Classic from Mike (the one with the 9-inch black and white screen), and taught myself HTML. The rest, as they say, is history.
The World Wide Web had really emerged around 1994. At the time, Microsoft was still cranking out Windows 95. Bill refocused the company on the internet starting in 1996, so that when I joined Microsoft on a 6-month contract with the grand title of "webmaster", we were hell-bent on catching up with Netscape in the web browser space, and the internet was on fire. Yahoo was the king of the web portals, but there were many competitors - Lycos, Excite, Alta Vista, and so on. Microsoft had nothing in this space at the time - it's MSN service was still a walled-garden community much like CompuServe and AOL. It wasn't until mid-1998 that we had a www.msn.com portal site that anyone on the internet could access.
Mike has influenced my life in more ways than one. He was the one who introduced me to the internet and generously gave me a spare computer to allow my interest to build, and eventually it was he who first suggested I should go work at Microsoft. Take away either of those two milestones and my life would be on a completely different path today. What kind of path, and whether it would be better or worse than this one, is impossible to say - after 10 years working for the Evil Empire, I really can't imagine doing anything else or being anywhere else - but it feels like this has been a good path for me, so cheers, Mike, old boy.
There's an old tradition that a person should bring M&Ms to work on their anniversary, in an amount that equals the number of years that they have worked at the company - in other words, 10 lbs of M&Ms for my 10-year anniversary - but not that many people follow it anymore. There are just way too many people that have been in the company 10 years or more. Even with 70,000 employees, you'd never run out of M&Ms to eat.
"10 years at Microsoft, what a great achievement, you must be proud!" Well, in a way, I am. But it's hard to think of it as much of an achievement at all. I think of myself as just one of 70,000, and one of the "younger" people in my team of 60 or so people - we have one 20-year guy, and many with more than 10 years under their belts. Besides, I'm not sure how a period of time can be an achievement. It's really what you do that's important. Did I spend the 10 years contributing meaningful things? Did I make an impact that improved things for our customers?
I prefer to take the quiet and humble approach. But I'll say this. I'm not ready to retire yet. Because when I do retire, I want to be able to answer those questions with conviction. 10 years under my belt, sure, but we're still just on Web 2.0. The Internet is still young, and there's a lot of cool shit going on, and I want to be a part of it. Sick!Sick as in really sick. Not sick as in cool, nor sick as in gross.
I haven't updated my blog because I have been sick for the past week. I can't remember the last time I had to take an entire week off work. In all likelihood it was the flu, although the doctor couldn't say for sure. Flu is bad enough, but its potentially very serious for people with asthma. I am on a course of steroids now to help my delicate lungs recover, and it does seem to be helping. I have beeen coughing up copious amounts of green shit from my lungs for the past 3 days, and as disgusting as it sounds, I'm far happier to have it out of me than to have it still clogging up my lungs. Except for my lungs, I'm ok now.
I think I'll go back to work on Monday. I am sure I'll still be coughing, occasionally violently, which I'm sure my officemate won't appreciate at all, but fortunately my manager will be away for the next three weeks, so I plan on using her office to spare my officemate.
My Exchange server account is flooded with email while I have been out, and I can no longer send any email as a result. When I get back to work, that's my first priority - get in the office, shut the door, and go through the huge email backlog. Like many people at MSFT, I literally receive thousands of work-related emails every week. It's unmanagable. Especially when I spend maybe two-thirds of the week in meetings.
On a more positive note, I'm getting a new TabletPC on Monday morning and Justin from Bungie dropped off a new Xbox 360 for me on Friday evening (a reward for some "Pimping" I had been participating in), so there are a couple of big things to look forward to :-) March 21 QR codedQR codes are interesting. As far as I can tell, they are only used in Japan, but I might be wrong about that. QR Codes storing addresses and URLs can be found in magazines and advertisements in Japan. The addition of QR Codes on business cards is also becoming common, greatly simplifying the task of entering the personal details of a new acquaintance into the address book of one's mobile phone.
I don't see any reason why QR codes would not take off in other countries.
Here's the QR code for this website's URL (http://pbsea.spaces.live.com), which I created at an online QR code generator:
Attractive, ain't it? (Yes, this is probably the most boring blog posting I have written...) But hey, have fun creating your own QR codes containing secret messages, you crazy kids! March 20 Grand Canyon SkywalkI found a moderately interesting article on the BBC News website about a new glass viewing platform at the Grand Canyon, which essentially is embedded into the face of the canyon and extends almost 20 meters over the canyon. It must be an amazing view.
