elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

Back in 1999, I sat in a room with Lucy Mohl and various other luminaries at Real. I call them luminaries because in terms of development efforts internal to the company, they were all rock stars. Externally, this was before blogging, so of course nobody knew who they were.

It was the beginning of the design work for what would become RealOne. Lucy asked everyone for an example of great design. One person mentioned their BMW. I mentioned StarCon II. Here's approximately what I said:

"There's this game, it only runs on DOS, and you have to have a special boot disk made in order to run it because of some archaic rule involving memory space. However, it's completely worth it. The premise of the game is to save the world, but the mechanics are you can never be too rich or too good at fighting. The great design is the view of the stars. It's unclear how great this is until you start playing the game a bit. You have a complete star map, and you can focus onto each star and go there. Each star has a planet possibly with moons. There's aliens to meet and riches to mine all over the place. The feeling is of a self contained world of unlimited possibility. That's why this game is so great."

If I were giving a similar speech now, I would add that viewing the star map, once you know the possibilities, you get that seat of your pants G-force feeling like you've just floored it on a camaro. And I would also add that this is how operating systems should be: your doorway to simply everything.

If you're interested in learning more about StarCon II and possibly playing it, here are some useful links. People who are already fans can enjoy the music tracks too. Thanks to Rally Guy for the links.

OMG Star Control II music remixes! http://www.medievalfuture.com/precursors/

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….discussion of the old classic Star Control II. If you haven’t played this game, or haven’t played it in a long time, it’s available legally free of charge from this link. Strongly recommended; great game.

Also, a group called The Precursors has been remixing a bunch of the Star Control II music. Their remixes are compatible with the new release of the game. Some of them are really good, I especially like the Spathi communication theme.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:48 AM | Permalink

Here at MS, there are lots of posters heralding SP2. They have photos of what I assume are the major players for that release, larger than life. It has the whiff of transparency and accountability all in a nice graphic design the size of your car.

In the lunchroom, all the eurest employees are wearing the SP2 t-shirts, which say something about fighting back against hackers. On each table of the lunchroom, there is a trifold cardstock brochure with the major player's faces on them too. Which got me thinking:

- Imagine snatching up these folks in the middle of their busy workday to try to take their picture. How many do you take? And since everyone has to have a different color background, which one do you choose for which person?
- Say you're Todd Wanke (who I know only from e-mails sent to the entire company). One line item in your day is to pick the best photo out of the pile. Which one do you choose, given that people will be staring at it, slurping their chili (like I was).

It's just an odd set of conditions to produce something coherent, is all.

Also during the aforementioned chili slurping, there was a commercial for a guy creating a statue. The shot of him included him working on a huge piece of clay with a chisel, but he was also talking on his cell phone. Completely accidental, but brilliant. Why?

- Art is work, just like any other work. You would never dream of not answering a cell phone call while programming, would you? Art is the same way. It's not the result of tantrumming or extended childbirth-type pain. Sometimes it's just like cut and paste.
- People feel about programming the way we (programmers) sometimes feel about art. It is some kind of miracle coming out of nowhere, with much applied genius and pain. This is obviously false.

So, hooray for cell phone artist man.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 01:18 PM | Permalink

Too busy to write. Lots to wrap up. Too busy to even look for work. I guess that's a problem that solves itself.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 09:22 PM | Permalink

Some people (not me) are interested in manipulating their site's rank in various search engines for various search strings. Oh, I admit, I'd like to have the [string="I%20hate%20eurest%20what%20do%20I%20do%20for%20lunch"] crowd. But in terms of things I harbor a deep desire for, my search rank had better take a number.

It hit me this morning, for absolutely no reason, that my old Radio weblog is probably overrun with comment spam and there's nothing I can do. That old thing is still a big win in the rankings, probably all from one generous link from Scoble, and it's as dusty as an old abandoned house. Now with all the comment spam it's like an abandoned house with criminals lurking about trying to sell drugs. I was once grateful for Radio's policy of not taking down old weblogs once the writers move on, but now maybe I wish they would. Also, a mean pinch on the arm to me for not choosing some sort of universal URL before starting a weblog, one that I can redirect anywhere. (What was the name of that service? I know it's in here somewhere).

In case anyone hadn't noticed, I'm here at 6am with perhaps two weeks of work to cram into an 8 hour day. and instead I'm writing this, and slugging through gapingvoid.com looking for something (I think it's "grit" but I'm not sure). This is perhaps the first time I've procrastinated in ten years. It feels yukky, which is punitive damages for taking so much on in the first place. Another pinch: don't do this next time!

