I woke up at Don’s house one day last week utterly convinced that I was going to win the lottery that day. It was 6:30a, which is early for me, but I had an 8a meeting (*very* early for Microsofties), so I had set the alarm. Tim, who was also staying at Don’s that week and with whom I was sharing a room (separate beds : ) was on Eastern time, so had already accidently woken me at 6a that morning on his way to the door (it’s not his fault; I’m too long for the bed and it’s a tight squeeze to get past me when I’m I’m in it). I must’ve had some strong dream between 6a and 6:30a as I lay there in and out of sleep.

The premonition was so strong that I recalled the epilog from one of the first non-comic Dilbert books in which Scott Adams talked about his belief that there were multiple parallel universi and that by process of positive affirmations, he’d moved his consciousness into one that had attained great success in spite of his abysmal drawing abilities (this was before his TV series was canceled).

So, all morning, in classic positive affirmation style, I had “I will win the lottery today” running through my head. It swamped all other thoughts, except those of whether I wanted the annual payment or the lump sum ($25M or $13M, respectively) and how I was going to spend the money.

My first purchase was to be a two-week trip for my entire extended family to Hawaii where we would decide how rest of the money was to be spent. The idea was to devise a plan wherein every adult member of my family could get a life-changing amount of money, e.g. $100K, to use to follow their dreams, but awarded only in a manner that wouldn’t actually cause more harm than good (as large sums of money can do [or so I’ve heard…]). Then, I called my sister-in-law to ask her where, money being no object, she would want to live. I’ve been looking for houses in her neighborhood lately so that we could be closer (“It takes a village to raise a child.“).

Right away, she was suspicious of my question, “Why? Are you going to win the lottery?”

“Yes,” I said, confidently.

“Really? How do you know?”

“I woke up with a ‘feeling,’” I said, unashamed.

“How often have you had these feelings and they’ve come true?” she asked, judging her odds.

“Never.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointedly.

“No. I mean, I’ve never had a feeling like this before,” I corrected her.

“Oh,” she said, this time more excited. I’ve also loved that about my sister-in-law. She’s very open-minded. She never once questioned my sanity (out loud), but instead started planning where she wanted to live. Her conclusion is that she’d want a nicer house very close to where she currently live, but basically, that was all. “I like my life,” she said.

That was my conclusion as well. I have things that I want to do that aren’t likely to generate an income stream, e.g. figure out how money works, but my life is a good one and doesn’t need major changes. It was fun to go through the mental exercise and I would certainly have been happy to win the lottery that day, but it’s OK that I didn’t. That early morning feeling lead to positive affirmation of a different kind.

Before RSS took over, I had a folder named “Daily” which had links to all of the URLs that I surfed to on a daily basis. One problem was that for the sites that changed daily, it was a pain to decide what was new. An even bigger problem was the ones that didn’t change daily. Eventually, the pain of surfing to them daily was outweighed by the pleasure I would get when those sites were finally updated. A bunch of my friends’ infrequently updated blogs fall into this category (you know who you are : ).

Sure, RSS is useful to track Scoble as he shirks his moving duties, but even more useful to track Tim when he eventually does update his blog. With RSS, I don’t have to experience any pain surfing to Tim’s blog day after day. Instead, I let SharpReader poll Tim’s blog and when it’s finally updated, I’ll know about it. All gain; no pain.

What that means, unfortunately, is that I only read blogs with RSS feeds, because I’ve long ago gotten out of the habit of surfing my “Daily” folder. So when Josh Trupin (editor of MSDN Magazine) gave his reasons for being out of the office on Monday, he had to send me an email with a link to the description of his horrific train injury detailed on his blog. As fun a writer as Josh is, I won’t go back (unless Google brings me there) ’til he’s got an RSS feed. I’ve been hurt before; now I’m older and wiser and require an RSS feed before I’m willing to wed myself to a blog.

