Riding Herd : Random

iPod woes continue

jmazner — Fri, 13 May 2005 10:29:00 GMT

After another visit to the Apple store, and another struggle with the Genius bar, I'm now in a state where iTunes blue-screens (BAD_POOL_CALLER) when I plug in my iPod. If I uninstall iTunes, I can connect the iPod to my PC and it behaves like a nice normal FireWire drive. But if iTunes, or the related iTunesService or IPodHelper services are running, I get the blue screen.

This is no fun at all. If anyone has a contact at Apple who wants to diagnose the mini-dump of the blue-screen, let me know ;) As it stands, I have a pretty worthless iPod right now. I suppose I could uninstall iTunes, connect as a firewire drive, and just copy all my music across, but I bet it won't transfer licenses for the songs I bought from the store.

[update: I see I'm not the only person who's had these sort of problems -- this thread sounds like the behavior I was seeing before the Apple folks reset my iPod.]

[update #2: I finally got my iPod happy again by giving up on FireWire. I brought my laptop and iPod into the Apple store and asked them to loan me an iPod USB cable (part number M9569G/A) to see if that worked. It did. $19 later, I had my own USB sync cable and was re-filling my pod with tunes.]

FWIW, the way I got my Genius bar appointment was to keep hitting the reservation page every 30min or so from work, starting at about noon. The page tells you what timeslot it's going to give you. At noon, it wanted to give me a 2pm timeslot (no good, since I couldn't leave work so early.) By 3:30pm, it was handing out timeslots around 8pm, which worked out fine for me, so that's what I signed up for. I got to the store 20 min early in case the line was moving fast, and had another poor customer service experience -- the Genius suggested I hang around the store since I'd be up in about 10 minutes. 30 minutes later, it was finally my turn. The Genius spent half an hour doing some diagnostics on the iPod, flashed the firmware and reformatted the hard drive. He concluded the iPod hardware was working fine, so there must be something wrong with my PC. It didn't seem to occur to him that maybe it's something wrong with iTunes ;)

Mr. Sketch is great!

jmazner — Wed, 11 May 2005 08:29:00 GMT

After two grumpy posts, here's a feel-good post. I've had two day-long meeting/training things each of the last two weeks. And at both of them, I was pleasantly surprised that, when it came time to do some team writing excercises on a sketch pad, we got to use scented markers! Sanford's Mr. Sketch markers, in particular.

Fun smelling markers seem to bring out the kid in everyone. The red ones really smell like cherry! You could see everyone's face light up as we passed the various colors around to see what each one smelled like. One guy scribbled a bunch on the sketch pad and then sniffed the pad to see how strong the scent would be.

A couple scented markers lightened the whole mood of our meetings.

Customer service too good to be true: Apple and iPod

jmazner — Wed, 11 May 2005 07:56:00 GMT

So speaking of over promising and under delivering: I just returned home from one of the most frustrating customer service experiences I've had, courtesy of the Apple store near my home.

Last year, I bought my wife an iPod for her birthday. At the time, there were no Windows Media devices that seemed even remotely as functional and fun as the iPod, so that's what I went with. It's been a great device, and worked well for us for the past 11 months. Last week, I wanted to buy some new songs from the iTunes music store and synch them to my iPod. That's when my troubles began. Long story short, it seemed like my iPod's hard drive was corrupted somehow.

On Saturday morning, I got to the Apple store just as it was opening, and headed over to the Genius Bar. It wasn't clear to me how their sign up list was supposed to work, but I was the first one there, and the resident Genius typed in my name and asked about my problem. He started walking me through the basics (do a soft reset, run the Updater, etc), all of which I had tried. He then suggested that I force the iPod into disk mode (by first doing a soft reset, and then holding down the << and >> buttons,) and then use the Updater app to do a hard restore of the software. Well, another long story made short, it didn't work. I got a wide variety of interesting errors and hard hangs of my PC thanks to some apparent conflicts between the latest iTunes and the latest iPod Updater, but no luck upgrading the iPod.

