Matt’s Blog

Phew, it’s been a long week. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get home from work before 8pm any day this week. Considering I leave the house around 6:30 am those are some brutal hours or, as they say at The Empire©, a good work/life balance. Of course I must take some responsibility for this. I had a fair number of errands to run last week, and so the time that I wasn’t working had to be made up somewhere.

Speaking of errands though, here are some words that you don’t want to hear from your mechanic: “what are your long-term plans regarding this car.” Yep, it looks like the long-awaited end-of-the-road is within view for my beloved Rodeo. The details are extensive, boring and really expensive so I’ll spare you. Let’s just say it’s time to start saving for a suitable replacement. I will admit that I kind of saw this coming though, a few months back the ol’ Rodeo started making a groaning noise whenever the clutch was out, and I thought to myself: “that sounds expensive.” Well now I know to myself that: “yes, that sound is really expensive.”

Here’s the thing, I really don’t have to do anything for a while. According to the mechanic the car will likely be good for another 5-10 years, which is why he asked what my “long term” plans were and not what the “rest of the afternoon looked like.” So I really don’t have to do anything immediately, but there is a catch. The noise, which is already perceptibly louder than it was a few months ago, will only get louder the longer I wait. Or as my boss says: “your car is now like a girlfriend, it will keep whining louder and louder until you spend a lot of money on it.”

However, while we’re on the topic of girlfriends, I’d imagine that the transmission noise will preclude any (undoubtedly expensive) relationships from even starting. One earful of my ride will ensure that I remain frugally single for the foreseeable future. This way I’ll never forget why I’m saving up all this money for a new car… awesome! Seriously though, now that I think about it this might work out pretty well. If the noise gets bad enough I might not have to drive anywhere saving valuable dollars on fuel. I can see it now:

Me: So, friend, do you want to go see a movie tonight.
Friend: Sure, that’d be awesome. You have suck kick-ass ideas Matt.
Me: I know, but really we should go. So I’ll drive?
Friend: Um, yeah. I’d really rather not have my neighbors hear you come pick me up, so I’d better drive instead…
Me: Sweet!

Wow, with all these positives its easy forget the fact that my car will soon be making an ear-splitting racket wherever it goes. Er, wait… no, it’s not.

Enough said:

So today we have a planning off-site which is actually in just another company building in a different part of town. So far about the only thing I’ve planned is how to move our group to this building as soon as possible because the offices are much nicer than the ones in our building.

I don’t think that you can consider something to be “off-site” unless you have to enter some funny password to get access to the wireless network. Or, better yet, no internet access regardless of funny passwords. Regardless the table always ends up looking like this anyways:

Ok, I lied. I actually have planned some things while I was here. Of particular note is how to stay awake given the volume of food provided. Seriously, they put out sausage, eggs, pancakes, and potatoes for breakfast and then expect us to actually focus on work?

An entertaining aside; a friend of mine sent me this post which seems to be based on the story of a MS employee or contractor who is *very* upset. Maybe he (she?) got up on the wrong side of the bed today, or perhaps he/she didn’t have a good breakfast today. Maybe he/she should have come to the offsite, I can guarantee that we did not have a bad breakfast.

So this week at The Empire® we have been working on a rather important intermediate milestone in my product (it’s going well thanks for asking) which means that there was a lot of pressure. Work pressure is one of my favorite things because, much like real pressure, it makes something very valuable out of what is essentially a pile of crap. Humor works in pretty much the same way so:

work pressure == humor (for large values of work pressure)

One of the traits that makes this happen is that work pressure takes what is would normally annoying and turns it into something that is a REALLY BIG DEAL. Take co-workers for example. Seriously I think people around here like making other people’s lives difficult. There’s some kind of perverse power in saying: “Behold! You will bend your work habits to my will! I’m taking the server down for an upgrade and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

Whatever. Usually you just log off and find something else to do while you wait. That or you get “workarounds” which is really just code for: “time-consuming normally unnecessary steps that might make the product barely usable.” But sometimes there is justice for the worker. Twice this week I get mails something like the following (and I’m paraphrasing):

From: team_A_serveradmin@theroot.ofallevill.com
To: alltheotherteams@theroot.ofallevil.com
Subject: Your Life Will Now Suck

Hi team,

Just letting you know that <critical-productivity-tool> will be in running in <obscure-configuration> so we can test <obscure-test-scenario> today. So … <details-about-how-this-will-make-your-life-suck> … thanks!

