Found a great optometrist too!

I’m covered under VSP for an annual eye exam and $120 towards contacts/glasses each calendar year. Since this year is almost up, I figured I had better use the benefit ASAP. Well I randomly selected a doctor and it turned out great.

So if you’re looking for a good optometrist in Mountain View (right next to Google/Microsoft/Intuit/SGI), then check out:

Allison S Zaum O.D.
Pacific Eye Care Optometry
1040 N. Rengstorff Ave., Ste. B
Mountain View, CA 94043
(650) 968-3937

Again, I’m not getting any referral fees; just want to pass on a recommendation

A honest used car dealer? At least it seems so to me…

I’ve always distrusted car dealers, and I’m sure many of you do too. But when I bought my 2004 Audi S4 this time, I actually ran into a few used car salesmen with integrity. Sound like an oxymoron? Not at Burlingame European.

First, their transparency. My car was being sold under consignment (the dealer is selling it on behalf of a private party) and as we went back and forth on the price, the salesperson pretty quickly gave me the sellers minimum requested price + a marginal $200 commission (which I was more than happy to pay).

Next, during the purchase process, the staff was actually very nice. The dealership is a family owned business and I was able to talk to a few of the people who worked there; all very nice people. They made me a bagel with cream cheese and some tea. Ask for Bart, Sam, or Al, they are all great to work with. Say hi to them for me; oh, and don’t worry, I’m not getting a single dime for this post or for any referrals – now if that’s not a sign of true customer satisfaction, I don’t know what is…

Finally, they made a $600 mistake. We got to the bottom of it and I see what happened; Bart quoted me a price, I repeated that price to Sam, who put it into the computer and then refigured it differently, and I got the car for $600 less than originally agreed upon. After we figured out the mess, they said to not worry about it. Because of the mix-up, they aren’t going to make any money on the transaction, but they just let it go because the contract was signed and they wanted the buying experience to be great at Burlingame. (Yes, legally they were screwed, but I’m sure they could’ve played some tricks if they wanted to. My financing hadn’t been processed, etc.)

I’ve been to a lot of car dealerships, all brands, in Michigan and Seattle, looking at all different types of cars (I’m kind of a car nut). I’ve never had a better experience than this past Wednesday. If I ever decide to buy another car, I’ll definitely be going back there.

Now, maybe I’m being taking for a ride and it’s all a show, but I don’t think so.

Open and transparent used car salesmen, but closed and censored blog conversations? I must be stuck in bizzaro world!

Goodbye Celica, Hello S4!

Old and busted:

The new hotness:

This past Sunday, I finally got some motivation and posted my old 2001 Toyota Celica GT on Craig’s List. I wasn’t expecting much response, considering the holidays, but I got a ton of calls immediately. On Tuesday, someone came by and bought my car.

The problem was, I hadn’t actually procured another car yet… the buyer wanted to close the deal today (Thursday) so I basically had one day to find a new car. Fortunately, I already knew what I wanted, it was just a matter of getting all details sorted out.

So yesterday, I went to the dealer, test drove the new car, and worked through all the paperwork. End result: sold my 2001 Toyota Celica GT for $10500, and bought my new 2004 Audi S4 for $39500 out the door (~$36500 before taxes, etc.). Who wants a ride?

Anyone want a WordPress.com invite?

I know it’s not a Windows Live Messenger invite (take a look at the number of invite requests in my post about Live Messenger), but I seem to have an invite for WordPress.com, Matt Mullenweg’s free hosted WordPress site. First one to e-mail me or leave a comment on this blog gets it!

UPDATE: Oops, looks like they’ve already opened it up to everyone. No need for an invite! … nothing to see here …

SteveSi censored me?

Here’s what happened:

1. I read Steven Sinofsky’s recent post about PMs at Microsoft
2. I disagreed with a few things in his post and responded in my blog
3. I posted a manual trackback in his comments since his blog platform doesn’t have trackbacks
4. He deleted my comment in his blog because I had a link to Mini-MSFT’s blog at the very end of my response

I know it’s his blog and he can do whatever he wants on his blog, but I was still shocked and appalled by his actions. I decided to e-mail him and we had a brief thread. Basically he told me that 1. he doesn’t think anonymous blogs add any value and 2. he doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with arbitrarily deleting comments (he says the “social norms” of blogging haven’t been established yet). I disagree with him on both points, but I’ll concede that he’s entitled to his opinion.

Here’s a little snippet from our thread that I found pretty confusing…

I think what I reacted to is that you claimed that mini represents the way things are at Microsoft so read that, and you “guarantee it”. Given that mini is anonymous and you do not work at Microsoft, from my perspective that is a bit over the top.

