Random Stuff

I wonder what it means when someone says I have an “aggressive” coding style. It was a comment made to me today by one of my co-workers while discussing a project that we are working on.

Just a quick note to say that I am still employed. It will be a interesting year to come. Regardless of what my current standing is, I am still going to be sure to have my finances in order.

I’ve spent some time this weekend improving my search engine. It’s amazing what lack of money with plenty of boredom can cause. There’s not a lot that will be immediately visible, but it’s there. A lot of work went into the crawler and the formatting of the search results. I also wrote an “about” page.

The crawler had a problem in that it never released URLs from the queue, so whenever the crawler started again, it would start with double the number of links it was supposed to scan. It has code to prevent rescanning web pages, but that takes time. When you are talking about 1000 URLs this isn’t a lot of time, but add 1000 more every time it runs, then it starts to cause problems. It now clears the queue for the specific instance of the crawler before it determines what it needs to scan. This also takes care of a crawler failing and being restarted. In all of this, I accidentally messed up the search data, so I had to reset the database.

The search results now have an abstract based on where the key words are located. Previously I just took the first 200 characters of the page, now it takes the first 200 characters starting where the key word or phrase was found. Failing that, it falls back on the beginning of the document.

The about page now touches a bit on why I wrote it, where I got my information, and a little about me.

There’s a long way to go.

• Records need to have a “time until next rescan”.
• A few more support web pages need to be written like help, legal, and contact information. The usual type of stuff.
• It needs to be able to read sitemaps
• People need to be able to submit URLs and sitemaps and I need to figure out how to put those into the queue and prioritize them.
• I have a couple more ideas on optimizing scoring of the search results, but I want to be sure they don’t slow down the queries.
• the html layout really should be controlled by CSS. It should not be hard coded tables and positioning. That way, I can format it easily by adjusting the css instead of editing the page. It would also allow me to format all of the web pages at once instead of needing to edit them all.
• and lots more

I’m assuming that the recruiter who called me today has read or is reading this blog. It is about the only way I can figure she knew to call me directly at  office at Microsoft rather than calling the number listed on my resume or my linkdin profile. Or maybe she saw my facebook profile as well. I don’t know. Either way it caught me off guard.

But what I really want to know is who offers $170k per year for a build engineer? I make a good amount of money, but not that much. But here are the reasons I said I wasn’t interested.

1. I just started back working with a team of people who I not only have worked extremely well in the past, but are close friends as well. I made a commitment to them and I cannot walk away from that. I really enjoy where I am at. Not just the money but the people.

2. When someone says “We are building the next Google Killer”, I believe it. I also believe the odds are as good as all other “Google Killers”. In otherwords, next to none. Most likely they will follow the same path as all others before you.

3. The fact that you are willing to pay nearly twice the industry standard for someone with my experience tells me that as a startup you are being extremely irresponsible with any venture capital. How much are software engineers being paid? What about managers? How about the execs? The burn rate of capital has to be very high.

4. Even if I would have been in a position to be interested, I would have been skeptical. This falls into the too the “too good to be true” bucket.

I would be interested in seeing what you are doing, heck, I might even provide consult for you in trade for equity. But work for you full time, even for what is a very large amount of money, I can’t do right now.

I wish you the best of luck.

Chevrolet just made a big mistake. Then again, it’s the same mistake the American auto manufactures have been making for years. They did what I call the video game rut.

When you go shopping for a video game console and games to go with it, most of what you will find are games centered around shooting, explosions, and general violence and destruction. It’s a good market, but the reality is that it is a 10% market. Most everything video game related is targeted toward adolecent and young adult males. Simply forgetting about the 90% of world that would buy video games.

Nintendo came along and made a game console that didn’t market to the young male, but targeted everyone else. Others in the industry laughed, but they are not laughing anymore. The Wii is now the number one selling console in the world. They are still hard to come by even after more than a year of being on the market. They made something that everyone else would like.

Just like the rest of the auto manufactures in the world, Chevy decided to make a production electric car. Ok, that’s pretty cool. Then they came out with their prototype vision of what it would look like. Surprisingly, it looked good! Unline the egg shape of the Prius, it looked like something sporty. I was actually excited about this. This wasn’t just a car targeted at a very specific market, rather it was made to look good. It wasn’t a design that said “I’m driving green!” it was a design that said “This is a good looking car.”

