For those of you that reviewed or got free access to our Avalon book while we were still writing it, please please please post a review on Amazon.com. Thanks!

You can also order them online. I find that even Thanksgiving is good for gift giving, as is Halloween! What could be better than the gift of knowledge?

All of the initial copies of Programming the Windows Presentation Foundation have been sold out at the PDC. That’s a double edged sword, of course. On the one hand, it’s nice that so many people wanted a copy that they were gone by the time I got to see the remaining display copy on Tuesday after lunch. On the other hand, I want the publisher to have provided enough copies to feed a longer buying frenzy.

The good news is that another, larger shipment of the book will be available @ the PDC in the Marketplace store Thursday afternoon. Please form a line in an orderly fashion and keep the sleeping bags out of the normal aisle of traffic. : )

Or, feel free to purchase one online (or two — XMas is coming up!).

The following is an internal email published here with permission:

From: Lisa Brummel
Sent: Friday, September 09, 2005 1:54 PM
To: Microsoft
Subject: Update: Hurricane Katrina Relief Efforts

While the effects of Hurricane Katrina will be felt in the Gulf Coast for months and years to come, the contributions and volunteer efforts of thousands of Microsoft employees worldwide over the last week and a half have made a real difference in peoples’ lives. Fortunately, all of our employees in the region are safely accounted for.

I want to thank everyone who has been responding to requests by relief agencies for cash donations to meet the most immediate needs of evacuees. To date, a total of $9 million in cash, technology assistance and support has been donated by Microsoft and by employees. This includes $2 million from Microsoft for relief, recovery and rebuilding efforts, $5 million in technology assistance and support, and U.S. employee contributions totaling more than $1 million, which will be matched by the company.

In the hours and days following the hurricane, hundreds of Microsoft employees have used their creativity and initiative to help speed relief, often doing what we do best — using technology to solve problems and help improve people’s lives. These efforts by our employees are what make Microsoft a special place to work. I wish I could mention everyone by name, but since that’s not possible, let me share a few examples that will give you an idea of the great work people are doing.

• Jim Carroll, a database architect from Birmingham, Alabama, and a half-dozen other Microsoft engineers from California, Florida, Alabama and Texas, worked virtually nonstop for four days to develop katrinasafe.com, an online tool being used by the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, and by relief agencies to help evacuees find family members separated by the crisis. Since the site went live on Sept. 5, information about tens of thousands of evacuees has been registered on the site, and it’s being updated continuously with information from relief centers across the affected region.
• Murali Krishnan, a group program manager in MSN, led an effort of about 100 Microsoft employees to build a secure Web site hosted by MSN to accept donations for the Red Cross. Krishnan’s team built the site — donate.msn.com — in just 20 hours, unheard-of speed for a project of this magnitude. The MSN Web site has already generated more than $3 million in donations for the Red Cross.
• Dawn Gagnon, a mobility solutions specialist in Houston, arranged for the delivery of Microsoft Smartphones to 30 doctors at the main Red Cross medical triage site in Baton Rouge, and 150 Texas National Guard command post leaders being deployed to Louisiana to help with relief efforts. With land lines and switching stations down throughout Louisiana, the Smartphones were a top priority of the Texas National Guard to keep command leaders in touch. A makeshift assembly line of friends, family and neighbors at Dawn’s house worked for 12 hours to activate and charge the phones and make up waterproof bags that included car chargers and extra batteries.
• John Morello, a senior Microsoft consultant in south Louisiana, saw the need for an e-mail system that volunteers could use to help evacuees connect with people they’d been separated from. The Microsoft Hotmail team created the accounts in under four hours, and this has already helped reunite dozens of families. Suresh Babu, group program manager at Hotmail, then orchestrated a cross-team effort to help tens of thousands of evacuees set up and use free Hotmail e-mail accounts to let friends and family know they’re OK, check in with employers, contact their insurance companies, even keep in touch with other victims of the hurricane.
• Todd Ellison, a technical account manager in the Houston office working to assist local officials in relief efforts, walked into a wholesale computer parts distributor and asked if they would donate two laptop computers needed by the chief information officers of the City of Houston and Harris County, Texas. Five minutes later, Todd was out the door with two new machines.
• Bill Steele, an Indiana-based Microsoft developer evangelist and private pilot, has been using his own twin-engine plane to shuttle food and supplies to areas of need. Flying out of Baton Rouge, Bill has delivered 17,500 MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), mostly to the lower part of Mississippi.
• Steve Lough, an account manager in our federal sales office, led a team of senior Microsoft technologists working in partnership with Intel, Cisco and SBC at the Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C. to help create a communications infrastructure for relief shelters, establish computer kiosks for evacuees and Red Cross workers, and dispense financial assistance broadly. Microsoft also worked with the Red Cross to establish a solid core data infrastructure to meet the huge increase in demand on the agency’s IT system.
• Blacks at Microsoft (BAM) is allocating funds to assist displaced students at historically black schools affected by the disaster, including Xavier University, Dillard University and Southern University of New Orleans.
• In Redmond, a group of employees is putting together 200 boxes of sanitation and first-aid kits — about a ton of supplies. They’ll be shipped to the Microsoft office in Houston where Microsoft employees will pick them up and take them to a local airport, where four private planes are at the ready to fly the supplies to Baton Rouge. From there, they’ll be picked up by local charities and dispersed to those in need;
• The folks at Bungie Studios, a Microsoft subsidiary that developed the Halo games for the Xbox, used the Web to sell more than $100,000 “Fight the Flood” charity T-shirts online. The proceeds will go to the Red Cross, as will royalties earned from other Bungie Store products sold in September.

