I was sent an article today that said Bill Gates has started another company called BGC3. While the details are sketchy it sounds like the company will be a think tank that will be focused on solving problems. I would love to see Bill Gates apply the passion and energy that he has around solving humanitarian and education issues to other issues like alternative energy sources, better user interfaces to computers, or global warming.

Only time will tell what if anything comes out of this company.

There has been a lot of press coverage about Bill Gates leaving his day-to-day activities at Microsoft to focus on philanthropy. As I have been reading them I have been thinking about what it will mean for Microsoft. I have seen several companies where the founders have left. In most cases the transition was smooth because everyone understood their jobs and realized that what they were doing wouldn't change. Over time, however, the new leadership started to change things and the companies took on a new feel. This transition happens every day on a much smaller scale when a manager leaves a team or sometimes even when a new member joins a team. What makes this so newsworthy is the size of Microsoft and the effect that it's products have in our everyday computing life. I would venture to say that even if you have never used Windows (say using *nix or the Mac exclusively) you are still influenced by what Microsoft does just because people will ask you questions about their Windows machine.

I wish Bill Gates the best of luck in his new ventures and hope that his work will have a huge positive effect on the world. It would be nice if we could see some of the diseases that have been eradicated in the United States completely eradicated in the world, learning opportunities for more of the people in the world, and technology solving more problems that don't revolve around profit and loss. I don't know that it will lead to world peace but we can always dream that someday all of the efforts of the good people in this world will lead to something like that.

This is a little off of the typical content for my blog but when I saw this I thought I just have to share (and besides its Friday so you deserve a little break). I got an e-mail asking me to take a survey. It was a web based survey from a company I know so I decided to try it out. Almost all the questions were the typical questions with answers on a scale of 1-7 with 1 being the dislike/no answer and 7 being the like/yes answer. Then I got to a question with this for the possible answers.

 

I sat there for a minute analyzing the numbering scheme. I tried to find a pattern like 1 in the middle with the numbers concentrically arranged around it. I also looked at an odd/even distribution. It isn't like they just reversed the numbers and the questions above and below it were in the correct 1-7 order. Finally I decided that it was taking too much of my time and I should just skip the question. Unfortunately all of the questions required an answer. Normally I would have just closed the browser window and decided that they weren't worth the time but this time I decided that a little random data might give them something to think about and just chose the 1 button. I don't know if I was indicating I wanted them to do it for me, I was ambivalent about the whole thing, or that I want to do it myself but it would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in the meeting where they start asking about the results and why this one question seems to be outside of the expected values. I am sure there will be some finger pointing and questioning of the database or the web programmers. I am truly sorry for any grief I might cause those people. In the end I think they will have to throw the question out or get some high priced behavioral analyst to decide if I noticed the changed number scheme and clicked on the number I wanted or if I just blindly clicked the position I expected my number to be in. That would be some feat of mind reading.

According to ComputerWorld IE gained a small market share in April. It is the first gain for IE since October and comes after Apple attempted to push Safari out via automatic updates. I didn't do that well in statistics but the numbers seemed relatively small and might just reflect that there is some settling in the marketplace as people pick their favorite browser and use it. The article points out that IE6 gained in popularity. That tells me it wasn't a whole slew of new Windows Vista machines. I am hoping it wasn't a lot of people who gave up on Vista and went back to XP but that is certainly also a possibility. If that were the case I would expect the numbers to change as those people download IE7, Safari, or FireFox to their XP machines.

Of course as we all know and are reminded of almost every time we watch the news, statistics can be made to tell almost any story that we want.

I predicted earlier that one of the big trends this year would be "green". I have seen it a lot more lately. Last night as I was waiting for dinner I was flipping through a Wired magazine and saw a few ads from IBM on how they can make the data center green.

It is not just technology companies that are getting into the act. For years I have been seeing signs in hotels that say something like "Millions of gallons of water are wasted washing towels that have only been used once. To save the planet please hang up any towels that you want to reuse." I have done this. I have also put a small piece of paper in one of the unused towels to see if it has been removed. Early on I noticed that all of the towels were changed out each day whether they were used  or not. The signs were really there to help me feel better but didn't change the way the hotel staff serviced the room. Over the last 6 months I have noticed that the unused towels are being left in the room. That makes me feel a little bit better about my contribution to living on this planet. I still haven't seen a hotel that leaves the towel I hung up on the towel rack but maybe with a few more years of training the staff will get to the point where they are not washing towels that have been used once.

