Craig's Musings

Today I tried a really unlikely, impossible to imagine scenario for a wireless operator – a family member (my wife), after seeing my cool new phone and using it, wanted one herself. That would NEVER come up. Edge case. Million to one shot. No one could possibly be expected to plan for that unlikely scenario.

I bought KT an iPhone a week and a half ago, and I finally had time to activate it today (I've been just slammed at work the past bit). I plugged it in and iTunes told me that I can't switch to a family plan throught the software, that I have to call the iPhone activation number. Okay, sure, why not - I call. The polite rep tells me that because I want to add a line, I have to talk to their "add a line" people (even though the number I was told to call was specifically because I wanted to add a line - but whatever). I wait on hold, waiting, waiting, thinking, man - too bad there isn't a machine that could automate repetitive tasks so that people didn't have to sit around waiting while other people did a bunch of repetitive tasks. Some day, maybe. And maybe a man on the moon, too - but I know I'm out there in my thinking. Anyway, I wait on hold, and get the "add a line" person. After explaining that I want to activate my iPhone, she tells me that she can't do iPhone activations. I had to ask - then why did I call the iPhone activation line if you can't do iPhone activations? I get back a very polite "we can't do iPhone activations from here". But I'm told that if I go to a store, that they can do it there.

Like I said, million-to-one scenario - who would have thought that a user might want to add an iPhone to an existing account and turn that existing account from an individual account into a family account? But maybe it will come up a few times, and AT&T will figure out they should support it instead of leaving a p*ssed off customer without a working iPhone. Yeesh.

Posted by Craig at 2:21 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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I'm experimenting with a variety of travel times to our SVC office - I tried "fly in at 9:30pm the night before" trick my first time - that was good for not being tired the next day, but had the downside of using the San Jose rental car buses when they are completely off schedule. I waited for over 20 minutes to ride a bus. I tried the "fly at 9am, get in at 11ish" trick last week - I liked that one, I didn't have to get up any earlier than normal. The downside is that it isn't a good travel time for a single day visit - you lose the entire morning. Today I wanted to try a day trip, so I took the early flight. I have to say, the "4am wake up to catch the 6am flight to get in 8:30ish" trick sucks the most so far. I am so tired my eyes literally can't focus properly. And I have a fairly important meeting with a key partner today, too. Gah!

On the plus side, I got to use my giant gray goiter with my iPhone on the way down and watched a couple of episodes of 24. The iPhone is a KICK ASS video iPod. The screen is super bright and easy to see even if the person beside you has the shades up, and the size is awesome - I can't go back to my video iPod, I won't!

P.S. Note the single space after each period in this post.

Posted by Craig at 12:39 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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On a recent blog posting I made on Mac Mojo, a commenter railed on my use of two spaces after a period. This one took me by surprise – I'd never see so much passion about the number of spaces after a period before. I am definitely an old school typist - while I didn't learn on a typewriter (or DOS, for that matter), I learned on a Commodore PET in 1980, then I did a ton of Unix and MVS work in the mid to late 80's. Then I discovered DOS Land in 1989, Windows Land in 1991 (where yes, there were proportional fonts), Web Land in 1998, and finally I discovered Mac Land in 2000. Up until today, no matter what Land I was in, two spaces after a period is just what I typed. Publishing content in Web Land made them go away, of course - put as many as you want, it doesn't matter. That never bothered me much - I never thought to care one way or the other. But my thumb hits two spaces as part of my hard wiring – I'm typing this entry right now trying to put only one space after the period, and it is hard to fight my thumbs.

Personally, I like the extra spacing between sentences – it improves readability for me. I tend to consume things in chunks when I read, and so more spacing helps - much like a paragraph break improves readability, too. So off I went to the World Wide Web to discover what all the hub-bub was about.

Apparently, my thumbs liking to hit space twice after a period brings me dead in the middle of a controversy: this archived discussion on Wikipedia is similar to a bunch of other debates I saw. This spawned more curiosity - of all the things for people to flog each other about, two spaces vs. one after a sentence didn't strike me as a top priority for flogging.

I did a little more digging, and it looks like I'm going to have to reprogram my thumbs:

• About.com cuts people like me a little slack, summarizing with "Professional typesetters, designers, and desktop publishers should use one space only. Save the double spaces for typewriting, email, term papers, or personal correspondence. For everyone else, do whatever makes you feel good." I wasn't so sure about the whole "if it feels good, do it" motto, so I kept searching.
• The Chicago Manual of Style says "In typeset matter, one space, not two (in other words, a regular word space), follows any mark of punctuation that ends a sentence, whether a period, a colon, a question mark, an exclamation point, or closing quotation marks." However, in the Q&A, they do cut the two space folks a little slack, but not much.
• The AP Stylebook Ask the Editor section, when searched for the word "space", will reveal that "AP uses a single space after a period at the end of a sentence."

So there you have it - one space, not two, if you are publishing something professionally. Apparently, in personal writings using two spaces is somewhat kinda sorta okay - but you'll get frowned at for doing it.

