Today marks the 9 year anniversary of Alicea and I getting married.  Wow – 9 years.  We’ve known each other since September 1992, and have been dating/engaged/married for all of that except 3 years.  9 years married, 17 years in each other’s lives.

I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  How lucky am I to wake up every morning next to my best friend in the whole world?  My soul mate?  My partner in trying to do the right things in raising our daughter?

9 years since saying “I do” on a perfect Spring night in Charlotte, NC.  9 years since one of the happiest days of my life – I’m still on cloud 9 (ha!) every time I even think about that day.

We were talking about it last night, and these past 9 years have gone by so fast, and at the same time we’ve done and been through so much. 

• An awesome honeymoon in Charleston, SC
• Starting our post-college lives and careers in Charlotte, only to get moved 3000 miles away at the drop of a hat
• Cross-country drive (arriving in Seattle for our 1st anniversary)
• Finding the perfect church on a whim on day
• 10 day road trip to California and back on US-101
• Buying a house when we never thought we could (we got our mortgage rate locked 2 weeks before they bottomed out!)
• Finding out we were pregnant on on your birthday
• Flying to the top of a snow-capped mountain in a helicopter
• Having to go to the hospital a few weeks later for “some testing”
• Having Kaitlyn born 3 days later; 5 weeks in NICU for her and over a week in the hospital for you
• Getting to celebrate a “0th birthday party” because KC was home a month before her original due date
• Spending a week on Maui while Grandma watch Kaitlyn for us (we TOTALLY need to go back!)
• Raising a healthy and beautiful 4 year old daughter
• Getting to spend each day knowing we have each other to come home to, rely on, vent at, care for us when we’re ill, and make us laugh.

9 has always been my number – I was born 9 pounds 9 ounces on the 9th day of the 9th month.  I don’t buy into superstition too much, but I’m betting that this is going to be a pretty awesome year none the less. 

Here’s to you hon.  Thanks for being there every day.  Thanks for being my best friend.  Thanks for being the love of my life.  We’re still smiling!

As the old saying goes, if there were no bad times you wouldn’t appreciate the good ones!

Kaitlyn got a beautiful, shiny, purple bead stuck in her right ear yesterday at preschool and didn’t tell anyone until last night as we were putting her to bed. We spent the next few hours at the Overlake Urgent Care in Issaquah where they tried a few different techniques to get it out – didn’t work. Lots of pain for KC though in the process – not good. We got asked to head to Overlake ER in Bellevue, where the doc took a look and said him messing with it would just make it worse. Got referred to an ENT doc in Issaquah – went there this morning. Consulted with him and everyone agreed the best course of action is to remove the bead while KC’s knocked out so she doesn’t get even more traumatized. Fun times!

Kaitlyn isn’t in any pain as long as someone isn’t prodding around in her ear, and she’s being a trooper about the whole thing. All the nurses love her and she’s gotten a bunch of new stickers out of the whole deal! Awesome ENT doc too – even had Kaitlyn look in her stuffed bunny’s ears to make sure no beads were in there too. The procedure is early on Tuesday (no worries about leaving it in until then), and we should be home by 9 or 10a.

What a trooper.  Kaitlyn told us last night, before we even left the house, “that was a bad thing to do – I shouldn’t ever do that again.”  At least we’re good enough parents that when she messes up she’s willing to tell us about it, and figure out self-corrective action for the future.

Good lord, my daughter is ready for the working world!  She just did a post-mortem on a high-priority incident!!!

I’ve heard this is going to be resolved in Outlook 14.  In fact there were huge cheers when we were told this at the Company Meeting in September.  Time will tell…

In the mean time, time will continue to be spent sitting and waiting … and fuming.

I really love Windows 7 and am happily using it on my primary laptop.  The so far the only thing that doesn’t work is my AT&T wireless modem (need to find a driver installer that doesn’t care about the OS version).

One issue that I haven’t liked is the Windows Live Messenger client wants to live in the taskbar with the rest of my running apps instead of the system tray where I’m used to it staying.  But  I just came across a way to make it work like I want and stay over by the clock in the system tray: compatibility mode!

