There are probably more coffee shops in Hayes Valley than there are people. Okay, that’s obviously not true, but it sure feels like it. I hunkered down at a new cafe, La Boulange, this morning located at 500 Hayes and Octavia. Across the street is Stacks. Less then 200 feet is Cafe La Vie. A block up is Modern Tea. Two blocks away is Blue Bottle. Then there’s the other little French place down on Gough. Oh, then the crepes place that makes a good latte up on Gough going north past Hayes. Then there’s of course Citizen Cake half a block past that. That doesn’t even include the places that are on the other side of Gough if you keep going down Hayes (I can visually remember at least one). I count 9 within four blocks of each other. It’s not hard to stay jittery in Hayes Valley.
Windows Live Calendar
Windows Live Calendar is live! This has been many, many, many months in the making, starting with an idea a long time ago (it first surfaced when we started talking about rebuilding Hotmail three years ago!), to coding in two continents, to finally hitting the Go button today and RTWing (Release to Web) our product. This is the second v1 product I’ve been able to participate in from start to ship and it’s as unique and as exciting watching the service go online as the first time.
To give you an idea of what happens when we go live, we have a lot of folks in a conference room with a Polycom conference system where people are dialed in to. There are projectors with logs of the production machines displayed, people marking things on the white boards to make sure that changes and fixes don’t get forgotten and the actual folks pushing the software to the servers. We try to have the day itself scheduled down to the half hour or fifteen minute mark, but we do make changes to on the fly.
We had our whole data center ready and prepped to go today, so our “go live” moment was a final decision that was made with all the key stakeholders which then resulted in us marking the service as In Service, and within seconds new users were pounding on it, creating accounts! Thus, Windows Live Calendar was born. It’s amazingly cool to watch a log file fly by with reports of new users being created.
It’s not easy to make that final “yes” call. From late last week we’d been working long hours in the home stretch (including a 3+ hour conference call on Sunday night!). Lots of time checking, double checking and triple checking that everything when we finally said yes would work — and by and large it did. Of course, when you’re bringing a new service online, stuff doesn’t work (and it didn’t all work), so having everybody in that conference room I mentioned earlier was key to making decisions on the fly.
Ship or go home – it’s everybody’s accomplishment getting us to where we are today, and I’m proud to have been a part of this team. Lots more to write about, but I’m exhausted from the last few days; expect to hear more soon.
Coverage Tone
It’s interesting to think how much (and how little) influence news anchors have in the portrayal of stories they tell on network news. This piece from the Washington Post talks about the dilemma people like Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams faced in how to talk and the words to use about the worsening situation in Iraq after the situation started falling apart.
For example, from Brian Williams:
Every day, Williams asked the question: Did Baghdad correspondent Richard Engel have any news other than another 20 Iraqi civilians killed when an IED detonated, leaving the same smoking carcasses and pathetic scenes of loved ones crying? That, Williams felt, was the problem: The horrible had become utterly commonplace. To most Americans, he believed, the war could not be more ephemeral. It was half a world away, and it required no sacrifice by those who did not have a family member in the armed forces.
The article also talks about how Katie Couric had been somewhat browbeaten by the NBC president on how persistently she probed for answers from Rice.
Couric felt there was a subtle, insidious pressure to toe the party line, and you bucked that at your peril. She wanted to believe that her NBC colleagues were partners in the search for truth, and no longer felt that was the case. She knew that the corporate management viewed her as an out-and-out liberal. When she ran into Jack Welch, the General Electric chairman, he would sometimes say that they had never seen eye to eye politically. If you weren’t rah rah rah for the Bush administration, and the war, you were considered unpatriotic, even treasonous.
I’ll leave conclusions as an exercise to the reader.
Mobile Broadband
I’m pretty sure mobile broadband is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. I’m on CalTrain, riding down the Peninsula at 80+ MPH, and online! My speed test showed 296 kbps downstream and 105 kbps upstream, with a 265 ms ping to LA. Pretty sweet. I can’t wait for WiMax and true 3G to start showing up in the marketplace.
A Boy and His Blackberry
I don’t think I’ve ever liked a phone this much. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever liked nearly any gadget I’ve owned this much. Only my iPod is in the race. I recently (off of Craigslist) bought a Blackberry 8830 on Sprint. It has 3G (EVDO), it’s a CDMA phone in the states, and has unlocked GSM capabilities when you take it overseas. Did I mention it has GPS? And Sprint lets you thether for free?
The interface isn’t pretty, but it works so well that who cares about pretty. All my messages (text, email, Google Talk IMs, voicemails, missed calls) are integrated in to one messages view. The phone application keeps a history of who I talked to. The browser is great (okay, it’s no Safari, but still it works really well). Plus, there are a ton of 3rd party applications that can be downloaded to the phone that work with the same UI model, so they feel consistent across the RIM made and 3rd party made apps.
I’m a Blackberry convert. After using the Moto Q, a RAZR, a Sony Erickson set of phones, Samsung phones, Audiovox SMT, even a NeoPlanet smartphone, this is hands down the best phone I’ve owned. Only the Sony Erickson comes close in how it “felt” to use, that I enjoyed using the phone, and didn’t find it a chore.