The other day I was shredding some papers from the early 90's. I was shocked to find a letter from my bank (I don't use that bank any more and the more I think about it I think it was a good idea to switch). In the letter, the bank had just sent me a debit card to use to withdraw funds from my checking account. On the letter was the bank account number, the number from the debit card, and my social security number. Needless to say I couldn't get that piece of paper into the shredder fast enough.

It would be nice to go back to a time of innocence when I would have looked at that paper and thought it was kind of the bank to have me double check the information instead of thinking about how if an identity thief were to get that paper they would have a lot of information that they could use to steal my money and my name. Now I am wondering how many other papers I have that have escaped the shredder.

First of all let me say Happy 2008 to everyone out there. It seems hard to believe that another year has come and gone.

I have sworn off swearing off making predictions and will attempt to come up with a list of things that I think will be important to all of us working in technology.

1. The Economy - In the past few years it seemed to me that IT budgets were increasing and companies were willing to take a chance on newer technologies or new ways of thinking. With the mixed signals on the economy and nobody really knowing if the US is headed for inflation or a recession but it seems from my informal polling that IT budgets are staying flat or increasing at a smaller rate. That could be a local phenomenon but if it is true it means that we will all be back to justifying costs and showing a shorter ROI for our projects.
2. Green - No, not the lime green color that my daughter is crazy about but the environmentally conscience type of green. Before "green" has been seen as something you do because you are an activist. After all, three years ago when I looked at purchasing a car I just couldn't justify the increased cost of a hybrid vehicle. I would have loved to own one but I just couldn't ever see saving enough in fuel costs to justify the larger up front cost let alone the expected higher maintenance costs. Most companies have looked at their "green" initiatives in the same manner. If they could save money by consolidating servers (and save the environment as a side effect) they were willing to do it but nobody in their right mind would spend extra money just to be green. I now see more companies seeing green as an investment that might cost them money in the short term but that will pay off large dividends in the long term. Besides that being green can be used as a competitive advantage if you can show how your competitors are polluting worse than you are.
   I think technology can help out a lot here. Not only are newer computers getting better about saving energy, the newer operating systems like Windows Vista are pre-configured with energy saving settings that will shut down monitors, spin down hard drives, and will eventually put the computer to sleep. There are other technologies that allow me to shut down my machine but have it wake up when it needs to be patched by the IT group so I don't have to leave my machine on all night long one or more nights in the month. There is also tremendous potential for IT applications to be used for tracking energy usage and providing plans for cutting down on the impact of our technology on the environment.
3. Open Source - I think that open source software has become such a large portion of our industry that to think that it will ever go away is just a fantasy. I also don't see it taking over the world and all "closed source" software going away. I think there is room for both models. I still don't see how you can build a long term business on creating and giving away software but if someone can figure a way to do it I am more than willing to use their software. I see a longer term where Linux and a few successful large projects will be supported and a lot of small utilities but the majority of the software industry will still be run on closed source software. I am not sure what the final percentages will be but I will expect that for the next few years at least we will see open source gaining in prominence. I also expect to continue to hear open source touted as the fix to all the software ills just like structured programming and object oriented programming and a lot of other "silver bullet" ideas before it. One thing is for sure and that is the whole collaborative model of most open source projects has proved that quality software that addresses a business need can be developed by large, geographically distributed teams.
4. Communications - A lot of major players in the industry have "unified communications" offerings. If you take a larger look at software a lot of it is about communicating ideas. I am putting software like Microsoft Office, blogging, pod casting, and web conferencing software into this larger bucket of communications software. There are countless articles and studies talking about how we are overwhelmed with data but starving for information. I think a lot of this problem lies in the way that we try to communicate facts to each other. I think that whoever is able to come up with software that will help us weed out irrelevant facts and drill down on the data that will ultimately become information that we can use will have done us all a service.
   I see a bunch of different technologies that can help with this communication issue. Some of the most obvious are the web conferencing and telecommunications type software like skype but there is a large range from the spam filters that we use to the business intellingence and data mining that drives the dashboards, KPIs, and reports that we rely on to software for creating presentations (just an aside, anyone who could figure out a way to stop boring PowerPoint presentations from being delivered would be a real hero). As we are innundated with information and expected to be constantly available this software will become more and more part of our lives. I think it might be too soon for it to appear this year but within a few years I would expect to see the resurgence of "agent" software that will go out and find information that is of interest to us and put it into neat little packages of information that we can get whenever it is convenient for us.
5. Security - I just read a report on the rise in data breaches last year. It is staggering how much data is lost because someone left a laptop in a cab or because somone sent unencrypted data through the mail and the package was lost. I see many more companies implementing a Chief Security Officer or similar position that will be responsible for making sure that data is secured. I also hear more about encrypting data whenever it is at rest so it will not be compromised. We also have to be aware of phishing attacks and other on-line scams. All of these threats will need to be addressed if we are to continue growing our digital economy.

