Scott Blomquist's space: Personal

Blog is moving

Sat, 14 Jul 2007 05:18:42 GMT

I'm moving my blog to what will probably be its final resting place: http://Scott.Blomqui.st. At least for a while, I'll mention new posts over there on here so that those of you who "subscribe" via Live Messenger will be kept up to date. As brilliant as the Messenger Gleam is, you're going to have to use a news reader.

Live Spaces could possibly win me back if they start allowing OpenID. I'd like to use http://Scott.Blomqui.st, which is Secured by Vidoop, although my prediction is that the "big guys" allow their users use their Live ID, etc. as OpenIDs elsewhere on the web, but disallow the use of external credentials in their walled gardens. Only time will tell.

In Seattle this weekend

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 18:18:05 GMT

Hey, everybody. I'll be back in Seattle this weekend (January 27 & 28). Anything fun going on?

A typical day in Tulsa

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 04:43:13 GMT

I can't believe I'm coming up on the end of my second month at my new job in Tulsa. Here's a picture of a normal day for me.

I wake up around 7:20am to an NPR station. I love the little fanfare that Morning Edition uses to introduce their business section. One of these days, I'll figure out how to record it—I think it'd make a good ring tone. There's also this guy that talks about "the Oklahoma state temperature". He says "the Oklahoma state temperature is 34", just as if it's the same sort of observation as "the Oklahoma state flower is mistletoe" or "the Oklahoma state bird is the scissortail flycatcher". I don't quite understand how an entire state can have a temperature, unless we're talking Rhode Island. But I guess that's neither here nor there.

Like most cities in the plains states, Tulsa is laid out on an enormous grid with 1 mile between points. Also like most plains cities, it has a fabric of highways woven throughout the city (not "freeways" here, unlike the west coast). My drive to and from work is about 20 minutes. That's about twice as much of a commute as I ever had in Seattle. Unfortunately, I don't live right by one of the highways, or that could be 10 minutes shorter. The flatness here means that I always have 2 bars or more of cell phone signal instead of the 2 bars or less that I've grown accustomed to in Redmond or Bellevue.

If I don't sleep in, and can get out of my house by around 8am, I usually swing by one of two Starbuck's locations—most of my new coworkers will recall that I spent most of my first week trying to figure out where to get a good coffee in downtown Tulsa. There really isn't a good place to get a good coffee in downtown, so I bring one in with me from suburbia. Any snobs out there who feel like telling me that Starbuck's hardly counts as good coffee either can keep it to themselves—I'm completely fine with commodity coffee. I don't have the time to invest in figuring out why coffee that solves the 95% case isn't as good as the real stuff.

I get in a little before 9am every day, and park somewhere near the 4^th floor of the Bank of America building in downtown Tulsa. I take the elevator past the 8^th floor, which smells very strongly of bacon throughout the day. I get off on the 24^th floor and let myself into Vidoop's offices using a code on a keypad by the door. I stop by the kitchenette and grab some coffee and some instant oatmeal (and you thought free soda was cool…). I'm the first one there about half the time. The other half the time some of the business types beat me there.

My development team has a daily scrum at 9:15. I spend my day wandering back and forth between my office, and about half (maybe a little less) in the incredibly cool 24^th floor corner office that the developers get to share. When I'm at my desk, I have numerous ways to stay busy ranging from writing or reviewing technical documents, contributing to the business plan, studying up on all things Identity 2.0 (ask me about sxip, SAML, OpenID, CardSpace, or pretty much any other ID2.0 hot topic, and I'll probably be fairly informed and extremely opinionated), reviewing code, pitching in my own few-dozen-line code changes to our main product, writing email, taking phone calls from our early customers, giving design advice or constructive criticism to the developers, or taking time out to think "on paper" (which usually means either in OneNote or on my personal MoinMoin-powered wiki).

When I'm in the developers' office, I spend my time helping troubleshoot build issues, giving guidance on C++ syntax, helping choose technologies for new features and projects, beating Windows into submission for the Linux- and Mac-weenies that we have around, and keeping the team unblocked and having fun.

