Seeping Matter

Ever since the FIA announced that Formula One would be returning to the United States this year, I’ve been making plans to attend the race at the new track that is currently being built in Austin.  I’ve signed up on their mailing list so I will know when tickets become available and have been carefully monitoring the progress of things there.  An e-mail from them this week, asking me to participate in a survey for ticket pricing, got me looking into things a bit more.

I’m not coming away feeling very confident.

There’s a lot feeding into this feeling that I’ll touch on later, but the bottom line is that I don’t get the impression they really know what is going on there.  That, plus I don’t think they have a good feel for how grassroots racing fans support the sport and why that is important.

If neither of those are true, the only other logical conclusion is that they are trying to create a premier event meant exclusively for wealthy Americans, rather than a racing event meant to reward the bulk of the loyal racing fans that have followed F1 for years.

Of course there are other conclusions, like maybe nobody actually works there.

When I got the survey, I started looking around at their website to try to figure out some of the logistics of our trip — where we will stay, track ingress and egress, etc.  It was pretty alarming to find that the track’s website makes no mention of any onsite camping and specifically says that onsite parking will be limited only to VIP ticket holders.  To give you a point of comparison, VIP tickets cost well into the thousands of dollars for the weekend.

Hotel stays are similarly atrocious.  Most hotels in Austin are already completely sold out for that weekend.  I did find some openings in a Holiday Inn Express for nearly $300/night.

The cost of hotels are obviously beyond the control of the track owners, but they could certainly have expected that the prices would skyrocket for the weekend.  Still, it is pretty clear that the only people who have made concrete plans are those with significant financial means, paying thousands of dollars per person for tickets, and several hundreds or even thousands of dollars for hotel rooms.  People with that kind of money can probably also afford to fly into Austin and take a taxi to the track.  But what about the rest of us?

I’ve been to my fair share of racing events, and I can tell you that lots of the fans that support racing do so on shoestring budgets.  At tracks like Miller Motorsports Park and Laguna Seca, people are coming to the track towing trailers, in cars with tents, or on motorcycles — lots and lots of motorcycles.  They are camping at or near the track and eating food they’ve prepared in advance and brought with them.  They are making sacrifices to get to the race because it is important to them.  They don’t have a lot of money.

When World Superbike comes to Miller Motorsports Park, there are over 50,000 fans in attendance from all over the United States and even other parts of the world.  MMP offers onsite camping to accommodate people who have come from a long distance for the weekend.  There are all kinds of sites available including small tent sites for those on a real tight budget.  At the MotoGP at Laguna Seca, there isn’t much in terms of onsite camping facilities, but the staff at Laguna Seca accommodate this by coordinating with nearby camping facilities to make it work.  You can even reserve and pay for your camping spot via Laguna Seca’s website at the same time that you buy your tickets.  They have shuttles that run regularly between the campsites and the track, and these shuttles do not stop until everyone has arrived where they need to go.

World Superbike and MotoGP are no fly-by-night racing series — these are world-class, prestigious, worldwide racing series with the best racers in the world.  Like Formula One.

When we e-mailed the Circuit of the Americas to ask them some of these logistical questions, it took several days before we received a cryptic non-answer:

We will have shuttles going to and from the track to three different Austin locations.  RV and Camping information has not been finalized yet, but I would recommend checking private camping sites or even Texas State Park facilities for a great secondary vacation while you attend the race.  Allowed items (chairs, blankets etc.) will be on the website shortly after we release individual ticket information.

I don’t know about you but I sure can’t put a finger on what’s up with James Stewart lately.

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you probably can’t put a finger on it either.)

Sometime last year, JGR Motocross, an up-and-coming non-factory race team, did what seemed impossible:  They signed one of the top title contenders, James Stewart, away from all the other factory teams.  Expectations were certainly of the highest sort.  Stewart is a multi-time Supercross and Motocross champion, and JGR was looking to establish themselves as a premier team by bringing Stewart on board to win a title.

This despite Stewart’s Supercross record last year where he crashed more often in main events than not.

Now a year later, both Stewart and JGR are clearly disappointed in the results they’ve had.  Just a couple of days ago it was announced that JGR had released Stewart from his multi-year contract, as I expected.  Today Yoshimura Suzuki announced a multi-year deal with Stewart as a Suzuki rider, also as I expected (but not as I would have done in their place).