These are a few (fairly obvious) trends that I think will be important in 2008. Who knows, if I am right I may do something crazy in 2009 like predict when the next version of Visual Studio will be released.

Last night while watching the news I saw a report of an earthquake in New Zealand. I immediately thought of all of the people that I have shared e-mails with and the few that I have met from New Zealand. It got me to thinking about how much smaller the world has become, or how much larger my view of it has become over the last few years. This year alone I have been to Canada, Malaysia, the Czech Republic, and Italy. I have also traveled around the United States and met many people from different countries. I am constantly amazed at how well we can get along when we are talking technology, cars, or other shared interests and how that doesn't seem to scale as well when "governments" and "countries" get involved.

I am sure that most people just want to get along with their neighbors, no matter how far away those neighbors might live. The Regional Director program has helped me to meet people from many different countries. We don't always agree on every topic and the sometimes lively debate is one of the real benefits of the program. One thing we all seem to do is care about how technology will affect us and our parents, grandparents, and children.

If I can come up with some good predictions of where technology will take us in 2008 I will put them down in another post. Until then I hope that technology is making your life easier, your world smaller, and helping you to keep in touch with your friends and neighbors.

Looking at the calendar I realize that had I not left Keane 5 weeks ago I would be celebrating my 15th anniversary with the company today. Looking back over the last 5 weeks I have learned a lot and had a chance to work on projects that I think will prove to have a bigger impact than the work I was doing at Keane. I do and will continue to miss my friends and colleagues at Keane but I am loving the chance I have to learn and do new things with Advaiya. In the end I think the decision to change jobs was a good one. In a bit of irony, my last day with Keane I came home and had a letter directing me to a web site to pick out my 15 year anniversary gift from the company. I did go and look but didn't order since I knew I wasn't going to be working there today.

I have been dying to post this announcement here but I thought I would send out personal e-mails to all the people I worked with and let them know before they heard it here. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a bigger task than I thought and I haven't sent out all the e-mails I wanted to. I finally decided that it is better to read it on my blog than to suddenly find out that my Keane e-mail account doesn't work any more.

This Friday will be my last day with Keane. I will be leaving 5 weeks short of my 15 year anniversary. I have enjoyed my time at Keane and the many people that I have had a chance to meet and work with along the way.

I will be starting work for Advaiya on the 20th. I am excited about the challenges that await me and the chance I will have to work with and contribute to a team working on different challenges.

I saw a link on the MSN home page today that I just had to check out. It looks like if you are using Live Search (and who isn't?) that you can instead go to the page at http://click4thecause.live.com/Search/Charity/Default.aspx?locale=en-us&source=msnhp you can search from there and Microsoft will donate to ninemillion.org and help out with the nine million refugees around the world. Pretty cool especially if you are already using Live Search.

The company that I work for (Keane, Inc.) announced today that they will be sold to Caritor. It made the front page of the Caritor web site at http://www.caritor.com/ with a nice animated gif with fireworks and everything. Of course it will take a while to see what happens but right now all of the executives are saying that day to day operations will not change and that we will see no change in benefits, etc. I sure hope they are correct. In any case it looks like we will be in for a couple of interesting months while things settle down and get straightened out.

For those of you who want to read more the press release is at http://www.caritor.com/news-events/news-new.html.

I have been a little silent lately (I may be in danger of ruining my New Year's resolution of blogging twice a week or more in 2007) because I have been busy and the hotel I am staying in has had spotty wireless connections. What I wanted to talk about on this post is my new cell phone.

I went into the store and told them that I needed a phone without a camera. The nice lady there looked at me like I had 2 heads. I had to explain that I sometimes go to secure locations where a camera is not allowed. Unfortunately those same locations are the ones where I don't have a permanent land line and they tend to be far away from anything else so it is the perfect scenario for when you would *need* a cell phone if you had car trouble or just to check in and say that you are heading home in the middle of a storm and that your family should not worry.