After dinner this evening, I drove back to the Apple store to get the iPod repaired. The greeter at the door was very nice and said she was sure that if the previous Genius Bar instructions hadn't worked, I could just swap for a new iPod under warranty (which expires next week, by the way ;) She pointed me to her manager, and I explained the situation. He noted that the Genius Bar sign up list was full for the night, but suggested I talk to another sales associate who's an iPod guru. I talked to that guy, and he said "yep, we should just give you a new iPod."

That, for those of you still reading, is the "over-promise" part ;) What a lovely way to make your customers happy, to say that 1) we acknowledge the problem, 2) we assume it's our fault at this point, and 3) you deserve a new, functioning iPod immediately.

All I have to do in order to make the swap is to check back in with the Genius Bar. Seems simple, no? Well, unfortunatley the Genius Bar is booked up for tonight. Ah, so how about I make an appointment to come back tomorrow instead? Sure, says the sales rep, just vist the store's home page at 9:30 in the morning, sign up for Genius Bar time, and it will tell you when to come by. Hmmm...."But," I tell him, "I have to work tomorrow, so if it tells me to come by at 10am, I can't do it." He assures me that it's really a very nice system and that I'll be helped at precisely the time it assigns to me. That's not going to help me with the problem of leaving work for an hour to drive to the store and back, though.

So I ask the sales guy whether I can just make an appointment to come back to the Genius Bar tomorrow night. Nope! The only way to schedule a Genius Bar timeslot in advance is to pay $99 for a ProCare card. If you don't have a ProCare card, the Genius Bar schedules you, not the other way around.

I suggested, in as kind and friendly a manner as I could, that we better find a different way for me to get my iPod replaced under warranty. He agreed, had a chat with his manager, and then interrupted the resident Genius to explain for 5 minutes what my situation was. Neither one of them actually asked me any questions, but the Genius said "yeah, we should replace it for him. But the queue is closed for tonight." Could the sales rep make the swap for me now? Nope! Apparently there was some extra step that Genius had to perform that would involve talking with me, and despite the fact that he could spare a few minutes for the sales rep, he couldn't spare the same amount of time for me.

So what does the sales rep suggest I do to get my hands on a working iPod? "You sure you can't just sign up for a time tomorrow morning?" His other suggestions included an hour long round trip to a different store down by the airport, or coming back tomorrow as soon as I could after work and signing up for the Genius Bar. "But there's usually a two hour wait by that time of day," he warned me.

What a crazy system! I wonder how many Apple customers end up paying the $99 for a ProCare card in order to actually reserve a time that works for them, rather than being at the mercy of the Genius Bar's daily schedule? I guess I'm going to bring my laptop and camp out at the store for a few hours some night this week. Apple took only 30 minutes today to go from exceeding my expectations to vastly under-delivering.

Customer service too good to be true: ATT and Audiovox

jmazner — Wed, 11 May 2005 07:36:00 GMT

I'm in a mood to rant about poor customer service experiences I've had lately. Since one of them is about Apple, I figured I better start by posting the other one, which is related to Microsoft technology.

Back in November, I bought an Audiovox SMT 5600 smartphone through my cell carrier, AT&T (now Cingular). This is the first smartphone I've owned, and I've really enjoyed it. Having access to my calendar, contacts and email with over the air synch has been a huge benefit for me. But as it turned out, my particular phone wasn't quite put together right. There was some sort of shielding problem that caused a buzzing on most of my phone calls. It got progessively worse after several months, so I figured I may as well get the thing repaired.

The 5600 comes with a year long warranty. So I called the AT&T store from whom I purchased the phone. They told me to call AT&T Wireless's warranty department, and the warranty department, in turn, told me that AT&T isn't responsible for the warranty, Audivox is. Okay, next call goes to Audiovox warranty (800-229-1235, option 1, then 2, then 3). The person who answers the phone is very nice, and tells me they have a deal that sounds too good to be true -- for $20, they will overnight me a brand new phone, and then I can just send them back the old phone. $20 for a brand new phone sounds like a nice deal, especially since I had already scratched my phone up a bit. The other option would be for me to send my old phone in and wait for them to repair it and send it back. The service agent lets me know that they usually turn around these phones in a day, so I would only be without my phone for a week, tops.

