Category Archives: Work

Stuff related to my current job of a broader interest.

Nomenclature…

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…or…


Words Mean Things


Hundreds of years ago, when most long guns were stocked to the muzzle, there was usually a metal part known as the muzzle cap at the end of the stock to protect the thin wood and end grain there.  The half stock rifle, with which we are all familiar, often has a cap at the forward end of the stock also, but since it’s not at the muzzle, we call it a nose cap or a forend cap.  The forward end, or forward portion of the stock, for hundreds of years, has been called the forend or forestock.  For some reason hardly anyone, it seems, uses these terms anymore.


When I tell someone they need a nose cap on their AK before they can use a standard forend, they’re at a loss to understand.  For one thing, it is no longer a forend but a handguard, and there is apparently no longer any such thing as a nose cap.  In these modern times, when we’re still using the exact same features, we need the new term “handguard retainer”.  If I try to add clarity by calling it a forend cap, it still doesn’t work.  I have to use some version of “That metal thingy what holds the handguard on at the front of the handguard” but that’s a lot more syllables than the centuries old “nose cap”.


“Stock forend” or “forestock” no longer works.  I hear “forearm” more often, but most common is “lower handguard” (but some AKs only have the one, so using “lower” only adds confusion.  If a rifle doesn’t have an arm or arms, then it cannot have a “forearm” (the forward portion of an arm).  Since a rifle is an “arm” (in a different sense of the word) then a “forearm” would be the muzzle, wouldn’t it, or the front sight or something out there?


What really throws me for a loop is the term “foregrip” which I always take to mean “forward pistol grip”.  We sell forward pistol grips, so when you ask me for a “foregrip” I can only conclude that you mean forward pistol grip, which is after all a “foregrip”  We sell forends too, but you need a nose cap for a standard forend.  “You know; that foregrip you sell” applies, potentially, to a wide spectrum of products.  When I ask, “Which one?” I almost always get a “what?” or a “the one you have on your web site”.  We have a lot of them on our web site, which you would know if you’d looked at it, which I assume you did or you wouldn’t be talking about it.  You might as well say, “You know– the one I’m thinking about.  I can see it right here in my mind– why can’t you see it in my mind?”


Do you know where your rifle stock’s heel, toe, comb, wrist, forend, nose and nose cap are located?  Or is each feature “That thingy, there, next to or at the end of that other doo-hicky, what holds the thing you hold on to…there…by the bracket”?  I swear; I have several conversations per day that go along those lines.


Recently I had a guy completely reiterate everything I said, “just to be clear” in his words.  He knew all the parts, he knew how to use the language, he knew what part he had called to talk about, and he got everything exactly right.  I had to take a break, take a deep breath, and tell everyone about it.


Anyway; I take the common misuse of terms, or unfamiliarity with the jargon, to mean that there are a lot of new gun owners out there, so I try to be as patient as I can.  The other day I told a guy he needed to be sure he got Picatinny rings for our M8 rail.  Problem was, he didn’t know what “Picatinny”, “rail”, or “rings” meant, nor “Leupold” nor “Burris”.  I had to explain the meaning and derivation of each term and how it applied to his situation.  “Leupold is a manufacturer of optics including rifle scopes…”  At one point in the conversation he said he’d have to call those folks at the Picatinny Arsenal and order some of those rings.  He ended up spending a couple hundred dollars with us, so I must not have sounded too exasperated with him.


While I’m at it; a sight is not a site.  This is the first time I have cited the use of “site” when “sight” would have been right.

It’s good to have clarity

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After I had forcefully expressed my extreme frustration with my insane boss at Microsoft a manager higher in the chain of command told me, “It’s good to have clarity.” Although I was infuriated at the time the phrase stuck with me and I see it’s application to many situations.

Obviously, with clarity of the problem the solution set is smaller and more likely to succeed. What’s even more interesting to me is that in so many of the cases the clarity of widely varying situations lead to the exact same, obviously correct, solution.