By shortly after noon, it's time to go get lunch from one of the several places around. One of my current favorites is a place called "Lou's Deli". Every time I go there, or even every time I think about their tasty meatball sub, I'm reminded of the scene in fight club where we get to meet the namesake of Lou's Tavern (Search for "who am I" on http://www.hundland.com/scripts/Fight-Club_third.htm).

We push on through the afternoon, and by around 7pm, some of the developers disappear for the evening. Most nights, we still have a few people around at 10pm.

I go home and get some sleep so I can get up to my alarm the next morning at 7:20am.

Settling in to my new gig

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 02:07:55 GMT

I'm settling in to my new gig and having an absolute blast. While I was at Microsoft, I had a couch that was blue with each of a green, a yellow, and a red pillow on top. That color scheme worked fine for there, but not so well at Vidoop, whose logo is red and white. I changed the slip cover out for a red one, and borrowed time on my mother-in-law's embroidery machine to make myself some pillows with the corporate shield on them. I didn't know I was capable of such a thing, but turns out they make it sound harder than it is.

Everything's changing

Mon, 27 Nov 2006 10:51:32 GMT

I (and everyone I know) figured I was about the last person on the list of people likely to quit work at Microsoft any time soon, but a very interesting opportunity came along.

It's the kind of company that would rather that I not say much about just yet, but I'll say this: it takes something pretty special to convince me to leave my extremely fun, well-paying job at Microsoft working as the development lead whose team was responsible for the user experience on Live Image Search.

One of the things that make this opportunity special include an opportunity to work with my brother on a software project like he and I have always said we would someday. Another thing is that the company is headquartered in my home state, Oklahoma.

I really like Seattle, so I've never been in a huge hurry to pack up and move back to Oklahoma, but at least on some level I'm happy to have the opportunity to give something back to the state. Y'see, my last two years in high school were at a highly specialized public school called the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics. It's a 2 year residential school that's 100% taxpayer funded. The catch is that you have to apply for admission and get selected to attend. Oh, and you get an unaccredited diploma upon graduation since many of the teachers come from university teaching backgrounds and don't have secondary education teaching certificates. That doesn't matter too much--there's not a university in the country that doesn't recognize the quality of the academic program there.

Enough about my educational background. The bottom line is that the people of the State of Oklahoma gave me quite a bit, and I'm thrilled at the opportunity to give something back. (Related point: one of the themes that Representative Ernest Istook challenged Oklahoma's incumbent governor on was that Oklahoma's young people are leaving the state due to limited high tech opportunity. Here's another clip on the same theme.)

At any rate, my wife and I are packing up our stuff and moving to Oklahoma, at least for a while. I still think there's a high chance that I'll end up back on the West Coast someday, quite possibly working once again at Microsoft. But in the meanwhile, I'll try something else for a change. I expect to learn a lot. And maybe I can make an impact both at my new company and in my home state at the same time.

[Edit: make the mention of OSSM a link to the school's web site per bl00mie's suggestion.]

Windows Live Image Search Beta

Fri, 17 Mar 2006 07:29:40 GMT

[Long, rambly post follows. It may provide some insight into why I haven't been posting as much lately as I have at some times in the past.]

Lately I've been working harder than I've ever worked before with some of the smartest, coolest people I've ever met on one of the most interesting projects I can possibly imagine. My team at work, MSN Search's Multimedia Search Team just shipped a beta release of our Image Search product and boy-oh-boy was all the hard work worth it!

Before I go any further, if you haven't seen it, go take a look. Start at http://www.live.com and type a query into the search box at the top of the page. Press enter and then click the Images tab. I think you'll like what you see.

One of our primary goals was to fix the rough edges that every other image search UI today share. We wanted users to have a clean, uncluttered display of as many thumbnails as possible with the ability to quickly see metadata for the images that they cared about, and to be able to continue to browse images while looking at the web pages underlying their search results. Based on the early feedback, it would appear that we succeeded.