I took a couple days to ponder, and then decided to go with the $20 new phone deal. It sounded too good to be true -- and guess what, it was! When I called back, they told me they were temporarily out of replacement phones. Okay, could they tell me when more phones would be in? Maybe in a couple weeks, they say. Okay, can you reserve one for me and just send it to me once it's in? No, we have no way to do that. Okay, can you call me when the new phones are in? No, we have no way to do that. You should just call back in a couple weeks.

This exact process repeated itself for over a month. I'd call, they'd say they didn't have any replacement phones, didn't know when more would arrive, and couldn't do anything to help me out. It was starting to sound like this $20 replacement deal was around just to say they had a nice warranty policy, and it could never actually be used.

Eventually I broke down and mailed in my phone. While I had been told it would take only a day to repair, they didn't tell me that it would also take two days just to enter into the system once it arrived at the warehouse ;) My week without a phone was starting to stretch into two weeks by the time they had finally looked at the phone and tried to diagnose it.

There is a good ending to the story -- they decided the phone was defective, and sent me a new one at no charge. So I ended up getting my new phone, but only after a long stretch of frustrating interactions with Audiovox.

Audiovox over promised and under delivered, and that counts as poor customer service in my book.

Ralph Reed

jmazner — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 10:05:00 GMT

My wife said that one of her colleagues today asked her why Microsoft would hire Ralph Reed as a lobbyist. How about because given the wonders of our political system, hiring conservative lobbyists is the only way to get your voice heard in DC these days?

DeLay organized the “K Street Project” in the 1990s to help Republicans grab more special-interest money in Washington. This scheme—named for the D.C. street that is home to many lobby shops—threatens corporations and trade groups with political reprisals if they hire Democrats as top lobbyists.

I think it’s crazy to assume that Reed was ever asked to ponder social value or civil rights issues. The New York Times thinks so too, according to this, which says “the initial New York Times story makes it pretty clear that Microsoft thought it was hiring Reed to lobby Bush”. You hire Ralph Reed to get the attention of the Republican majority, that's all.

Is it terrible that Microsoft feels like it has to have a strong lobby presence in order to achieve business goals? Yes. Fortune had an interesting article a few years back that explained the history of the MS lobbying effort. It’s not a very flattering story, and it gets the cause and effect backwards when it says MS “has created a model for influencing government that other companies are sure to follow.” The point, however, is sadly clear: the companies with the $$ and the lobbyists are better off than those without. When your competitors are spending money in DC and you aren’t, you lose. So now Microsoft spends money in DC.

Is it particularly terrible that Tom DeLay’s K Street Project means that it’s no longer just about spending $$ in DC, it’s now about spending $$ with DeLay’s favorite Republican buddies? Yep.

It’s a crooked game, but it’s the only game in town.

As always, my writings represent only my own views, and are not intended to reflect those of my employer.

When Shared Documents aren't

jmazner — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 20:13:00 GMT

I just spent an hour helping a friend debug the strangest problem I've seen here at the Friends And Family Helpdesk.

John sent me an email asking why his Shared Documents folder had been renamed to Documents, and why he now gets Access Denied errors every time he tries to browse into it. Through the wonders of XP's Remote Assistance feature, I was able to take control of his machine and do some investigating.

I figured I'd start by looking at the Users and Groups MMC snap-in to see what kind of account he had, and then use the Security tab on the folder to take ownership or change ACLs as needed. As it turns out, he's running XP Home, which offers neither of these features. But even Home includes cacls.exe, so I used that to see what was going on.

The good news, I suppose, is that everything made sense -- running cacls "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents" showed that the ACL for the folder was empty, no users had permission to do anything. I was able to fix it by doing a "/g builtin\administrators:F /t", although I kept getting permission denied errors on some of the subfolders, and had to manually re-run the same command on them.

The bad news is that I am totally stumped as to how this could have happened. It doesn't seem like the Home UI offers any possible way to muck with folder ACLs. I know John didn't do any hacking with cacls. And his virus checker reports the machine is clean. Really strange stuff. I also couldn't figure out how to tell the shell UI to display the name as "Shared Documents" rather than just "Documents". John told me that he recently installed Picassa 2.0 and used it to delete some of the pictures in the Shared Docs folder, but I can't imagine why Picassa would ever get invovled in changing ACLs.