Posted by Craig at 6:01 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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I've fallen behind on this blog - the last three days have been a blur. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday in our SVC where I had a ton of 1:1's. I had a list of folks I wanted to see, and last time I was out there (2 weeks ago), I tried just "dropping by". That was a disaster - I only managed to sit down with a couple of people. Turns out people are in meetings or coding away like mad fiends… aka working. During work hours. Go figure . So this time around, I got time on people's schedules, which was a much more effective way of actually getting time with people. (yes, it is true, I am a time management genius). But that meant that I was completely booked up for two straight days, followed by today's marathon - back-to-back meetings from 9:30 to 5:30, followed by a mad dash in rush hour traffic to my father-in-laws 70th birthday gathering.

So to make a long story even longer, finally after 3 days I now have a chance to catch my breath and blog about something that really matters - the hideous four hundred foot long Belkin iPhone headphone adapter. Mine showed up while I was at SVC. Has anyone seen this thing? It's friggin' HUGE. It's over 2 inches long (okay, so it's not 400 feet). It makes my iPhone look like it sprouted a giant gray goiter. But at least it's bendy. I can bend it over 90 degrees, like a Gumby doll.

On the plus side, thanks to my iPhone's giant gray goiter, I can now use my Bose noise cancelling headphones. I can't wait for my next flight - I can retire my video iPod at last!

Posted by Craig at 10:27 PM | Permalink

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Program management is an interesting discipline at Microsoft – it was when I first joined the company, it remains so now. It is a role that requires good "soft skills" ("I'm a people person"), good prioritization skills, good analysis skills, good presentation skills, and being able to walk that Zen line of "good enough" when shipping product. It's half art, half science, half Buddhist monk, half evangelist (arithmetic skills aren't really a requirement, though). It is a neat role that you don't see at a lot of other places – you'll see the title Program Manager, or Project Manager, but it is rare that you see Microsoft Program Management in action (although, as Rick points out, occasionally the more feature-happy Program Managers need to be put in their place).

I was never a Program Manager at Microsoft, I started as a Technical Evangelist (technical marketing) and then transitioned to a software development role and worked my way from there. I made the jump to general management in April of 1998, but I was still fairly heavily development biased in my thinking. My self-selected career track of leaving Microsoft to start a company really threw me into the realm of Program Management for the first time. Investors, customers, employees – that list of skills I mention up front turns out to be REALLY handy. Over the past 7 1/2 years, I've found that one can Program Manage anything to get the results one wants. I'd been doing it unconsciously for the first 35 years of my life, but once one is doing it consciously, watch out. It helped me navigate everything from raising money during the most hostile environment to startups in a long time to navigating the halls of a media company.

About seven months ago, my (just turned) six year old son was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. We got lucky in that he didn't end up hospitalized – normally, how you find out your pancreas has stopped producing insulin is that you start to lose weight and you get really sick. But he had his six year checkup a week after he had started to wet the bed out of the blue, so we mentioned the bed wetting to the doctor, and bam – one urine test and a trip to the hospital later, we had our diagnosis. His blood glucose levels were north of 450 (60-120 is normal for non-diabetics) and his A1C result was 8.2% (<6% is normal for a non-diabetic, good control for a diabetic is < 7%). Point blood glucose tests tell you how you are doing at any given moment, but they tell you nothing about the hours in between. A1C really is the ultimate metric – it is your body's memory of how your blood sugars have been behaving. So the 8.2% showed us that while his initial blood glucose reading of 450+ was wildly high, it hadn't been wildly high for the past 3 months – just way too high.

Anyway, after the initial shock was over, I set about in a methodical way to understand how his body used carbohydrates and how it consumed the injected insulin, and to put in place a discipline and a methodology to really manage his diabetes. I did a ton of research up front (and continue to this day). An Access database was born, along with a tightly watched and tweaked rhythm for eating and exercising. Far more than the suggested minimum number of daily blood glucose readings became part of the program – after all, the pancreas does it continuously, so the more the information we have to help us substitute for the pancreas, the better. Part of the fun along the way was the evangelism of doctors and nurses to get the extra supplies we need (I am a huge fan of redundancy and long term planning). A lot of questioning and pushing back against medical advice that didn't fit what I was seeing in the patterns of the numbers was a big part of the fun – although we have switched to Children's Hospital in Seattle where the staff seems much more knowledgeable and much more willing to listen to reason, so I'm having to deal with less crap now. Every day is a day that something could go wrong and every day requires careful attention, but we are really in the zone now.

Once every 3 months, we have to take our son to Children's for a checkup. Today was that day. The travel and the appointment take about a half-day all told, and they poke, they prod, they ask questions – oh, and they measure his A1C. Today it was 5.8%

You can Program Manage anything.

Posted by Craig at 7:15 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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Microsoft has a fiscal year that ends June 30th and our performance review cycle is set to that same timing. That means in July, things get busy for managers at Microsoft - reviews to read, comments to write, and rewards to distribute. The last time I was involved in an annual review cycle at Microsoft was June of 1999 - eight years ago. Shockingly, the tools have changed from 8 years ago. So tonight was my "suck it up and learn the tools" night. Some of our stuff is amazing - huge improvements from years ago. Some is still a work in progress. But all of it, the great and not as great, has the goal of helping managers do a better job of guiding and rewarding employees. It is great to come back eight years later and see how much progress Microsoft has made on that front - we really are committed to taking care of our employees and managing their careers. It's cool.