The really interesting thing, for me, was the graphic that accompanied the article, showing the height of platform the canyon wall and comparing it to the tallest buildings in the world. For all of humankind's progress, it really reminded me that nature is truly our mother. I am embedding it here for you to see.
March 17 Paddy's DayToday, March 17th, is Saint Patrick's Day, a national holiday in Ireland in honor of the man credited with introducing Christianity to the island of Ireland. We Irish generally just call it Paddy's Day. For some unknown reason, however, Americans typically refer to it as St. Patty's Day. If there are any Americans reading this, please realize no Irish person ever says Patty's Day, and it annoys me, so please stop saying it.
Other random desires to correct popular American myths: 
And a few more unrelated items that I can't resist sharing:
Anyway, happy Paddy's day to you all. Personally, I will ignore it completely with the exception of this blog entry. But if the mood strikes you, enjoy your green clothes wearing, green beer drinking, and parade watching. Beannachtaí na Féile Phádraig oraibh go léir! March 11 Daylight SavingsIn the US, as in many but not all other countries, we move our clocks forward one hour in the spring, and back one hour in the autumn. Many devices with clocks are engineered to take care of this change automatically. This year, however, the US changed its clocks forward by one hour 3 weeks earlier than normal. I lost one hour of sleep, the mornings are now darker than before, and the evenings are brighter for longer.
More interesting, however, is the feeling of Y2K all over again: pundits spewing end-of-world scenarios, but in the end, not very much happened. Mini-Y2K, they called it. Today I found that Vista and XP had updated themselves as had my Windows Mobile device, thanks to a patch that I had installed previously. I changed other clocks such as those on my thermostat, microwave and oven - and more importantly my alarm clock - manually, just as I would have if it were the first Sunday in April, which is when we have all gotten used to changing the clocks one hour forward. That's about as eventful as it got. Tonight, I couldn't find any news reports at all covering things which had gone wrong.
The biggest significance to me is the same as every year - I work closely with teams in Asia, and they don't change their time forward and back like we do. They stay consistent year-round. Unfortunately, if I called Beijing at 6pm last week, this week I'll have to call them at 7pm :-( And it's going to stay that way until November.
Anyway, if you do business with people in the US, please be aware that it may not be the time you think it is.
In compliance with the provision in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Daylight savings dates in the United States and Canada will start three weeks earlier (2:00 A.M. on the second Sunday in March) and will end one week later (2:00 A.M. on the first Sunday in November). March 07 History MonthsIn the US, it seems almost every month is a "history month" - February was Black History Month, and today I noticed that March is Women's History Month. I have a lot of questions what the objective is.
I wonder what happens if a black female should be celebrated? Does she get celebrated twice? Do the Blacks and Women's organizations fight over who gets to celebrate the person?
Can a white male be celebrated for his contributions to either the civil rights movement or to the feminist movement, or does the person have to be black or female to qualify?
Is there a central organization whose role is to allocate months to certain groups? Who decides these things?
If we have truly advanced in racist and sexist behaviors, is there really a benefit in defining segregated History Months? Isn't the ultimate goal of fighting prejudice to eliminate treating one group differently from another? Doesn't defining Black History Month and Women's History Month reinforce that blacks and women are somehow "different"?
All of this makes me feel like starting Caucasian Male History Month. Who's with me? March 06 And all this time I thought I was IrishThe New York Times has an article on a new theory that the English, Irish and Scots are all genetically identical. One Steohen Oppenheimer, a medical geneticist at Oxford, believes that we all arrived in the British Isles about 16,000 years ago from Spain, speaking a language related to Basque, and that subsequent invasions by Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were only a minor influence to the gene pool.
Apparently we're the original Basque Separatists.
Well, if this theory holds true, it seems we have only a few choices:
Charitable chatting
Today it's time to draw people's attention to a new charitable initiative that Windows Live Messenger is running. I think it's a very cool idea. Microsoft is donating money to the charity of your choice. All you have to do is add a special code representing your preferred charity in your screen name, and then simply chat on Messenger as you always have. The charities are mostly US-based but don't let that stop you from helping Microsoft donating to those charities. Point your browser at http://im.live.com and read all about it.
First you have to have version 8.1 of Messenger. Most of you should have this already if you are the type of person who updates when prompted by the Messenger application. If you are not sure, just look in the About dialog (Help... About Messenger). Mine says it is version 8.1 (build 8.1.0178.00).