I guess there's no real point to this post other than to say wow, that was a strange problem.

[Update: it seems my friend has not been the only person to get into this state: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;813649&Product=PlusDig]

Evangelism jobs available

jmazner — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 23:04:00 GMT

Our team is looking to hire some new evangelists. Here are the details and links to information on the Microsoft.com jobs site. We are starting to interview for some of these positions, so if you’re interested, 1) apply via the website, and 2) send me a note via this blog once your application/resume are in the system.

Three of the positions we have open are what I’d consider to be typical technical evangelism roles, each one focusing on a different technology area:

evangelizing ISVs to build on the Whidbey .NET FX and WinFX, evangelizing developer tools and components developers to add Whidbey and WinFX support to their products, and evangelizing those same tools and components folks to integrate their functionality directly into VisualStudio (via VSIP).

These three positions are all about developing expertise in a particular technology, being able to simply and memorably demonstrate the value of that technology to other developers, and helping early adopter customers succeed in implementing the technology. You’ll work not only with partners and customers at leading ISVs and enterprise IT shops, but also with hundreds of other Microsoft evangelists worldwide who will take your message to their local partners. Most of the technical evangelists on the team have experience building products, as either developers or as program managers, and they tend to be the sorts of folks who look forward to giving talks at conferences.

We also have two positions (here and here) with a slightly different focus. While all our evangelists are expected to understand both technical and business value, I’d say these two particular positions require more on the business value side, and less on the technical side. They’re more about very clearly articulating how Microsoft technologies will deliver compelling business value to a particular company or market segment – and doing so directly to a CxO level executive at one of those companies. Less experience as a programmer in favor of more experience doing product planning or business development might make you a better fit for these jobs, although you’ll still be expected to have a strong grasp of the technology.

Back from vacation

jmazner — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 17:00:00 GMT

My blog has been quiet the past few weeks because of travel, both for work and vacation. If your idea of a nice vacation is spending a week in the sun, with ocean, pool and kitchen only a few steps away from each other, you might enjoy Ocean Palms as much as my friends and I did last week. Hard to be sitting in front of a keyboard and monitor again after that!

When a journalist blogs, is it journalism? or blogging?

jmazner — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 05:56:00 GMT

Random thought that hit me as I was reading Jon Udell's blog entries on Longhorn. What's the difference between his blog entries, and his news analysis pieces or columns in InfoWorld? They seem to be of the same caliber of writing and analysis. Is it just a question of length, or does Jon have a different standard for content that goes into his blog, vs. content that goes into a formal story in InfoWorld?

Scoble has had some entries about what blogging means for journalism. I don't have much of an opinion on this, but it would be very interesting to hear what Jon, Mary-Jo, or David Coursey (is AnchorDesk now gone in favor of David's blog?) have to say. Does a quick blog entry meet the same standards and go through the same background and vetting process as a “real” story? Is a blog entry equally as obligated to represent both sides of a controversy, or is it expected to only represent the journalist's point of view? Are blogs supposed to be more of a conversation -- and if so, should they always have comments enabled?

"You work for crooks, Jeremy"

jmazner — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 18:19:00 GMT

I got into an interesting discussion in the comments on Dan Gillmor’s column about Microsoft’s behavior. Dan concludes that “Microsoft won’t reform itself.” Because I like my job and don’t like sitting in depositions, I opted to not comment on any of the legal issues, but to contrast with Dan’s list of negatives, I did point out what I thought were some positive changes in the way Microsoft interacts with partners. (Other commenters on the article took on Dan’s point directly, eg: “the Lindows business plan has been to provoke Microsoft […] so they don't need to demonstrate usefulness of the product”)

I wrote:

But surely you've seen some positive changes in the last few years as well, no? The Rotor shared source implementation of .NET (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/Dndotnet/html/mssharsourcecli.asp)? The broader Shared Source initiative (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/mar04/03-15SSIOneMillionPR.asp)? The royalty-free license to the Office 2003 XML schemas (http://blogs.msdn.com/jmazner/archive/2004/02/23/78903.aspx)? The work with IBM, BEA and others to ensure interoperable web services implementations via WS-I (http://www.ws-i.org/)? The hundreds of Microsoft employees reaching out to the developer community via blogs (http://blogs.msdn.com/)? More frequent Visual Studio technology previews (http://weblogs.asp.net/jaybaz_ms/archive/2004/02/21/77796.aspx)?

