shahine.com/omar/

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, Microsoft used to purchase truck loads of Odwalla Juice for the employees of Silicon Valley. This was a tradition started by many of the smaller splinter groups around Silicon Valley before Microsoft pulled them all together into our Mountain View Campus. I loved me some Orange Juice every day.

Well, Microsoft is also known for giving away all you can drink sodas. We also get these sodas, but this was a tradition Microsoft started in Redmond at some point.

Anyway, when the dot com bust happened Microsoft took away the Odwalla as well as a few other things. Why did they do that? Well, honestly, it was expensive and they didn't need to give it to us any more. Attrition went from 30% or so a year in Silicon Valley to record lows of 7% or so. I mean what were you going to do? Quit cause we took away Odwalla? I think most folks didn't really miss it much.

I remember one time an employee at work decided to take all the green superfood Odwallas out of the fridge on a Friday before a long weekend because they "expired". This was before Odwalla flash pasteurized the juice and it had a very short shelf life. They also used the bottle tops similar to the plastic milk cartons. Well, we referred to these things as Odwalla Bombs. The term was coined when we returned to our break room kitchen on Tuesday morning and it was covered in Green stinky plankton looking superfood. YUCK! In fact if you left pretty much any Odwalla out of a fridge for long enough it would explode.

Microsoft tried to set up Odwalla vending machines all over campus but no one purchased from them. After all, none of use were used to paying, and when we found out how much those little 12 oz bottles from heaven cost, we didn't buy. Instead we happily consumed all sorts of sugar water. We did however start getting Talking Rain, which is basically soda water with a hint of fruit flavor. Personally I don't like the talking Rain.

Over the past few years I have stopped drinking soda. For one thing it was rotting my teeth (really). Instead I have water or Welches cranberry juice.

This year I am trying to avoid consumption of high fructose corn syrup (HFC). What is that you ask? Well it:

1. tastes like sugar
2. costs a heck of a lot less
3. Is considered "unhealthy" and some believe contributes to obesity.

You'll be surprised at just how many things are sweated with HFC. Just look at the ingredients next time.

I have found that most things labeled organic don't have HFC and are sweetened with good old sugar. Anyway, recently our Cafeteria started selling Naked Juice for about $2.20 to $2.70. Now at first I thought this was expensive till I found out this stuff costs $3.99 at Safeway and Whole Foods. Creepers! That's more expensive than a Jamba Juice.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I decided I was going to start having this stuff at lunch. Since Microsoft is subsidizing it a bit I might as well.

The good news is, this stuff is DELICIOUS. I mean, I love it. It's much better than Odwalla. So far I've tried the following:

• Mighty Mango
• Pomegranate Acai
• Orange Mango Motion
• Power-C

and my fav is Pomegranate Acai.

I also found that Safeway often sells them for $2 each. I stopped by this weekend and loaded up. This stuff is yummy and good for you to.

The bad news is that this stuff is at least 100% more expensive than Soda sweetened with HFC and obviously not free .

Just heard about this on the radio and I just signed up.

For $41 they will take care of getting rid of most of your junk mail (the old skool kind that shows up in your mailbox).

Lora and I must get a recycle bin full of this stuff each month. It's amazing.

We'll see how this works out, but for $41 it's worth it to me.

Oh, and Lora and I haven't received any credit card offers for at least 3 years. How did we do it? Call 1-888-5 OPT OUT and you can essentially block the companies like Equifax from selling your info to them. I asked for a permanent block.

If you are using a ReadyBoost drive iTunes video is unplayable/unwatchable due to horrible perf.

I wonder who's at fault here?

I tried a few dozen things to get things working and then stumbled on a solution.... no ReadyBoost for me. Good thing I upgraded to 2GB of RAM on my Vista PC.

One of the things a lot of people don't understand is that for a mature service you must build for peak load. You don't care about anything except the point of time in the day or year that you will experience your greatest amount of traffic. And you typically add 20% on top of that just in case.

The reason you do all this? To avoid problems like this. I suspect that all the Turbotax customers that filed returns at the last minute could care less that Intuit was unable to handle their peak load.

Oh, another thing. Don't blame your customers:

While stopping short of promising that filers whose returns failed to reach the government on time would not face late fees, he described the IRS as sympathetic.

“Don’t wait until the last minute is the moral of the story,” Harry Pforzheimer, said.

[source: Herald Tribune]

Good thing I filed my taxes back in February. I think I will do the same next year .

Moleskine has come out with really cool city guides. I plan to get one for New York and San Francisco.

They have such features as:

I. General Information

» Key Map
» Metro Map
» Station Index
» Transportation
» Useful Information

II. Topography

» City Maps
» Street Index
(up to 36 colorful maps for the city and metro system, and an alphabetical street index)

III. Notes and Thoughts

» Blank pages (up to 76 blank pages, giving you all the space you need to write, jot down useful information, and record your thoughts)

IV. City File

» 12 tabbed sections containing another 96 blank pages, giving you all the space you need to capture your memories and favorite haunts.
» Six Std Tabbed Sections
Food: places, legends, recipes
 Drinks: bars, wineries, stories
 Sleep: places, dreams, adventures
 People: names, faces, encounters
 Places: info, shopping, art
 Books, Music, Movies
» Six Alt Tabbed Sections
Six additional tabbed sections can be personalized. A sheet of 35 adhesive labels is included with each book.