Everyone’s wondering, which Stewart is going to show up for the Motocross season?  Will it be the former champion, one of only two people to win ever single moto for the entire season?  Or will it be the Stewart of late, unable to run at the pace of the top guys and usually crashing himself into oblivion?

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m not exactly a fan of James Stewart.  I think he’s a spoiled brat, unmotivated, selfish, and a poor sport.  But he’s also incredibly talented and fast.  I sure would like to think that a couple of years of pounding himself into the dirt instead of standing on the podium might have helped him grow out of the police-officer-impersonating, superior-to-everyone-else, reality-tv, whiny-crybaby phase.  Maybe this time the deal wasn’t all about the money, but instead about being on a historic team with a great bike that needs a great rider, just for the love of the sport.

Could we really have a new James Stewart that races because he loves to race, one who competes in every race in every season, wins some of the time, but is a great sport all the time?  I’d sure take it.

This Saturday is the Salt Lake City round of the 2012 AMA Supercross series.  This is the last Salt Lake City round of the contract with the AMA.  Until the 2013 schedule comes out we won’t know whether Salt Lake is on the schedule again, and we stand to lose our Supercross like we did in 2005.  And that makes me sad.

People wonder what I like so much about racing.  For me, there’s a lot to like about racing, but possibly the most exciting thing about racing is the start.

The start in NASCAR is, admittedly, not nearly so exciting as other top-level series, since they do rolling starts instead of standing starts.  Still, there is something pretty magical about hearing those engines open up, 14000 cubic inches roaring at 8000 RPMs as 40 transmissions shift as one.  The cars move to the far side of the track and it is eerily quiet, quiet enough for a normal conversation with your neighbor, the cars sounding like a distant rolling thunder approaching.  Then, the sound hits suddenly, like a thousand power chords over the world’s loudest PA.

Standing starts are even better.  Standing starts are the norm in MotoGP, World Superbike, and Formula One, for example.  Everyone lines up on a grid, fastest qualifiers at the front.  At the green light they all floor it and head into the first corner in a big bunch.  The fact that they manage to ever avoid an accident in the first turn is pretty amazing.

But I think the king of the race starts has to be the Supercross start.  There’s no grid:  Twenty riders all line up side by side, handlebar tips maybe six inches apart.  Miss Supercross holds up the 30-second board to signal the impending start.  Once the board drops and she runs off the track, the revs come up on all twenty bikes and the riders focus down on the gate.  It drops, and all twenty of them rush toward the first corner (almost always a left-handed corner — there’s a good reason for that), pushing and shoving and jockeying for position all the way.

I love that sound, the sound of all twenty of those bikes roaring down into the first turn.  It is one of the most exciting moments in sports, like overtime in a college football game.  It’s a moment you get eight times at every AMA Supercross event.  I sure hope they renew our contract, because I’m gonna miss that sound.

Tickets are only $10.  Not doing anything Saturday night?  You should come.  It’s almost the same price as a night at the movies.  And you’ll get to see the absolute best riders in the world doing what they do best (well, at least the ones that aren’t injured).  It really is amazing.

If you were to come into my bedroom sometime (I don’t know why you would do this, but bear with me here…) you might see this:

As you can see, this is a hospital sock placed nice and flat on the top of my wife’s jewelry box.

When I see this image it makes perfect sense to me.  I know exactly why there is a sock on my wife’s jewelry box.  You are probably racking your brain trying to figure out why on earth I would have a good reason for doing this.  In fact, right now you are probably thinking that it is a construed example simply for the purpose of writing a blog post.

Let me enlighten you.

We turn a fan on every night when we sleep.  Having a fan on generates some monotonous white noise which we find helps us sleep.  In addition, since our bedroom is upstairs, it is often a bit warmer up there than is comfortable for sleeping.  I, particularly, prefer sleeping in a cooler room with more blankets on.  Pointing a fan directly at us addresses both the heat issue and the white noise issue.

In order to get the fan to actually blow on us, it has to sit up high enough to make a difference.  So we tend to place it on top of this jewelry box which puts the fan at the optimum height.  The only problem with this is that the fan we use vibrates a lot.  Frequently, when we were first doing this, we’d be startled awake in the middle of the night to the sound of the fan falling on the floor as it vibrated itself off the jewelry box.