Some examples will make my point. The following are not even half of the things that immediately come to mind. But some were close enough telling the stories would have been somewhat repetitive.

Nearly a dozen years ago I met a young woman, Patrycja, at a party who after learning I was an engineer cheerfully told me of all the money she had been making recently. She was a stripper at a club (no, she wasn’t working the party I was at, she was fully clothed) and although she made very good money there it was nothing to what she made from a recent “gold mine” she had been working. Some middle aged engineer who had near zero social skills and had never had a girl friend had been paying her for private visits to his home. No, she never had sex with him. She would strip and/or just spend time with him a couple times a week for a few hours. He had lived alone and frugally for many years while making good money. He had a lot of savings. In the last few weeks he had paid her over $20,000. He had another $80,000 or so left in savings and in a few months she expected she would have collected all of it.

Maybe the guy thought he was getting his money’s worth but my thoughts were different. I never, ever, wanted to have anything to do with this person again. I knew I probably wouldn’t remember what she looked like a year (or 20) later but I wrote down her unusual name so that I wouldn’t forget.

It was good to have clarity. That relationship, even though just a few minutes at a party, needed to be terminated.

Over 30 years ago my boss repeatedly told me, “You’re the project engineer on this, make the decisions and get it done.” But then a few weeks later a group meeting he was telling us how important my project was and how it was going to make such a huge impact to the company and especially those that had stock options. “Who gets stock options?”, I asked. His answer floored me, “I of course have stock options and at review time the company allocates options that I can distribute to the people I manage. I give them to my project managers.” I was shocked that he would say this in front of everyone in our group because most of them were clearly not project managers. Still, it would be good for me even though I hadn’t been awarded any stock options yet. But then he continued, “And my project managers are Jim and Bill.”

When he told me I was the project manager on the project he just meant he wanted me to assume that role. He didn’t mean that was my actual title or that it meant anything beyond assuming responsibility for making the decisions. And further research indicated that the two people with the actual title of Project Manager were more than we really should have for the number of people in the group. I wasn’t going to be promoted anytime soon.

It was good to have clarity. I terminated the relationship and moved on to another company.

For many years I unsuccessfully tried to get my wife to go to counseling with me. I finally got a highly recommended book for couples and we listened to it as we driving from the Seattle area to Idaho. After a couple chapters she asked me what I thought of our marriage and what needed to change. I told her we needed to work on some things and I enumerated some items that could be improved. She unfastened her seatbelt, opened the door, and tried to jump out as we were driving 60 MPH down the freeway.

That was sufficient clarity that something was seriously wrong and further investigation was instigated. There were compelling signs there was a personality disorder involved. If true then there was no chemical imbalance that drugs could mitigate. Counseling and therapy is so rarely helpful and problematic that most therapists refuse these type of patients.

I was 95% sure but not entirely convinced it was time to terminate the relationship. Within an hour and 20 minutes after having been served papers she tried to kill herself again.

A few days later when talking to my counselor she said the last suicide attempt pretty much confirmed my suspicion about the personality disorder. But what was odd, she said, was that my wife had only one husband for 35+ years. Most women with her condition would have had three or four by her age. “Mere mortals,” she said, “Would have left her years ago.”

It was good to have clarity. There are no second thoughts or wondering if terminating the relationship was the right thing to do.

The government deliberately gave and let sales go through for thousands of guns to known violent criminals hoping to “recover them at crime scenes.” And just what sort of crime scenes would they expect those guns to show up at? It sure wasn’t going to be jaywalking, tax evasion, or running a lemonade stand without a license. If they had two or more brain cells to rub together they had to know some of those guns would be used to murder and injure innocent victims. Hundreds died from the use of those guns and there are laws that if enforced against the government for those gun transfers would put people in jail for decades if not life sentences. As far as I know there are no exceptions in the law for government agents and I know for certain there aren’t going to be any prosecutions for those gun transfers. Those people believe they are above the law. U.S. Attorney General Holder and President Obama all but.admit that by refusing to cooperate with investigators.