Here’s what to do:

1. Close/exit Messenger
2. On your local computer browse to C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Messenger\ (or \Program Files (x86)\ on a 64bit OS install)
3. Right-click on msnmsgr.exe and choose Properties
4. On the Compatibility tab click the “Run this program in compatibility mode box and choose Windows Vista.  Click OK at the bottom.
   
5. Now you can start Messenger again from the Start Menu.
6. In the System Tray click on the “Show hidden icons” arrow and then click Customize.
   
7. In the Notification Area Icons dialog find Windows Live Messenger and in the dropdown to the right choose “Show icons and notifications”.  Click OK at the bottom.
   
8. There you go!  Messenger back in the System Tray!

Credit to www.mess.be for the tip!  Unfortunately they don’t have URL’s directly to their posts.

Just wanted to let you all know that I’m still around! 

You may have noticed that I’ve added a couple of links/feeds to the right of this page.  The first one is my Twitter account: http://twitter.com/nanovak.  I have actually been quite active over there as I find the 140 character short post syncs up well with my usual desire for blogging: oh that would be a cool thought or quote to share.

The other feed is a “link blog” feed of blog posts and articles that I find interesting to share.  Some good stuff there! http://feeds.feedburner.com/NathansLinkBlog

I’m starting to get motivate to write a 2008 year in review post, so stay tuned for that.

For now, it’s off to bed to try to get rid of a head cold.  Joy.

Funny Pic: The Financial Crisis Piggy Bank

Just came across this in catching up on TechCrunch posts.  Pretty funny revisiting of characters from the old Budweiser commercials from 1999-2002 … eight years later.

That’s from the homepage of www.nytimes.com right now.  What’s the most impressive, not the “OBAMA” line.  To me the most important is “Racial Barrier Falls in Heavy Turnout”.  One of the most proud moments I’ve had in my 31 years.  Proud of our country.

Thanks to all who voted.  Remember this feeling, what it’s like to play a part in the process.  No matter if your choice is victorious or not, it’s PARTICIPATING that’s the key.

And thanks to everyone who finally was able to put the “race card” back in the deck with all the other issues.  Especially after living in the South for nearly a decade, it puts a big smile on my face to see Virginia and (at this point in the evening, possibly) North Carolina vote for an African American for the highest office in the land.

As John McCain is saying right now in his concession, let’s all “find ways to come together” to help restore our prosperity, enhance our security, and make this country a better place.  “We are all fellow Americans.”

Congratulations America.  Job well done.

My wife informed me a couple days ago that my final college loan payment was made a few weeks ago, and we just received an official letter stating the loan is paid off and closed.  Wow.  At 32 years old I’m finally done with college!

It’s nice to have that paid off, but at the same time it was kind of my last connection with being a decade younger than I am now. 

My career seems to be taking me in a more technical direction than I once hoped, and where I used to think that getting my Masters some day was good goal, now I’m not so sure.  Sure I could be wrong, but at this point I don’t really see a big benefit.

So here’s to the good old days of just worrying about making it to classes and determining the best strategy for winning a game of Spades at 3am.   But at the time, here’s to having a few glasses of a nice merlot while answering the door on Halloween while my wife and daughter are out raking in the goods!

Of course I just thought of another interesting tidbit: I’ve come full circle.  When I was in college I thought it would be the coolest thing to work at Microsoft, but knew it was pretty darn hard to get hired there.  In the last 10 years I’ve done a lot, and even reached the point where I thought Microsoft wouldn’t be the right place for me.  Today I can’t think of anywhere else, or another team I’d rather work on than Messenger Ops at Microsoft.

That deserves another glass of merlot.

A new grocery store is going to open in our town.  Well, reopen under new ownership after the last group went all Chapter 11 on us.  This has led to some considerable discussion on the various email DL’s and other online forums for folks who live in Snoqualmie.

The best post I’ve seen just came in while I was at lunch, and is in response to my beautiful wife pointing out that a newspaper article said people in Snoqualmie were driving half an hour to get to a grocery store.

But then he got a phone call from a retail developer at Snoqualmie Ridge, who said the community’s only supermarket had closed and residents were driving a half hour to shop for food.
-Puget Sound Business Journal

What a load of bull the retail landlord fed these people!  There’s a small organic grocery in downtown Snoqualmie (3-5 minutes) as well as a QFC and Safeway 6 miles away in North Bend.  The response?