Then select from a list of charities (there are 9 that I know of). You can change your screen name by going to Tool... Options and typing the code for your charity somewhere in your screen name. For example "cooldude *unicef". Once you are done, you will see an "I'M" emoticon in your screen name and you're ready to go chatting and donating money to the charity Unicef.
Overall I am very impressed by this simple campaign. Whoever thought it up deserves a pat on the back. I encourage you to support it.
TIP:
As far as I can tell, there's nothing to stop you from donating to more than one charity at a time. I just added two codes to my Messenger screen name (*unicef cooldude *9mil) to donate money to both Unicef and ninemillion.org. March 05 Death and Taxes
Benjamin Franklin, one of America's Founding Fathers, wrote what is today a famous quotation: "But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
Well, after sacrificing many hours of my most precious weekend, I have just finished my tax return for 2006. It was not easy, and my brain feels close to death now! It's a straightforward enough process except for reporting on stocks, which is a major pain in the a$$. My broker, Fidelity, gives me most of the information, but it doesn't go far enough to be really useful. I get "stock awards" (SAs) as part of my overall compensation package at work, and I also participate in an ESPP program. Both types of stock are taxed differently, but Fidelity doesn't separate them out in the 1099-B form, even if you sold a single block of shares which included both types, which basically means it's pretty inaccurate.
I thought about trying to describe the problem in detail, but I don't want to reveal too much of my personal financial details, nor Microsoft's, and I don't have the energy to make up fictional numbers, sorry :-)
I used TurboTax software from Intuit to help me with the preparation and e-filing. It cost about $80 for the version which includes the ability to handle stocks. There are also a couple of optional "hidden fees" beyond the initial price of the software: E-filing my return with the IRS via Intuit cost me $16.95. I really feel this should be included for free in the price of the software. Also this year, I took the optional "audit defense" package for $34.95. It means if the IRS don't believe my return and want to audit my work, they will take care of everything. I hope and don't expect to be audited, but I feel it's money well spent for my peace of mind.
So, in summary: death and taxes are unavoidable, but doing your taxes might kill you!
However, at least this year, I am getting a refund. W00t! ;-) March 03 Cross your legs...I wonder what the theme of this blog is supposed to be. In a very short space of time, I've covered everything from showing off my personal travel pics and my new car, to cute Japanese characters, Windows Vista registry hacks and a lengthy observation into the history of England and Ireland. It's really all over the place. I think I need to pick a theme and stick with it. I find with other blogs that I read regularly, they provide a source of information or entertainment in certain areas - you know in advance what kind of topics will be presented, and if you like it, you will return. The only exception to this is my friend Mr T S in Japan, whose blog I read just to keep up with what is going on in his life and his occasional commentary on life in Japan vs life in the US, which I always find entertaining. (Dear Mr T S, I do hope your cat gets better.)
On the other hand, perhaps the apparent lack of theme in my blog does serve a purpose: it can provide insight about me - all the random crap [pun intended] that goes through my brain, the breath of topics which I feel worthy of writing about, these cumulatively must paint a picture of who I am, what I care about. I'm just not sure if that is interesting to anyone.
Maybe I need to ask for opinions in a poll. That is, if anyone is reading this in the first place :-)
AT ANY RATE, to further confound you, here is my topic for today: Pissing in public!
Well, ok, I'm really only going to write about a random fact that I thought was interesting: Beijing, China, the hosts of the 2008 Olympic Games, has 7,700 public toilets. That is a ratio of one public toilet for every 1,948 people. London, England, host of the 2012 Olympics, has just 415 public toilets, despite a population of 7.5 million people - a ratio of one public toilet per 18,000 residents!
 Here is the link to read more about the public toilet situation in London.Thinking positively, I suppose that's just fewer toilets for heroin addicts to accidentally drop their stash down :-) [Oblique reference to the book/movie/play Trainspotting's famous toilet scene].
Pic of young March 02 Vista screensaver funTweakVista and Long Zheng have cool infomation on registry hacks that you can use to alter the behaviour of Windows Vista's screensavers. Hours of fun for you geeks out there :-) March 01 My latest new toyI bought a new car recently. It's a Lexus ES 350, or in otherwords, a Toyota Camry that costs more money and has more luxury features. A friend of mine calls it a "fat cat car" now. She might have a point there... It's the first time for me to buy a Japanese car. I felt that I preferred Northern European cars and I've always had a Northern European car until now. But I'm very happy with my Japanese car. Recently it seems that Mercedes have let their quality slide, and BMW has that infernal i-Drive system that I have never read a single good review about... Saab is now essentially an American car company (GM). Anyway, I digress.