There was lots of buz generated around this car. Lots of people saying “Finally!” or “GM got something right!”

Then something happened. I’m not sure how. Committee maybe? Lack of vision? Fear of stepping out in front? I wish I knew. When the production model showed up, it was a major dissappointment.  By the time everything was said and done, Chevrolet designed another Prius. Another boring egg shaped car. When asked, the CEO simply said, “Well, the kind of people who are going to buy an electric car aren’t concerned about how it looks. They are buying it to make a statement.” In effect, the market for this car just got reduced to the 10% (or less) market instead of everyone else.

If you pay attention to the tech industry, or more specifically the Search Business, you have seen a lot of hype surrounding both Google and Cuil. Google recently announced they had reached the 1 Trillion mark. Cuil just came in with a bang saying they have indexed 120 Billion web page stating they have indexed more web pages than anyone else. So who is the biggest? Is someone lying?

Neither one is. It’s plain and simple marking. Both are playing with numbers and slight of terminology so that the detail is easily missed.

It is quite possible that Cuil has spent more resources on their crawler to scan web pages. They simply have managed to put a lot more effort into the gathering of data. It is quite possible they have managed to index 120 billion pages. This is no small matter. In my own exploration of indexing web pages, I found that the index really is a gigantic set of data. For 7000 indexed web pages, my index has 12 million records. It’s not optimized in any way, but you get the idea. Put in that context you can see that number may not be representive of what is important to the person doing the searching.

Look closely at the Google statement though. It says “1 trillion URLS”. It does not say they have indexed 1 trillion web pages. Those are two different things. Again, back to my own exploration of search engines. For 7000 indexed web pages, I have 300,000 URLS. Again, what google has done is no small matter, but needs to be put into context. What good are those 293,000 URLS if you can’t find them in the search engine.

So who is right? Which is better? What’s the meaning of all this? Pretty much nothing. It’s all marketing.

My personal opinion is that Google does a much better job of finding relavent data. Period. I do an ego search on Google, I find a few book reviews I’ve done on Amazon. If do the same on Cuil, I get the Amazon results but they are burried under a pile of websites that have hijacked Amazons book reviews. The reason for this could be that Cuil’s index is bigger, or that Google is doing better ranking of the same data. I can’t tell.

I do like the context and suggesting that Cuil does. And it has a slick interface. I also like the simplicity of Google seach.  I think the results that Cuil presents will begin to improve as they gain experience and figure out what is really important to the users. Google will then really have something to watch out for.

A job has been handed to me on a silver platter. A job back at Microsoft. But this is not just any job. This is back to the same group on the same team that I worked with 12 years ago. Add to that all of the people are good friends. They are also people I work with exceptionally well as part of a team. In short it is the dream team I would have put together given a choice.

Interviews were a formality. Sallary negotiations consisted of them giving me what I told them I would take and then they added some more. But the real reason I accepted is the team I will be working with. I am being brought in as a senior member in the team. But make no mistake, these people are stars. People who I not only respect personally but professionally as well.

It was a choice that I did not take lightly. It kept me up at night thinking about this. Should I? Shouldn’t I? But, again, it all boiled down to the people.

Ok, time for some boring stuff.

I’ve made some major improvements on the back end of my search engine. Response times so far are down to under a second for most queries. There are still some edge cases that still hang things up. I was able to make a query that took 15 minutes. But I think the most common cases are handled. Boolean searches are now possible. Scoring is a bit more accurate I hope.

I wiped the database clean and started repopulating it based on a different seed address (my own) so those that I have links to and those I have mentioned here will most likely be in there.

Right now about 5000 pages are indexed. 221,000 urls are left to be scanned. I read somewhere you should get about 8 links per page scanned, I am getting closer to 50 per page. I think that’s because I’ve scanned blogs and have managed to start indexing the BBC news site (I have a couple BBC links in my blog).

I can now run multiple crawlers across multiple machines across the internet if I so desire. I’ve limited them to 1000 sites per night and I am only running two, so I don’t piss off my gracious host (When your t1 is free, you try to be nice so you can keep it free).