“Not sure where people would get information line that…”

Thanks Chris!

I’m not sure a spoonful of sugar will help in these rough times in the economy, but it certainly could at least help you feel better for a short moment.  Catching up on news from this week I came across TechCrunch launching the f@%kedcompany for the new downturn: The TechCrunch Layoff Tracker.

To intro the page the have a great graph that espouses what I’ve been saying for a long time … if your company is having issues or entering tough times cut early, cut ONCE, and cut deep.  I’ve lived through not doing that in the last dotcom bubble burst in 2000-2001.  The company I worked for went through seemingly endless layoff rounds and morale was totally shot.  We were eventually purchased for about half the amount of cash we had on hand … bought with our own money.

Essentially, if you make a deep cut in workforce early in a downturn sure there’s a morale hit, but at the same time the core group of folks who are left know that management is serious about preserving the company – and their jobs.  If management decides to cut a few jobs here and there “so as not to make anyone worry” they’re actually doing the opposite – who knows when you could be next.

So in the last couple weeks we’ve heard of lots of layoffs from companies that are well funded (Zillow for one).  While a lot of folks are viewing this as a sign of the economy tanking (and I don’t disagree there), I think this is more of a sign of CEO’s making the right decisions for the good of the business and the majority of their employees.  Sure it sucks to be the 1 in 4 employees laid off from Zillow, but 3 in 4 now have a good fighting chance of riding through this recession in one piece.

If only my former employers heeded these lessons…

Gotta love the Inter-tubes…

The Dow index has finally broken the psychological 10,000 point barrier this morning.  I’ve been waiting for that to happen for a few weeks now.  When I started writing this post the Dow Jones Industrial Average was actually off 582 points, down to 9743.32.  A late rally looks to have brought back some of the loss to close down 369.88 at 9955.50.

Here’s a look at where the Dow has gone in the last 12 months.  We’ve bled out about 28% of the value of the index in a year.  That can’t be good!  I’m not worried about my retirement – heck we’ve got another 35 years before that’s going to happen.  This does SUCK for folks like my parents who are recently retired.

A lot of people wonder how the hell this all happened.  I’ve been sticking my head in the sand on that one, other than to know that a lot of banks made a lot of bad loans to a lot of people who should have known better than to buy a $500,000 house when they only make $50,000 a year.

If you really want to know the precipitating events that lead up to the meltdown in the recent months head over to This American Life and listen to their show from this past weekend entitled “Another Frightening Show About the Economy”.  Alicea and I heard the first 10-15 minutes and were enthralled at the story being told in a way that a normal person can comprehend.  Just because I used to work for an investment firm doesn’t mean I understand it all!

I’m catching up on some blogs and came across a great piece on the new (still beta) version of Windows Live Messenger.  You can read all about it over at Download Squad.

It’s so awesome to actually be involved with something that millions of people use every day! 

If you haven’t tried it yet, you can get the new version by visiting http://download.live.com/messenger.

Just had a really funny thing happen.  I was typing in Office Communicator the name of one of my colleagues to see if she was online yet this morning.  I typed in “teri h” and the app searched through both the company address list and my personal contacts in Outlook.  The irony is that it looks like while Teri Hoffman isn’t online this morning, the local teriyaki restaurant we go to by our house isn’t online today either! 

The real reason this appeared is that I have a number of restaurants in my contacts so it’s easy to place takeout orders while we’re driving home.  Microsoft has integrated our Office Communicator platform with the phone system, so if I wanted I could click on the phone icon next to the restaurant’s listing and call them.

Still, it got a good laugh out of me that a restaurant would show up in my IM client!

I just have to share this with you:

I had the distinct pleasure of attending my first Microsoft Company Meeting yesterday at Safeco Field.  I can assure you, you’ve never been to a business meeting like this before!  Does your office gathering have Rainn Wilson as MC?  A pitching mound?  Beach balls and pyrotechnics?  A drum line?  20,229 paper airplanes (and hundreds more unofficial flying paper objects)?  Gigantic display screens?  4 seating levels?  20,000+ people (more than a Mariners game these days…)?  A traffic jam?