However, there is only so much time in tools that one can take. By about 9pm, my brain was full and my contacts were dried out, so I headed home. And there were packages waiting - sweet, sweet Fed-Ex packages full of stuff I'd ordered a few days ago. iPhone accessories (an additional iPhone dock and a pack of universal dock adapters were the first to arrive, more stuff coming), Wii accessories (more Wii-motes and MarioParty 8), and three completely unrelated hi-def movies - on Blu-Ray, Ghost Rider and Bridge to Terabithia and on HD-DVD, BBC's planet earth. My iPhone is now nestled in my Altec Lansing inMotion portable speaker/amplifier and blaring "Thunderstruck" by AC/DC and I'm trying to decide between watching Ghost Rider and checking out MarioParty on my Wii. A nice break from review tools!!

Happy Friday!

Posted by Craig at 10:03 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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You know, being a Canadian and an American, there is a bit of cognitive dissonance in celebrating telling the British to shove it 231 years ago. After all, Canada still is a member of the British family - we still have a Governor General to represent the Queen and everything. On the other hand, I'd rather have the American three-tier system of government and the American "land of opportunity" entrepreneurial spirit than anything else, so I guess I'll just have to suck it up and say "Happy Independence Day!"

Speaking of cognitive dissonance, I find myself torn. I love my new iPhone - it is a great internet device, media device, and phone. On the other hand, I really, REALLY, REALLY miss Exchange ActiveSync - Windows Mobile 5/6 + Exchange 2007 is an awesome combination for mobile mail and calendar. The iPhone currently is lacking for someone who wants all the stuff that is great about iPhone AND to have a corporate life. So in the spirit of the 4th of July, I decided to have a little "iPhone SIM Revolution" tonight and see if I could get my new AT&T SIM from my iPhone working in my Samsung i320 (the original Blackjack - still an all time favorite of mine).

I'm happy to report a roaring success - my i320 is working great, as is my iPhone - all it does is complain about "no SIM" on power up. The cool part is that my iPhone is now an awesome WiFi enabled iPod/Browser/YouTube device - it all works GREAT.

For my own reference in the future, after the break are the settings that it took to get data working on an unlocked Windows Mobile phone for AT&T.

Under Settings/Connections, Add a Proxy connection:
Connects From: The Internet
Connects To: WAP network
Proxy: wireless.cingular.com:80
Type: HTTP
Username: leave blank
Password: leave blank

Under Settings/Connections, Add a GPRS connection:
Connects to: The Internet
Access Point: wap.cingular
User Name: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Password: CINGULAR1
Primary DNS: 0.0.0.0
Secondary DNS: 0.0.0.0
IP address: leave blank

Under Pocket IE Options/Connections:
Automatically detect settings: Leave Unchecked
Select Network: Wap Network

Posted by Craig at 11:24 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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I actually found myself holding my breath a couple times during this vivisection of an iPhone.

Posted by Craig at 9:58 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment | TrackBacks (0)

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The bottom floor of our new home was unfinished when we moved in at the end of March - it had 3 great big rooms, but the previous owners just never needed the space. I had it finished and turned into a fantastic home office. Work completed a few weeks ago and I love it - it is great to have a space of my own again.

I put in a nice LCD HDTV with every possible media type connected - a PS-3 (Blu-Ray/games), an Xbox 360 Elite with HD-DVD player (games/media center extender/HD-DVD), a Wii, an Apple TV, plus DirecTV. I have HD sources coming out my ears. A nice comfortable chair topped it off - I have couch potato nirvana in my home office.

What's my point, you ask? Well, last night I was having "Craig Time" - it starts every Sunday around 4 or 5pm - where I have no dad or husband duties - I get to putter in my office. So what do I do? I start to putter with my iPhone, and suddenly I look at the time, and I realize that I have been watching Starship Troopers (a favorite) on my iPhone for 90 minutes - while sitting next to a 46" LCD Tv. Oh, in a desk chair instead of my comfy chair.

I am pathetic!

(but my new iPhone is cool)

Posted by Craig at 6:46 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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While I've been a US citizen for four years now, I've also been a Canadian for forty two years. So happy Canada Day, everyone! Here is one of my favorite Molson (yes, the beer people) ads in their "I am Canadian" theme:

Posted by Craig at 8:55 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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Today is my first real day on my iPhone. So far I'm loving it - there are so many nice touches it is hard to keep track of them all. Sitting here typing this in Chuck E. Cheese, though, I sure wish it had games of some kind to kill time (my iPod games I bought last year wouldn't sync). And I miss OTA Exchange support already - IMAP doesn't appear to be enabled at work.

I am getting better with the keyboard by the minute, although this post was still a little painful to type. But the cool part is that I could do this post using the MovableType web interface!

Back to small hollering boy guard duty!

Posted by Craig at 1:54 PM | Permalink | | Leave a comment

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