Some things I plan on doing when I get the time…
1. Clean up the html
2. Create a logo
3. Write the typical “About”, “Legal”, and “Contact” pages
4. Create a page that lets people submit addresses to be indexed
5. Figure out a way to “update” the index for pages already scanned and how often to scan them
6. Write a better alogorithm for getting the abstract from the article.
7. Use the document title in the link instead of the link itself
8. Compress similar pages together (like subpages of a blog)
9. Write relevance ranking algorithm to compliment in text scoring.
10. Do more html parsing for relevance.
11. Figure out how to span multiple machines with the DB itself as it grows
12. Check out load balancing for both apache and the db. I’m sure my poor little web server wouldn’t handle a heavy load.

Maybe I should give my search site it’s own blog.
I think I might need to study up on information retrieval as well.

I’ve figured out some complicated items on search queries and how to handle them using forward indexes. I don’t have them implemented on the main page yet, but experimenting around I am now able to handle single word searches, multiple word searches and search phrases using the forward indexing.

There is still a long way to go yet. Multiple phrases and boolean expressions are not yet handled. Yet at the same time the queries now take 1/10 the time they used to.

http://rwack.com  (It also wouldn’t hurt if an ad or two was clicked )

There are also some things I need to implement which require I start over on the database so I get to wipe it out and start over.

This has to be one of my favorite interviews ever! Kudos to the guy being “interviewed”. The TV journalist is asking insulting questions to those waiting in line for an iPhone. He really picked the wrong guy (or right guy in my opinion) to ask “Have you ever seen a woman naked?”

My favorite part starts at the 1:34 mark where the interviewee clearly states “This is journalism to you?!” which strikes me as a pretty big insult to any journalist.

The price of gas is certainly a hot topic these days. I know personally it has hit my pocket book quite hard. A couple years ago I bought a car I never thought I would buy simply because it was getting too expensive to drive one of my gas hogs every day to work. When I did this I went from no car payment and $1200 a month for gas, down to a $575 per month car payment and a fuel bill of $300 per month. A decent amount of savings. Now that gas prices have doubled since then, I am almost back at the point I started at. For the first time since I was 20 years old, I am seriously considering riding the bus because it is getting too expensive for me to drive.

But I’m not angry about it. Far from it, really.

Over the last few years I’ve been in many discussions about fuel prices, fuel efficiency, electric cars, traffic, and a few other related topics. Usually there are a few different catalysts to the conversation or debate, but my argument as always stood pretty much the same. I usually emphasize two of my opinions. So far they seem to be playing out as expected.

People won’t change unless they are forced to do so. This is common for a lot of systems outside of people. A system does not change unless it gets stressed to the point of being either uncomfortable or even failure. People will not give up their cars unless it becomes too much of a burden to keep it. The environment, global warming, pollution, none of these have an impact on the driving habits of most people. Yes there are a few who take these things seriously, but the majority of the population will take no action regarding these impacts of a car. Why? Because they can still afford to drive.

Stress to the system will also drive innovation. The electric car has been around since the time of Henry Ford. But in the last 100 years, there has been a negligible amount of research to make electric cars go further, faster, and more reliably. Yet look at the gains in automotive technology. The worlds fastest car in 1908 could only go 141 miles per hour. It had only 135 horsepower. My “economy” car has twice the power, and with very little modification could go just as fast. But the electric car, up until recently has not really improved in performance at nearly the same pace. The power may be close, but the range was limited to about 50 miles at best. But recently, there has been real change in this area. Take a look at the Chevrolet Volt or the Tesla Roadster. Real change is coming. Why? Because people has started to demand it as a result of Gas prices. It is getting too expensive to put fuel in your car. Research is now actively happening. Making electric cars that cost less to drive and are just as convenient as gas powered cars. And they look good too.

But what is the price per gallon which people start serious making the change? The point at which it goes from only people who are early adopters to mainstream? I have always argued it will be when gas here in the U.S. goes above $5.00 per gallon. I’ve mentioned this over the course of several years as I talked to people about this subject. Recently when Honda came out with their hybrid car, and again when Toyota came out with theirs, and even yesterday when talking about the Tesla roadster. Daily we seem to get closer to that point. The new technology started to appear around $3.50 per gallon and really started to look like a serious alternative when the price went to $4.00 per gallon. Now, as we get closer to $5.00 it seems more and more like an electric car will be a reality.