I agree that maybe that statement was over the top; I’ve updated my post in light of that. However, I’ve e-mailed Steven back about the fact that I did work for Microsoft – so I have ample first-hand experience – and that my previous post wasn’t based on Mini-MSFT at all. Well, it seems he’s decided to ignore my reply and the sentiment of many people who don’t agree with his censoring actions – including other Microsoft employees…

At first, I could understand that it was a simple mistake where he thought I was just quoting some stuff out of Mini’s blog/comments and disagreeing with his post. But now that he knows the context and should realize that my previous post isn’t based on an anonymous source, I would think that in the spirit of healthy communication, Steve would restore the original comment and encourage some constructive discussion.

Again, I understand it is “Steven Sinofsky’s Microsoft TechTalk” so he can do whatever he wants on his blog, but can someone talk to him about how transparency and open discussions work out here in the blogosphere? Hey Scoble, can you have a chat with Steve about this please?

SimplyFired videos are hilarious!

One of my co-workers Tod just told me about the SimplyFired videos; I had seen that they were accepting video submissions for funny videos involving getting fired from work, but I didn’t know they had produced some pretty hilarious ones themselves (or at least they look like professionally done).

It looks like they are running a contest too; the winner gets a iMac G5 and a Sony camcorder. Pretty sweet prizes; a step up from the iPod shuffles they were giving away earlier (Which reminds me, I wonder how that Apprentice cruise turned out for the winner of their first contest…)

They should put these up on YouTube and see if they can’t get any MySpace people to pick it up; I hear stuff travels like wildfire on there

A few sample pictures from my Lumix FX9

I let my camera battery charge all day and I took a few test shots right as I was leaving work today. All of these were hand-held shots taken with the optical image stabilization turned on (I think they were in Mode 2) and no flash. I retouched them really quick in Photoshop; nothing fancy, just a quick auto level and a small adjustment on the shadows/highlights. I’m pretty happy with these pictures seeing as how it was a pretty low light situation.

When you zoom in at 100%, you can see some noise in the solid color parts of the picture. The EXIF says these were at ISO 100 (the 2nd lowest ISO setting), I wonder if ISO 200 and 400 are worse :S Overall though, I’d trade a little bit of noise (which Terry tells me can be filtered out through software) over blurry shots anyday

Here’s the trusty smartphone:

Here’s Terry, probably in the middle of explaining something technical:

In this shot, you can see that the image stabilization can’t account for everything; Cam must’ve moved right as I was taking the shot.

I would’ve been hard pressed to take these shots on my S400… hopefully the FX9 won’t disappoint!

Yay! Got my Panasonic Lumix FX9 today!

Last week, I finally got fed up with my old Canon S400 (sunny outdoor pictures turn out great but the low light performance and speed is severely lacking) and I decided to check out the Panasonic Lumix FX9 based on some reviews I read. I ordered it last Friday from Onecall using their Free 3-day Fedex option and I actually got it today! Now that’s some seriously speedy service

I’ve only been able to play with it for a little bit so far, but I’m liking it a lot. I took some test shots around the office in regular indoor lighting conditions and they turn out pretty good. A little bit noisy, but at least it’s not totally blurry. It’s smaller than I expected too (although it is still larger than the diminutive Casio Exilims or the Pentax Optios).

Unfortunately, I ordered a 1GB SD card from Newegg which doesn’t arrive until tomorrow

I’m sure I’ll have photos over the holidays that I’ll be flickring up; I’ll post up more of a review after I’ve used the camera a bit.

Steven Sinofsky, I agree, but I disagree…

I saw over on Dennis’ blog that he linked to an entry Steven Sinofsky wrote on his “Microsoft TechTalk” blog about the PM role at Microsoft. I was reading through it and most of it sounded pretty much inline with my experience until I got to this little bit:

As an aside a lot has been said lately about “agile development”. A key benefit of program management is that we are far more agile because we have program management. That can be counter-intuitive (even for many developers at Microsoft who might be waiting for their PM to iron out the spec). But the idea that you can just start writing code without having a clear view of the details and specification is a recipe for a poorly architected features. A great PM knows when the details are thought through enough to begin and a great developer knows when they can start coding even without the details for sure.

I kind of agree and kind of disagree with this. I agree because obviously, you can’t start coding without any idea of what you’re building. I disagree because it appears that Steven doesn’t know exactly what agile development is… there are many different methodologies for “agile development” and as far as I know, none of them involve coding without any specing whatsoever…

Then later in his post, he writes:

Many companies will “sell” you on being able to do many of these different things from one job. This is just not a reality that exists and I always feel a bit bad for folks who believe this. There are two times I hear this a bunch. First is at startups you hear “come join us from college and you can own all of this”. Of course at a startup the real experience is that you are the college hire, which means you will do the grunt work while the founders and the venture people do all the strategic work–so you might find yourself setting up the build machines rather than interacting with customers. Second, I hear this a lot when companies are selling against Microsoft and point out that “at our company we do not specialize and everyone does everything”. This is another “well in reality…” situation, since of course even when I have seen companies that claim to do the specifications or customer research and up front planning they do that work from Product Management, and those people are just as specialized, they just report to the marketing team. And we know what that means, which is when push comes to shove the marketing team will need to use every hand to get out there and generate the business and sell–so even if there is a single group that does the work, those roles are specialized, and rarely dedicated specifically to the role.