Jaw-dropping demos of technology that your company (maybe even YOU) helped put together?  Steve Balmer running around the room chest bumping people, screaming his head off, and inadvertently knocking defenseless women over?  (seriously – that was funny as hell!)

I can’t wait to get using the next versions of Windows, Windows Mobile, Office, and a bunch of the other stuff I saw.  I can honestly say that coming from the outside (of MS) recently, that while you may think the Microsoft has lost “the touch” I can tell you you’re wrong.  Just wait for this stuff to get out.

Speaking of – check out the new beta version (public) of Windows Live Messenger (and the other WLx products).  Head over to http://download.live.com.  Messenger is WAY cleaned up from the UI of old, you can leave it logged in on multiple computers (chats appear on both and when you close a window on one it closes on the other – great for folks like me with multiple PC’s), and you can see “What’s New” with all the people in your address book.  My extended team runs Messenger, the address book platform, as well as the stuff that makes “what’s new” work.

Lastly, I’m so happy to see Microsoft finally get off it’s ass and compete in the marketing space.  Far too long, IMHO, have we countered Apple’s Mac v. PC ads with either nothing or the kind of over-detailed over-engineered non-passionate advertising Microsoft is known for.  It’s time to stick up for ourselves and the fallacy that cool people use, and cool things happen, only on a Mac.  Great things happen on the PC platform every day, and I’ve heard lots of stories about just as many issues on Macs as Windows boxes.

I’m a PC … and I help tens of millions of people every day connect to their friends, family, and community … one IM at a time. 

For the last couple weeks we’ve been glued to the TV watching various events from the Olympics.  It’s been great to watch all the swimming, and track events, and see some of the stuff that you never really get to watch but for every 4 years (rowing, whitewater, etc.).  [What's the deal with trampoline as an Olympic sport?  That's just nuts!]  We even watched a bunch of events while we were on vacation the first week of the games.  Kaitlyn tells us she wants to be a 10M platform diver.    We’ll see.

Tonight we watched the closing ceremonies on NBC in HD – the fireworks and other bits of eye candy look so much better in HD.  That being said, for the past 2 weeks we’ve been pretty firmly planted “north of the border” watching the Games on CBC.  That’s right, Comcast carries Vancouver, BC, Canada’s CBC channel here in the states.  AND THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT!

We’d watch an event one evening live, and then notice that the same stuff was getting replayed 18 hours later on NBC.  Especially crappy was when NBC did decided to show something live they only did so for for the east coast of the US.  They tape-delayed EVERYTHING for the west coast, but still kept the “LIVE” banner on the screen.  Can’t the FCC get them for false advertising?  And don’t get me started on the inappropriate and moronic comments that Bob Costas feels like filling airtime with.  Spare me.

Next time, especially with Vancouver hosting the Winter games in February 2010 we’ll be watching a LOT of CBC.  I only hope Comcast starts carrying their HD feed here in the states by then.

I read a story this evening on Engadget HD that at least gives me hope … ESPN is thinking of bidding for the 2014 and 2016 games and promises to never tape delay anything.  NICE!  I can’t wait to watch Olympic dodgeball on ESPN 8 … The Ocho!

For those frustrated by NBC’s arrogant mishandling of its broadcast rights, there exists one slim ray of hope (other than living somewhere lucky enough to get Canadian television so you can actually see the events before reading about them in the paper or on NBC’s own website), ESPN. That’s right, with Brett Favre finally on an NFL roster, the sports giant has apparently found enough free time to consider taking a run at broadcast rights for the 2014 Winter Games and 2016 Summer Games.

It’s been a long day.  2 days.  3 days … week.  We’re doing A LOT of work this week and, unfortunately, we’ve got some dependencies on new circuits being delivered for new/enhanced services to our Baltimore office.  Nothing seems to go well on this trip, and we’ve been running into issues at every turn.

But a few minutes ago I was able to go to my “happy place” because of an email I got … announcing I could check in for my flight home tomorrow evening.

From here on out, no matter what happens, I’ve got my ticket outta here – literally. 

It’s my last day on the job today; I start at Microsoft on Monday.  The atypical part of the story is, though, that I’m traveling this week and look to be putting in about 80 hours on the clock.  Usually folks check out at the end of their stay … I guess I’m still emotionally invested in making this place successful.