I was saying, I am very happy with my new car. Of course I had to go for the "ultry-luxury package" to get all the bells and whistles. I'm a gadget freak, so bells and whistles are very important to me! It's the first time I've had a car with things like a navigation system, keyless entry and seats that both heat up and cool down amongst many others.
For all the geeky toys to play with, it's a nice soft, quiet ride with a 3.5 liter V6 engine with 272 horsepower. It's not a sporty car by any means, but it does ok. Here's a pic. Mine looks just like this one, same color and wheels.
I had to agonize over my decision for a long time before deciding on this one. I couldn't decide what kind of car I wanted. I wanted a sporty but mature car, something like a BMW 5 series, and I wanted an SUV with a V8 engine, and I wanted a soft ride with good road-noise insulation so I can listen to my iPod with better fidelity. Of course cost also was a concern, although I tried to ignore that for a while... ;-)
In a strange way, I felt that my difficulty in selecting a type of car shows something about myself. Maybe I need to decide what kind of person I am. Did I decide finally what kind of person I am because I bought the Lexus? No, I don't think so. I think the jury is still out on that one. Isn't it too early for a mid-life crisis? Hmm...
Ireland versus England, game and historyAlthough I have lived in the US of A long enough that I now use Americanized spellings by default (forgive me), I am Irish. Not that I ever felt particularly Irish when I was growing up; I was merely myself and I had far better things to do than to reflect seriously on my nationality. And now that I'm living overseas, I rarely bother to read the news about goings-on "at home".
Recently though an expatriate colleague of mine alerted me to last weekend's historic Ireland-England rugby game at Croke Park. This stadium is the largest in Ireland and the home of our national sports. This year is the first time when a sport created by the English has been allowed to be played in the stadium, and now the English themselves were coming to play, and "God Save The Queen" would have to be played for all to hear. Given our long and complex history with England, this would have been unthinkable until relatively recent times. Still, it was hard not to feel delight when Ireland won the game by 30 points, our biggest win over England ever (the final score was 43-13).
An Irishman always delights in the comeuppance of an Englishman. This is primarily true in sports, when we will happily cheer on "anyone but England", i.e. whoever they happen to be playing against, whether it's France or Burkina Faso.
History is history, as they say, and these days I think virtually nobody harbors any ill will against the English, and indeed the English likewise have no ill will against the Irish people. But just briefly, just this once, I can't resist a little look back in history so you have an idea of how far we have come! I'm not a historian and this is not meant to be an academic paper so please don't flame me for minor misstatements of fact nor for leaving anything out :-)
I'll just mention 3 things, so you don't fall asleep:
1. freedom to self-govern and freedom of religion
England exerted some degree of political influence or control in Ireland from around the time of the Norman invasion around 1200, gradually becoming increasingly dominant, but I would speculatively put the decisive moment of the beginning of true English rule at 1541, when the English King Henry VIII had himself declared King of Ireland and outlawed Catholicism. For a brief period between 1642 and 1649, Ireland was (arguably) free of English rule. Then came the brutal re-conquest by Cromwell. It wasn't until 1922 that Ireland was again free to govern itself.
2. land ownership and the famine
For the majority of English rule, the land was divided up and given to English/Protestant settlers. The Irish who occupied the land were essentially reduced to tenancy and being tenant farmers working for the English plantation owners. Between 1845 and 1849, Ireland suffered a famine. Or rather it suffered a famine because the potato crops that the tenant farmers relied on to survive - the food they were allowed to eat - failed. At the same time, the land owners were exporting vast quantities of foods out of the country. The fact is, there was food to eat, but the people to toiled to produce that food were left to starve while the land owners made handsome profits from the food, exporting it to England and elsewhere. It is impossible to put an exact figure on the number of deaths, but estimates vary from a half million to 2 million deaths and more than one million people fled the country. To put that in context, the population before the famine was around 8 million people. Estimates are that the total population declined about 20% in the 10 years from 1841-1851. It took a long time for Ireland to recover from this, and emigration continued so that by 1911, only 4.4 million people remained.