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 06:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hi Everyone,

I've been invited so many places because of this li'l old weblog, and nary a time have I been the inviter. UNTIL NOW. Whoops, that just leapt right out. Actually, we shouldn't host any shindigs for the next month or so. But that doesn't mean you can't!

That's right, I woke up this morning wanting to give back, and this is a way I thought of doing it. If one of my loyal readers wants to host an event (meetup, bbq, book chat, ballroom dance contest) at my new home we'd love to have it there. It's pretty much at the center of the known universe, and it's larger than an airplane hangar. OK I exaggerate but you get the general idea. No sense wasting it while we're disorganized.

I know a large barrier to hosting events is the state and size of your home. From reading your weblogs I know many of you want to do it more (or at all) but just haven't the stamina to surmount mount cleaning project. But if you have the energy but lack the space, now you have no excuse. Just drop me a mail (address on the left).

Bye now,

-Beth

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 11:52 AM | Permalink

We're moving on Sept 1, and I know just the guys to call for a truck. Handy Andy. The store with the trucks is on sleazy aurora avenue, where the only thing cheaper than the goods are the services. No way I would ever call U-haul again. First of all, the large credit card deposit. The on-hold phone tree. The central ordering with the links to what the computer shows they have in actual locations. The credit check. The questions about insurance. Once you get there, they print out your information on a form on a dot matrix printer, then you sign a copy feeling like elmer fudd with the dead sea scrolls. Until you've had an authentic customer experience, like the kind you get at Handy Andy, it all might seem terribly necessary and makes everybody seem important.

Here's what happened instead. I call the local phone number. Someone answers. "Handy Andy, can you hold?"
"Sure" I answer.
Then, HE PUTS THE PHONE DOWN and I hear what's happening while I'm waiting to be helped. He's helping another customer, one who walked in. Fair enough. No music. No threat of anyone else calling. I hear them conducting the transaction. It's very channel 9. Then he picks up.
"How are you doing for trucks at the end of the month?" I ask.
"Not so bad, we just need a couple days notice" he says.
"How bout I give you notice on the phone now?"
"That's fine, what size do you want?"
"Um, you have the same sizes as u-haul, right? The 14 and the 17 foot?"
"Yeah, we have the 17 foot. What day?"
"The 31st, return on the 2nd."
"First name?"
"Beth."
"Okay, I have you down. It will be 30 bucks a day and 30 cents a mile."
"Sounds great, see you then." and we hang up.

Anyone who has ever done u-haul knows this is completely unheard of. This is the real nostalgia, the feeling we have for full serve gas stations and never ending refills on coffee. It's not manufactured nostalgia, like crowing about how many years of customer service you've had or whatever, while your customer is on hold. It's not a teenager from the suburbs wearing a white paper hat serving you a milkshake from a time neither of you remember. This is just a place that thankfully hasn't evolved to whatever age of glorious customer service we're supposed to be living in at the moment. It's nice.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:07 PM | Permalink

Somewhere I read that all blog posts are either "thinker" posts or "linker" posts. Most of mine are thinkers, but here's a linker. If you're interested in Microsoft or the software business at all, keep tabs on KC Lemson's story about solving security problems for attachments in outlook. It touches on nearly every aspect of why we (I) find software interesting. Culture, interaction with customers, technical problems, the cycle of good intentions to production to results then back to good intentions. It's a great read and I'm all ears for the next installment.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 02:14 PM | Permalink

Yes, I got it together yesterday and sewed my solution together, using the sacrifice-all-everything-must-go method. It only took one day, after all that.

A folder running a webservice in IIS contains files, visible by c:/inetpub/wwwroot/myservice. You can turn show hidden files on to see the underlined folders such as _whatever. Given that selecting the CONTENTS of one of these folders, and copying it to the inside of a suitably live destination folder such as http://egriggthatsme/myservice, does NOT work (can't add as reference, file not found, etc.), but on the other hand selecting the FOLDER itself such as myservice and pasting it to http://egriggthatsme in fact DOES work, I can only assume that show hidden files still leaves some files hidden. Anyone else have experience with this? Not that I'm going back to touch the feature again.