I don’t know for sure. Those are just my opinions. But I think we are ready for this now.

Debbie and I spotted a Google StreetView camera car in my neighborhood this weekend. I wonder what the pictures will look like.

Well, OK. It’s not an accident. I decided to experiment around with writing a search engine. I’ve run into a few problems and still have quite parts I need to implement, but all in all, it has worked a lot better than I had planned.

http://rwack.com

There are the usual problems when you start looking at something big like this. Horsepower of the machines you are using for this, or in this case, machine. Memory is needed because databases are memory intensive. Drive space is needed because you are storing so much data to make this happen.

I did try to make it scalable. It is set up so that I can start adding more machines for doing different tasks as well as load balancing coming in from users doing searches. A real test of this, though, won’t happen unless I add more machines. That won’t happen unless I magically start making a lot of money off the Google ads running on the side.

There is a lot of work going forward. I’ve got some ideas about ranking web page relevance that I’m going to play around with. I need to work on the crawler and how it scans and stores links, also, this one part isn’t quite working how I want it to when I run multiple copies of it.

Another problem I have, which is mostly related to resources, is that I keep running into the big players on the internet. When I run into a site like Microsoft or Ebay, the crawler winds up spending all of it’s time indexing the thousands of links these guys have to their own sites. This wouldn’t be a problem with unlimited resources, but I want a more diverse collection of pages. And coming up with an exclude list is not a guarantee the results will be different. Imagine trying to come up with a list of all of the large sites on the internet?

So there it is. Search on a very tight budget.

Working for a start up company is all about Risk vs. Reward. Typically working for a start up means that there is a fair chance you will lose your job when the company folds. Or perhaps the company has too high of a burn rate and has to lay off a people because that last round of funding didn’t come in when it was expected, or perhaps that contract that would have made the company a couple of giant bags of cash was given to someone else.

There is also the chance that a start up company you work for makes it big time. You see the product you work on spread and become the center of the known world, or even a part of it.  You become part of something big. Hopefully all those stock options you got when you signed on were all worth the effort.

It is because of the above points you need to look at how you view your employment. Is it a job or an investment? Anyone can work for a company and do 9 to 5 work. But what is the payoff? Even at big companies, you won’t get far just putting in your time. Those that make the big pay checks are the ones who go the extra mile, take risks, and put in the extra time.

I look at who I am working for as an investment. Because of this, I look at the amount of risk I am taking versus the amount of potential reward. Will the payoff be big enough to justify the sacrafice of time, the stress of knowing I may be sent back home when I show up one day because the company ran out of money? How much sacrafice does my employer expect me to make and how much is he going to reward me?

Payday is one thing.  I can collect a paycheck anywhere. Does my employer expect me to make extra sacrafice for just a pitance and be happy with the knowlege I have a job? If the company sold tomorrow, what would the return be for the founders? Would the return on my investment match the amount of work I put in?

These are all things I have on my mind at the moment. When I started working for my current employer I made it clear that I viewed this job as an investment. Right now that investment is weighed.

I’ve been interested in search engines since I was first able to get results out of the WebCrawler. When looking at just what the web crawler did, I thought “I could probably do that some day!” but lack of time, resources, and most of all knowledge, I never did. I’ve kept an active interest in search engines, but getting real info was hard to come by. WebCrawler no longer does indexing, rather they aggregate information from other search engines now. But it started the search revolution as a project from University of Washington.

It’s at this point I really need to learn more. I need to go back to school. Why? Well, for the most part, I am self taught. The only formal education I’ve had in computer progamming were all in introductory classes about stuff I was already quite skilled at and using on a daily basis. I need hand holding. I do know some SQL (a language used for accessing databases), but anything outside a simple query is right now beyond my reach without more understanding of what lies underneath.

But back to the topic at hand. Off and on over the last few years, I’ve been working on my own crawler to index web pages and follow links. While toying around with this tonight, I stumbled on the original paper written by the founders of Google when they were at Stanford. When I started reading it I was fully expecting to be confused by all of the complex information presented. In actuality, it is clean, simple, and thorough much like the Google search interface itself.