In response, Ron Talbott said he’s seen no positive changes from MS, writing “The "changes" you've described have almost zero effect on the anti-competitive practices that are at the core of MS' business strategy” and concluded “You work for crooks, Jeremy”. Another commenter, Bobby, wrote “why are we supposed to applaud Microsoft's taking a step?”

I’m not the guy who sets Microsoft’s business strategy. I’m not the guy who is in the meeting when all the execs discuss how to set business strategy. I’m not even the guy who gets to see the notes from that meeting ;) But from my perspective down in the trenches, as someone who’s spent most of the last 8 years building software for MS, the business strategy I see is “build good software that does what customers need, then sell it to them.”

Any meeting I’m in where product team folks are debating features, the discussion is always centered on what will be best for customers. I’ve spent the last two years trying to make sure that the Longhorn platform offers the right set of functionality to developers. Sometimes people make the wrong decision. Sometimes they make a good decision, but it looks like a wrong decision. But most of the time they make good decisions, and build a good product. If they build a bad product that doesn’t satisfy customer needs, then no one uses it, and it either dies, or goes back to the drawing board for v2.

For a long time, none of the decision making process was exposed to the world outside of Redmond. But now we have hundreds of employees writing about how and why we make these decisions every day. And I think initiatives like Rotor, the Office schema licensing, and WSI show that we are increasingly making decisions to promote interoperability. I don’t understand how, looking at these changes in the past few years, Ron sees them as indication that I work for crooks.

To Bobby’s point: I’m not asking you to applaud anything. Just tell us “yes, this is good”, or “no, this is bad”. We listen, and we adjust based on what our customers and partners tell us. If the community tells us that WSI is a good thing, and you agree that interoperability with IBM and BEA is an admirable goal, then we’ll continue to work on that. If you tell us that it’s a mistake and not meeting your needs, then we’ll adjust accordingly. If you say nothing, we have no idea whether we’re meeting your needs or not.

When good ideas look bad

jmazner — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 07:12:00 GMT

Chris’s blog has been particularly good at making clear the process a product team will go through to try to ship a product that meets their users’ needs. Certainly on the product teams I worked on, we made decisions based on what would be best for our customers – or at least what we thought would be best for our customers. Sometimes we got it right, sometimes we were wrong and had to change direction, but it was always about the customers. I was often frustrated when the media would pick up on a bad decision that was made with the best of intents, and make it look like a deliberate choice to cause customer pain. Even more frustrating than that, however, is when we do this to ourselves without any help from the press at all ;)

Here’s an example that I stumbled onto last week when my wife forwarded me a mail from a professor. A product team made a good decision, but we managed to make it look like a bad one.

Here’s the story of the good decision they made (* gathered second hand, I wasn’t on the team involved): Since at least Office ’97, Microsoft has included in the Office Resource Kit a utility called the Converter Pack. It’s a bunch of file importers and exporters that allow Office apps to deal with file types beyond what we ship in the main Office package.

Because these converters are built to understand specific file formats, they never really need to change once they’ve been shipped. If you’ve got a piece of code that does a good job of importing files in WordPerfect 5.0 format, and that format is never ever going to change again, that code should be able to live in maintenance mode for quite some time. You could just keep shipping the same binary over and over again, unless there was some dramatic change in circumstances.

Well, between 1998 and 2002, there was indeed a pretty dramatic change in circumstances at Microsoft, in the form of the Trustworthy Computing initiative. A renewed focus on security-hardened products meant increasing the scrutiny of every line of code that Microsoft shipped, including even the little side projects like the Office Converter Pack.

