Category Archives: Work

Stuff related to my current job of a broader interest.

Investing

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A guy at work, Chet, frequently stops by my office to take a break and talk about, among other things, the state of our economy. Are we going to have hyper inflation? Deflation? Should savings be put into stocks, bonds, precious metals?

I bought a few ounces of gold and silver in the late 1990s and that turns out to have been a fairly good investment. But as Chet points out, “You can’t eat it.”

If being able to eat it were the sole criteria for sound investing then a few tons of lentils, peas, and wheat from the farm be a good idea but my bunker can only store so many sacks before it starts getting in the way. And I’m pretty sure some of the sacks of food I sold to people worried about Y2K in 1999 (about 20,000 pounds total) are still in their closets unopened except perhaps by rodents and insects. The food stores fairly well but unless you were very careful how you stored after ten years it has noticeably degraded.

Dave Hardy points out there is an alternative to gold that is useful (I don’t recommend eating it however) and which has retained it’s value every bit as well as gold has for the last 136 years. When I bought my first gun the guy I bought it from pointed out that guns in good repair don’t loose significant value over the years. Even that SKS you bought for $65 back in the early 1990s kept pace with inflation. Ammo too has been a good investment.

So perhaps that is Chet’s answer. Instead of precious metals like gold and silver invest in steel, copper, brass and lead with a little bit of nitrocellulose thrown in.

Boomershoot 2010 fall prep done

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Two weeks ago I delivered a bunch of concrete blocks, mortar, and grass seed to the Boomershoot site. I didn’t stay long enough to do anything with it because I wanted to shoot in a steel match that same day. I made the quick trip out there because I was afraid it would snow up or rain so much that it wouldn’t be accessible until spring and I wanted the materials out there so I could walk (or snowshoe) in if I needed to and do any last minute prep work.

Today I drove back out and planted the last of the grass. It wouldn’t have been disaster if I hadn’t gotten the grass planted but it will be better that I did get it done. I would have liked to have done some work finishing off the semi-permanent toilet but I ended up spending time talking to my parents and brothers and then driving the 345 miles back to the Seattle area.

I’ll probably go back out there in a couple weeks. Due to a huge office move at work I will have the entire Thanksgiving week off (extra, free, vacation!) so assuming the ground isn’t knee deep in mud or waist deep in snow I will spend some of that time working on the site. But I have 2010 essential stuff done for this fall.

New shooter report

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I took two people to the range with me tonight.

Gang is one of my co-workers. He is from the People’s Republic of China. He had some military training when he was still living there but he only fired eight rounds total from an SKS. He went shooting with some friends in the U.S. once quite a while back. He doesn’t qualify as a “new shooter” but he is still a beginner. He told me he would like to try it again sometime and I, of course, was pleased to take him to the local range. He said his father-in-law was visiting from China and would like to go along too if that was okay with me. FIL had never fired a gun before. He had field-stripped one in training but had never fired it.

Gang bought me dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. I went through the safety rules with Gang translating for his FIL. I told him which guns I had brought and Gang asked if they all fit in the car. I said there was plenty of room but I was carrying one with me there in the restaurant. They didn’t seem surprised or concerned.

When we got to the range I then had them do some dry firing with the .22 revolver. I worked with them on the grip, stance, sight alignment, and trigger control. First using the gun in single action, then double action.

Here is FIL cocking the gun in preparation to fire his first actual shot:

Here is the result of his first eight rounds from about 10 feet away:

I was impressed! I know people who have put many hundreds of rounds down range and can’t shoot that well. Gang’s efforts were similar but offset to the right and up of the bullseye about the same amount as FILs were down and to the left.

I then rented a Ruger Mark III/45 since my Ruger Mark II is still with daughter Kim in Idaho. Here FIL is punching holes in the target with the semi-auto:

I fired a few rounds with my STI to make sure it didn’t go full-auto on me after getting it’s new NP3 finish before letting them try it.

They both fired it a few times then I loaded up the Gun Blog 45 for them. The loads were 230 grain bullets but downloaded to a Power Factor of only 175 (typical is about 200). Here the FIL is just getting the gun out of recoil with the slide still not closed:

They said the .45 hurt their hands a little bit but they had big smiles on their faces after shooting a few rounds each:

Next came the Evil Black Rifle:

Success! The target below has holes from both FIL and Gang from about 20 feet away. Each of them had one go low and the rest in a tight group in the middle of the A-Zone. FIL put his three on the lower left of the A-Zone with Gang having the upper three.