3. the racism
At approximately the same time as the famine occurred, or perhaps even more damningly right afterwards, the prevailing English middle-class view of the Irish was one of undisguised contempt. Cartoons of the time, particularly in Punch magazine, caricatured the Irish as apelike and either laughably stupid or downright evil. Academic literature was no better, practically advocating genocide. Here are a couple of quotes from one Robert Knox in "The Races of Men" from 1850:
the source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. There is no getting over historical facts ... The race must be forced from the soil; by fair means, if possible; still they must leave. England's safety requires it. I speak not of the justice of the cause; nations must ever act as Machiavelli advised: look to yourself. The Orange club of Ireland is a Saxon confederation for the clearing the land of all papists and jacobites; this means Celts. (Knox, The Races of Men, pp. 253-54.) the Celtic race does not, and never could be made to comprehend the meaning of the word liberty ... I appeal to the Saxon men of all countries whether I am right or not in my estimate of the Celtic character. Furious fanaticism; a love of war and disorder; a hatred for order and patient industry; no accumulative habits; restless, treacherous, uncertain: look at Ireland. (Knox, The Races of Men, p. 27.) I found the above quotes in an excellent paper here, which I encourage you to read to judge the mood of the English at the time.
To close, here are some cartoons. First, three cartoons from Punch magazine:
February 27 Relax Bear (リラックマ)In case anyone was wondering about the cute little bear that I use as my image in my profile, it's "Relax Bear" from the San-X company in Japan. リラックマ in Japanese phonetically translates to rirakkuma, (a compound word, literally リラックス, "relax", and クマ(熊), "bear").
Basically, he's the laziest bear you've ever seen. I can really feel this bear and I have so much in common...
If you can't figure out what this bear character is all about from the link in the first paragraph to the Japanese product page, you can read about it in English on Wikipedia. And yes, I think this probably does prove that Wikipedia really does have a lot more arcane knowledge than people might expect. Heck, I have 3 Wikipedia links on this article alone!
Oh yeah, I'm really an adult, and I'm not supposed to know so much about cute kiddy stuff, but hey, I yam what I yam, and that's all I yam, as Popeye was so fond of proclaiming. (Or as God said to Moses, but that's a whole other story, and I'm really not wanting to turn this into a religious blog!) Jesus' Tomb and Statistical ProbabilityLast night, whilst driving home, my iPod hookup wasn't working temporarily (loose connection) so I had NPR on the radio. They were talking about a new Discovery Channel documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" which is set to air on March 4th. I read more about it online this morning, and it seems to be stirring up the usual hornets' nest of criticism and support from all sides. Basically the claim is that this is the actual tomb of Jesus Christ, that it also contains the bodies of Mary and Mary Magdalene, and Jesus' son.
I'd like to share with you a couple of my opinions on this.
The first point is the fact that the tomb itself was discovered in 1980, some 27 years ago. And for all the attention this new documentary might be getting at the moment, the BBC beat them to it in a documentary they released in 1996. That's 11 years ago. So although I haven't seen this new documentary yet, this seems to be really old news. I have to believe that all the arguments for and against the claim that this is really the final resting place of Jesus Christ have already been exhausted. It shows that people never tire of regurgitating the same old clichéd arguments. But then that's old news too. It's difficult for me to believe that the creators of this new documentary weren't primarily motivated by a desire to ride the coat-tails of the attention Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code (and the 2006 film of the same name) received.
Which brings me to my second point, one of statistical probability. I'm a big fan of statistical probability, and this is ultimately a conflict between religious faith and probability. In the absense of both faith and absolute proof, people will very likely believe that which is most probable. Let's digress for a moment and take the old story about the moon being made of cheese. Sure, it would be cool if the moon was really cheesy, but it's just not very probable, is it? The statistical probability of the moon being made of cheese is so low that nobody except very young children would seriously entertain the idea for more than a minute or two. Most adults would logically think "I may not know what the moon is really made of, but it's probably not gorgonzola". Which brings me back to the alleged tomb of Jesus. There is no absolute proof here. All there really is, is an argument of statistical probability. The Christian establishment, with faith on their side, is arguing against the skeptics who seek to disprove their faith. This is an argument you simply cannot win with probability. Faith cannot be overthrown by a claim which is merely probable. It's quite simply a waste of time. Unless, that is, you just love a good argument.
Next installment: the world is
February 26 Scenes from JapanAs my first post in this new blog, I though I would share with you some images of Japan. I have been lucky enough to visit there around 8 times for work. Since I chose Japan as my first blog post, it must be obvious that I am a big fan of Japan!
I took these photographs on various trips to Japan, and all of them are taken within a short distance of Tokyo. You can see images from Tokyo, Yokohama, Kamakura and Hakone in this slide show. Enjoy!
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