I’m super-tired today, having pulled a couple of 18 hour days and a 12 hour travel day since Tuesday.  Today looks like more of the same (guessing 15+ hours).

As I was walking out to our rental car from the hotel this morning I turned to my good friend and boss Brian and said, “dead man walking.”  Oh how true on at least a couple different levels.

Looking forward to starting my new adventure next week at the same time.  A couple days of official orientation, and then some settling in, etc.  I’m really jumping off a cliff with this change in my career, and that’s both exciting and scary at the same time.  Here’s hoping I remembered the parachute!

I mentioned the other day that I couldn’t say anything… and at the time I couldn’t.  But that’s since changed.    The first couple days of the week I got to help with a couple ISA Server exam refreshes, so there’s part of the mystery.  And here’s the other part…

I’ll be in the New Employee Orientation session at Microsoft’s Redmond campus on Monday, July 28th.    I’m joining the Global Foundation Services group to help run the infrastructure behind behind a little program you may have heard of called Live Messenger (it does instant messaging, or “IM” as they say – evidently all the kids are doing it these days).

I’m truly honored and humbled to have even been considered, much less offered a position on the team and with Microsoft.  I’ve always had a goal to work for Microsoft, going all the way back to college (I even interviewed with MS my senior year).  I thought I’d gotten as close to that as I was going to when I spent 2.5 years working at Cascade Investment (I received annual “head-nods acknowledging my existence from Bill Gates during my tenure).

About 6 weeks ago I read a blog post by Dare Obasanjo talking about the availability problems of Twitter of late, and how the architecture decisions they made in the beginning lead to some of their issues today (and limit what they can do to easily resolve them).  At the end of his post he throws in something that really grabbed my attention: “If this problem space sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring. I’m specifically looking for good operations folks.”

That got my mind running … designing and implementing systems at huge scale has always been an area of interest for me, but I’ve never found myself in a spot to actually be doing it.  After a day or so of mulling things over in my mind I bit the bullet and sent an email to a friend who’s been on the Live Operations team (now GFS) for a couple years to get his take on things.  His reply was a shocker: “I work directly with Dare on a current project I would love to have you onboard.”

I don’t know if that was a sign or not, but things sure did go quickly after that.  All told I had about 9 hours of phone calls, lunches, and onsite interview sessions.  These were perhaps the most grueling interviews in my life (I really haven’t interviewed cold for a new job since January 2000), but at the same time it was a lot of fun! 

There’s something to be said for asking someone a demanding question they have no way of knowing the answer to (or maybe there is no answer) and evaluating their thought process, analytical skills, and ability to ask good questions.  The next time I have to interview someone I definitely have to work some of this technique into the mix.

I’ve always heard and known that Microsoft’s interview process is a gauntlet that is exceptionally difficult to pass.  I never thought I’d have what it takes to make it through, especially interviewing for a position that runs such a large-scale system when my background is clearly in the SMB range (small/medium business).  A couple of the folks I spoke with, though, said that if they went looking for people with experience in the scale of systems GFS deals with they wouldn’t be able to find anyone; find a smart person who fits the team and they can learn the details.

So that’s the challenge for me in the coming months … get up to speed on a completely new system, scale, architecture, paradigm.  It’s going to be tough, and it’s going to take a lot of hard work.  But I’m excited for the challenge; to be outside of the comfort zone that I’ve built up over the last 10 years.

I can’t wait to get this next chapter act in my career started!  Wish me luck!

PS – a special thanks to Alicea, Barton, Brian, and Bryce for sticking by me through all this.  Your insights and simply just being there to listen have been invaluable.  YOU ROCK!

I spent the first couple days of this week at Microsoft’s campus working with a small group of folks doing a refresh of the certification exams for ISA Server 2004 and 2006 (70-350 and 351).  ISA stands for Internet Security and Acceleration – basically it’s Microsoft’s network firewall product that runs on top of a Windows server.  It’s a great too for publishing apps in a secure manner to the Internet, speed up web browsing for your users (by keeping a copy of commonly-accessed web content on the ISA server), and providing remote access to a network (VPN)

I’m under NDA so I can’t tell you a lot of details on what we did and discussed, but I can tell you that it was a really cool experience.  If you’ve ever taken a test and thought “these questions are stupid” I had a chance to avenge your experience (as long as your complaints were with either the 70-350 and 70-351 exams). 