As I watched them shoot I keep thinking of Tiananmen Square and wondered how things might have been different had the civilians been armed and able to defend themselves. Gang, his wife, (and perhaps FIL), and daughter will be attending a private Boomershoot party next spring. After learning how to use guns of course they need to learn how to make explosives.

I’ve now taken new shooters to the range from Taiwan, India, Canada, and the People’s Republic of China. I’m exposing the world to freedom, first hand, one person at at time…

As we were leaving the range Gang asked if I was going to the gun show this weekend. I told him that I was returning to Idaho but he and his entire family (even the baby) would be welcome and he said he might go to look around. He doesn’t have a house right now but when he does he might buy a gun for self-defense then.

Quote of the day–Suresh Parameshwar

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So, do you still give chemistry lessons on the white-board in your office?

Suresh Parameshwar
October 15, 2009
[See also another time when I quoted Suresh.

Suresh was my mentor at Microsoft when I first started working there full time. Almost two years ago he left Redmond to go back to India (still working for MS). He was back in Redmond this week on business and stopped by to visit friends. A bunch of us had dinner at our old boss’s house last night and stay up talking until almost midnight.

Before he went back to India on more than one occasion Suresh and I had discussions about explosives and I explained the chemistry to him on the white-board.

The above question was one of the first things he said to me when I saw him last night.–Joe]

Windows Mobile 6.5 is out

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It’s possible there are few lines of some of my prototype code that made it through to release. I’m not certain. Windows Mobile 7 will have significant input from me.

Here are the details:

AT&T today announced two new smartphones based on Microsoft Inc.’s new Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, HTC’s Tilt 2 and Pure (see images, below.)

AT&T didn’t announce full details for all six new phones, but said the HTC Pure is now available at AT&T stores for $150 after rebates, and the HTC Tilt 2 will cost $300 after rebates. Both require a smartphone data plan commitment and a $40 or higher voice plan in order to receive the rebates.

6.5 is a big step in the right direction and 7.0 will be awesome.

SteveB talks about what I’m working on

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Windows mobile 6.5 will be out soon. Windows Mobile 7.0 will come out later.

I’m working on 7.0 and it looks very nice. I too was worried about 6.5 until I saw it for the first time last week (competely different team so it’s not quite so weird that I didn’t see it sooner). 6.5 is a big step forward and I am much less worried about it now.

The release of 7.0 will make me much happier with our position in the mobile phone market.

That is all… Back to work…

Charity

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Microsoft matches charity donations dollar for dollar for full-time (a “blue-badge” in the local vocabulary) employees. The Second Amendment Foundation has been receiving my automatic payroll deductions since I started full time with MS.

Kevin reports my donations, matched by Microsoft, have been put to good use:

I’ll post about this again, but last night SayUncle asked a question about donating toward the legal fight for our rights, mentioning that he’d received emails from people saying they’d tried to donate during the Parker/Heller litigation and had been refused. Alan said that there had been a deliberate decision to take that case all the way without outside aid of any kind, which is why offers of assistance had been politely but firmly declined. However, all the current litigation, such as the Chicago incorporation suit and many others, are being paid for by the Second Amendment Foundation and CalGuns. If you want to help now, that’s where your money needs to go. I’ve been receiving solicitations from SAF for a while, but I did not know that they were the financiers of these efforts. They’ll be receiving donations from me in the future, and I hope from you as well.

The payroll deductions are open for change starting October 1st and I’ll be increasing the amount they get.

I will return

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I didn’t do as much blogging this weekend and yesterday as I normally would have. I had extra things to do at work the last few days. Plus I went out to the Boomershoot range and played in the dirt (pictures to follow) all day on Saturday.

At work yesterday afternoon I gave a short presentation and demo (actually I had Gang do the demo since his demo was completed and mine wasn’t) despite mangling a few sentences got laughs and applause at all the right spots and I should be able to give blogging a little more time tonight.

I really want to say something about “Prags” v. “threepers”. It appears I accidently lit a match near a powder keg with this post (see here and here). Maybe late tonight I’ll have something…

Blogging may be light

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The boss is going on vacation for a couple weeks to celebrate his 25th Wedding Annivesary (which isn’t until December but contrary to suggestions they are not celebrating early in case they don’t actually make it that far). Instead of this little mouse being able to play while the cat is away he asked that I be the cat while he is gone. And as he brought me up to speed on the things that needed my attention while he was gone he told me the demo I’m working on that he absolutely must have by the 18th (two weeks from now) is actually due next Tuesday (one working day)*.

