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Stuff + nonsense. Updated daily. So far. Pretty much. Overwrought by Scott Knaster.
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Saturday, March 08, 2003
Wintry
Hey, looks like it snowed on my buddies in Sammamish, just outside Redmond. Looks like fun! I grew up in Colorado. I used to love waking up and noticing the subtle brightness in the room, a sign of fresh snow outside. I loved looking at the clean white canvas the snow created. I loved walking around in the snow. And I hate hate hated shoveling it, cleaning off my car, and driving through that nonsense.
Friday, March 07, 2003
Driving yourself crazy
This story tells about "extreme commuters", people who drive hundreds of miles each day to and from the SF Bay Area for their jobs. The Bay Area has traditionally consisted of 9 counties, a pretty big chunk of real estate, but now the "greater" Bay Area includes an additional 7 counties. These folks who drive 2+ hours each day sure help me put my new 45-minute commute in perspective. I don't think there's another metropolitan area in the U.S. that's laid out like the Bay Area. Rather than one big city surrounded by suburbs, we have 3 of the biggest cities in the country. The most populous (San Jose) is the tech business center. Another (San Francisco) is the cultural and tourism center. The third (Oakland) offers a lot but lives in the shadow of SF and a bad reputation. All the in-between places have their own personalities too. Commute patterns are all over the place. A large number of people now live in SF but commute to jobs in other cities, which never happened back in the day when SF was the center of the universe around here.
Thursday, March 06, 2003
When the name of the company is Danger, all puns have already been used
I started working at Danger in Palo Alto yesterday. Here's a little of what happened. I managed to make two wrong turns on my way there in the morning before finally parking at the CalTrain station. I'm going to experiment with the commute, driving different routes and also trying the train. When I got there, I was thrust into startup chaos at full velocity. It was exactly like playing Myst. I was dropped into a strange place and I had to figure out what was going on, including the object of the game. Nobody remembered I was coming. My job description was vague. There was no computer, desk, or cubic footage allocated to my corpus. The harried recruiter/hr/facilities guy (everybody at a startup has a bunch of jobs) scrambled and found me a space and a desk. I had my laptop, naturally, so I was OK. My first acquisition was a cat 5 cable. Then I found the bathroom. Then I needed to get a cardkey to go from floor to floor. But the guy with the cardkeys was on a different floor. I had no phone. I didn't know his e-mail address, or even his name. So if I went to see him and he wasn't there, I would be trapped. Luckily, I ran into somebody I knew, who took me to the cardkey guy, who warned me the cardkey machine was being flaky, but then made one for me. Finally, I found another familiar face, who spent time helping me figure out (a) my job, and (b) stuff I need to know to do my job. I have determined there is approximately 57 jillion tons of stuff for me to learn. Danger's offices are the coolest I have ever worked in. The building is old and jammed into downtown Palo Alto. I think it's actually several buildings spliced together. The interior is filled with funky touches like skylights and sliding glass doors. Offices are everywhere: behind doors, behind glass, in the middle of twisty little passages (all different). The decor is Red Lectroid: ancient Mac 12-inch monitor, stack of FedEx forms, pair of kneepads, car battery, various graffiti and cartoons, box of broken plastic cases, giant button on wall with obligatory "don't push" sign. The people are incredible. Many of them helped me on my first day's adventure. Many more will help me get my job done. I will try hard to remember their names. Right now I'm operating on about 20% overall info retention. Many times I saw Ceej and did a pantomime for her in which my head inflated to an unmanageable size (as if by acquiring knowledge) and then exploded. This is going to be a blast.
Wednesday, March 05, 2003
LazyBay
This is kind of an interesting idea. But doesn't this take the fun out of it?
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
It was a great neighborhood
Mr. Rogers got his philosophy from his grandfather, who said to him: "You know, you made this day a really special day. Just by being yourself. There's only one person in the world like you. And I happen to like you just the way you are." What a cool thing to tell kids, or any other human beings.
Seismic shift
It's the end of a long day during which I cleaned out a ton of old junk and prepared for switching my life to a new PowerBook (the 15" titanium). You're soaking in it! Tomorrow will be another day of rebooting my life, and after that, I promise less navel-gazing and more cool, useless stuff, just like the old days.
Monday, March 03, 2003
Come on baby, let's go downtown
University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto is my new work neighborhood. Here's an article about how things are OK there, even during these dark times.
Sunday, March 02, 2003
I am sort of not working at Microsoft any more (Part 2)
See Part I. When our small San Jose group, which made Mac IE, Outlook Express, and Java, was absorbed into the Redmond-based Macintosh Business Unit, the folks who created Mac Office, some folks took the opportunity to advance their Microsoft ambitions by moving to Redmond. Seven people left on a single day, and many of them now have prominent roles inside the company. Although relocating to Redmond and getting the authentic Microsoft experience was intriguing for a corporate culture geek like me, I stuck around, mainly because my family would have disowned me if we moved. I knew that Mac opportunites at Microsoft for a writer guy like me were limited, especially in Silicon Valley, and that eventually I would probably end up working on Windows. In November 1999, my friend Hillel Cooperman (one of the "Redmond seven"), managed to get me a job writing user interface guidelines for a cool experimental version of Windows. It was incredibly exciting. However, the whole project was based in Redmond, except for me. To get this relationship to work, we would have to cross new frontiers in telecommuting, which is not Microsoft's strongest area. Two weeks after I accepted the job, the project was re-orged out of existence. Again with Hillel's help, I managed to get a job as a sort of internal freelancer, writing mostly in-house documents on the Windows and MSN teams for two years. I liked the challenge of having many different projects, but the work was really out of the mainstream. I spent two days every month in Redmond, during which I would meet with as many people as possible, walk around trying to soak up hallway conversations and random culture, and have fun catching up with friends. For the past year, I have been working on a more focused (and very mainstream) task: writing an ambitious new edition of the book Microsoft Windows User Experience Guidelines for the next version of Windows. This is a massive undertaking. I have to talk to everyone building features for Windows, a cast of hundreds. I committed to finishing this book even though I realized I had strayed from the more technical stuff I like better. But as the project progressed, my managers and I started to see that if I spent more time in Redmond, the book would get better. Eventually, my managers pressed me to be in Redmond more, and I resisted. And a few weeks ago, we reached the point of no return: I decided to leave the project, and try freelance writing, which is how I started at Microsoft way back when. Once I decided to quit, I became incredibly curious about everything going on in the nerd universe of Silicon Valley. I have had a lot of fun renewing old connections and learning about new stuff. So, yesterday was my last day at Microsoft. Except, technically, it wasn't, because somebody screwed up and forgot to officially terminate me. That means my e-mail didn't go poof, my badge didn't stop working, and I didn't get my vacation pay cashed out. So for every day my vacation pay is delayed, I'm going to use my still-working badge to get into my old building and steal a ream of paper to cover the interest. (NOTE: THAT IS A JOKE.) What am I doing next? Back to the geeky stuff! I have a technical writing contract at Danger that should be very cool, and I'm looking for ways to get back into the Mac universe. I'm sure I'll write more about all that later.