To address this problem, we put a hospital sock on the jewelry box.  The fan sits on the sock.  The rubberized tread on the sock keeps the fan from vibrating itself off the box.

One of the major sources of discontent at work or discord between neighbors or friends or family members happens when people do things that we just cannot comprehend.  We can’t understand why someone would do this or that.  That’s not uncommon, but the problem comes when we make the mental leap to:  ”Therefore, that person must be an idiot, because I am a sane person, and I can’t make any sense of why they did that.”

Instead of making that leap, think of the sock on the jewelry box.

In almost every case, people make rational, well-formed decisions based on their experience and their understanding of reality at the time.  That doesn’t mean everyone always makes intelligent or correct decisions, necessarily.  (I know, I’ve made lots of boneheaded decisions.)  What it means is, if you see someone doing something and you just can’t figure out why they would do such a dumb thing, what it probably means is that you don’t have all the information they have or see the world the way they see it, and if you did, perhaps you would behave the same.

Next time you see someone doing something that seems silly or boneheaded to you, take a step back.  Maybe it is a sock on a jewelry box.  If you take some time to think about why a rational, intelligent person would behave that way, or better yet, if you take the time to talk with them and find out about their motivation and perspective, you might come to a better understanding of the situation as a whole, and avoid straining a relationship in the process.

I mostly loved working at Novell.  Great technology and great people made most days good days.  There are brilliant people at Novell, and believe it or not, that company has invented some really amazing technology.  For some reason Novell has perpetual difficulty figuring out how to bring products to market, how to take products that should be successful and actually make them successful.

One Novell product that clearly fits this mold is iFolder.  iFolder was first released over a decade ago as a product for synchronizing files and folders between PCs.  All Novell employees got free iFolder accounts while the company tried to figure out how to sell it.

I don’t know of a single Novell employee that didn’t absolutely love iFolder.  Once I started using it I wondered how I ever lived without it.  I would use it to synchronize work files between my desktop and laptop, to synchronize these work files between work computers and home computers, to synchronize personal files between home computers and from home computers to work computers.  In sum, my files were always available to me on whichever computer I was using.  Changes I made offline would synchronize automatically when I came back online.  It always worked and I never had to think about it.

It was a marvelous product.  That made it even more sad that Novell could never seem to figure out how to make it big with iFolder.

When I left Novell in 2008, losing access to my iFolder account was seriously a difficult loss.  I actually considered this as one of the arguments against leaving, along with other things like the private window office and five weeks of paid time off.  I really loved iFolder!

Luckily for me, a new company called Dropbox came along and released their product in late 2008.  I signed up for a free 2GB account almost the instant I became aware of it as a replacement for iFolder, and I’ve been using that same free account ever since.  It is sad to think that Novell had a seven year head start and dismissed as unsuccessful a product that Dropbox is peddling with so much success.  But for me, I’m just happy to have my iFolder back.

Dropbox still doesn’t offer all the features today that iFolder did years ago, but it meets the main requirement:  My important files are available at any computer I use, whether at home, at work, or even on the internet.  I’m completely satisfied and love their product.  And with a free 2GB account, if you aren’t using Dropbox now, I’d have to ask why.  Like me, once you start using it, you’ll probably wonder how you ever got along without it.

To get your own free 2GB account, click here.

There are two types of delegation.

The first is the type of delegation are all born knowing how to do.  This is the type of delegation where you tell people exactly what to do and how to do it.  Little children do this instinctively with their friends and siblings, and they drive each other crazy doing it.  We call this “being bossy.”

The second is a much more challenging type of delegation called stewardship.  When you delegate in this way, you explain in detail all of the required outcomes of the task being delegated while leaving freedom to the delegatee as to the means of achieving the required outcomes.

In my experience, most people are naturally pretty poor at this type of delegation.  It’s not easy to do, thinking of the outcomes you want but granting freedom as to the methods.  I figure this has something to do with why this type of delegation is so rare.

Ironically, almost everyone who assigns a task hopes the results will exceed their expectations.  But since they usually delegate the job by specifying exactly how they expect it to be done, how can the person receiving the task hope to do any better than to meet expectations alone?