In addition, three of Microsoft’s Across America trucks, fully equipped with communications systems and advanced technology, are on their way to Red Cross relief operation centers in the Gulf Region to provide vital coordination capabilities.

Groove is being used by the Red Cross and the Army Corps of Engineers as a collaboration tool to enable communications for multiple partners in the relief effort, and Groove has employees helping on site at the Red Cross.

Our sales force is letting business customers affected by the hurricane know that we’re waiving software licensing fees for up to six months, and making premier support consultants available to help them get their IT systems back up and running.

The speed of these response efforts has been just incredible. I want to acknowledge Ron Markezich, our CIO; Jennifer Heard, GM of the South Central District, as well as Cathy MacCaul, Linda Testa and the Community Affairs team, for coordinating our efforts to support relief organizations, government agencies, educational institutions and customers.

I’m very proud of my company right now.

I feel like I’ve spent the last four days in hibernation, awaking like Rip Van Winkle to an entirely new environment. And while the new environment is still filled with boxes and won’t have internet, cable or phone ’til tomorrow, it’s still a very pleasant environment, flat so the boys can bike everywhere, near family, very near the schools, filled with friendly people (many of which have already introduced themselves and I’m worked double-hard this time to remember their names) and with plenty of potential for renovation (and the space that’s there is nice all by itself). There will definitely be an adjustment period, but overall, it was very nice to wake up in.

On a personal note, with the move, getting ready for PDC, my son’s birthday, my wife’s birthday and my 14th wedding anniversary, some of my personal relationships have suffered (I’m *so* sorry to have missed last week’s PND!). My have my apologies. I hope things will get better after the PDC!

I got a time estimate from a friend who’s a brand new contractor in the area of home renovation (my wife made me promise to start renovations on our new place immediately as a condition of purchase). He’d already bid me an hourly rate, but I asked for a rough estimate of time spent. He hasn’t yet seen the place (we can’t talk the owner into letting us come over again), but he answered my question anyway, giving me an estimate 5x lower than I suspected it would be (Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!). I replied with the following advise on how a contractor should estimate time for maximum customer happiness (and therefore maximum revenue):

There are two schools of thought on time estimates. One school of thought, which I’ll call “bait & switch,” says to knowingly under-estimate so that by the time the customer notices a slip, they’re committed and they continue with their contractor by sheer momentum, hoping it’ll all be over soon. This technique produces customers that either pay more than they thought or that force the contractor to cut corners to meet their initial estimate, lowering the quality. In either case, the customer tends to get unhappy, which hurts repeat business and word of mouth.

The other estimation technique I’ll call “under-promise & over-deliver.” In this scenario, the contractor estimates their time very conservatively, then doubles or triples it to take into account the unforeseen. This estimate may scare the customer away, but a good contractor will say things like “I hope it’ll be less, but I want to make sure that we spend enough time to make sure that you’re happy,” to smooth the way. Plus, when the contractor delivers early, the customer is happy, calls again for future work and says things like “and he came in under the initial estimate!” to all his friends.

Obviously, very few people that read this site are contractors in the area of home renovation, but I think the advice applies to most forms of contracting. Take it as you will.

Lord keep me off of the list of people that don’t have to go through regular security checks:

“The Aug. 5 memo recommends reducing patdowns by giving screeners the discretion not to search those wearing tight-fitting clothes. It also suggests exempting several categories of passengers from screening, including federal judges, members of Congress, Cabinet members, state governors, high-ranking military officers and those with high-level security clearances.”

Can’t you just picture the movie where the terrorists kidnap a Cabinet member, hold their family hostage and use them as a mule to blow up some airplane? I’ll take the anal probes at the airport, thank you.

In a (very) past life, I used to write intergrated voice response (IVR) systems aka “voicemail hell.” It may not seem like it, but we spent a *ton* of time trying to make a voice output/12-key input UI as friendly as possible.

However, I never thought of the IVR feature I ran into today. While transfering my utilities to our new address, one of the utilities put me on hold and offered to call me back when it was my turn in line (promising me that I would not lose my place). I’ve got the world’s most perfect cell phone and the world’s most perfect Bluetooth headset, so staying on hold was just as easy as not, but still, that’s a damn cool feature.