So I sit here looking at the simple genius in that paper and wonder if I can come up with anything like it. I don’t know that I can, but it is still fun to toy around and solve problems for myself as a means of satisfying my curiosity.

What do you wish a web search engine would do?

I just noticed that several letters on my keyboard have worn off so if you didn’t know what letter the key was supposed to be, you’d have a hard time with it. Also, all the keys on my keyboard used to have a matte like texture to them. A good majority of them are now smooth and shiny. You can tell where my fingers land on the keys, like I tend to use my left thumb more than my right when hitting the space bar, so it’s only shiny on one end.

This keyboard is only a year old.

Just for fun I updated the engine and some of the website that I have for groveling car pictures off the internet. The engine code is much cleaner, the database is smaller, and searches are faster.  It’s also got a separate component for loading the pictures so the image information is preserved.

Check it out: carpicarchive.com

I’ve been using Flickr more and more. I was reluctant at first to use it because I could just as easily write my own web page to host my own pictures. But as I began to take more photos, it became cumbersome and the utility of Flickr became apparent. It wasn’t until I reach my limit as a free user that I decided to pony up for a pro account. I think this was the first service on the internet that I actually paid for. I’ve come to a point where I really rely on it.

I’ve mentioned before my opinion on Microsoft buying Yahoo. Regardless of my opinion on why or why not that deal should happen, I worry about what will become of Flickr. I like it just the way it is. It is exceptionally clean, easy to use, reliable, and powerful. A rare combination.

Knowing what I do about Microsoft from working there for ten years, is that if they do wind up owning it, they will not be able to leave it alone. I can imagine it being clumped into the mess that is MS-Live. Worse yet, I could imagine it requiring MS-Silverlight (MS answer to flash) making it incompatible with any operating system other than Windows.

Both of these would be a tragedy to a wonderful service.

Brick walls are merely there to keep those out who don’t really want it. –Randy Pausch

I just got done watching the “Last Lecture” given by Randy Pausch and it was brilliant, emotional, and inspiring. He is fighting pancreatic cancer.

Here is the video. Be warned. It is almost two hours long, and towards the end gets emotional, but it is worth every minute of it.

Google is getting into a Trans-Pacific cable, not Trans-Atlantic like I had thought about in a previous post.

Read more here: “Google Buys A piece of Transpacific Cable - Om Malik on GigaOM.com“

Tech City Bowling in Kirkland is a popular place for a lot of companies on the east side to go for team events and celebration. I’ve been there several times over the years. Before it was even called Tech City Bowl.

Today the company I work for decided to take us all there to celebrate shipping one of our products. There was another company there doing something similar. Looking around I started to see several familiar faces. Then it dawned on me that they were all my former coworkers from my previous employer.

It was quite fun actually. It was a bit odd because I didn’t have a lot of good things to say about the company. I got along with the people fine, but sometimes the line between how you feel about your work and the people you work with is blurred.

The group I normally hang out with and I got a lane right next to my former coworkers where we sat, joked, talked about how they were doing and how their company was doing. In general we all had a good time. It was fun to be essentially hanging out with both companies at the same time.

I’m glad I make friends easily.

So Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo. I don’t think they should. They should go back to their core business of building software and operating systems. Or even go back and fix their core business of building software and operating systems. Not trying to buy their way into beating Google.

Microsoft suffers from a disorder. I’m not sure what the name of it is, but they think they need to be number one at anything and everything that someone else is good at. And they will do it by any means they can, then declare themselves victorious  even though they are not. “HEY! LOOK AT ME! I’M NUMBER ONE!”

They are really diluting themselves. Diluting their products. Diluting their name. Buying yahoo will not do them any good, nor will it fix any of their problems.  It will not take Google down a notch, it won’t bring Microsoft up a notch. It will just turn Yahoo into another Microsoft train wreck. Bloated, slow web pages that only run in IE.

The only thing I really worry about is Flickr and what will happen to it. I use it extensively and would hate to have to change services. But regardless, it’s not a big deal.

What would be a big deal, and the timing is perfect for it now, is if Apple decided to release MacOS to run on consumer PC hardware. Now that Microsoft no longer has their focus on the operating system market. That would really shake things up, quite possibly disastrously for MS. That, however, is a different discussion.