I worked until almost 20:00 last night then went to the range and put a couple hundred rounds down range. Blogging will probably be light until after Tuesday as I will be spending most of my time working or at one of three different ranges.

*To be fair, it was as much a surprise to him as it was me.

Data reduction

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On Friday my officemate told me Kris had just stopped by and left something for me. I found a damaged Pocket PC with a note on it asking that I do an Idaho Stress Test on it. I contacted Kris via IM for more details. The screen had been damaged and was completely non-functional. There was company sensitive data on the device which needed to be destroyed and Kris wanted me to do this for him.

On Saturday daughter Kimberly and I went to the Boomershoot site and, among other things, destroyed the data for Kris. I also had a hard disk that was in similar need of “data reduction” and we deleted the data on both items at the same time.

Tomorrow I’ll deliver the pieces Kim and I found to Kris but for the rest of you here are a few pictures assembled into a video:

Things I Don’t Understand #876,394.1

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Why is it that every printer ever made has User Frustrator Tabs (UFTs) built into the paper tray?  Their only function is to prevent the user from sliding a new stack of paper into the paper tray.  They’re there to catch the corners of the paper as you’re trying to get it into the machine, thus causing one or more sheets to bunch or shift inside the tray.  Often it’s the bottom sheet that gets hung up, and of course it’s impossible to slide the bottom sheet forward under the stack, even without UTFs, unless you remove the whole stack and try again.  UFTs work especially well when you have an important customer on the phone and you’re in a hurry to print something.  Of course the printer never knows that you’ve just installed a new, crumpled stack of paper in it, so while you’re on the phone you have to find the right button to push, telling the printer it is now time to jam and wad a new sheet in its mechanism.

I can just see Butters, in his aluminum foil Professor Chaos uniform, evil grin on his face, as he builds the CAD file for the new HP paper tray; “He he he heeee.  Now the world will know the pain and frustration….”

Hey guys; ever though of having, you know, flat, smooth surfaces inside the paper tray?

#876,394.2;

Why is it that the printer and camera manufacturers actually hire (and presumably pay) extra people to write software, and then actually include it in their product packaging, just to take over my computer, turning it into an All-HP Fun House, or the Wonderful, Lollipop World of Cannon, instead of the computer I actually liked and paid for?  It’s like putting dog turds in your product packaging.  You hire people to search for dog turds, you hire people to wrap those dog turds, and then you pay to ship those dog turds with each camera or each printer, so that I’ll stick one in my optical drive and ruin everything, permeating my whole computer.  Gee, thanks.  All I wanted to do was print stuff, OK?  How hard is that to understand?  All I want to do is take pictures and put them on my computer.  Why does that require special dog turd software?  You know what I do?  I pull the card from the camera and use a damned card reader, ’cause that way I know I’m not sticking yet another dog turd in my optical drive.

(go ahead– ask me how I feel about it)

Geeks get rewarded

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I’ll bet some Microsoft geeks had fun with this.

You should hear about some of the parties we have had. Read Renegades of the Empire for some hints.

[Via an email from Rob.]

I know this guy from East Germany

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A guy on our team speaks with a very noticeable German accent. I never thought much of it. Another guy is from South Vietnam, another from China, the new person on our team (just today) and my officemate are both from India. If there is anything unusual about the foreigners around the office is that they work harder than the U.S. born people. This guy is no exception. I see emails sent by him from late at night and all weekend.

But he stopped by to talk about stuff last Thursday and we ended up talking about where he grew up. He was born in East Germany. I hadn’t realized that. For some reason I always thought of West Germany whenever I might have considered his origins. He hates the communists. “Communism makes people lazy. Yah!”

I said it always amazes me that experiment has been run so many times and resulted in 10s of millions dead and still people keep wanting to try it again. I told him of someone I know who told me they didn’t think people should own their own houses. The government should own them and allocated them on the basis of need. This person told me, “You and Barb don’t need such a big house. Some other family with a larger family needs it more than you do.”

His eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. “You tell them I lived that. You tell them to go visit this town. Yah!”, and he showed me a town on a map of Germany. “Not one bomb was dropped on that town during the entire war”, he said. “There was no fighting in that town. But if you go there that town looks like it was all bombed out. When people don’t own their property they don’t care. The roofs, they are all falling down. Yah! You tell him to go there and look for himself.”

After he got married they applied to the housing allocation board for a place to live. There was “nothing available”. But other people who applied after him got really nice places. But they were the children of the people on the board, and the people who had connections to people on the board. After two years the housing board told him that his parents had permission to make some changes to their place (I understood this to be partitions, plumbing, etc.) and then he and his wife could live there.

He told me he graduated, “The best in my class.” But he couldn’t get into college because his family weren’t “good communists”. He got a job in a picture tube factory (television sets I presume) and he did so well the company used its pull to get him a position in school. He got a B.S. and M.S. in electrical engineering. Then he got a PhD in Computer Science.

After the Germany’s were reunited his father obtained his secret police file. Every letter to or from West Germany, where some of their family lived, was read and a summary was put in his file. He found out who had spied on him and who said things about him that put his loyalty to the communist party in doubt and stopped his career.

“Joe”, he said, “People complain about how unequal things are with the rich executives in a capitalist society. But it’s just the same under communism–it’s the politically connected that have the money and the people that aren’t connected don’t have anything. I know. I lived it. Communism, it’s very bad.”

I need to ask what he thinks of the plans for health care and the take over of the banking industry, etc. in this country. That should be interesting.

Bing

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Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft but not in Search.


I know MS has been spending a lot of money attempting to catch up to Google as a search tool. A year or so ago I attended a few internal meetings and saw data that showed objective tests placing search results above Yahoo! and nearly as good as Google. I expect the results are at least on par with Google by now, but still MS wasn’t getting the traffic anywhere close to that of Google.


It appears MS has decided that search quality wasn’t a deciding factor. Yes, the branding of “Live Search” sucked. “Bing”, to this non-marketing expert, appears to be much better. And I hope that will help. But what they are doing is much, much more than just rebranding it. Check out this video. It’s a decision engine, not just a search engine.


Coming soon: Bing.

Unable to reproduce

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I’ve used that reason to close a bug before. But the meaning of the word “reproduce” was different in my context.

I wish

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Full disclosure and disclaimer time. I work for Microsoft. The following opinion is my personal opinion and does not represent, to the best of my knowledge, the opinion of anyone in MS management.


The EU is about to fine Intel:



Microsoft and Intel are taking it on the chin in Europe these days. On Wednesday, the EU is expected to bring down a heavy fine on Intel for its myriad anticompetitive activities at the expense of AMD. The Wall Street Journal reports it will be one of the biggest fines in the EU’s history.


The anticompetetition commissioner can fine Intel as much as 10 percent of its annual revenue. That would be a $3.8 billion fine based on 2008 revenue, more than triple the $1.16 billion charged to Microsoft for noncompliance in the EU’s long-running antitrust action against Redmond.


One has to wonder what percentage of the EU income is based on fines and what percentage is based on taxes. But most of all I wonder how long the EU would last without Intel and Microsoft products. I’m sure Intel and Microsoft could do without the EU a lot better than the EU could do without Microsoft and Intel.


I just wish Microsoft and Intel had the gumption and the means to demonstrate that to those commies.

More Microsoft layoffs

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We received an email from Steve Ballmer yesterday morning saying the other shoe was dropping. I’m fine and everyone I checked with is fine but I still need to check in with a few more.

We Get it, Already

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This is an open letter to all the talk show hosts, pundits, party hacks, cheaters, scumbags, sick twisted freaks (you know who you are) and pro-freedom bloggers.  We could spend the rest of our lives cataloging the outrageous behavior of nasty, America-hating, ignorant, self-loathing, cultist, freedom-hating, anti-human, leftist politicians including Progressive Republicans.  We know they’re bad, OK?  If there are three or four people who still don’t get it, that’s all right.


I’d rather try to figure out how we’re going to get some principled Americans nominated so we’re not always forced to choose between bad and worse– between more socialism slower, and more socialism faster.  This last national election was a real puker.  The Republican Party is, at the moment, just as lost, dumbfounded, selfish and clueless as ever.  They’re a herd of does, staring blankly into the headlights of an on-coming truck, and the worst part of it is; they don’t even suspect that they’re clueless.  They in the Republican leadership think they have some really clever answers, which amount to more of what got us into this mess.  I recently heard it described as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  That fits very well.  The Republicans have some really super great, super ultra smart ideas for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  No really, listen…  (all the while we have this simple, proven model for success, and it’s being ignored.)