Wow… I’m going to have to totally disagree here. I see Steven has qualified the statement as being based “[his] experiences and of course your specific situation might be different” but it still seems to me like it’s not exactly in touch with reality.

For example, at Plaxo it doesn’t matter if you’re a fresh college grad or you’re a 20 year industry veteran. The plain truth is: we can’t afford to hire super specialized employees. Each person at Plaxo needs to be a valuable contributor and extremely flexible – there’s just too much to do and not enough people to do it. In addition to that, we also can’t afford to hire people who aren’t going to contribute to our critical projects. We only have 35 people; that means everyone has to do substantial work on the products we’re shipping to millions of customers. We can’t put a college hire on “grunt work”, we need him/her to design features, implement them, and get them shipped to our customers.

Now I’m not saying that the college hire won’t need to do any “grunt work”. What I’m saying is, everyone does “grunt work” when it’s necessary to get the job done.

The same thing repeats itself over and over at the other startups I visit and talk to. Steven, I’d encourage you to come down to the bay area and visit some startups sometime; I think you’ll see a drastically different picture than the one you’ve illustrated.

The funny thing is, I’ve seen Steven’s “college hire” description more at Microsoft than any startup I’ve visited. In my experience (and of course your specific situation might be different ), I’ve seen many college hires at Microsoft put into positions where they are taking care of build scripts, fixing bugs in code they didn’t write, and setting up test machines – basically doing the “grunt work”.

I know I’ve picked two very specific excerpts from Steven’s post to tear into, but the rest of it is actually really good. He does a great job detailing the Microsoft PM/Dev/Test model. From my own personal experience, I think Microsoft’s PM program is great and I know I learned a ton from working there. Getting a job at Microsoft is definitely far from the worst way to launch a career

However, for all you potential college hires out there, you gotta ask yourself: what are you working towards? If you’re looking for a long and steady 20 year career where you can slowly move up the corporate ladder and make a comfortable living, then you’ve got Redmond, WA written all over you. But if you’re looking for a career where you can make some big bets and with some luck come out orders of magnitude ahead, then my opinion is that Microsoft isn’t such a great place to invest your time right out of college… if you want to know what working at Microsoft is really like, check out Mini-MSFT’s blog and the comments people leave there. I guarantee you that’s the real deal.

UPDATE: I’ve talked to a few people about my last statement in the post referring to Mini-MSFT and I can see how people might take exception to it because it makes it sound like I’m saying the stuff in Mini-MSFT is exactly what happens at Microsoft. I should’ve also said that in addition to stuff like Mini-MSFT, I’d encourage people to read other blogs (like Dare’s, Dennis’s, and Adam’s) to get a comprehensive view of what working at Microsoft is really like.

The discussion of what you’d consider impact is murky as well. There’s probably an element of buyer’s bias where we each think that we’re delivering a lot of impact in our own different ways. Comparing the amount of impact is probably a fruitless endeavor, at the end of the day we’d just be comparing apples to oranges. The one thing we do seem to agree on is that there’s no clear definition of “impact”

At the end of the day, if you’re considering working at Microsoft, I would suggest you read up on a few different blogs about working at Microsoft (including both Steven’s blog and Mini-MSFT). As Dare and Adam said, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle and even within Microsoft, the situation varies.

Gmail RSS Web Clips… user feature or another way to get clicks on ads?

A few weeks ago, I started seeing the Web Clips feature in my GMail. I thought, hey that’s interesting, they are doing some RSS aggregation in my GMail. But then I noticed something a little bit interesting: they rotate ads in the middle of the Web Clips. Smart business move I’m sure, but what happened to not confusing users?

After thinking about Web Clips a little bit more, a lot of other questions start coming to mind (I think I’m echoing some other bloggers on these…). Why can’t I subscribe to custom feeds? Why doesn’t GMail just provide a full RSS aggregator?

At the very least, you have to wonder what the motivation behind this feature was; was it really for the users? Or was it a way to increase the bottom line contributions of GMail? And in the latter case, couldn’t they have at least put some additional thought into making it a useful feature for users?

Also, Dru tipped me off that they are supporting contact groups now. Which again begs the question: why isn’t it just an integration with Google Groups?

I hope they’ve got something huge up their sleeves (read: GCal with integration to GMail). Otherwise they might be in for a ride when the new Y! Mail and Hotmail AJAX clients come out. Thanks for being the catalyst for change in the web mail space, but please keep innovating GMail!

P.S. If anyone can invite me to the Y! Mail Beta or the Windows Live! Mail beta, I’d love to write up a review