Right now I’m sitting at my desk, watching an episode of Eureka on Hulu.com. I have an account there while they are in private beta. Pretty cool stuff actually. High quality. A lot of shows I like, a lot easier to navigate that the cable box menu. I don’t find the content or the website amazing. I do think it is cool, but this is something I could see coming. I’ve talked with others many years ago. What is really cool though, is that I have a friend who is working on this project. (thus my beta access).

At work, we just took a loot at the Android open phone platform which Google plays a big part in. The day it was announced, knowing the history of a friend who works there, the first thing I did was email him and ask him if he was one of the people who is working in it at Google. “Yep” was the reply.

Those two are just a couple of the high profile examples I can say something about. There are many more friends working on many more projects that will shape not just the computer industry, but our lives.

Back when we all started doing this, we did it because it was cool, but most people didn’t understand. We really didn’t care. We weren’t doing this for everyone else. But somewhere along the way it all came together and other people caught up.

What really amazes me is where we are compared to where we came from.

Microsoft Windows: You don’t need to know about this bug, it doesn’t exist until we say it does.

Apple Mac: There is no bug. It must have been you doing something wrong.

Linux: WOW! That’s really cool!!!!

HAHAHAHA!!!!!

This is too funy! I recognized all of the events and most of the faces. One of the people in the video is even in my facebook friends list

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi4fzvQ6I-o

Here is a good article on amateur radio operators and the role they played during the recent storm.

http://www.kptv.com/weatheralert/14776224/detail.html

I have a ham radio license. My call sign is KD7HBH. It is a tech class license. While I’ve been inactive for quite some time, I have no doubt about how and why amateur radio can be so effective in different situations.

I first read about ham radio in sixth grade. I know this because I still have the book I checked out from the school library and never returned. I stumbled on this book while cleaning out my garage in 1999. Even though a lot of people were getting licensed in 1999 because of the “y2k” panic, my interest was more curiosity. I wanted to see if I could pass the test. I was interested in the technical aspects of it. With the ecouragement of a friend who also had a license (Hi Tasha) I was soon off to get mine. I passed the test with a 34 (out of 35 questions).

Sure, I could get a CB radio, but that just didn’t cut it for me. Even with my lower class license I could now use an FM transmitter. I was no longer limited to just 4 watts of output power. It was now 200 watts with my license and up to 1500 watts if I chose to get a higher grade license. I could actually build my own radio equipment from scratch and not be limited to FCC approved. All the cool stuff that appealed to me.

In the time I was active, I talked to ham radio operators all over the world. Argentina, Japan, Taiwan, Ireland. I’ve talked to operators on ships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans.  The coolest was talking to an astronaut on the Space Shuttle (Every US Astronaut has to get a ham license).

Inventions also come about from the freedom a ham license gives you. Single sideband transmission, television, cell phones, wireless networking. Steve Wozniak (inventor of the mac) had a ham license (WA6BND) although it looks like his license has lapsed.

But what really gets my attention is when ham radio operators are able to provide emergency communication when all other systems are failing. Ham radio operators are restricted only by their license and what their pocket book can afford. They are often prepared to operate with no commercial power for extended periods of time. In remote and diverse situations. I myself, can hook my radio up to one of my cars and can be on the air in 15 minutes. Running at 40 watts, I could last about two days on just the car battery without starting the engine.

Once a year, amateur radio operators actually practice emergency situations during a contest called Field Day. 24 hours making as many contacts as possible, with those contacts being as far away as possible. All with non-commercial power. Generators are allowed. Extra points for using Solar and/or wind power. There are classes for low power, multiple stations, and just about every other means of communication possible on the ham radio bands. But, you can’t plug in.

innovation and community service what what ham radio is all about.

My license expires next year. I’m definitely going to have to get it renewed. I might even dust off my mic.

I have friends who live in Japan. I also have friends who live in Russia. From time to time I get an email about some location where something happened or some place I should visit or see in my lifetime. I tuck these emails away for future reference.

One thing I like to do is to look up a map to see where these places are relative to other locations, building an imaginary itinerary  so that when I do go, I can group places together. Both Google and Microsoft have messed that up for me. At least for my browsing maps in Japan and Russia.