Although it is not yet certain the leading hypothesis for the motivation was to justify another assault weapon ban. The direct infringement of a specific enumerated right under the color of law which results in the death of innocent people is punishable by death under 18 USC 242. Hence, a case can be made for the death penalty for the government perpetrators. But that will not be given even a second’s thought by prosecutors.

It was good to have clarity. It was clear to me but perhaps not the general population who really don’t know the law and the details of Operation Fast and Furious.

The day Obama Care was ruled constitutional Ry told me something like, “Things are clear now. There is no mistaking where we stand.”

The constitutional limits of power are relegated to the status of a myth. If taxes and/or penalties can be levied and collected for failure to buy a product or service imagine the corruption that enables. What kind of return on “investment” can made by a company which bribes enough politicians such that every family or person in this country had to buy a particular service or product?

The only limits to government corruption and power in our country are the limits of physics and economics.

It’s good to have clarity. It’s time to terminate the relationship.

I need a new frontier.

Quote of the day–Kurt Eichenwald

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Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees.


Kurt Eichenwald
August 2012 Issue of Vanity Fair.
Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant
[Via email from Ry. I could rant for an hour about this. It was a strong contributor to my leaving Microsoft.


But the final straw was a manager who several people on my team independently concluded, “He’s insane!”. The most inspired and brilliant thing I have ever done with software, a new algorithm for estimating the location of device based on the presence of cell and Wi-Fi signal, was termed by him to be, “A negative contribution to Microsoft.” A month or so later the bug this algorithm change would have fixed was termed to be a Priority 1 bug that had to be fixed ASAP. When I pointed out I had been telling him for months that we needed to make this algorithm change he then marked the bug, “Won’t fix” and it was forever ignored.


He asked us all what we liked to do best and did well then gave us tasks there were just the opposite of that. The most incompetent “engineer” on our team was promoted to a senior engineering position, the same level as me. He didn’t qualify as an engineer in my book. Had he been an intern I would have recommended he not be hired or brought back for a second internship. Others “promised” promotions by our previous manager were given poor reviews and told they were on their way out of the company if their performance didn’t improve.


I could, and have—just ask Barron, rant for many hours about this guy. He was the worst manager, by far, I have ever had in nearly 35 years of being an engineer. And I’ve had an alcoholic, one who said things to me that would be considered sexual harassment, and just plain stupid and incompetent managers. But seldom would they get in the way of you getting your job done or doing it right. This guy was counterproductive, actively destroyed moral, and degraded the quality of the product.


Four out of five people on our team complained to our skip level manager about this guy. He did nothing. Three out of five people on the team quit Microsoft because of him.


The last I heard he still works for Microsoft. If I ever get a call from a Microsoft recruiter I will tell them there is no point in continuing the conversation if this guy still works there. Any company that holds on to someone like that is not a company that I will work for.


Still, I think Windows Phone 7.x is finest mobile phone available and I am extremely proud of helping build and ship that product. I will continue to favor Microsoft products over others. But Microsoft has problems. The culture I experienced in the mid and late 1990’s was gone when I joined as a full time employee in 2006 and while I thought the culture from the earlier time needed some changes what it changed into was worse for both the employees and consumers. Microsoft needs to make some serious changes and I hope they are up to the task.—Joe]

Red Flags

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I could go on and on and on and on about all the times I’ve been scammed in business.  When you’ve been in business for 35 years you accumulate a lot of stories of woe and intrigue.  One of the dumbest scammers was a couple of kids using a stolen credit card, who wanted us to deliver thousands of dollars worth of musical instruments, picked out over the phone sight unseen, each being the most expensive of the available choices, to a parking lot on a Sunday.  We just got as much information out of them as we could, called the cops, and found out that these kids had been busted multiple times in the past for check and credit card fraud.


