Rocky Mountain High

I find myself back on a plane, headed for scenic Denver. Not something I thought I would be doing, but here I am.

The best feature about my flight is the video display on the back of the seat in front of me. For free I get to watch a graphic of the plane superimposed over a mapquest map, showing altitude, air speed, and location. Way cool in a geeky sort of fashion. Now I know what city I'm looking at out the window, whether the pilot tells me or not. For $5 I could watch a Direct TV feed of various channels, but who needs it?

I also showed #3 son how to go online and track my flight, which I hope will ease some of the issues he been having lately. Between that and the excellent video conferencing capabilities of Skype, he should be OK.

The Denver airport is gargantuan. It's also about thirty miles from anywhere I need to be. With all of that room and the traffic flow, you think there would be something to DO there when you're stuck there. But unless you want to spend way too much for the usual airport touristy crap, there's not. Especially if you don't drink.

Last time here I spent an afternoon driving up Lookout Mountain, and going to the very touristy Buffalo Bill museum. I wish I'd had more time to get off the tourist track. But the view was spectacular, and I bought the usual useless trinkets for the kids.

The thing I could not get used to was seeing open land with nothing cultivated on it. Back home if there's an acre or two of open field, someone is growing corn or soybeans or wheat on it. Out here, hardly anything grows, even when the land is left to Mother Nature to plant. It really makes me wonder why folks originally settled the area to begin with.

Perhaps I'll have time to find out on this trip, but I'm not holding my breath. There's a train ride I'd like to take, if I get the time. But chances are I'll end up barely having the time to accomplish what I'm really going there to do.

BookMooch

While updating my catalog of books on LibraryThing the other day, I discovered Bookmooch, a website for cheap book lovers everywhere. (Ok, that was poorly worded. Not inexpensive books, but miserly readers.)
The concept is simple. You get points for listing books that you want to get rid of. Other people list books they want, and if there's a match they can mooch them off of you. You ship them at the amazingly cheap Media Mail rate, and you get more points. You then use those acquired points to mooch books off of others.
The service is fairly new, in internet terms. They are just at 10,000 members. So at the moment there are lots of books on wish lists, but none of the books I put on my list were immediately available for mooching. Besides, I didn't have the points yet.
The hard part for me is going to be continually selecting books I'm willing to give away. Obviously, there are some I'll never get rid of. In fact, I rarely give away a book. Invariably I miss it somewhere down the road. I haven't read The Tommyknockers in years, but I just know that someday I'm going to have time to kill, and the desire to re-enter works from King's 'addicted' stage will come over me. (That's what that book is really about, by the way. It might be full of alien artifacts and strange mind powers, but it's really about all the crap King was shiving into his system (mostly through his nose) at the time.) But I've found five or six in my pile so far that I'm willing to be seperated from.
The fun part for me is going through the local Borders, seeing a book I like, firing up Bookmooch on my PDA and entering the ISBN into my wish list. Somewhere I gave away my copy of Wicked, and there's no way I'm going to by another. But I'll gladly mooch it from someone!

John Varley

I recently picked up Red Thunder at the airport, Varley's omage to Heinlien. It was such a great read, and what a pleasure it was to be back in VarleyLand once again. Thunder is about a group of kids and an drunk ex-astronaut who build a rocket ship, fly it to Mars, and rescue a Nasa crew along the way. Pure camp, pure entertainment, pure fun.
The best thing the book did for me was remind me how much I loved Varley's work. I went back and bought Titan, Wizard, and Demon, which make up his Gaean trilogy and just finished those. While the books certainly remind of Ringworld, that quickly goes away as Varley introduces wild ideas, creatures, characters, and situations. These are three books where literally anything can happen (biological creatures that run kerosene ramjets and drop bio-bombs!) and generally does. The characters pull us through the mayhem, in that we genuinly care what happens to them, and where they're going. Even the odd ones.
Let's just say I never expect to be saddened by the death of a blimp again.
Ultimately, one of the best things about the series is Varley's decision to put the women front and center. Yes they are flawed, and sometimes overly needy, and overly vulnerable. But they are in charge and good at it, and manage to maintain their sexuality. Perhaps not thier sanity.
Re-reading made me hope that Mr. Varley still has something up his sleave for Cirroco and Gaby. Gaea is a huge world, and there are millenia yet to fill. How about a repair mission?

Taking the Blue Pill, RTM

So here I sit, 35000 feet above the earth, trying to figure out how to summarize my experience at the TAP Hands-On event.

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: The Microsoft employees were great. They were genuinely interested in what we had to say and took our criticisms and comments seriously. They certainly went out of their way to make us feel welcome and wanted. The specialist that was assigned to us even showed up at the hotel this morning, to make sure we did not want to go to the Microsoft Store like we had discussed previously.

