Seeping Matter

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.