Today (yes, we still have sucky Tuesdays) I realized I forgot to order tomatoes from the Albertsons delivery service last night. We use delivery because the 10 bucks saves me an hour, and I'm worth it. Plus my car has bees in it. Anyway, no tomatoes, so I picked some up from the pricey market next to the coffee shop in my new (old) neighborhood. These were "heirloom" tomatoes, which is not a term regulated by the FDA, but I take to mean "the look and taste of homegrown, if the gardener was batty and geologically old, and the tomato plants themselves bearing pedigrees and perhaps lower down on the tomato species modernization splicing tree." They were great, I had a salad with pre-packaged herb mix, goat cheese, a yellow and a red heirloom, olive oil, and rice vinegar dressing with fresh ground "tricolor" peppercorns. On the side was fresh potato bread with butter. Of course now I'm finishing off my stockpile for the weekend of coding, so I have a starbucks doubleshot beside me and a tub of gummy bears. Funny, I knew that (unlike many coding problems) gummy bears wouldn't solve this one, so I left them in the fridge.

There you are. Microsoft. Food.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 01:59 PM | Permalink

Back in the days when I was only a program manager, not a program manager / developer or developer for that matter, I was protected from the dynamic that hit me in the face at the end of last week. (It's Monday, so given that this took our Friday and Saturday, I'm still reeling from it and cleaning it up). I'm consoling myself with the theory that when developers make mistakes, or plan for things to go one way and realize they won't ever go that way, or get to any state where they have to cut features or start over with their project after 6 weeks, that was happening on my projects all the time and as a pure program manager I just never caught wind of it. It's hard, it's humiliating, and the best thing for it is to hunker down, pretend the building is on fire, and make any decision you need to in order to wrap up this very dangerous feature. Certainly notifying a bunch of people before things are wrapped up is counterproductive. It's comforting to me to think this has been happening all along, and I'm not the only one. And I will not be disabused of this comfort, I need it so badly, in order to get things on their feet.

The irony is I was working so well! Meaning, every challenge I came across was quite tricky, and I had to research and execute on something I hadn't done before in many cases. In other cases, this was building on what I had already learned, so that went very quickly. Development is not for those with an easy shame reflex, because in other fields the quality of your work results in quality work. In development, you might just be brilliantly rendering a bear trap, which will catch you on the next loop around.

The low point is calling the cab company at 9pm on Saturday, hearing them say it will be a half hour wait, and the thought of losing another half hour on top of two whole days of wasted (but brilliant and heroic) work, was just too much. The cab dispatch said "long day, huh?" after hearing the catch in my voice. He had no idea. Instead of waiting for the cab, it was somehow better to go out to the bus stop (muggy heat, darkness, feels like New York except smells like pine trees and camping) and wait there. Might as well have something be cheap if you have to wait the same amount of time for it. Sit there and wonder why I got so choked up. I care about my work, and am a little compulsive about it, and I give up a lot to come in and do it. So when circumstances don't show me the love, I get upset. Not really angry, you understand, but upset in a disjointed way, like everything coming onto my plate is from another planet, and I can only stare aghast at it. Another comfort: I chose this work, and these challenges, and there's no sense claiming that they're too hard to solve. I'm getting exactly what I chose, and that includes the occasional disappointment (or train wreck, depending on how much sleep you've had). So those thoughts filled the bus ride just fine. I wasn't bored for a blip.

When I started my weblog, my old radio weblog that is, I was mostly interested in documenting my transition from program manager to developer. I wanted to have a searchable chronicle of the technical terms and tools I encountered, to act as a spare brain, and show some sort of trajectory. That was in 2002 I think. This has worked so well that now I'm much more interested in the craft of programming (and program management) than the philosophical position around it. I had Hugh's "How to be Creative / Put the hours in" page open on Saturday as an inspiration, and it struck me that this is the kind of thing I would have been delighted to write 2 years ago. It's still relevant, but not a match for the crafty place I'm in now. That's why my weblog has transitioned from the philosophical stuff to daily occurrences such as this latest challenge. It's ground level, it's exhibit A, it's fodder for extrapolation and not the extrapolation itself. What's next after this trend of probably too-personal postings? Not sure. It will have something to do with packaging, I hope.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 09:06 AM | Permalink

My dh, who does not have a weblog and will go unnamed until he does and can speak for himself, works for a high-tech company which will also go unnamed. Let's just say both are really cool (dh and the company, no it's not microsoft) and if not for the next words I'm about to write, I'd love to name them both. The reason why I'm writing about his company, is they are having a major push for a deadline right now. As far as I understand it, the major push consists of the following:
* Actually setting criteria for being "done" on the deadline, rather than just looking at the calendar and using the build for that day and calling it done. Although I didn't agree with this practice, it did make me laugh when they did it in the past, and it certainly relaxed the pressure on cram weeks quite a bit. But no more. This time they mean business. Also -
* Recognizing that they don't have enough resources to finish by the stated deadline, and they couldn't possible hire and train new resources, so there is a need for increased time from existing staff. On with the plan to get water from the stones:
* First, there was a lovely meeting where everyone said nice things about each other.
* Then, there was an e-mail stating you had your choice on how to do a 60-hour week: either work 5 12-hour days, or work 6 10-hour days. This needs to go on for 6 weeks for project A. If you're on projects B, C, and D, these dates are conveniently scheduled to not overlap with project A.
* My dh is on projects A, B, C, and D, all of which could conceivably have these mandatory 60 hour weeks each for six weeks occurring in a series.
* Everyone on project A has their name on a board, and are keeping track of how many hours they put in in a public way.
* Oh, and we're moving.
* Oh, and we have an infant.
* Oh, and I need to do my own cram-week somewhere in there.

