Category Archives: Work

Stuff related to my current job of a broader interest.

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.

My headache was cured this morning

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If you follow my Tweets you will have already gotten a few hints.

  • 11-30 AM May 18th Is insanity contagious? I think I might be infected by contact with someone at work. May I take another sick day now? Please?
  • 11-39 AM May 18th I have a headache now. I almost never get headaches. Is there a pain reliever you can get OTC for reducing pain in the ass people?
  • 11-42 AM May 18th My coworker will be buying a months supply of such medicine too. Maybe we can get a discount on a bulk buy.
  • 11-46 AM May 18th Someday I will blog about this person. Other people need to be warned.
  • 10-19 AM May 19th Woot! I just got a great offer from another company. I can tell my crappy boss goodbye!

I have been told, in a very firm tone, by two different friends that I shouldn’t blog about this person by name. So, at least for now, I will hold off. But lets just say my mood has greatly improved in the last 24 hours and Barb will probably stop telling me I should take anti-depressants.

Former co-worker Chet also left Microsoft because of this guy. This morning, after I told people I was leaving, someone who also has had to deal with him came to me and said, “He is crazy! He has to be insane.” I think it is a case of Peterson Syndrome (a generic case which is probably unrelated to guns). Imagine having to deal with someone like that on a daily basis. Now imagine them writing your performance review. Yeah. I have been having nightmares for months now.

There are some things about working for Microsoft that are very good. There are other things that are very broken. Two more people, who don’t work with my boss, told me today they are looking for an exit for similar reasons to mine. Microsoft has some very serious flaws that are not being addressed by management.

My offer from another company includes a raise larger than all the raises I have gotten in working at MS for five years and a stock grant (vested over three years) that made me light-headed and made Barb squee.

I have another interview on Monday so I haven’t accepted the offer yet and I keep hoping I will get an interview at Barron’s place of work which is a few minutes from my home in Idaho instead of the Seattle area like the others I have been looking at. But the job applications there are moving way to slow for me to wait around much more. I need to get out before I just pull the covers over my head and never get out of bed.

You may notice an uptick in blog post frequency… we’ll see.

Quote of the day—Senator Al Franken

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Steve Jobs said to the press that ‘we build a database of cell tower hotspots that could be 100 miles away from where you are, those are not telling you anything about your location.’ Yet in a written statement, Apple explained that the very same data would help your iPhone calculate its location. How can those two statements be true at the same time? Does this data indicate anything about your location or doesn’t it?

Senator Al Franken
May 10, 2011
Senators press Apple, Google for answers about location tracking
[I know! I know!

While Apple is a direct competitor to my employer (Microsoft) with this product and it’s not in my best interest to defend them I feel compelled to say that in this particular instance Apple is getting a bum rap. I worked on this same feature in Windows Phone 7 and understand the problem very, very well.

The answer given wasn’t the best and that probably made it difficult for Franken to grasp the concepts. So I’ll try again. Almost for certain this is how it works. The phone obtains a collection of cell tower  locations and unique cell tower IDs in a particular geographical area. This area could be a rectangle that is 100 miles by 100 miles on a side. When the user requests their location the phone obtains the unique ID of the cell tower the phone is connected to. The ID is looked up in the collection of cell towers, just as someone’s name might be looked up in an address book. The location/address of the cell tower is then returned to the user as the best estimate of the user’s location.

As long as the cell tower IDs used for location lookup are not stored then the best that can be done by examination of the files on the phone is to see the different cell towers (and Wi-Fi) collections that were stored. As long as those collections were large (100 miles by 100 miles per collection) then the best that can be deduced is the user was someplace within that collection area. If the collection area is much smaller, say 100 feet by 100 feet (this could happen because Wi-Fi access points have much greater density that cell towers) then it becomes very important to make sure those collections are secure from snooping. If those collections are sometimes for a small geographical area and the files are not made secure then shame on Apple. They were being careless with the users privacy and should be chastised for that carelessness. But at this time I cannot conclude Apple screwed up.

So to answer Franken’s questions, those two statement can be true at the same time. The data does indicate your position within the geographical area of the hotspot locations. But that does not necessarily mean the location is know with the type of accuracy that a stalker would find particular useful–unless just knowing the city or zip code is sufficiently damaging.—Joe]

Location info—why you should care

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The iPhone (and cousins) storing of location information and similar activity by Android is turning out to be a pretty big scandal. Some people are saying, “I’ve got nothing to hide.” but most people I associate with don’t think that way. And since that guy writes for the NYT he doesn’t really count with most of the country anyway.

Brian X. Chen and Mike Isaac explain the issue better than I could:

Having a data file with over a year’s worth of your location information stored on your iPhone is a security risk.

So if a thief got his hands on your iPhone, he can figure out where you live and loot you there, too. Same goes for a hacker who gains remote access to the consolidated.db file. But if a thief or hacker dug into an Android device, there isn’t going to be much geodata saved on the smartphone to digitally stalk you. (There’s plenty of other data on smartphones such as text messages, address books and so forth, but at least we have control over what data we store in this regard.)

Bottom line, this data shouldn’t stick around on your iOS device, because it does nothing but put you at risk. And you should care about that, because this problem can be and should be fixed by Apple, and you should demand that.

I’m not at liberty to say much but I will say that I spent some time explaining the security of Windows Phone 7 location services to our Program Manager and Dev Manager this afternoon. Both seems satisfied with the status. It’s not as good as I would like it to be when I put on my utopian privacy hat but I think the tradeoffs made were within acceptable bounds. I’m also pleased that at every stage through the location service development process privacy was taken seriously by everyone I worked with. I had expected I would have to fight hard at times to protect location information but that was not the case. I only got pushback on some relatively minor issues, for legitimate needs, and the compromises made were acceptable to me.

WP7 location service does a much better job of protecting your privacy and giving you control over your data than the iPhone currently does and probably better than Android. And as long as I am working on location services I will do my best to make sure it stays that way.