Just the other day, we got an order for multiple units of the most expensive thing we have to offer.  First red flag.  Not enough to get all suspicious, but it makes you wonder just as little bit.  In the comments box, he/she/it says to hurry, but offers no reasons why.  Second red flag.  That may sound innocuous to you, but it’s extremely rare.  When we try to process the transaction, it comes up with a no-match on both the cvv number and the billing address.  Third red flag.  When I reply, asking for the correct cvv number and billing address he/she/it has no idea what I’m talking about and therefore can’t provide any info.  Fourth and fifth red flags.  That’s two more; one because a person spending a lot of money for something needed right away couldn’t get the numbers right, and two because someone is doing all this as his/her/its very first time making an on-line purchase (if you’ve done it before, you know the meaning and importance of a cvv number and a billing address).  If you don’t know what “cvv number” means I can maybe sort of forgive you because some sites refer to it as a “security code” but I can’t forgive you for being unable to use google for a few milliseconds to find out.


My long legacy of being scammed tells me this is a kid with a stolen card, or some other dirtbag loser/gangsta and that I shouldn’t engage in any more messing around.  It’s not any one or two red flags, but the accumulation of red flags that made me nix the deal.  I know full well that it is possible that this is an innocent, inexperienced buyer, but it’s too unlikely a scenario to gamble a lot of money.  Nor will I offer any explanation to this person, beyond “…our security department has rejected the order.  Please look elsewhere.  Sorry.”  Other red flags I won’t tell you about.


Those of you who aren’t in business do understand (don’t you? no, you probably don’t– no one learns about business unless they actually do it, because most people go through public education) that any time there is a problem with a credit card, it is I, the business owner, who always eats the shit on the deal.  No one else is responsible.  You may THINK that the credit card bank is letting your unauthorized charges go at their expense, but they’re charging the vendor (that’s me) whenever that happens (it’s called a “chargeback”) and then merchant services threaten to cut off, or jack up the price on, my merchant services.  The business owner is always at fault.

This Would be Cool

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…but the manufacturer defaced it horribly by putting lettering and numbering all over it.  I wouldn’t mind owning one, but then I’d be forced to advertize for Colt’s without compensation, flashing that company name and address around everywhere I went.  They should pay me to own it.  And those serial numbers?  Those weren’t required by law in the 1840s and ’50s, and the gun would look SO much tidier without them.

(This in response to people who complain that my products have to be defaced with my company’s name and the model number, or the patent number in some cases.  It turns out that there’s also a significant culture in the muzzleloader world that hates the idea of signed or numbered guns.  That fact that maker’s marks, serial numbers, inspectors marks and proof marks have been a necessary and worthwhile part of manufacturing since Grok made his first stone club seems to get lost on some people.  Maybe the famous works of art would be worth more if they’d never been signed, too [they were such shameless self promoters they turned every work of art into an advertizing billboard for themselves].  We do refrain from using flashing lights in our logo if that’s any consolation.  Our engraved logos are matte black on matte black, but they’re still too obnoxious for some people)

High Praise for Windows 8

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From John at work. We are both working on Windows 8. Occasionally we will complain about some problem or another we have run into with the prerelease bits we are dealing working with.

This morning he sent out some email:

I don’t know what all the Windows 8 bashing is about the new UI is clearly superior: 

image

Obviously he is correct. As Greg (at work) pointed out, “This is a much more pleasing shade of blue.”

Quote of the day—Ry Jones

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As long as I’m above ground and I’m not getting rained on I’m doing great. Everything else is just gravy.

Ry Jones
March 17, 2012
[Ry was explaining to me how he kept his spirits up when unemployed for eight months and his financial situation grew worse and worse.

As I posted a few weeks ago Ry is now working at the same place I am and he is now on his road to recovery.—Joe]

It’s a small world

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This morning I road the bus into downtown Seattle pretty much as usual except one of Caleb‘s brothers was on the same bus. He recognized me from the Boomershoot coat and says he reads my blog all the time. 🙂

It turns out he works five stories above me in the same building.