In many ways, my list of “My First” articles lately have been written out of duty to all of the developers that have always wanted to work at Microsoft, but haven’t yet been able to. I first applied for a job @ MS as a summer intern in 1988. I was turned down while another guy down the hall of my fraternity was accepted. He spent all summer building LCD panels into one giant screen and I spent all summer writing FoxPro code. I wonder if he still works here. I can’t for the life of me remember his name. David something…

Anyway, every time some new, fun, cool opportunity comes up, I feel like I have to take it just so that I can share it with the folks that don’t yet work here (seems like they’re hiring everyone, though, so it shouldn’t be much longer : ). This time, I got to be in an episode of the .NET Show. I was to be 15 minutes of code demo after Brad Abrams and Anders Hejlsberg reminded folks that .NET wasn’t just about web services. There were all kinds of folks that Robert had on tap to give the demo, but they were all busy, so eventually they got to the last monkey in the barrel and had to settle for me. : )

I flew up this morning and had to call MS information: “Hi, I’m a Microsoft employee, but I’m new. Can you tell me where to go to get the MS Studios?” This in spite of the fact that I’d been there less than two weeks before! (I’m terrible at remembering anything that doesn’t have a lot of parenthesis and braces in it). They showed me to Green Room #2, where they had some food waiting, just like I was a real “talent”. Maybe the food was really for Brad and Anders. Maybe the food was for Nick Hodapp, Project Manager for Visual C++, who was in the makeup chair when I arrived. Nick was there to remind people that MS is serious about C++ both in the native and managed spaces and to show off the port of Quake II to managed C++.

While I waited my turn in the makeup chair, I watched Brad and Anders do their thing and made sure my demos worked. I was amazed that Robert never stopped the shooting while he did his interview. He did the whole thing in one take, which puts quite a burden on me to get my demo right the first time! I also spent some time eating the Green Room food, IMing my wife (she said to make sure not to use too much blue eye shadow or I’d look “trashy”) and giving the makeup artist a talk on the benefits of Wi-Fi (she asked, honest!).

After Brad and Anders were through, they wandered into my makeup session. I’ve always wanted to meet the creator of C#, but not while having my eyes done… Anyway, Brad and Anders were having a debate about the merits of a new optimization of the .NET framework and it was really cool to see how practical Anders was. I don’t know why, but I imagined a guy that could come up with something as clean and simple as C# to be pretty academic. That wasn’t the case at all. His view of the debate was that he wanted to see a few uses of a proposed new feature before he even thought about including it, as opposed to judging it on the basis of it’s “coolness” as can happen when engineers gather together in groups. That brief chat made me feel better about having him in charge of my favorite programming language.

After having just the right amount of blue eye shadow, I sat up on stage with Robert and Nick and my new friend Bob, who ran the entire shoot. He was like the voice of God, being only heard and not seen from his control room in the bowels of MS Studio. He and I bonded quickly as we settled into the banter of trading insults familiar amongst the wiseasses of the world (now *that* sounds like a cool domain name! : ). Robert was very causal and very smiley, very different from the seriousness he portrays on film. Nick was very polished and gave such a compelling demo of the managed C++ Quake II port that I couldn’t help but jump in and beg for more. I, on the other hand, said the word “crack” and mentioned my colleague as he IM’d himself onto my computer screen, both times making Robert roll his eyes at me (off camera, I’m sure). I also went off into la la land once when I answered a question that Robert hadn’t asked, causing Nick to jump in with an answer.

All in all, having yourself filmed for posterity was pretty different from giving a talk. It was nice, because I had Nick and Robert to play off of and Robert was very good about moving things along. It was hard because, unlike a talk, there were things that I said that I wished I hadn’t merely because they are permanent. Hopefully it went over well as a whole. I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch it myself. Someone please tell me how it is when it’s published next month…

I just had a “Windows Moment.” I was on the phone with my Dad who has Windows XP and was having trouble. Since he paid for my computer science degree, he assumes that I’ll be his tech support. In fact, everyone in my family assumes I’ll be their tech support; it’s annoying as hell! I don’t know how support folks diagnose and fix problems over the phone all day long. More than 5 minutes and I’m ready to say, “How much was that computer science degree, Dad? I’ll write you a check.”

Anyway, after trying it for about 20 minutes (and failing), I asked him if he had the Remote Desktop settings on his My Computer->Remote tab, thinking that I could use terminal services to solve his problem. Of course, since he was running XP Home, he didn’t, but he did have Remote Assistance. So we tried it. And even though he’s in the back woods outside of Fargo, ND and on dial-up (isn’t this a commercial for Windows XP?), he was able to email me a request for remote assistance (Start->Help->Ask for assistance->Invite a friend to connect to your computer with Remote Assistance) and I was able to connect to his computer (through my firewall!) and solve his problem (half of Office ’97 was installed on C: and half on D: and wasn’t happy about it at all).

Wow. That’s a feature that made my life better.

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

When I visit Redmond, I share an office with Andy Oakley, the PM for GotDotNet Workspaces. Workspaces was recently released from beta to v1.0 and when that happened, Andy sent around feedback from users.