The only thing I can think of is to have him put a cot in his office every other week, and just pretend he's on a business trip. Every other OTHER week would be regular schedule. Make sure a regular week coincides with moving day, and my cram-week. But I'm open to ideas, especially since I doubt we could sustain this through projects B, C, and D without me looking into state employment rules and regulations in a spare moment and putting my lawyer on speed dial.

If that predicament doesn't have you laughing, this will. It's a pragmatic comparison between cassette tapes and the iPod.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 10:39 AM | Permalink

We are incredibly busy right now. Our big house had 3 microsoft people renting it from us, and they all decided to move out the end of this month. We'd like to move back, but that led to a big debate on whether we could afford it. My contract with microsoft is up at the end of this month, so it's hard to take on extra expenses for housing when your income is going down. Therefore, yesterday I spent running around in the heat, and a perfectly awful vehicle, getting things together to rent just half the house. We will still move back, only to half of the house. Needless to say I didn't get to work until 7pm which is an all time late show-up from me.

The good news is the upstairs is rented, so that's all over with in one day. We will be sharing with one of the teachers at the kid's preschool, so that just seems like a great match. Thank you Craig for building craigslist, this was the fastest response I have ever gotten, even from local newspaper ads. Anyone wanting to look at pictures of the place can look at this website. Now we can have big parties and return the favor for everyone who has entertained us over the past 3 years we've been living in tiny spaces!

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Two major topics are kicking around my world right now. One is work-life balance. This is the ability to follow through on your commitments without sending your other commitments packing. The other is personal growth. This is the ability to change and adapt for the better, by acquiring new skills such as leadership.

The most striking thing about these topics is the lack of role models we have to follow. Blogs are written by human beings, and can't live up to the manufactured successes we find in the media, nor should they, because the media is faked anyway. So blogs have just exposed this role model gap to me more obviously, as they should - they would not be nearly so interesting if the people writing them were not struggling with anything. I still have my eyes peeled for good role models in these areas, especially in the software industry. I suppose my standards are pretty high.

Second most striking thing about these topics is the fear that underlies both of them. It's no great revelation that fear is the big blocker of progress. It has a few flavors. There are big fears like death and war, medium fears like losing a house or a job, and small fears like hitting reply-all when you didn't mean to. The only thing I can confidently offer is that I'm no longer worried about the large or medium fears, but the small ones are stopping me in my tracks. This is one of those look on the bright side things I suppose, but admittedly part of the reason why I'm awake at 3am is the idea that my own success (hopefully in the 3-5 year timeframe) will be whittled away by tiny flawed choices I make, that will snowball into one big success-blocker. I'm pointing this out because it's the type of problem a few good role models would mitigate or even solve.

A lot of good discussions have grown up around Hugh's Sex and Cash theory, which is illustrative of a phenomenon in work-life balance. Hugh's position is one extreme, claiming that only by this separation can we be successful. The other extreme is more common within microsoft culture, and is why people joke about the red pill and the kool aid. The perspective most people have at microsoft is: I love my work, I am my work, there is no need for a vacation because I'm already doing what I want to do with my time. If they don't have this perspective, they can feel it within reach and are working for success under that model. Most are not using Hugh's model and trying new hobbies and looking for fulfillment elsewhere. Josh Allen's post is a good example of a common microsoft perspective on this. (Disclaimer: this is a subjective opinion, perhaps it's just the people I know that are the red pill type.)

I am loathe to place my own opinion on this continuum, but rather choose curtain number three, which says: the way you structure your fulfillment is not as important as whether you can get yourself unstuck. Stuck is bad, nimble, flexible, and agile is good. If you're stuck, and separating money from your true creative calling is something that frees you, go for it. If you're stuck, and combining money with your true creative calling is something that frees you, then go for it instead. Either action is correct and can lead to success same as the other. But the specific action, and even the success, is less important than being unstuck in the first place. Getting yourself unstuck is like opening a window in a stuffy room. The important thing is: now, you can breathe.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 03:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I scored 9 out of 10 on this "are you an InfoPath Whiz" quiz.