It was a blast to hang out with some wicked smart people and get into technical debates about best practices and firewall techniques.  Kudos to the whole group for, in my opinion, making some great progress on these exams!

The one part that bummed me out … well pissed me off really … was having 5 people who’ve been using the ISA product since it was called Proxy Server 8+ years ago all look at a test question, debate it, all arrive at an answer, find out we’re all wrong, and then learn that the people who have taken the exam in the last few months have gotten that question right about 90% of the time.  What the f…

Folks – don’t cheat.  Brain dumps are illegal (people go in to take an exam and steal the content and then post it online), and you’re not doing yourselves any favors.  The more people who pass exams by cheating the more diluted the pool of certified engineers becomes, and then you get to a point where having a certification doesn’t matter.  Effectively you’re screwing yourself over by making your certification useless, plus you’re lying to your employer (and yourself) in saying that you’re competent in a product or technology when you really aren’t.

STOP IT.

Or, maybe you should just keep on doing it.  I know a PhD Psychometrician who’s an expert in Wii Boxing that’s gonna get ya!

There’s SO much stuff going on in my life I just can’t talk about publicly right now … and it’s eating me up!  There’s the whole big [redacted] that I can’t talk about.  Plus there’s another possible [redacted] that I can’t tell you about either.  And then for the next two days I’m going to be [redacted] which I think is completely cool and am really looking forward to … plus it pays really well!

Whew … okay, thanks for letting me spill the beans about all that. 

I hope to be able to share my thoughts more about all this before the week is out.  I don’t know if I could go another weekend without having [redacted] finalized and put to bed.

Speaking of bed … it’s 11:30p!  Yikes!

I came across an interesting post today from Tim Heuer about the site Line Rider moving to Microsoft’s Silverlight version 2.  Now forget about the fact that you’re not interested in the technologies behind this website and how it does what it does.  Just know that by watching the video below you’re about to waste an afternoon on YouTube.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you! 

Check out Steve Gillmor’s post over at TechCrunchIT about his best guess at the future of Microsoft’s online services/platform strategy.  Pretty compelling arguments, and perhaps we’re seeing an opportunity for Microsoft to climb out of 3rd place in the online ecosystem.  Only time will tell, but this sure seems plausible!

As Bill Gates closed the door for the final time Friday on his ex-office (Ballmer takes over Monday) the rhetoric about continued one day a week doesn’t match the reality. Whether you believe Bill will have an ongoing role in Office and Windows futures, I bet most of Bill’s input is already factored in by the owners of those two dominant sources of Microsoft revenue.

What comes next depends on whether Microsoft can pivot to the open Web paradigm as predicated in the Live Mesh strategy, or meander along while attempting to catch up in search and failing to buy Yahoo. You can find plenty of the latter analysis elsewhere, but here we’ll go for the throat of Microsoft’s disruptive opportunity by using a time-honored approach when faced with few facts but a lot of clues. Namely, building a case out of circumstantial evidence. And a smoking gun.

[ … GO READ THE REST!!! … ]

The Live Desktop is Mesh plus Silverlight. A Silverlight Office, however iteratively it is rolled out, will provide Microsoft the leverage to frame the discussion of an Internet Operating System. By mandating openness at all costs combined with a clear user contract trading software for services, the strategy puts Google and Apple in the position of explaining how they too get from here to there. Perhaps a SIlverlight-like runtime from either company is in the pipeline, but more likely are the Gears and SproutCore developer frameworks which are lighter-weight and less fundamental to each companies’ current success.

Contorting the words of Johnnie Cochran, if the glove fits you must convict. Will a Silverlight-only Live Desktop emerge soon after Election Day? If so, what will Microsoft or its developers do with it? Will Ray Ozzie, who spent the first half of his career as the most successful third-party application developer in Windows NT’s history with Lotus Notes, lead a wave of Live Desktop development under the rubric of Services with just enough Software? If the Himel post goes 404, maybe not.

The Smoking Gun
Steve Gillmor
Sat, 28 Jun 2008 20:28:27 GMT