On the seventh day

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If you follow my Tweets you will know that I submitted a Windows Phone 7 application on February 25th. In my Tweet I asked, “Does anyone know how long it takes for it be certified and published?”

No one responded.

Yesterday I asked a guy at work who had gone through the process. “About 60 days” was his response. But then he explained it was a very special case that involved getting special permission, blah, blah, blah…

I dug deeper into Microsoft App Hub and found:

Certification takes an average of five business days. If it has been longer than seven days to complete Certification, contact Support from the e-Form from your account Dashboard.

Today, just a few hours from it being a full seven days, I received an email telling me the app had been published.

Still it doesn’t show up in the market place. After some more searching I found (on the same page as the previous quote):

Note: It may take up to 24 hours for the app to show up in the catalog.

So my work is finished and now I must wait a day.

And so on the seventh day it was finished and it was very good. And on the seventh day I rested.

So here is a direct link to “As the Crow Flies”. It isn’t currently active but will be within 24 hours.

This is a very simple app that measures the great circle distance between any two points on the surface of the earth using Bing Maps with aerial photography. The points could be your office and that beach in the Bahamas. It could be the opposite sides of the Space Needle. It could be the distance from your shooting position to that cardboard box filled with explosives on the hillside.

Update 3/5/2012 4:24 AM: The link to the app above now works but searching in the marketplace still does not.

Update 3/5/2012 6:45 AM: The app is fully active in the marketplace now.

New office

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We moved into a new office in downtown Seattle today. I have a nice view of Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains from my desk. Very nice!


I also discovered Ry started work here today!

Quote of the day—Glen Utzman

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Your employer doesn’t know the answer. If he knew the answer he wouldn’t need you.

Glen Utzman
Professor at the University of Idaho Accounting Department
[This is an excellent observation for almost any professional job.

Utzman is daughter Kimberly’s professor this semester and she provided me with this quote.—Joe]

Three out of five

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I just found out another one of my former co-workers at Microsoft is leaving because of our insane boss. Sometime next week is his last day.

That will make three out of five people on our team who have quit the company because of him. The three most senior people.

It’s rough on those of us leaving but perhaps the message will eventually sink in to his boss that we all tried to tell that this guy was virtually impossible to work for.

When I had my last conversation with my skip level manager about my boss he asked me, “What do you really feel about him? Do you think you can work with him?” I told him, “I feel complete contempt for him. I cannot and will not work for him any longer than I have to.” His response was, “It’s good to have clarity.”

That sealed it for me. Both of those guys should have been given jobs scrubbing toilets at minimum wage.

Off work for weeks

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Yesterday Barb visited the doctor for a follow up after breaking her ankle/leg last week. They found a tibia fracture as well as the known fibula fracture and the damaged ligaments. She is not supposed to put weight on her leg for another six weeks and it may be 12 weeks before she can walk normally again. Being a physical therapist this means she will be off work for many weeks. Physical therapists do not have desk jobs.

It’s a good thing that she has something like 300 hours of sick leave available as well as disability insurance.

One might think of this as a paid vacation but vacations for her usually involve lots of travel, restaurants, and walking. In this case she can’t do much but hang around the Clock Tower and wait for me to come home. She is mostly stuck eating my cooking too. I’ll bet work never looked so good to her before.

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A riot story from long ago

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This came from the gun email list at work from Brennan B. Published with permission:

I had just moved to the U.S. and was attending U.C. Riverside at the time of the L.A. riots.  An RPD cruiser got flipped and burned in the shopping center across the street from my apt.  Roommate worked in an auto parts store over in Rubidoux (the closest thing Riverside’s got to Compton) but he wasn’t on shift those days.  We acquired plenty of beer before the stores closed and spent much of that time in lawn chairs on the roof drinking, listening to a portable radio, and watching the city burn.  It was nothing if not picturesque, especially after sunset.  I don’t have much to tell first-hand, but his work’s monthly staff meetings involved meeting up at our place, talking plenty of smack and drinking plenty of beer, so I heard all that they had to say on the subject.