We need to change that.  You need to change it.  I need to change it.  There isn’t anyone else.  I suppose, since it’s up to us, it will have to be on the local level for most of us, being as we’re not billionaires.  That’s OK.  We can still do what we can do.  A lot of people are jazzed up right now.  They just need somewhere to start.  Well, pick a place, a local issue or a local politician that needs a hand (or a very public spanking) and get to it!


That there are clueless people is not the issue.  There will always be the clueless.  They’ll sit on the sidelines, worrying about who likes them and who doesn’t, trying to figure out where the “center” is so they can position themselves in it and claim superiority for having done so, while someone else does the lifting.  Are you a sitter or a lifter?


I have a bad feeling that things could come to blows before this government is brought under control, and I really don’t want that to happen.  Do you?  This country is far too important in the grand scheme of things.


And with that; I don’t have much more to say on here, other than to repeat myself or talk about the weather and what I did last weekend, unless it’s to tell you what I’m doing on the local level to influence politics.  Now I think I have some calls to make.


(Note that I placed this in nearly every one of Joe’s categories. It’s relevant to everything we do and every opportunity we want for our kids in the future)

Quote of the day–Aravind Seshadri

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You know how to get a solution? First you create a problem.


Aravind Seshadri
April 15, 2009
[One of my favorite things about working at Microsoft is that I am surrounded by smart people–very smart people. Also knowing that some of the software I write will be used by, literally, a BILLION people is really, really cool. That and being part of the Borg means we get to rule the galaxy.


So, yesterday Aravind, Hiep, and I were discussing our plans for domination of the galaxy when Aravind told us the above. I burst out into laughter as my mind went flying into all the different directions implied by those two sentences. Here is a sample:



  • Before you can solve a problem you have to define (create) it. Once it is accurately defined you can much more easily solve it.

  • Most businesses sell “solutions”. The grocery store sells you a solution to your hunger problem, the electric company sells you a solution to your energy problem, etc. Before you can sell anything new you have to create a problem. Before there were telephones did the people know they had a communication problem? Before there were cars did the people know there was a transportation problem? Before there were diamond engagement rings did people know there was token of commitment problem? We create problems in people’s minds so they will buy our solutions. This applies to (perhaps especially in) politics, and personal relationships, as well as the business world.

  • If you have a problem in “Area A” you may be able to solve it by creating a problem in “Area B”. For example, a scumbag is causing you discomfort by threating you with a knife and you want a solution to your discomfort. You create a fluid retention problem for him by inserting multiple jacketed hollow points into his thoracic cavity. You now have your solution.

  • And my favorite, “There is no problem the proper application of high explosives can’t solve.”

-Joe]

Quote of the day–hunter006

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Breaking shit sounds easy, but it’s not. It’s actually pretty hard. The reason being because there are people just as smart as me, if not smarter, designing this specifically so it doesn’t break.


hunter006
March 27, 2009
My job as a SDET
[hunter006 is a co-worker of mine. We are, in a sense, on opposite teams. It’s an interesting relationship. I give the other team full access to every detail of the design and implementation. All the documents, all the source code, all the threat models then at any time completely and honestly answer any questions they might have about the system including things like, “Where do you think the greatest weakness are?” And “How would you go about breaking this?” Any success they have means more work and possibly poor performance reviews for me.


On the other hand, if I do my job right they will work their butts off, not find anything worse than typos in the documentation, and have their boss constantly screaming at them because they haven’t found any bugs. If they haven’t found any bugs then they aren’t doing their job, right?


Large bug counts, if found by you, are good on performance reviews. Large numbers of bugs assigned to you are bad. Currently I have one bug assigned to me. It’s about a year old and I’m pretty sure someone else fixed it a long time ago when they were working on something related. I just haven’t gotten around to verifying and closing it out or assigning it to him. Son James recently told me in his group the average is about 70 bugs assigned to each developer. He has about half that.


I just got new tester assigned to my portion of my current project. She’s a sweet young thing and I had a meeting with her earlier this week to explain the design and suggest ways to test it. I didn’t show her the proof I have been writing software since before she was born. I’ll save that for later when she is putting in long hours and still not finding enough bugs to keep her boss off her back.–Joe]