But back on how cool the project and the people are. I've been working anywhere from 60 to 100 hours per week for the last 5 months with short-lived periodic breaks, but I feel more energized than I normally do even during less insanely busy weeks. I was starting to get nervous that Jennifer would give up on me, but she was very supportive, and I think she likes to energized-by-work me well enough to put up with some amount of personal deprivation. (I'm sure that near the end, she was starting to feel strung along and wondering if it'd ever end--we had a couple of times during the long push where we thought we had a ship date picked, and then something would go wrong to set us back by an indeterminate time. But she stuck with me, and I really appreciate her supportiveness.)

Almost without exception, the people on the project are some of the best I've ever worked with--cool under pressure, smart about all the things that matter, hard-working. I have to give special credit to my boss and our program manager. My boss Hugh is excellent at both the technical and the people side of things. It seems effortless for him to keep our team focused and working hard. Our program manager Julie is phenomenally smart and has a knack for keeping everyone outside our team aware of what we need and working hard on our behalf.

We have many more great plans for both Image Search and many other projects lined up, and we're already working hard to bring even more cool stuff to the world. Hey, team, let's keep kicking butt!

Sergey "The Slaver" Brin

Fri, 17 Feb 2006 06:51:26 GMT

Absolutely stunning Sergey quote from ex-Google brand manager Doug Edwards on his xooglers blog:

Sergey once asked a large assemblage of Googlers what our greatest corporate expense was. “Health insurance!” was one answer shouted back. “Salaries!” “Servers!” “Taxes!” “Electricity!” “Charlie’s grocery bills!,” came back others. “No,” said Sergey. “Opportunity cost.” He explained that the products we weren’t launching and the deals we weren’t doing threatened our economic stability more than any single line item in the budget. It became a regular call and response at staff meetings and added to the sense that no matter how hard we were working, success was slipping through our fingers. Rather than cause employees to feel defeated, however, it became a rallying cry to redouble their efforts.

In other words, "The opportunity cost of our employees sleeping and having lives outside work is our company's greatest expense." How could that possibly encourage super-human commitment rather than induce demoralizing levels of despair?! Is this really a strong motivator if the prospect of having-a-cooler-project-at-work-than-any-spare-time-project-could-possibly-be is not? (I'm willing to consider the possibility that my mistake here is to assume that the average Google employee has a job as cool as mine in MSN Search.)

Arthur, I'm especially interested in your thoughts on this.

[Edit: fixed my misspelling of Sergey's name.]

Probably evil; almost certainly divisive

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 07:56:06 GMT

Tonight, I got an invitation to sign up on some website called http://www.officeballot.com. The premise is very simple: you sign up using a work email address and then get to rate your co-workers and provide written comments (good or bad) on them. It claims to promote meritocracy.

I, frankly, can't believe that there's any possible good whatsoever that could come out of this site. It seems to me that it will hurt some people, whether right or wrong, and it won't really gain anybody anything. I guess the good news is that I imagine most people would take the comments with the large dose of salt required.

I'll be quite surprised if they don't spend so much time, energy, and money fending off lawsuits that they fold up shop by the middle of 2006.

How not to die while jump-starting a car

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 05:55:50 GMT

My friend Nick wasn't quite sure how not to die while jump-starting his co-worker's car. It's pretty easy not to die, really. Here's the skinny.

I notice that he had two main concerns. The first was how not to get electrocuted. The second was how not to explode while attaching clamps to batteries.

First: how not to get electrocuted. It turns out that you don't really need rubber, or dryness, to avoid getting electrocuted by 12-volt batteries hooked up to 14-volt alternators. Even when wet, human skin resists 12 (or 14) volts pretty well. You know the 9-volt battery/tongue trick? Without knowing the actual values, I'm going to estimate that 12 volts from one hand to the other passes far less current than 9 volts to the tongue. For a couple of reasons: 1) your tongue's job is to be wet--wetter than Seattle's wussy rain gets your skin, and 2) the distance that the current has to travel along your tongue is really short compared to the distance that it would have to travel along your skin (or through your skin and along your water-filled innards), and resistance is usually directly proportionally to the length of the conductor. So, seriously, there's no possible way you could electrocute yourself. I'd say that having non-insulated handles on the jumper cables is more of a threat to the battery (easier to accidentally short it) than to human life. Don't believe the car-battery torture scenes you see in the movies--Mel Gibson is such an over-actor.