The problem lies in how the maps are localized. If you look at a map of Japan, it is all in Japanese characters.  Same for Russia at least in Google maps. It is kind of interesting, but the reality is this feature does me no good. I cannot understand the Japanese characters. I also do not understand the Russian characters. The real problem lies in that there is no way to turn this off.

If I search for Shinjuku Station, I can get a feel for where it is, but what are the surrounding areas? Is there a familiar place within a few miles?

I can’t tell.

I came across this link via Robert Scoble’s facebook feed.

http://www.brandinfection.com/2007/10/02/when-brand-infection-works/

I love this picture. It says so much about so many different things going well beyond just the Microsoft vs Apple debate.

This thing called a computer is sucking my time away from me. If I were me as a parent talking to me as a kid, I’d tell myself I’m abusing my computer privileges.

I just realized I spent 4 hours getting nothing done because I sat in front of my computer.

after I already spent 10 hours at the office in front of one just like it working.

I’m turning this thing off now.

When I turn it back on, I’m limiting my time on it. 45 minutes tops each day. 15 in the morning to read personal email, 30 minutes at night with email, blogging, and research.

There seem to be no shortage of rumors coming from Google lately.

Things I’ve heard about, and then denied by Google:

• Trans Atlantic cable for them to have more bandwidth
• Google Phone
• Google looking to purchase Sirius Satellite.
• Google buying MySpace
• Google buying DoubleClick
• Google Creating an Email system
• Google Creating an Aps service

The last four have happened. The next three have not. But they are more recent. Even if they don’t follow through on the rumors they are denying, the fact that these rumors happen really doesn’t surprise me. In all honesty I think the rumors came from within Google.

One thing that is common in young companies is brainstorming. You don’t see it so much in older companies because the mode of business and the structure of those in charge vs the employees changes over time. But while they are young, they probably had a session where the problem was the growing demand for bandwidth. Someone piped up and said, “Hey we could lay our own cable.” or “We could buy a satellite!” and the ideas were brushed off and were the topic of comical conversasion later. Someone heard it in the hallway and it spilled out into the real world.

On the other hand.  Google is also still young enough to pull something like these ideas off.

Just a thought.

I was sent a survey in the mail today. It was a Microsoft Exit Survey. A nice little paper that coincides with the Microsoft Employee survey with a link to a survey site. It was a bunch of check boxes that were meant to give an idea of why a person would leave such a company. But in true Microsoft fashion it was glossed over so that there was no real way to paint just how ugly of a picture it really was.

Out of 50 choices per page for three pages, you were only allowed to check three items. It’s hard to do when you could easily check 25 or more. The comments box was way to small to say what the survey didn’t cover.

Why did I leave?

1. The manager of my group told me to my face that I would never get a promotion
2. The previous review I got ZERO raise and ZERO bonus.
3. The review previous to that I got a raise that netted me $240 (yes $10 per paycheck) more per year and no bonus.
4. I regularly saw people directly credited for work that I did. Not just work I contributed to, but the work I specifically did. All they did was ask me to do it.
5. A manager suggested that my kids go live with their grandparents.
6. I was told that I just wasn’t excited enough about the company.
7. Management purely self serving there.
8. There is one manager for every three employees, when I started it was one manager for every ten.
9. Projects are no longer done to improve the products, they are done to pad the resumes of managers.
10. No matter how hard you work or how much you do, you are constantly made to feel like you aren’t doing enough.
11. Microsoft just got to arrogant for my taste.
12. During my exit interview, I was offered a substantial raise. Enough to make up for the the two previous years of nothing.
13. During my exit interview I was also offered a promotion.
14. The person performing the exit interview was flabbergasted to learn that it only took me three days to have multiple offers of substantially more money.
15. It would have been so much easier to keep me happy than to try to recover.
16. I couldn’t put up with another year of negative reinforcement to get me to do a good job.

The exit interview was probably the most surreal part of the whole process. It was almost like leaving a cult. “Are you sure you want to leave? It’s so nice here. You’re really going to miss us.”

I don’t miss it, even a little bit. The people I made friends with are still my friends. I am still in an exciting field working on some cool stuff.  I make better money and have better opportunity. My work is appreciated and recognized.

The last question was “Would you consider working for Microsoft again?”

NO.

The only way I would work for Microsoft again is if the company I worked for sold out to them. I would then only stay long enough to cash my stock out.