If you hope to have your expectations exceeded, your only hope is to give a stewardship.  Unless you offer the freedom afforded by a true stewardship, you really can’t hope for much more than for the job to be done exactly like you specified.  It’s tough for anyone to exceed expectations in that environment.

This week Microsoft formally announced the product I was working on before I left:  Microsoft User Experience Virtualization, or UE-V.  It is a part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, as are all products currently being developed out of Microsoft’s Utah Development Center.

UE-V is an example of what happens when you let marketing people go unchecked in naming a product.  The “V” stands for “Virtualization”, of which there is none in UE-V.  UE-V doesn’t have anything to do with virtual machines, virtual environments, or even virtualization of the “User Experience” in the strictest sense.

It is apparent that the purpose for choosing UE-V as the product name has to do with trying to maintain some semblance of branding continuity in the product names that comprise MDOP.  Two of the biggest products in MDOP are App-V (Application Virtualization) and MED-V (Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization).  In the case of these two products, however, there actually is something being virtualized, so the name is appropriate.  Three other products in MDOP (namely DART, MBAM, and AGPM) do not use virtualization and also do not include a “-V” in the name, so I don’t see the point of forcing UE-V to contain a “-V”.  Besides, App-V and MED-V are at least pronounceable as a single word.  How do you pronounce UE-V?  ”You’ve?”

Despite the utter naming fail, I have to say that I think UE-V is a pretty sweet product.  It is well planned and designed to address a very specific set of needs, and it does that pretty well.  The management of user settings is granular and highly configurable, the synchronization of the settings is timely and relevant to the scope of the settings, and the solution will work well in both traditional (user desktop) and more enterprise-y (VDI or TS) environments.  I designed and wrote the bulk of the code that manages the storage of the application and environment settings, and there’s some pretty cool stuff in there that I’m quite proud of.

Of all the MDOP products, this now makes four (MED-V, MBAM, UE-V, and DART) that are developed out of the Utah Development Center.  It is a significant contribution to Microsoft made by that team, one that Microsoft should be pleased with.  I’m glad to see UE-V get announced, because I’m proud of that and the other products that I worked on when I was there.  And if you are looking for a solution to synchronize your settings between devices, I think UE-V is a great alternative.

If you are using MDOP, that is, which is only available to Microsoft customers with an SA subscription.  Which means that, unless you are working for a really big company, you probably won’t be able to use UE-V.  Sorry.

I found this little gem on my old Sony Ericsson phone that I’m using now:

I guess everything is free on the day this photo was taken.

My first cell phone was a Qualcomm cell phone issued through Qwest.  This was the worst cell phone I ever owned, and not just because it was a big unwieldy brick.  It did not actually make or receive phone calls.  To be fair, this helped us avoid overage charges on our 30-minutes-per-month plan.

Eventually I got to where I was willing to pay for a cell phone that was actually a phone.  For some reason I bought a vibrant blue and white Motorola that looked something like this one:

It wasn’t too bad, but, well, I mean, look at it.

Not long afterward I bought another phone.  It was a Nokia that looked something like this one.

This was actually a pretty good little phone.  Basic, but pretty good.  Good battery life, placed calls, good call quality.  I liked it.  After a few months, Novell decided to pick up my cell phone bill and offered to buy me a new phone.  For some reason I replaced this perfectly good phone with another one.  It too was a Nokia, much like the one above, but more expensive and not really any better as it turns out.  (Sorry, can’t find a picture.)

I eventually replaced that phone with another Motorola, this time a flip phone:

I have to say I didn’t much care for it.  It always felt like it was going to break when I would press the lid against my ear.  It seemed pretty flimsy.

I replaced it with one of my favorite phones I ever had:  A Motorola Razr.

I was surprised by how much I liked this phone.  I was worried about seeming too trendy, getting a Razr.  But it was actually a really great phone.

Verizon, however, was not so great.  I switched to Verizon after a number of years of mediocrity with AT&T because I had a friend on Verizon who quite liked it.  But the agent who signed me up, well, to be frank, he flat-out lied to me about what the phone would do and what my plan entailed.  As a result I didn’t have the experience with the Razr I could have had.  If Verizon hadn’t lied to me, I might have stuck with this phone for years.

As it was, I decided to leave Verizon when my contract came up, and that meant I had to get a new phone.