Prior to this, the auto parts store where my roommate worked had been getting robbed pretty regularly every 3~6 months.  Less than a year before the riots one of the employees got beaten because the robbers didn’t believe that he couldn’t open the safe or get more than $20 out of it at a time.  Shortly thereafter the store manager and assistant manager, Carlos and some Korean guy whose name I forget, both got handguns and started carrying them regularly.  Everything was completely black-market, no paper trail, no permits, no nothing.  Like most folks in that neighborhood, honorable intentions or otherwise, I presume they saw little point in applying for a concealed carry permit since they would of course get denied anyway… and if they were ignoring that one particular asinine gun law, why bother with the rest of them?  Hard logic to argue against in a neighborhood where following the law very likely meant compromising one’s life, and apparently no beat cop in his right mind was interested in driving around demanding to see people’s CCW permits anyway.

Anyway, some guy tried to rob the store shortly thereafter on a day when both managers were on shift, and one was crouched down stocking behind some shelves.  In no time the robber got bum-rushed, disarmed, pistol-whipped, dragged out back at gunpoint, beaten like a piñata and left in the dumpster to sleep it off and reconsider the poor decision-making process that had brought him to that unhappy point in his life.

Then when the riots hit a mob came into the parking lot with Molotov cocktails in hand screaming that they were gonna burn it all to the ground.  Carlos and whassisname came out to discuss the issue with their pistols tucked Mexican-carry into the front of their waistbands in plain view, and asked who wanted to light up first.  The mob abruptly decided they had something more important to burn down elsewhere and went on their way.

Though I never asked, I was completely confuddled as to why these guys risked their lives like that for an employer that didn’t treat them particularly well in the first place and, had the regional office ever caught word of such goings-on, would certainly have fired them all in a nanosecond, done everything possible to sell them out to the police for maximum jail time, and anything else that might make an appropriate example of such vigilantism.  I also wondered if the regional manager ever pondered the question of why those few stores in that mini-shopping center were the only ones for blocks around that didn’t at the very least have some broken windows.  …in fact I remember hearing that something like 80% of the [national chain] Auto Parts in Los Angeles, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties got torched, and this one was in one of the worst neighborhoods of any of them.

It was only much later that I realized it had nothing to do with loyalty to their employer.  Rather, it was for themselves and the workers for which they felt genuinely responsible.  I think they simply recognized that they spent a large portion of their waking lives there, and that no one was going to take care of the chronic crime for them, so they finally decided to let the neighbors know not to bring trouble around their doorstep anymore because they were sick of dealing civilly with uncivil individuals.

Objectively speaking, their revised approach to the problem seemed to work out pretty well.  My roommate transferred to another store but kept in touch.  We even still occasionally hosted some staff meetings from the old store, and word was that work life had become blessedly boring following those two confrontations.

There really is no socially acceptable moral to this story.  Actually in retrospect I have to say this saga planted one of the many seeds of cognitive dissonance in my mind that [much] later blossomed into a full-fledged rejection of the “guns are bad, m’kay?” stereotypes that inform us as to what sort of people carry guns (especially illegally), and how tragically this was all supposed to have turned out both times.  Though I’m still not inclined to press my luck with the black-market guns and unlicensed carry.

I think the moral to the story is that morality and the law only have a slight positive correlation and there is sufficient data to support the hypothesis that willfully breaking the law is sometimes the correct thing to do.

Too bad

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Information Week says Windows Phone is likely headed for extinction:

Microsoft’s share of the smartphone market is plummeting at an alarming rate–so much so that the company’s last ditch effort to make an impact in mobility, Windows Phone 7, may be irrelevant by the time it manages to ship the much-anticipated Mango update and realize its partnership with Nokia later this year.