Of course, folks love it in general (even some hard-to-please MS internals), but I was surprised to see to some folks were using private Workspaces for their team’s main source code base. I shouldn’t have been surprised; this makes a lot of sense. Private workspaces provide a protected space for file sharing, discussion, bug tracking and source code control. The last time I set up a commercial software development team, I needed weeks to get all of this picked out, installed and working and I needed an IT guy to keep it running and backed up. I remember hearing about a 3rd party that was going to bundle all of this together for a fee, but never got around to it. With Workspaces, MS already provides the whole team development environment, including VS.NET integration and a web interface, and it’s free! Plus, with a private workspace, only folks on your team get access.

IMO, the only big piece that was missing from Workspaces was a way to pull down all of the source onto a build machine for regular automatic builds. For commercial work, this is key. So, Andy, tired of my whining, built a command line tool for pulling down all source from a GDN Workspace (and put it up in it’s own GDN Workspace). Personally, I’d be slightly happier if it took arguments from the command line instead of a .config file, but that’s easily added from the Genghis CommandLineParser class for those that are interested. Enjoy!

I *really* want to own my digital songs, so I’ve been dying for a real site to purchase them one at a time, instead of buying entire albums I don’t want or ripping the songs off of the albums I do own. Towards that end, I was excited about BuyMusic.com and immediately spend $4.95 on five Avril songs. Overall, it was not a happy experience.

What I love about BuyMusic.com is the site:

• The web site is very usable and full-featured, making finding, listening to and ordering artists, songs and albums easy
• The price is right: $.99/song and $9.49/album
• I really wanted to immediately find the web service so that I could write a program to go through my wife’s bootleg mp3s and purchase them

Unfortunately, I hate BuyMusic.com because of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) experience:

• On one machine, I could listen to all of the songs, but only after a “DRM upgrade” (whatever that means)
• On another machine, I had to do systems administration to play a song (DRM doesn’t like it when you’re a guest and an administrator in the same account). This is fine for me, because I can chase the error to the web page and do the systems administration on my account, but what about normal people? Then I had to do another DRM upgrade. *Then* I had to log in with my user name and password on *every* song! That means I have to roam around to every machine in my house that might possibly want to listen to the music, because only I know the email/password for the songs I buy. What a PITA!
• I’m allowed three machines? Why? I can take my CDs to any machine in the house and my cars. I want to own this music for life and I *know* I’ll have more than 3 machines before the end of it. I tried it on four machines and it didn’t turn me away, which is nice, but how long will that last?
• How are these WMA files going to work with my mp3 player? Even if the format works, will the DRM get in the way?
• What about if I download a bunch of songs on my way out the door? If I’m on an airplane, I can’t jack into the Internet to obtain the license and there was no “pre-license” batch mode that I could find to save me from obtaining the licenses one at a time

The whole experience made me want to cry. The site was so great, but the playback was *so* hard. Why do I have to be treated like a child? I’m dying to pay for the music I want, but I don’t want to be penalized for it. I really wanted to find the inevitable hacking tool to strip the DRM off of the music I downloaded so that I could use it more freely, but what’s the point of that? This kind of hacking would break the license agreement and is no better than downloading mp3s (although the the latter is a hell of a lot more convenient).

I went with Erica Wiechers (.NET Show heart throb) to visit MS Studios today. Ostensively we were there to preview the Applied XML Developer Conference videos, some of which Erica will be turned into MSDN TV episodes. However, as long as we were there, Bob Snyder gave us the nickel tour.

The front entry was even more secure than the normal MS buildings, being encased in wire fencing and not yielding to my badge (we had to be let in from the inside). Once in, it was a big building with lots of open space and fun decorations. I got to see several blueprints of famous imaginary places, e.g. the spaceship from Lost in Space, the Addams Family house and the island from Gilligan’s Island. I got to see the two green rooms where “talent” gets ready in the full locker rooms, then relaxes on the coach ’til it’s their turn (although neither room is green). I got to see all of the studios, including standing on one of BillG’s markers, seeing the set where he interviewed with Larry King and the other set where he recorded his antitrust testimony. I also got to see the set for the .NET Show, which looks like the inside of half of a giant bowl, so that they can blend in custom backgrounds, both physical and logical. I go to see all kinds of cool a/v routing and mixing equipment, putting my one little PC attached to my home theater system seem so pathetic in comparison. I even got to see some live footage of Steve Ballmer that they were filming that day (man, he gets excited when he speaks : ).

In general, I’ve been getting to see and do a lot of cool stuff here at MS. Recommended.