I have service through Cingular and they only had 2 models in the store that didn't have a camera. One was a Blackberry and the other was the Nokia E62. On the whole I have liked the phone but I have some things I don't like. So here is my list of what I like and don't like:

Like:

• Screen: The screen is fairly large and bright. I have set the background as a picture of my children that was taken with my wife's camera phone (she doesn't have the same restriction) and it is easy to see even with the appointment and to-do information overlaid on it.
• Phone: This is a lot better phone than the LG one that it is replacing. To be fair the LG was the free model but it was hard to hear a lot of conversations where I haven't had a problem with this one.
• Form Factor: I have a blue tooth head set but I have also used my phone with it up to my ear and I like that the phone is small enough to be comfortable holding but also large enough that I can cradle it between my shoulder and ear when I need to jot down a quick note. I have also found that it does fit in my pocket when I don't want to wear it on my belt.
• Keyboard: At first I didn't think I would like the QWERTY keyboard but I have found that it is a lot faster to enter data and easier to figure out than the old phone where I would have to press the same key several times to cycle through the letters it represented.

Don't Like:

• Synchronization: For some reason when I synchronize with Outlook it will pull down appointments but when I go into view the details (notes in Outlook) they aren't there. If I add a new one it will replace it in both the phone and Outlook. That is not good for things like conference calls where the phone number is in the details instead of the location.
• Symbian OS: I was really hoping for a Windows Mobile 5.0 phone so I could continue to play around with mobile phone development. Unfortunately they all have a camera in them. I have no idea how to program for the Symbian OS and quite frankly I doubt that I will ever have the time.
• Belt Clip: I got the Cingular belt clip for free and twice I have had the whole thing come off my belt. Once was when I was picking up my backpack with the laptop in it and bumped the phone. The other was when I was getting out of my car. I think the seat belt caught on it but I am not sure. In both cases the phone didn't take a hard fall but it was kind of disappointing that it doesn't stay on better, especially considering the cost for the phone.

All in all I would have to say that I am satisfied with the phone. I don't think it has the cool factor that the BlackJack (the phone I really wanted) has but then again I have never really thought of a phone as a fashion accessory. That is one of the many reasons I will not be rushing out to get the iPhone (if Cisco doesn't stop it).

Here it is the first day of 2007 and the new year is full of promise. As I stated last year I have given up on making predictions (at least in public) about what the new year will bring. I am still looking forward to another great year. With MIX07, TechEd, and PDC along with the local launch events for Live, Office, Vista, and Exchange and all the user group presentations I am sure this year will be a busy one for me. I look forward to learning and discovering new things and doing my best to share them with you, my loyal readers.

May 2007 be a happy and prosperous year for you as well.

I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas. At this time of year my thoughts
turn to family and friends and I am very grateful for each and every one
that has touched my life this year. I wish you all the best at this time of
year and hope that the love of our Savior will be with all of us. My heart
goes out to the men and women in the armed services and I pray that peace
will prevail and they will be able to return home.

This is one of those non-technical posts so if you don't want to hear me brag about my children then you can skip this one.

The schools around here have a contest each year called "Reflections" where a theme is chosen and the children can enter in one of several categories to show off their talents. The theme this year was "My favorite place". I had two children who entered the contest. My daughter drew a watercolor picture of our front yard. She chose that as her favorite place because at the time the weather was warm and she could take a blanket out on the lawn and read a book. She earned an honorable mention.

My youngest son wasn't going to enter but after a lot of "encouragement" from his parents he finally relented and decided to go take a few pictures of the Peaks Arena ice skating rink because he thought if he took the pictures he could also ice skate and he loves to skate. You might remember the Peaks Arena as one of the venues of the 2002 Olympics. As it turns out he waited until we didn't have any time to skate but I took him down to the arena and he snapped a few photos. He wasn't all that enthusiastic about it but it did give him some one on one time with me and he also got to use the nice digital camera with a lot less supervision (aka Slow down!, Be careful!, Watch what you are doing) that he normally gets.

We entered this picture in the competition. He won first place at his school and is going on to the district competition.

I am very proud of both of my children for the hard work that they put into doing this.

I am catching up on reading blog posts after the Thanksgiving break and ran across the post at http://blog.devstone.com/aaron/archive/2006/11/20/2063.aspx from Aaron Zupancic where someone comments on his prose style. I am not sure I am qualified to comment on how good or how bad his style is for two reasons. The one that is most obvious to those who regularly read my posts is that I don't have the perfect style either. If I forget to run ieSpell I get spelling errors all over the place. The other is that I think style is somewhat like art. There are some basic rules but after that it comes down to personal preference.

I have been blogging for over 2 years now and hopefully I have helped out other people with my posts. I mostly write about what catches my fancy at the time and also try to keep people informed about what is going on as far as I know. I think that most blogs I read are about sharing information more than they are about making perfect writers out of all of us.