Second: how not to explode while attaching the clamps. The biggest reason that the jumper cable manufacturers tell you never to complete the circuit by connecting directly to the battery is that there are usually some really tiny sparks produced upon completing the circuit, even when done completely correctly. (Think slightly bigger sparks than a shock from a doorknob.) In some very unusual circumstances, the battery in a car can be caused to electrolyze the water in them into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. This is fairly difficult to do, and is not part of the battery's normal routine, but if you _happen_ to have a battery that built up some hydrogen and you happen to spark near the hydrogen, you could get a nice little hydrogen explosion that results in splashing sulfuric acid and lead-laced water all over you and your engine. (Think "ouch".) All it took was one jumper cable manufacturer realizing that they might get sued if this happens, and they quickly found a way to move the sparks to some other place where there is no chance of hydrogen build-up instead of some absurdly small chance.

Don't fear the jump-start. It seems certain that you're more likely to die in your car driving home from the jump-start.

Rotate the tires, please, HAL

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 21:23:26 GMT

Having reminded myself earlier today that it's time to rotate the tires on my vehicle, I also flashed back to when I was a youngster and first heard mention of "rotating tires" as a maintenence procedure. I simply could not understand how tires, which rotate a lot during routine execution of their duties, could be caused to wear more evenly simply by rotating them some more.

Even more behind, but having fun

Mon, 03 Oct 2005 21:32:20 GMT

On my vacation, I've come up with more stuff to do than I've actually finished, so I think I'm technically more behind on the stuff that I'm staying home to get caught up on. But I'm having fun falling doing it.

Behind, but catching up

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 05:45:22 GMT

I'm a little behind on blogging. For example, I really want to finish writing up the Mooncurser's Handbook Game, but I've been swamped at work for the last couple of weeks trying to get the MSN Search feature that I work on out for an internal alpha test. I finally finished that up on Friday, and have plans to start a 2-3 week vacation this Thursday. I'll mostly be hanging out at home trying to build some momentum on some of the projects I've been itching to start/finish, but I reserve the right to fly a little and maybe even visit Oklahoma to help my mom move from my childhood home in Chickasha to a place she just bought in Oklahoma City because of a long overdue job change. (She has been the Youth Director, the Campus Ministry Director, and jack of all trades for mere peanuts at her church for as long as I can remember. There were some really bad politics that I'm surprised she tolerated for as long as she did. She finally landed a similar job at a bigger church in Oklahoma City, but she's paid much better, and the people are probably 10x less poisonous.)

I'm also probably going to shop for a new laptop. (I'm thinking Tablet PC, but anyone who already has one can feel free to tell me how useless it is and try to talk me out of it.)

Unmarked cop car

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 05:35:06 GMT

The other day, I saw what I believe was a cop pulling a somewhat dirty trick.

There's an intersection (NE 51st St. and 148th Ave., for those familiar with the area) with a dedicated right turn lane that gets a right turn arrow when the cross traffic has a left turn arrow. This trains drivers who regularly patronize this intersection to, shall we say, stop less thoroughly when turning right whether the right arrow is on or not. This cop was in an entirely unmarked car, and was slowed down to a crawl approaching the intersection from my left while I was approaching the intersection in the aforementioned right turn lane. I looked to the left, and noticed that the oncoming car was clearly not a factor due to his insanely low speed (10 mph, rounding up aggressively), but something nagged at me that something was wrong and that I needed more time to figure out what his next move was, so I slowed down and in fact completely stopped wondering "what is this assclown doing?". Good thing I did, because as I stopped, he immediately started to speed up. As he approached, I noticed the tiny little rectangular cutouts in his grille for the red/blue strobes, and as he passed me, I noticed through his heavily tinted windows the usual laptop computer angled slightly toward the driver. Final confirmation came as I noticed what looked like two disk antennas, one on the roof and one on the trunk, mounted on his car. Gone are the days where unmarked cops are spottable from their array of suspicious-looking antennas.

