Archive
What a headline!
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.
College is finally over
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.
Where’s the grocery store?
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!
Tough medicine
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…
You’re a maverick!
Gotta love the Inter-tubes…
How did we get here
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!
Yay Team!
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.
IM for Food?
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’m a PC
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. 🙂
Nathan's Occasional Blog 