I got a call this morning early from my wife. I knew it was bad news because it was about 6:30 A.M. where she was calling from. She was crying and I found out that my dog Max was seriously ill. Max was over 12 years old and he had gotten to the point where he could barely walk so it wasn't totally unexpected but it still hurts none the less. I have played with Max, watched over him, stayed up all night with him when he swallowed a fish hook, and have greatly enjoyed his company. If you have had a pet yourself then you know what I mean. I will miss him very much.

 

 

I appologize for the non-technical nature of this post but today a long time co-worker and friend was layed to rest. Jim Andersen was buried today. I know I will miss his humor and after 10+ years of working for the same company there will be a big void when I get back to the office.

The world is worse off without Jim.

For a long time I have watched with dismay as my e-mail has reported a lot of trackback and referrals to posts on my blog from places on the Internet that I would not personally visit. I have pretty much ignored the problem up until now figuring that most people who would read my blog would know that spam is a way of life on the Internet. The other day I saw a couple of comments pop up that were definitely spam, they had the same wording telling my site has blogging potential (since that is all I have done I would hope it does) and then a key word. I decided that as much as I hate to censor anything on my site I also don't need that. I went through and deleted the comments and now I am going to try to figure out a way to go back and remove all of the trackback entries. I am hoping that will help out with the signal to noise ratio on my blog and I will try to make sure I post worthwhile information.

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The other day I got an award from my employer.  It was given to me "for exemplary perfomrance in Achievement Through Teamwork". This is the first such award I have gotten in over 13 years of working under basically the same management. I am somewhat surprised that I got the award since I didn't do anything that much beyond what I have been doing since I started working.

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So the whole award thing got me thinking about how to recognize employees. I have this pipe dream of one day leaving the corporate world and becoming an independent consultant and eventually building up a company that would employ no more than 20 highly focused and extremely talented individuals. I say pipe dream because I am addicted to a steady paycheck but that doesn't stop me from thinking about how to recognize people.

I have seen many different ways of showing your appreciation for people who have done a good job. The most obvious is the "employee of the week/month/year" type award. I have long been opposed to those because there are usually way more deserving people than time periods to recognize them. If you make the period too short, the award seems trivial i.e. Today's employee of the day is Bob because he made it to work 2.8 seconds before anyone else. If the time period is too long you end up with something like: I know all 10 of you worked yourself to death to complete the project but only one of you can be employee of the decade so Susan will get the reserved parking spot and exlusive use of the company car until 2016. Keep up the good work and maybe your turn will come around.

I have also seen monetary rewards. These seem to be recieved the best when presented correctly. Most of the time I have been given a gift certificate to a local resturant so I could take my wife out. The certificate rarely covered the meal but it let us go someplace nice for very little money. I did get one one time where my manager said something like "I know you have worked 100 hours of overtime in the last 2 weeks. Here is a $25 gift certificate. I hope this makes up for it." I was obviously less than pleased about the implication that my personal time was worth so little to the company especially considering the fact that they billed the client for all of my overtime hours. So maybe money is not the best idea.

For some people extra perks are a good motivator. I would love to see a program at Keane or any company that I worked for where you were rewarded with training or going to a conference. Maybe I am just too much of a geek but I love learning new things and the best thing is that I can use the knowledge I get at a conference to further my career. The only problem I have come up with when thinking about rewards like that is how to quantify what kind of contribution would qualify for a large conference like TechEd or PDC. Oh well, I guess I have a lot of time to think about it before I make the plunge into the world of running my own business.

Here it is in the waning hours of 2005 and I haven't put together my predictions for 2006 yet. Considering how badly I did predicting 2005 maybe I should stay out of the prognostication game. In any case 2005 has been a very good year for me and my family. We have been blessed to be healthy and prosper. I know a lot of people who suffered through and are still sufferning from hurricanes, floods, fires, and all sorts of other natural and man made disasters can not say the same thing. It is my hope that 2006 will bring to you and yours health and happiness.

I realize that Christmas is over but I wanted to let everyone know that I wish them a Merry Christmas. I love this time of year, especially the way that people seem to take the time to think of others. As I was reading the news this morning and looking at the stories of the memorials on the one year anniversary of the tsunami in Asia I remember what a sick feeling I had that morning and then later the feeling of pride as I saw the world pull together to help those affected. This year has seen hurricanes and earthquakes that have tested the faith, charity, and resources of a lot of individuals and countries. I hope that we will always band together to help anyone who is suffering.

I just wanted to take some time to say Happy Birthday to my country and I hope that those of you who had the day off have had a safe and enjoyable day. I was fortunate enough to be able to do some yard work and then spend most of the day watching some movies and just relaxing. I know I should have been busy learning new stuff about ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005, SharePoint Portal Server, or BizTalk but it was just nice to be able relax and enjoy myself.