Trouble is, I'm salivating at the thought of banishing it from my project. I'm wrapping up other things hoping I will have time to get rid of it. Two main problems:
1) Requires client side software installation. Nobody wants to do this installation, no matter how easy it is. And this is for developers as the user base, so the first thing they ask is "how come you're not using asp?" They see negative value in requiring the app.
2) Merge forms does not concatenate forms, but rather collates the fields all together into an indistinguishable blob.

That's about it. Funny just when you get good at something you have to move on...

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 12:48 PM | Permalink

The web page works fine when accessed on the same machine it exists on. It works superlousy when accessed from another machine. As this type of remote access is the point of web sites, I assumed the fix would be in the IIS world. On I plowed through the timeout settings on DefaultAppPool etc. to no avail. This took hours. Finally, it hits me: just have the link go to the machine name as a file, rather than as a URL the traditional way. I know it's sick and wrong, but it works and I'm as happy as the ladies making those honey bunches of oats with their white bonnets and their factory with those boxes on conveyor belts. In other words, completely unblocked. Hooray.

New queer eye tonight, and a new favorite ten things I hate about you. I needed a new Tuesday fix since 24 has gone away and this is it. Thank you bravo.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 06:26 PM | Permalink

I was looking at my list of links, rather than my feed subscriptions, and realized I hadn't read John Pocaro in a long time. He makes some great points about how to approach a performance review.

Here are the surprises for me:
"Take time to reflect." This is very hard, often because for me, too much thinking and not enough closure is weighing on me very hard at review time. It must take someone super-evolved to be able to close the door and say the world can wait. I'm suprised it seems to work.
"Don't worry too much about missing an agreed-upon deadline." Of course the person reading your review will already know if the deadline, um, moved for some reason. However, I've also believed that this too is a metric. Perhaps it's naive, but I think it adds to your credibility to keep track of these things with the same level of strictness that you tried to keep the deadline in the first place.
"Sometimes mistakes can be the best thing." This is an unbelievable story by John about a nice nice manager. Did I mention nice? Yes, there are nice people in software. Just beware they get real scarce sometimes around review time. Did I say that? There are so many nice people.
"Realize that half the equation is perception." Wow, finally the key to the missing link between the scores and the performance. On paper, it all seems so rational, with everything on metrics and all. Apparently the whole thing is skewed, so it's OK to lighten up.
"Ask your manager to edit some of their negative comments." Can't second this one enough. Thanks to John to being bold enough to say so.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 11:27 PM | Permalink

That statement, followed by a convincingly sincere expression, is a classic in interviews and hardly ever executed well. And this week, I've fallen prey to all the classics. Imagine someone is asking you "What is your greatest flaw?" in a job interview type setting. Your response?
1) "I'm a perfectionist."
2) "I take on too much."
3) "I refuse to give up until it's perfect."
4) "I work too hard."
5) "I can't let go of my job, tied to my cell phone and the e-mail 24/7"

Nobody believes these are honest answers. They just give you too much credit. On the other hand, if you had said something honest like:
1) "I often seem angry and stressed when really I'm busy and happy."
2) "I care what others think of me, and this blocks my ability to listen to them."
3) "I actively sabotage my professional success by having a complex personal life."
If you had said any of these things, you would be believed, but probably not hired. Cest la vie.

However, this week, although I can't say I've overcome the second list, I will say that I'd officially not be lying if I used any of the answers from the first list. In other words, I've stared at my computer demanding that my brain not only think, but pull together a complex project in a mind bogglingly successful way, and have it be perfect too, and my poor brain said sorry bub I've got a fever to catch, go ahead and blame this on yourself if you want but I won't be here to hear it. Transition to being at home wondering why I can't have measurable, gigantic success-type results just any old time I want it. Large wave of self doubt followed by enough guilt to get me back to work and repeat the cycle. It really is a disease. It's not really overachieving. It's more like over-wannabe-achieveing. In other words, much much worse.

Today I looked at the ladies in the doctor's office, who were waiting as support for other patients (mothers, daughters, etc). They were not themselves sick. They had obviously showered and had time to iron something in the past month. Sometimes I get a glimpse of this and think that's what it would be like if I didn't think there was some sort of eventual payoff for doing what I do. Yes I love it, payoff or no, but I also think it makes me happier than anything else. If I stayed home I'd just get compulsive about the ironing.

Anyway, it's been a while since I posted, so I had to write about something. Might as well be honest.

Posted by Elizabeth Grigg at 03:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)