V. Loose Notes

» Quick Messages / Perforated

VI. Back Pocket

» Accordion Pocket

» Translucent sheets for tracking itineraries
» Adhesive labels for personalizing

This is really cool and something a lot of folks at Microsoft has been working a long time on, but yesterday Penn announced that they have selected Windows Live @ edu for their students and alumni over Google.

ArsTechnica has some commentary.

One of the cooler thinks about our service is that with a little bit of technology and a lot of great work by the folks who manage the Windows Live @ edu program we're able to offer a pretty great set of services to any educational institution out there.

Winning over Penn was the most challenging of the Schools because they pretty much put the students in charge of deciding the relative merits of the different service offerings. There are a lot of schools already signed up for WL @ edu but Penn is the first Ivy League. As you can imagine, the others schools pay attention to who is picking who (us vs goog).

update: Microsoft has released an add-in to restore this functionality in Excell 2007

As a Program Manager at Microsoft I spend days and days using Sharepoint Lists. It's often very easy and preferable to export a list to Excel and manipulate it there. For example, you can read/write changes in a list and then also crunch data on other sheets like making Pivot Tables and so on.

Well imagine my horror when I learned that the two way sync feature was removed from Excel 2007. A little part of me dies every time I export to excel and then have to manually go and update a sharepoint list. I don't want to use Access to manipulate lists offline, but it appears that's the only option.

Well, I did some searches today and low and behold there is a solution. If you look in the comments in the post I just referenced you will find this:

Hi,

You can have that 2-ways sync functionality back if you install the small free activeX (200K, no dependency whatsoever on anything) available here: http://www.softfluent.com/wsslists.htm.

It reroutes .IQY files associations to itself, so when you click on WSS's "export to spreadsheet" links, it launches Excel 2007, and creates a 2 way sync WSS list (sorry, "table" as the feature has been renamed in the newly created workbook/sheet.

Any questions can be sent to smo (at) softfluent (dot) com.

Simon.

Thank you Softfluent for restoring my productivity.

To make this work on Vista you must launch IE as an administrator, then install the ActiveX Control. Then export your list to excel and when you right click on the table you will see the "Synchronize with SharePoint" button.

Looks like we've released an update to address performance issues with Outlook 2007.

I've installed the update on a few of my machines and I can't say I've noticed much of a difference, but time will tell.

There is a bug fix in this update that I do experience all the time though:

You create an update to a meeting request or an exception to a meeting request in Outlook 2007. If the meeting request is open when you create the update or the exception, you receive the following error message:

The function cannot be performed because the message has been changed.

However, when you click OK to close the error message, an update to the meeting request is sent to the attendees.

This is just funny. Look at the Spam ads that GMail is showing me. Spam Primavera and Spam Breakfast Burritos. Yummm!

There are more. It gets better and better.

A few months back I wrote about a chemical called Bisphenol A (BPA) which is commonly found in polycarbonate plastics, which make up most baby bottles.

Today, when re-reading that article I saw a Google ad for a new web site which tracks all sorts of news related to BPA if you are so interested. It also contains links to some plastics guides.

http://www.bisphenolafree.org/

Looks like some one filed a class action law suit demanding that the baby bottle companies label their packages as having BPA in them.

BTW, we have been using Born Free Bottles for our little Sarah and love them. They look and feel like the Dr. Brown's bottles but they are made from a bio-plastic called Polyamide. They can be found at Whole Foods (they are usually sold out though). I highly recommend them for your child.

Also, San Francisco and the EU have laws that now ban the sale of baby products that contain BPAs.

Email is to Instant Messaging as Blogging is to Twitter

I think Twitter is just group IM. I've been wondering about the relative merits and recent popularity of twitter, and came to the realization that it's very similar to blogging.

In a way blogging simply made your conversation public. Twitter makes your IM style conversations public.

Both Email and IM are similar in that:

• You send messages to specific people
• You can't subscribe to messages
• You need to know ahead of time who you are sending the message to
• You can't search Google for private emails or IM.

Both Blogging and Twitter are similar in that:

• You typically broadcast messages/content to everyone
• You can subscribe to people you are interested in
• You don't need to know ahead of time who you are broadcasting to
• You can search for any archived content.

I think Twitter has it's place... it's just a twist on Instant Messaging.

Wohoo. I hope that PC laptop makers start to add DisplayPort on their machines so we can finally go digital to the display w/o nasty analog.

Unfortunately display port is not compatible with DVI or HDMI but it does allow signal passthrough. Not sure what that means.

I am very excited that EMI has announced that it's going to start offering DRM free audio at a higher bit rate for an extra 30 cents a song. I might finally start purchasing music online.

This is one of the best pieces of technology news of 2007. You got to give Apple credit for this one.

I do think it will be a bit tricky to explain this to consumers though. How will the iTunes interface look. You already have things like [clean] and [explicit] will they add buttons for [drm] and [no drm]?