But inspecting and updating the source to all of the converters turns out be trickier than one might think. In some instances, the key logic of the converter was something we licensed from a 3^rd party, and all we ever got was a .DLL or .lib. In other cases, we had source-level licenses, but they didn’t include permissions to modify the code. And even if there was source code that we were able to change, it might well have last been built several years back, and to rebuild it now with a new version of the compiler, new shared libraries, etc, would mean introducing a lot of potential destabilization.

So you’re the Office team, you’ve got these converters with source that you can’t ensure is up to the quality required by the Trustworthy Computing initiative, and you’ve got customers who are clamoring for the next release of your product. What do you do? You take a good hard look at those converters, you analyze what your customers need, and you try to make the right decisions.

If a lot of customers are depending on a particular converter, you bite the bullet, re-write the thing, and code review and test to make sure it’s up to snuff. But you know you can’t re-write them all without slipping the schedule and irritating customers, so, on the other hand, if very few customers are using a converter, or there’s a good workaround, you decide to stop shipping it.

For example, if you’re looking at a hypothetical FooWriterPro exporter for Word that you licensed in 1996, but every version of FooWriterPro since 1998 has been able to import Word documents perfectly, you might well conclude that it’s better to drop the FooWriterPro exporter than deal with the stability and schedule risk of re-writing it to modern day standards.

Okay, that was a long set-up, but hopefully you’ll agree with me that faced with the choice of shipping a converter of unknown security standards, substantially re-writing a converter, or dropping a converter from the product, there are some circumstances when the right choice for customers is to drop the converter. In this particular case, the support team even went to the extra effort to keep the old converter around as an emergency backup – in the event that a customer called product support and absolutely, positively needed to use that converter, support could provide it to them (with appropriate warnings about the history and trustworthiness of the code.)

The last piece of the puzzle is that, as part of this security focus, we removed all of the older Converter Pack installs from ms.com. Instead, the Office 2003 Converter Pack, with it’s security-reviewed converters, was designed to install back onto older versions of Office as well, so that they too could have the new, strengthened converters.

To me, it sounds like a good decision.

But here’s how it looked to at least one of our customers using OfficeXP.

He discovered one of our KB articles, which said “The Office Converter Packs for Microsoft Office XP users, Microsoft Office 2000 users, and Microsoft Office 97 users have been retired and are no longer available for downloading.” First conclusion: damn, Microsoft is hosing older Office users, and forcing us to upgrade to Office 2003 if we want to use these converters.

Then he looked at a second KB which described what converters are available in the Office 2003 pack. The KB makes no mention of any older converters no longer being supported, but when he looked at the fine print of included converters, he noticed that an exporter he used is no longer there. Second conclusion: the sneaky bastards, they’re quietly removing exporters, so that I can only mail .DOC files to my co-workers.

Result: one unhappy customer.

He didn’t understand the trade-off the Office team made, because the KB articles didn’t explain it. He didn’t realize that the 2003 Converter Pack would work with Office XP, 2000 and ’97, because the KB articles didn’t explain that either. And he didn’t know that if it was a vital business need, our product support team would have been happy to send him the missing converter – again, because the KB articles didn’t explain it. In fact, we set ourselves up for failure, because the only way a customer will get the converter they need is to become angry enough to call product support and ask for it. So even if we provide it to them at that point, it’s only after they’ve gotten upset with us. All that pain could have been averted by adding just a few simple paragraphs to a KB article…

Postscript: as it turns out, the Office team has started hearing that, actually, there are some real needs for this particular converter, situations where there is no good workaround. And because the Office team tries to make the right decision based on user needs, they are out talking to customers now, re-evaluating whether they should do the work to revive this converter and bring it up to today’s standards for security and reliability.

Post-postcript: I’ve sent some mail to the Office and product support folks responsible for these KB articles, and they’re willing to discuss whether they should be revised to provide more detail.

Online geek golfing

jmazner — Sat, 06 Mar 2004 01:39:00 GMT

I'm not the first one to notice, but my teammate Jeff Sandquist has set up an XBox Live! community for the online equivalent of Scoble’s geek dinners. Seems like a neat way to play some online Links while meeting other members of the software community. I haven’t bought the game yet, as I generally embarrass myself pretty badly when it comes to golfing of any sort.