The last day of the event happened to be the same day as the big Microsoft yearly meeting, so all of the employees involved with the TAP gave that up to get our input and finish out the week. Maybe they'd all seen Bill speak before.

We did manage to see some sunshine yesterday, but the rain was still coming down. It's no wonder the pines and the moss and the rhododendrons thrive out here.

Now the true work is coming down the line, when we have to ramp up and test Beta 1, then 2, then pre – RTM, and finally the RTM. I'm looking forward to click on setup.exe with confidence, and turning the techs loose on the interface.

There were rumors of another get together as part of the TAP, but nothing definite. It would be nice to fly back in and have the same input into a later stage of the product, say after Beta-1. I'm thinking most of us in the states that were there would go back. I'm not too sure about the folks that were from overseas. I thought I had a long flight, but it couldn't even come close to the guy from Germany.

The entire experience has energized my thoughts about the product we're looking at and where it could help take us. I must admit it has also softened me a bit to Mictosoft in general. I'll always bleed red, but I'm no longer baised against the blue just because it's blue.

Taking the Blue Pill, RC3

Last day of the TAP hands-on testing. Customers from all over the world - Germany, Slovinia, etc - came to participate in this program.
Listening to the feedback from the other participants is an intersting window into the IT world of other companies. The off-line sessions have been valuable, gleaning info on how larger companies operate in their IT environment. Processes and utilities differ wildly. The common thread among everyone there, though, is the desire to make things better, to conform to standars, and to improve things like time to resolution and customer satisfaction. We might complain, but in the end we really do want to make things better for the end user.
It's been a long, brain-draining three days, and I'll be glad to get home. I'll also be glad to have my little list of inside contacts at Microsoft that are developing this product.

Taking the Blue Pill, RC2

Today was filled with more meetings, more debriefing, more hands on. I can't say enough about having the opportunity to sit side by side with Microsoft technical people while we go through the product, giving input and learning about why things were put together the way they were. Just having that input, being able to ask why this button is where it is, why this dialogue box is the way it is, has been the most rewarding part of the whole experience.

There are many issues to discuss, as we are looking at pre-Alpha code. Most of what we see is not fully baked, with entire sections that may get dumped, may get pushed to different products, etc. That really shows when I try to go 'off-lab', and poke around at different things and customize things to the way we might actually utilize them in our environment. Today I managed to find a bug that crashes the UI consistently, so that was kind of cool. And some would say, not atypical for any M$oft product.

One of the things that impresses me about the Microsoft campus is the ethic diversity. I don't know if it's a reflection of the area, of intentional Microsoft hiring practices, or perhaps a bit of everything. Perhaps most of all it's a reflection of my insular Midwest upbringing, where seeing families from other countries is unusual.

Lastly, the stereotypical 'rains every day' in Seattle has held true for us. Every day has been overcast, with drizzle off and on. It's a wet climate, with large trees and lots of moss around.

Taking the Blue Pill, RC1

So here I am after my first day with the Microsoft TAP program for a new product I'm probably not supposed to talk about. So while I won't talk specifics, I will talk about the experience.

I can't get used to all of the pine trees and buildings on hills. In the land of tall corn, all you see is maple, oak, and the occasional walnut. To see all of the conifers out here, still gloriously green, is somewhat breathtaking. And to look out and up to see not the sky but hills, with houses and buildings, will take some getting used to. Seattle is a beautiful place, but crowded.

The Microsoft campus gives the term gargantuan new meaning. I can't get a handle on all of the buildings involved yet, but it dwarfs everything around my home with the exception of perhaps the local college campus. It was the first cafeteria I've seen that had a food court style arrangement, with different goodies available from different locations.

But most of all I was impressed with the Microsoft staff. They genuinely cared about what we had to say, the needs we had to meet, and what we thought of their product. They took notes with eagerness, whether we said we loved a feature or thought something was stupid, or too complex, or not complex enough. They really took the time to make us feel like we had a say in where the product was going, both from a look and feel standpoint and from a roadmap overview.

The actual hands-on portion was less than thrilling. It was the kind of high level overview I experienced with the SMS / MOM training a while back. It was MUCH more interesting and informative only because we had a product engineer sitting with us, to answer questions and give input. So while we sometimes strayed wildly off topic of the task at hand, we still managed to get them completed and provide the feedback that they were looking for.

At the end of the day they crammed everyone into busses and we went to the Columbia Winery, which would be a great place to go if you're a drinker.

Hopefully tomorrow we'll hit the Microsoft Employee store, where I can get Xbox games for the kids cheap.