Come back Windows Live Mail! I neeeed you

Oops, looks like Windows Live Mail isn’t doing so well right now. For the past 15 minutes, I’ve realized how much I’ve grown to depend on it; I’ve got a ton of information in there – reciepts from e-tailers, random notes here and there I’ve sent to myself, evite invitations, archived files, mileage plan numbers, etc. I hope that they’re actually updating the service right now and when it comes back it’ll be better than ever! But realistically speaking, it’s probably just a normal service outage where a server blew up and they’re getting their backups online

Speaking of cool new features, I wish they’d build these:

• Flag for follow-up. This would be soooo crucial.
• Better contact list. I’d love to get some more features in there, maybe even an API for us to sync with
• Saved searches, like Outlook’s Smart Folders
• Conversation view. Make it like Outlook’s conversation view or like Gmail’s, it doesn’t matter

If they were only going to build one of these features, I’d vote for Flag for Follow-up. I’m sure a lot of Microsofties would agree!

Also, how do I get some invites for Windows Live Mail? People have been begging me for some

Dilbert illustrates how PMing works

My sister gave me a daily Dilbert calendar for Christmas last year and I’ve really been enjoying it. A few days ago was the crown jewel so far though; they had this little strip where Dilbert’s in a meeting with a product manager.

I thought it was quite hilarious

Winchester Mystery House… oooo scary!

Rose came down to visit this weekend and we went on a few adventures. First, we went to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose. It’s this house that was built by Sarah Winchester, who inherited a large sum from her husband, William Winchester, one of the presidents of the Winchester Rifle company. For an unknown reason, she built a ton of rooms in the house and designed it all herself, which made for a pretty random house. There are staircases that go nowhere and doors that open to nothing. It’s quite a trippy experience – probably because the floor is slated everywhere you go so it makes you a little bit queazy :S

Here are some pictures from the house:

   

We were told afterwards that you can find a buy 1 get 1 free admission coupon in the entertainment book. I guess it wouldn’t been cost effective for us since the ticket was $20ish and the entertainment book is only $15… oh well.

Oh, it’s not really that scary

Use jajah to prank call people?

Not sure if this has already been discovered, but I was thinking this morning about how you can try Jajah out so easily and I realized that you could just connect two arbitrary numbers together. I just tried it on my co-workers Dassi and Janice (they were good sports about it ) and it just works as expected.

I can’t think of too many pranks you could pull with this off the top of my head, but then again, I guess I’m not really the pranking type. Oh! I guess someone could write a modern romantic comedy called “You’ve Got Jajah!” about how a couple is set up through a VoIP service by a neutral 3rd party friend… but that would be lame… unless it had Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan… oh wait, maybe that’s still lame…

I wonder, if one of my co-workers has Jajah set up on their number, can I pretend to be them and put their number in the “My Phone Number” box and thus charge their Jajah account when I want to call them?

UPDATE: Once you register for an account, your phone numbers are registered to that account; you can’t just put in anyone’s number and pretend to be them.

Talk to me through Ether

So, let’s see how this thing works out. I heard about Ether a few weeks ago and signed up for their beta program; last week they sent me an invitation code and I just signed up.

99zeros 1-888-MY-ETHER ext. 01388673

Will anyone call? I’m anxiously waiting haha

Yes, we've been listening…

Over the past year that I’ve been at Plaxo, I’ve met quite a few people and they almost always after they find out I work at Plaxo, they say: "Oh, you guys send out all those e-mails…" Well, I’ve been pushing hard to get us to stop doing that and now we’ve got some results. For those that haven’t seen yet, Todd Masonis, one of the Plaxo founders, wrote up an entry on the Plaxo blog about our plans.

Here are the real guts of the post:

We quickly responded by adding opt-out and throttling features, but we’ve always known that the update requests were a means to an end — our goal has always been to get as many members as possible so that these e-mails were unnecessary. And it looks like we’re finally getting to that end.

As of last week, we’ve past 10 million members. We are now growing at over 50,000 users a day. Due to this great growth, the depth of our network, plus our heartfelt desire to be good net citizens, we have started phasing out update requests.

I’m one of the main drivers behind these efforts so if you have any feedback, please let me know. In the next few weeks, we’ll be completely removing the mass update request mechanism from all of our new user flows; we’ve already significantly cut down on the number of e-mails we send – I think we’re down more than 50% from our peak already and over the next few weeks we should see an even more significant decrease in the amount of e-mail we send out.

We’re also starting to get a bit more open on our blog; our employees now have license to blog on our corporate blog with pretty much 0 editing. We’ll see how it works out

Also, a bunch of Plaxo employees are starting blogs. Here’s a quick list:

• Todd Masonis
• Stuart Liroff
• Terry Chay
• Dru Nelson
• Haiping Zhao
• Stacy Martin

On another note, I’m currently trying out Flock; so far I like it (it’s got a performancing like blog console built-in ) and I’m looking forward to exploring more of it. Anyone got any really cool bits that I should make sure to check out?

Always lots to see around town

Rose came up to visit this past weekend and her friends Bonnie and Mike came up from Texas and LA too. On Saturday, we went around downtown San Francisco and on Sunday, we went to Napa. The weather was a bit touchy – it was a bit cold on Saturday and it kept raining and then getting really nice on Sunday – but we had a great time anyways!

To start things off, Rose and I went to Left Bank on Santana Row for dinner on Friday. I had escargot for the first time; it didn’t taste like much to me, but it looked interesting. I ordered a smoked rabbit risotto that was umm… interesting and Rose got a veal dish that was amazing.

Then on Saturday we started things off at the Ferry Building where the farmer’s market was in full swing:

Next it was off to Coit Tower and then Twin Peaks for some nice views:

And finally, we finished off the day with a yummy dinner in Japantown and a nice evening of Jazz at Yoshi’s in Oakland:

On Sunday, we headed off to Napa. We only had time to stop in at Opus One and Sullivan, but it was still a fun time. Check out some of the rainbows we saw On the way back, we stopped at the Golden Gate National Reserve just north of the Golden Gate Bridge and took a few quick pictures before the sun set.

All in all, a fun picture filled weekend! I think I used up 25% of my monthly Flickr allotment in one day uploading all these photos

Whoa, it's already been a year?

Looks like yesterday was my 1 year anniversary at Plaxo! Working at Plaxo is like entering a time warp; it feels like it was just yesterday that I started my job here, but then when I think back to all the stuff I’ve learned and all the projects I’ve worked on I think “wow, it’s only been a year?”

If nothing else, I’m learning a ton here at Plaxo. I learned a ton while working at IBM and Microsoft too – and even my short 2 weeks at Google – but I think each position yields itself to learning different things (not to mention that the methodology used to ship products varies quite a bit between the different companies).

I sense that I soon won’t be the youngest employee at Plaxo anymore either… we’ve got some college recruits in the pipeline and I’m sure at least one or two of them will be under 23. I’ve always been the youngest person wherever I’ve worked, so this will be fun – I won’t be the kid anymore (… well, maybe I’ll still be a kid hehe)

Ah, a year seems so long and so short at the same time… what have you been up to this past year?