Doubling and redoubling

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 18:07:07 GMT

Just found out that despite being in the top third by seniority of both my group and the company at large (which is how office space is allocated around here), I'm back on the list of people who don't get their own office. When my boss broke the news to me, he added "not that this is any consolation, but there were people who were tripled up before you got doubled...". Now, don't get me wrong--I understand that space may be tight around this part of campus, and I've had office mates before and it worked out just fine, but this just isn't normal.

No parking any time

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 19:44:54 GMT

The parking lots at work are tight right now. Apparently, there's some maintenance going on in one of the parking garages that's taking up quite a few parking spots, because coming back from lunch it's very difficult to get a spot. I get here early enough most days that there are still hundreds of people who show up after I do, so it's rarely difficult for me to find a spot in the morning.

Stopsign dance

Sun, 29 May 2005 01:10:52 GMT

The other night on Microsoft campus, I got stuck doing that repeated start/stop thing that you do at a stopsign when you and another driver can't decide who's going to go first. I ended up "winning". We were both headed the same direction. The other driver pulled up next to me at the next stopsign, and I shot him a glance (expecting, I guess, to connect over the shared experience that we just had). It was Bill Gates. That's not something that happens every day.

What the hell is that smell?

Sun, 29 May 2005 01:01:43 GMT

Jennifer and I had been struggling since last Monday to determine the source of a mild to moderately strong rotting-like smell that has been developing in the downstairs part of our house. We first noticed it in the rec room, and spent days scratching our heads and searching the room for a possible source. It wasn't in the closet, emptying the room's garbage can didn't help, etc.

So we closed the door to that room to see if maybe it was coming from somewhere else. Sure enough--the smell was no longer noticeable in there, but it was in the hall. The problem is, there are even fewer places for a source to hid in the hallway... Sigh. Perhaps it's one of the other rooms attached to the hall. Surely not, but let's try.

So I closed up all of the rooms attached to the downstairs hallway, and closed all the windows in the house to minimize air currents that might move the smell around. This involved moving the cats' litter pan to a different room since they'd be locked out of their normal "bathroom"--and we had already mostly ruled out the litter pan as a possible source--it just didn't stink enough to be the source.

I gave it yet another day to settle, and went looking for the smell. It seemed to be coming from the laundry room (the cats' bathroom) afterall. I gave up and decided it _must_ be the litter pan, so I washed it top to bottom. It was a hot day, so I re-opened some windows and even set up the window fan to suck some cool evening air into the house. This made the smell in the laundry room worse. Which was very weird because the litter pan had not yet been put back in the laundry room.

I finally decided that it _must_ be coming from some vent because the fan had to be moving substantial air over the source for it to have gotten that much worse in a mere 5 or 10 minutes. The only thing that seemed to meet that description was the vent to the under-house crawlspace.

Only barely motivated to bother, but quite interested in making the damn smell go away, I put my shoes back on, got my headlamp, and went spelunking in the crawl space. Not 5 feet from the entrance, I found a large gray animal carcass of some sort. It didn't really look like a rat, but it was definitely a mammal and probably a rodent.

Amazingly, despite my pathetically weak stomach, I managed to use the inside-out garbage bag trick to pick up the decaying body and take it out to the trash. Unfortunately, a small pile of fly larvae were left behind.

I think I'll set some traps to make sure that the dead animal doesn't have other friends queued up to replace his... ahem... role in my life.

To work or to camp?

Sat, 28 May 2005 22:17:03 GMT

Some of Jennifer's friends organized a camping trip over near Liberty, WA this weekend, and some of the campers made plans to make the short trip from there to The Gorge Amphitheater near George, WA to attend some concert called Sasquatch Festival.

I was looking forward to going camping with them, but I ran into some sticky problems in the software that I'm writing at work, and so I didn't get as much done at work this week as I had hoped. I considered going anyway and just saving the work for next week, but I really want to make this a good review period at work for various reasons, and decided that getting the work done would go a long way toward making that happen.

So, at any rate, I'll miss Jennifer while she's gone, but it'll be fun to hang out with the kitties and work on work stuff. I'll take some breaks for fun stuff--I just can't afford to make the whole weekend a break. The weather's pretty nice here. I think I'll go fly.