[Source: Tim Marman]

I grew up in New York City. You don't really become an environmentalist living there. There isn't much natural beauty, if anything, NYC represents the far end of the achievements man has made around urbanized living, economic power, social and cultural influence and concrete & glass.

Now that I live in California I can't help but love and appreciate nature. The California Coast is simply stunning and all the amazing natural resources out here on the west coast are easy to take for granted, but every time I pay my property and state income taxes I think... what a small price to pay for such an amazing place.

This brings me to my point. Now that I live in a house (first time in my life, I spent the rest in apartments) I can't help but see and feel the amazing amount of waste our society produces and we consume. The amount of trash and recycling that comes out of our house is shocking. When you live in an apartment this stuff just disappears down the trash shoot and you never see (only hear) the garbage trucks at 6am.

So, Lora and I do what we can to recycle. But that was just the beginning. I feel that I've turning into a Hippie . I remember the first time I went to Whole Fools and I was like, what is this place good for? They don't have good trash bags or Coke. And look at those weird bags people bring to the store for their groceries. Well now I'm one of those people.

I am HIGHLY IRRITATED when I go to Safeway and the bag people insist on placing one item in every bag. I come home and end up with like 20 crappy little plastic bags that you can't even recycle. These bags are made from oil and we consume an enormous amount of oil to make something that will sit in a land fill or end up somewhere on a freeway or beach cause it's cheap (about 1 cent a bag). However, San Francisco recently became the first city in the nation to BAN the use of plastic bags in Grocery Stores and Drug Stores.

Now, many can argue how bad this is and how it will drive up prices and blah blah blah. I say SHUT IT! Bio Plasic Bags (made from corn starch) cost a few cents more per bag. If this really bothers you buy a re-usable bag and keep it in your car. Whole Foods makes awesome reusable bags. They are large and have study handles and most all of your groceries will fit in 2-3 of them vs the 500 bags Safeway insists on giving you. In fact if you use such a bag at Whole Foods OR Safeway they will credit you a few cents per bag.

It's about time we start to pay for the very real cost of cleaning up the trash and mess and waste we spew into the world. Now that we have a child I'm even more sensitive about what we are not doing to ensure that she will enjoy this place as much as we do.

IMHO San Francisco is on a role. First they ban Baby products that contain harmful Bisphenol A (BPA) from things like baby bottles, and now plastic bags. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy that our irresponsible behavior to our natural resources and our over reliance on plastic and petroleum at the cost of our health and our planet is starting to trend back in the right direction.

I grew up as a cynic of recycling. Now I buy my tooth paste from Whole Foods and use my green bag. Go figure. I drove a Prius for the first time the other day, and while I still think it's ugly, I can't help but feel ashamed for driving a car that gets such terrible mileage.

Well, it's been a REALLY long time since I've posted about stuff I'm working on. One of the reasons I haven't posted about work related stuff is that I stopped working on Mail back when the M8 milestone was starting up (last summer). I worked on another project, then went on parental leave, and when I returned there was an opportunity to work on Mail Hotmail again and I took it. Moving forward my team and I are going to be responsible for the core mail features for Windows Live Hotmail. Think of this as a big chunk of the "application" which in our case consists of the server and the rendered HTML or AJAX code. Hotmail is a really significant project and there are LOTS of people that support developing and maintaining the service so I don't want to trivialize the fact that there are many other moving parts and areas of responsibility that my peers manage as part of the service.

I had a lot of fun on the other project. A small part of me is sad that I'm no longer a part of the team, since it's filled with so many talented folks and a really amazing future. However, coming back to work on Hotmail reminds me just how much I like working in this space. I'm an e-mail nut at heart, and it's what I've done for the majority of my 8+ years at Microsoft... and it's what ultimately brought me out to the west coast.

Anyway, the team just finished releasing M10 to the entire site today. M10 is a milestone along a remarkable journey that started in 2004 when I joined the MSN Hotmail team. I'm really proud of the work the team has done, and the polish and performance found in M10. We wrote the product from scratch (practically zero code reuse from the current MSN Hotmail) on .NET inventing and using technologies along the way to deliver a rich and fast experience that leapfrogs our current free mail product. The challenges we faced and the things we learned are really profound.

In fact you might notice that Yahoo Mail beta seems to be taking a few cues from our playbook (ignoring their storage announcement for a moment). There are some hard and fast facts around performance of Rich AJAX applications that a small number of major services are dealing with. And I'm talking about services that need to scale to hundreds of millions of users (with tens of millions of logons) across thousands of servers in hundreds of markets and cities across the world. There are no wide spread "best practices" out there to borrow. There is a lot of hard work in finding the right balance between performance and richness and deploying a service to a world wide audience with very little downtime.

Anyway, I just wanted to write this post acknowledging the excellent work the team has done, and mention that I'm back working on a project that I helped start with a group of amazingly smart and dedicated folks. It should be a fun summer watching the user base grow.

PS - I'd like to point out that Windows Live Hotmail M10 was recently positively reviewed in PC Mag and received an editor's choice award (along with Yahoo).