Fortunately, I ended up coming out even better than I was with the Razr.  In fact, I would go so far as to say this little Sony Ericsson phone is the best phone I ever owned.  It was tiny, had great battery life (try, about a week on a single charge), had great call quality and actually was pretty easy to text with despite the numeric keypad.  It had great Bluetooth features that worked flawlessly with my Macbook Pro laptop.  I kept this phone long after the contract expired.

In December 2010, I was working for Microsoft and they really really wanted everyone to have a Windows Phone 7.  And since I was trying to be a good employee I got one.

As you can see from the history, this was my first smart phone.  It had a lot of nice features, but I have to admit I wasn’t exactly blown away.  I don’t really attribute the underwhelmedness to the Windows Phone  7 OS, which I honestly think is pretty decent.

I think the main thing is, first and foremost, I want my phone to be a phone.  It has to make calls.  Over the past few years, the ability for this phone to send and receive texts is also a big deal.  Smartphone features are nice, but if the phone isn’t good at calls and texting, I don’t really care what else it does so much.

At first, the Windows Phone 7 wasn’t so bad, but there were two big blows right from the beginning.  I wanted to put a bunch of my MP3s on it so I could use it as a music player.  The Samsung Focus’ 8GB of built-in memory was just not gonna cut it, so I grudgingly bought a 32 GB MicroSD card.  Because of some odd decision Microsoft made with the Windows Phone 7, I had to completely reformat my phone and reinstall the OS in order to use this expensive MicroSD card.  Lame.

After this I filled it up with a bunch of music.  Then I tried playing some of the music.  Come to find out, the music player on the Windows Phone 7 is horrible.  Terrible sound with no shaping at all.  It was so bad that I couldn’t stand using it as a music player.  I resorted instead to a cheap SanDisk Sansa which totally rocks.

So, sans music but with a completely unutilized and expensive 32 GB MicroSD card stowed away in the phone, I continued to use it for a year.  Other than having to charge it pretty much every day (like most other smartphones), it wasn’t too bad.

That is, until it started crashing.  Right after the Mango update.

At first it was just on resource-intensive apps.  Then it was on pretty much anything that used the Internet:  IE, Twitter, Gmail.  Then it was when texting or talking on the phone.  Then it was for nothing at all.

The worst part was, the OS would crash, and the phone would not reboot — sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours.  That means the phone fails to meet my basic requirements of handling phone calls and texts.

When I called AT&T about it, they took a half an hour of asking me questions before finally advising me to buy a new battery.  When I asked them if they thought this was actually going to work, they had to admit they really didn’t know whether it would work or not.  I expressed disappointment that I was still required to pay monthly service charges for a phone that doesn’t work, but AT&T wasn’t about to meet me halfway on replacing the phone with one that actually works.

So, I’m back to the Sony Ericsson.  Glad I kept it.  I wonder what will be the next phone, and how long I’ll wait before I get it.

I’m a fan of Wired magazine and a subscriber.  I don’t agree with every opinion that makes its way through the writing throughout each issue, but I must admit that I prefer that they seem to have an opinion instead of being Switzerland.

Sensationalism is another thing, though, and the latest cover from the April 2012 issue is a pretty shameless example.  It starts out saying, “Deep in the Utah desert, the National Security Agency is building…”.

I’m in the tech industry in Utah so I’m aware of the NSA’s new site they’re building.  But when I read the cover, my first reaction was, “Another one?  Why would we need another one in Utah, when the one they are building is so huge?”

See, when they say “Deep in the Utah desert,” I’m thinking of a place like this, some 75 miles west of Delta, and truly deep in the Utah desert.  I’m not thinking of Bluffdale, Utah.

Of course, they were actually referring to the site in Bluffdale, currently under construction.  As anyone with Internet access can find out, Bluffdale is not deep in the Utah desert.  It is in the southern part of the Salt Lake Valley.  The new NSA location is only about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City International Airport, and easily visible from I-15.

Calling it “Deep in the Utah desert” is not true at all, unless all of the Salt Lake and Utah valleys, with a combined population of nearly two million, are also deep in the Utah desert.  This is pure sensationalism on the part of Wired to arouse further mistrust and suspicion about the NSA by claiming that the site is akin to Area 51.  They should know better.