Scott Blomquist's space

Just met Don Luskin

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:21:35 GMT

Just got a chance to meet Don Luskin, one of the guys that ran the real event that inspired the Disney movie "Midnight Madness" that inspired the Florida event that then grew into the Stanford event and the Microsoft event that inspired the Michael Douglas movie "The Game". Good stuff. He's full of very interesting historical perspective.

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.

Frontier airlines

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 04:02:46 GMT

Frontier Airlines is right when they say "it's a whole different animal". They apparently stopped accepting cash on flights and will now only take credit cards for alcohol, DirecTV, or movie purchases. Also, the Captain called the other pilot his Co-Captain, which is a fine title, I suppose, but it sounds a little like their First Officers have thin skin and need the ego boost afforded by an inflated title.

Craig's List, meet OpenID

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 05:29:57 GMT

I finally got around to posting a listing on Craig's List about a week ago. It had one of the simplest identity mechanisms I've ever seen. Instead of having to create an account, all I had to do before Craig's List considered me fully introduced was to provide an email address. A magic link was then sent to that email address. By clicking on that magic link, I could post my listing or to come back later to make edits.

OpenID would be the perfect middle ground between creating an account and their magic link email trick.

Technorati Tags: openid

Re-discovered a bug from a previous project

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 04:56:07 GMT

My current project (http://myvidoop.com) had a bug earlier where the user agent string from IE on my home computer is extremely long and causes the web site to behave incorrectly. I had the same problem when I was working on Live Image Search. In the case of Image Search, the long connection string would trigger our wimpy UI that supports downlevel browsers. On myVidoop, it was preventing me from allowing the web UI to connect to the back end server. Hopefully I'll remember to test this artificially in the future, because I never think about it as a problem until I stumble onto it.

Amazing mouse

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 16:40:10 GMT

Absolutely incredible new mouse: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=085

One tiny little letter

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 17:02:02 GMT

"unbeatable" and "unbearable" differ by one tiny little letter lexicographically, and by a whole lot more semantically. Sad that Outlook can't notice the difference...

The other Channel 9

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 08:19:43 GMT

Most of you have probably heard me rave about Microsoft's video blog for developers called Channel 9. It's named after my favorite feature of United Airlines—namely the ability to plug a headset into your armrest and listen in on the cockpit's radio by tuning to channel 9. As I was flying back for a visit to Seattle, our pilot did something that put the original United channel 9 in the same class of coolness as Microsoft's Channel 9. He invited us to tune in to Channel 9 for a 10 minute "talk show", where he proceeded to talk us through a bunch of trivia about our airplane and our flight. He talked about why we fly so high, why the cabin isn't pressurized all the way to sea level pressure, what it is that pilots actually do, and some performance numbers for our airplane.

One of the neater things that he talked about was that technically the only part of the flight that the pilots pretty much have to do is taxi and takeoff. He talked a little about Category III ILS operation, pointed out that both Seattle and Denver are equipped for Category III operations, and then went on to explain that the only reason they have visibility minimums for Category III is so that once your autopilot has you safely on the ground you can see far enough to safely taxi clear of the runway.

If you want to see just how eerie Category III operations are, there's some great video of a Horizon Airlines Category III ILS approach into Portland up on YouTube.

Update: we had clear skies down to a few hundred feet above Seattle, at which point it turned to very dense fog. As I was deplaning, I gave the captain kudos for his radio show, and said "speaking of category III, what was the RVR when we touched down in Seattle"? He told me it was 5500 ft. That was way longer than it looked, but I'm sure he was right. He said that they worried they'd have to do an autoland because the RVR number kept going up and down on them.

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.

Stupid then smart: Xbox 360 headset connector broke

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:36:20 GMT

I got an Xbox 360 message from a friend the other day telling me that my attempt at sending him a voice message sounded like 5 seconds of silence. I did some troubleshooting only to find that the tip of the headset's connector had broken off inside one of my controllers. That really pissed me off--I was less concerned about the loss of a headset than I was about the fact that I'd forever have a piece of headset connector stuck inside one of my Xbox 360 controllers.

Turns out that my worry was for nothing. The industrial engineering minds at Microsoft seem to have designed the controllers to handle exactly this contingency. If you first remove the battery pack from the controller that has the headset piece lodged in it, and then shove in an unbroken headset connector with the controller upright, the broken off tip will fall right out.

I'm pretty sure that this is the problem that Shodan1028 is describing over on the Gamertag Radio forums.

The return of fun flash crap

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:20:52 GMT

Attn: Maloney--you'll like this.

Only sort of a puzzle, but pretty fun: http://www.gamegecko.com/idiottest.php.

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.]

Beginning instrument training!

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 05:40:41 GMT

It's been way too long since I've flown, but I met up with my flight instructor today, and am signed up to get started learning to navigate through the clouds like real airplanes do!

Transparent screens

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 05:39:12 GMT

http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/show/

Online mini-hunt

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 06:20:15 GMT

If you enjoy the kinds of puzzles I do, you should subscribe to Panda Magazine.

Even if you subscribe to Panda Magazine, you should try out There's a Moose on the Loose! The puzzles that I've solved so far are fun and seem well designed.

Funny: ultimate blog posts

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 06:03:07 GMT

Hilarious: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,71720-0.html?tw=rss.index

I can't wait for Flight Sim X

Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:12:03 GMT

When Microsoft's next flight simulator ships, it looks like they're going to have some incredible features such as built in support for air traffic control and cockpit sharing. Here's a fun little YouTube video that shows off these features (and more):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsCpH7nqmS0

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

Sat, 08 Jul 2006 02:42:45 GMT

There's a book out called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", which I'll have to pick up and read sometime. Meanwhile, they have a really unbelievably incredibly slick flash animation that helps you visualize what in the world the universe could possibly do with 10 dimensions.

Photo Album: Mobile photos

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 02:34:44 GMT

Mobile photos

Photo Album: PhotoBlog

Tue, 29 May 2007 23:55:08 GMT

PhotoBlog

Longest security line I've ever seen in Tulsa

Wild sink at the Wild Palms Hotel in Sunnyvale

Dulles's goofy airport crawler things

Custom List: Links

Sat, 04 Dec 2004 21:59:23 GMT

Links

Tribal Librarian
My technical blog