Allow me to interpret: “We need you to test our configuration for us, but you would probably never do it on your own, so we are going to make you do it.” Now this is something that happens from time to time and is an important, albeit annoying, part of the process here at The Empire®. But as I mentioned earlier, on a week where you are trying to deliver a major milestone “annoying” quickly becomes “REALLY BIG DEAL”. So it came as no surprise when… *Ding*

From: team_A_serveradmin@theroot.ofallevill.com
To: alltheotherteams@theroot.ofallevil.com
Subject: Re: Your Life Will Now Suck

Hi team,

Hey, so just go ahead and ignore the e-mail I sent out earlier, we’re gonna postpone to another time. Thanks!

Now I imagine there was a conversation in between those two e-mails, and it probably went something like this:

Boss: “So I saw your e-mail and there’s been a few complaints about the impact of your changes on productivity.”
Worker: “Yeah, well did you tell them to get out a straw and suck it up? Haha!”
Boss: “Um… no. Did you consider the release schedule when you planned your changes by chance?”
Worker: “Consider other people’s needs? Yeah, that’s not really my style.”
Boss: “…”
Worker: “So I should change it back.”
Boss: “Yeah, you should probably do that.”

So sometimes at work I have these short casual conversations with co-workers who stop by my office. After a few jokes or stories are exchanged the conversation begins to wind down, and enters what I call the “awkward landing” phase. Also known as the: “I want to get back to work but I don’t want you to think that I didn’t appreciate your story” stage of the conversation. It’s important that this phase of the conversation be handled with care, because otherwise I’ll be known as the awkward weirdo with whom you should not share your funny stories. And let’s face it, working at The Empire® predestines you to a life where it’s rare to be told a story that does not relate in some way to: SharePoint, programming, code, computers, chess, WoW, Halo, acne…

There doesn’t really seem to be a good way to get out of this situation. Not that the other person is bugging me, it’s just time for us to go our separate ways. What I need is a phrase that’s halfway between “get the hell out” and “that was cool, now let me tell you a story that is slightly related to yours as repayment for the humor you have shared with me so you don’t think that I’m a total tool who only cares about work and didn’t appreciate your non-work story about (college football/drinking/cars…).”

Add to all of this the fact that this is The Empire® and so there is already a healthy dose of awkwardness drizzled all over the interaction like hot fudge on a Sundae. So yeah, if you have any ideas, let me know.

So a few months ago this article would have been entitled “Laptop Stickers: Completely Retarded or Just Stupid” but ever since starting work at the Empire I’ve had a slight change of heart. Not that I’ve fully embraced the concept of covering the back of one’s laptop lid with stickers quite yet, but I guess you could consider me curious. See, most people here at work have a variety of MS-related decals on their portable computers. At first I thought the idea was pretty dumb, but then I wondered: “hey, what’s wrong with repping a company that is paying for your house/car/food/whatever.” So now I’m reconsidering; what about putting MS-related stickers on my work laptop?

First the positives:

1. Everyone immediately identifies you as a MS employee. Who else would have an “I’m a PC” sticker on their computer?
2. Promoting Microsoft properties.
3. You can immediately identify which laptop in the conference room is yours. Not inconsequential considering that pretty much all 20-some PM’s on my team have the same model.
4. Annoying mac fanboys at Starbucks.

And now for the cons:

1. Everyone immediately identifies you as a MS employee and therefore assumes you are an arrogant tool.
2. Smartass questions/comments from people who actually are tools.
3. Promoting our less-successful properties. Windows Mobile I’m looking at you.
4. Annoying cute girls with macbooks at Starbucks.

So, seeing no clear winner I’m going to try an experiment. Up until now I’ve had no pro-Microsoft stickers on my computer. In fact, I’ve had no stickers of any kind at all. Starting today I’m going to add the most outrageous sticker I can find to the laptop lid, in this case this happens to be the “i bing u bing” sticker that has been sitting on my desk for a few weeks. I would have opted for an “I’m a PC” sticker, but alas there are none to be had around the office.

From now on, whenever I can I will work in a public space just to see what kind of reaction I get. If nothing happens then I might have to up the level of dorkiness in the sticker selection. Or I could just put a pro-Republican sticker on there and that would piss everyone here in Seattle off guaranteed.

At Microsoft’s newest datacenter in Chicago you’ll see evidence of a new trend in datacenter design and deployment. While the upper floors are more traditional computer-filled rooms the ground floor consists largely of parking spaces for these:

It’s a new concept detailed more completely elsewhere, but the gist of it is that you use self-contained multi-modal containers packed with servers as modular units that can be moved and configured to meet changing demands. There’s also a pretty strong case for disaster recovery and deployment in developing countries as well.

Here’s a video detailing the concept:

Microsoft Generation 4 Data Centers

And another video detailing the actual implementation in Chicago:

Microsoft Chicago Data Center Container Bay