…

Mango’s debut should also coincide with the arrival of the first Nokia phones running Windows Phone 7, though Microsoft has yet to provide precise arrival dates for Mango or Nokia phones. Under a partnership announced last year, the Finnish phone maker is transitioning its entire smartphone line to Microsoft’s mobile OS.

Whether Windows Phone 7 is a legitimate player in the market by the time that happens remains to be seen. The current numbers suggest otherwise.

I was very proud of both my contribution and of the final product. I can’t speak for the iPhone but I have played with the Android enough to be convinced the Windows Phone has a better user interface. Barb has always said she didn’t want a fancy phone. She just wanted something really simple. I knew she wasn’t going to be very pleased when I got her one for Christmas. I was pretty sure she would eventually be happy with it but I had to get her something else to go with it or else I would be in trouble so I got her a Jeep. Now she loves the phone and she came up to speed on it really fast.

I now sometimes get a dozen or more text messages a day from her. With her previous phones the kids and I could sometimes get her to read text messages but sending them was exceedingly rare and usually accompanied with a bad mood. Now she even Tweets from her Windows Phone 7.

As I was leaving Microsoft in the middle of May I had some people inside and outside of Windows Phone who were in much better “positions to know” than I was tell me, “You are doing the right thing.” A lot of this was based upon the market acceptance of Windows Phone 7 as well as the crappy manager I had.

Microsoft might still pull it out but there are a lot of outside influences that Microsoft just doesn’t have that much control over like the number of external developers who support Windows Phone. And the carriers who might wonder why they are putting effort into supporting a smart phone with such a small percentage of the market.

It’s too bad. I think it’s a great phone and I’m look forward to the Mango update.

Steve Lacy is dead

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Via Peter N. Biddle I discovered a former co-worker of mine, Steve Lacy, was killed in a car accident on Sunday:

A volatile mix of speed, alcohol and road rage claimed the life of an innocent victim Sunday who happened to be driving in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Washington State Patrol says the incident began at about 2 p.m. when a man driving a black Hyundai SUV was involved in a road rage incident on Interstate 405.

Witnesses told troopers the Hyundai driver began following a driver who he believed had cut him off as he headed south down the freeway.

As the Hyundai driver took the Northeast 85th Street off-ramp, he was speeding and lost control, flying across the eastbound lanes of Northeast 85th into the westbound traffic.

At that point, the Hyundai slammed into a gray BMW that was heading west on 85th Street and had not been involved in the earlier road rage incident.

The impact killed the driver of the BMW. He was identified as Steve Lacey, a software engineer at Google and father of two young children.

I have driven on both that freeway and that street countless time. I’ve even walked up and down that street more times than I can count. Sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do about it when death comes calling.

It was this Steve that I blogged about a few years ago.

Steve came to the U.S. from the U.K. when Microsoft purchased the company he worked for. This company had a 3-D graphics rendering package. Steve wrote a lot of the code that is now known as Direct-X 3D. Every time you play a video game on a Windows machine that does 3-D rendering you are executing code that Steve wrote. The world is a poorer place now not only because of the contributions he would have continued to make but because he was also a really nice guy.

Nice view

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I was dreading working in downtown Seattle but the nice office with a view at least partially makes up for it.

Puget Sound is in the distance on the left:

WP_000076Web_20110615

While doing the orientation in California earlier this week I found some other things out about the company that pleased me too. It would appear they very strongly encourage innovation and the particular focus for my MSEE (communication theory) is a better match that what I first thought it would be. Plus they are looking to leverage my experience at Microsoft rather than expect me to retrain for Linux as I had feared.

One of the first things I did after getting my computer up and running was search for, find, and add myself to the company email list for the gun club. Nice!

Also a guy just down the hall from me has several targets on his desk with bullet holes in them. I haven’t talked to him yet but I expect I will before the week is over.

A bug or a feature?