A little bit of politics is a dangerous thing...

jmazner — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 21:04:00 GMT

I’ve been wavering on whether or not to blog about stuff un-related to work. Scoble’s post inspired me, though, to think about when it makes sense to voice personal opinions. What would I have expected of any American with a public venue in, for example, May of 1954, to say about what was happening to their country?

Boy, one paragraph in, and I’m already starting to sound self-righteous ;) But I concluded that I can’t be silent in the face of a nation-wide debate (or at least shouting match, thanks Fox News) about civil rights for gays. I don’t want to start a long rant, I’m not going to try to change anyone’s mind, but I want to raise my voice in support of equal protection for homosexual couples who want to make a lifetime commitment to each other. Keeping quiet on this issue feels like delusional ignorance or cowardice, I’m not sure which.

I believe in the importance of a strong family infrastructure, of making sure that every child is raised by loving, supportive parents who are as committed to each other as they are to their children, and who represent a positive role model of love and respect. I’m none too keen on government legislation to enforce such things, but if that’s something you support, I suggest asking your legislative representatives to consider a bill that requires a two-year waiting period before granting a marriage license (to better assure the commitment of the couple and their long-term viability) – that seems like a far more likely way to improve the foundation of a family that by banning homosexual marriage.

I have yet to see a compelling argument for why homosexual marriage should be disallowed, while all sorts of short-lived, or abusive, or otherwise morally deficient heterosexual marriages would be allowed to persist. I particularly can’t stand the argument that judges enforcing Constitutional (federal or state) rights to equality are judicial activists acting against the will of the people, that sounds straight of 1954 to me. GatorGSA has a tongue-in-cheek response to some of the arguments that have been thrown out there.

A reminder of disclaimers: Opinions here are my own, and are not intended to reflect those of my employer, and I reserve the right to delete any comment that I feel is inappropriate.

Okay, forget the easter eggs

jmazner — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 06:22:00 GMT

Haven't yet seen one person in favor of easter eggs, and in fact Tom points out that Microsoft's own book on security best practices proscribes avoiding easter eggs. So I'm willing to be swayed by the masses (or at least the few of you who posted comments or blogs ;) that easter eggs should stay gone. None the less, a few parting thoughts:

1) even those who oppose easter eggs said they remember fondly the Excel 3D game easter eggs

2) Is there any other feature of Excel that anyone remembers fondly? I wonder if people ever reminisce about the great look of the menu bar in Excel 97, or the lovely properties dialog in Word 95. Easter eggs, even if they are nothing more than a creative way to put your name in lights, do bring some character to apps and put a bit of a human face on software. User benefit? Nil. Unless you liked playing the 3D game ;)

3) I think it's great if a programmer feels sufficiently proud of her work to want to assoicate her name with it forever (the Mac signature thing is a striking example of this, to me.)

So, RIP, easter eggs. What we've gained in app stability and rigid engineering process (which, admittedly, benefits users and sells software,) we've lost in fun and character (which admittedly does neither).

Easter egg follow-up

jmazner — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 15:43:00 GMT

Tom says there's no excuse for adding easter eggs. I think this post of mine has generated more activity than anything I've written about WinFS or Longhorn ;)

I'm not going to advocate that every developer ought be able to spend as much time as they want checking in hidden features willy nilly. But I think there is something to be said for allowing developers to add some personal expression and creativity to a product that they spend years building.

The original Mac had the signatures of all the designers on the interior shielding of the case. To me, that shows pride, and passion, for the product they worked on. At their best, easter eggs serve the same purpose (although admittedly adding code to software is higher risk than carving your name into a piece of shielding).

I also strongly disagree with the notion that developers ought to be spending every minute of their time at work writing code. While that's clearly their #1 job, if you hired only developers who sit at their desk all day writing code (and don't take time out to experiment, or be creative, or de-stress at the foosbal table, or whatever), I think your product would be worse off.

[update: fixed spelling of easter in the first sentence ;]