Burma and the Internet
Let’s start with this from the NYT:
Myanmar has just two Internet service providers, and shutting them down was not complicated, said David Mathieson, an expert on Myanmar with Human Rights Watch. Along with the Internet, the junta cut off most telephone access to the outside world. Soldiers on the streets confiscated cameras and video-recording cellphones.
Ouch. These last two weeks, following the news in Burma/Myanmar have shown how powerful the internet can be as a tool for communication and the freedoms of speech that we value. Reading the articles, it’s amazing that mobile phones, blogs, text messaging, and all these modern technologies are being used to help the outside world understand the insanity. But when it’s so easy to cut off, it’s saddening that the voices of the people who live in Burma can be so easily silenced. It also speaks to the fact that we have grown to expect things like connectivity, redundancy, and resilience in our communication systems. When they’re this fragile, we feel exposed and alone. For those in China after the Taiwan earthquake in 2006, you have a good idea how it feels to go from connected to cut off.
Images like these are what we won’t be seeing any more (also from the NYT article):
Soulja Boy
If you listen to “urban” radio at all, by now you’ve certainly heard the Crank That single by Soulja Boy, a 17-year old rapper from Atlanta. The track features Caribbean sounding beats and a fairly unique (to me) chanting style of rap. The reason I’m writing about it is not because of the song’s mundane lyrics or catchy sound, rather the way in which it got famous.
The MySpace page has the song heard over 4.8 million times, and over 12 million views on the profile. If you look at YouTube, there are tons of remixes and fan videos that have taken clips from shows like Family Guy and put the song over them. The best remix is by far Travis Barker drumming over the song. I could totally imagine this mix ending up on a rock station with the original playing on the hip-hop stations.
It’s pretty amazing how much momentum this artist has picked up by the way of the internet and community driven sites. A few of the reviews I’ve been reading of his upcoming album basically say that it was due to the huge viewership on MySpace and YouTube that drove the song to the top position on the Billboard charts. That’s just plain cool.
Halo 3
I know I’m a bit late to the game on this one, but I did in fact pick up Halo 3 at the Microsoft company store the day it came out ($25!). I got home, popped it in to my Xbox 360 that I had bought a few weeks ago (in anticipation of Halo’s release) and played through the first few levels. My first few thoughts are it’s pretty good and lives up to the hype. It looks stunning at 1080 on my LCD and the Theater mode really lets you appreciate the graphics quality and the draw distance the game has. One of my good friends bought an Xbox specifically to play the game and saw a few people in line at Best Buy doing the same thing. The inital sales reports say it rung up over $170m in the first 24 hours. Not bad for a game where you play a genetically modified human being on a quest to save man-kind.
Mumbai, a City of Contradictions
In this weekend’s New York Times, author Alex Kuczynski writes about his experience visting Mumbai, speaks a lot about the dichotomy of worlds between the new rich and the exceedingly poor. A couple of quotes jumped out at me:
Simply walking along a city street is an exercise in yogilike self-composition. If you walk, you must be comfortable with the press of warm bodies and the dense, meaty smell of skin and hair that has not been washed in weeks, perhaps months.
The ladies who lunch don’t speak of their philanthropic work to end the city’s abject poverty. “There are simply too many suffering,” one socialite explained. “So we focus on things we can actually have an impact on, like art and gardening.”
I wonder what happened to the girl [who was seen earlier playing in sewage]. Was her tarpaulin home washed away? As I imagined the all-night parties continuing at Privé, the Bordeaux flowing and the young investment bankers paying for bottles of Stolichnaya with black American Express cards, I wondered: was she able to even salvage a T-shirt, a pair of underwear, a favorite book of cartoons? I have no answer. The city of contradiction carries on, oblivious.
California Voting Trickery and Deception
The “Presidential Election Reform Act” is currently hunting around for the required amount of signatories to appear in the 2008 ballot. This proposed Act would change the way California’s electoral college votes are divided up, moving from a winner takes all to a system where a electoral vote would go to the winner of every congressional district, possibly moving away ~22 of the California electoral votes away from the winner of the popular vote. The cleverly named Act is a thinly veiled effort by California Republicans to sway the electoral power of the nation’s largest state away from the popular voting results in to a slanted version of electoral representation.
The number of voices against this proposed Act is growing, and as Slate argues that this is most likely unconstitutional. Article II, Section 1 of the constitution states electors shall be appointed by the states “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Taking this to the ballot and having the voters decide on how the state’s electoral votes are decided therefore would be unconstitutional. As Slate comments, the attempt to take this directly to the voters is a sly way to avoid the Democraticly controlled State legislature and confuse them with a well titled Act.
Further (and I’m no voting law expert), this would severely disenfranchise voters in more dense districts (e.g. Los Angeles or the Bay Area) by moving voting power to less populated areas. If the proposed Act argues to give more voter control to the individuals, that’s patently false as it is still a winner-takes-all system, only now at the district level. The popular vote is still left discarded under the Act.
As Mark Leno and others argue, we need electoral reform, and we need it badly. But what we don’t need is disingenuous trickery of the public to meet one party’s ends in the name of reform. The worst part of maneuvering like this is that it will drain resources and time to defeat where the state has pressing issues that require attention instead of this Act.