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I need to report this to some co-workers and at least warn them.

After leaving Microsoft last night I deleted my MS email account on my phone. The phone immediately said I needed to change my password on the phone. There were three edit boxes. One for my old password, one for the new password and one to confirm the new password. I put in the requested information and it claimed my old password was invalid. I tried again. Same problem. I then noticed it said my old password was four digits long. That wasn’t right. It had been six digits. As I tried to “get in” it started making me wait before I could retry. First it was one minute, then two, then four. When it got to 16 minutes I gave up trying plausible passwords they remotely set the device to. I got online and used the remote wipe feature to completely erase the phone.

Grrrr…. that was unpleasant. I can understand why a company would want to delete company private information off of former employee phones when they leave the company. But I did that with the deleting of the email account. The rest of the information that ended up being deleted was my personal information. They should have at least warned me so I could make sure I had all my personal information copied to a safe place.

As it turns out I think the only thing I lost was some notes about the length of some Boomershoot berms, all my SMS messages with my kids and wife from the past few months and a few things like that. Nothing that is more than annoying rather than something really important like a video of your child’s first steps or something.

The irony is that while at dinner with Ry last night he suggested I delete my email account rather than just let it expire and have Microsoft remotely wipe my phone like what happened to him when he left.

Last day at Microsoft

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Barb and I cleaned the last of my stuff out of my office yesterday so there wasn’t a whole lot of things to do today. The developer and test team took me out to lunch and gave me a nice card and some gifts. I turned over some unit test code improvements to a co-worker. They will check it in some other time when “the bar” isn’t so high. I turned in all the “engineering” cell phones I had in my storage cabinet. I went to the company store and bought a few things. And I filled out the online exit survey.

But what may turn out to be the most important was my in-person “exit interview” with HR. She asked “Why are you leaving Microsoft?” I told her it was entirely due to my manager. I loved my job until he came along. I told her in my 30+ years as an engineer I have had alcoholic managers, incredible stupid managers, and even one that was bordering on sexual harassment. None of them were all that difficult for me to work with. But this one was impossible for me to deal with and I could not find another way out. I talked to previous direct reports of his who had the same problems. My co-workers and I had talked to his boss with zero results. Another co-worker (Chet) had quit before me and there would almost for certain be others who follow me. And that I would have rather gone back to the farm in Idaho and shovel manure than work for him. I spent 20 minutes telling her stories and she took nearly a full page of notes. She said I should have come to HR sooner and they could have gotten me out of the situation almost immediately. I wouldn’t and shouldn’t have had to leave Microsoft. My boss’s boss should have addressed the problem. He was at fault in this too. Would I ever, sometime in the future, be interested in coming back to Microsoft? “Yes, I might be”, I replied. She told me there was nothing in my record that would prevent that and to give it consideration.

I’m skeptical HR could have or would have done something earlier. Talk is cheap at this point. It does makes me feel better so that is at least a momentary pleasure. But will there be any change? I don’t know. If there is change I’ll eventually find out about it. It would be nice if there is a hint of justice in the world but I’ve seen enough cases where you just have to say, “Life isn’t fair. You just have to move on.”

I’ll probably dribble more details out over the coming weeks but one thing I just can’t hold on to any longer…

Remember when I said I wanted to say something about remote update on the phone? There were a bunch of problems with updating customer phones in the field that delayed getting new versions of the software out to all our customers. I talked to someone on the team that fixed that problem and got the story as to what was wrong with the code. Before my boss came to my team he was the developer lead on “device update”. It was his team that shipped the faulty code.

After working for him for several months I was not surprised the code his team wrote gave us the greatest grief in the field.

My one regret today is that he wasn’t in his office when I dropped off my badge. I expected he would want to shake my hand and say something nice to me. I was ready to refuse and tell him, “GO. TO. HELL.”

I know people like this

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Not only do I know people like this I am getting a new job because I cannot work with someone like this.


Via email from Barron.