Jon's Blog

After having not posted in forever, I give you another poem. It is one that anyone who emails me at work for the next 2 weeks will see (for context, in Microsoft Speak, OOF means Out of Office:

I'm off to Peru
To Hike Machu Picchu
I'm gone a fortnight
but you needn't fright!
A hi-pri question while I'm out?
Please give AButcher a shout!
If a personal reply is what you yearn
You will have to wait until I return
And In order to move to the front of that queue
Sending Red-Bang is what you should do
But this is long, goodbye and have a good day!
My motto while OOF is less work and more play!

(notice how the shape of the poem is like a mountain? like one I"m going to climb? woohoo!)

Sometimes people (usually family) prod me about the fact that I haven't posted a blog in a long time. Most of the comments on my Eurotrip Blog are from my sister reminding me that I hadn't posted in a while and that I should. See, I go through these spurts where I'm in a blogging sort of mindset where I start looking at things that happen and say to myself, "oh, I should blog about that." When I'm not in the blogging mood I just don't think that way. I don't notice blogging opportunities and generally let myself forget about the blog. This is when people make comments. Well, I've started getting the blogging bug again. This past weekend something happened and I thought, "Gee, I could write a blog about this." I promptly forgot what it was, but at least it was a sign that I was starting to think along those lines again. My new idea is to write this post to try and kick-start the process of getting back into the bloggin' rhythm. Since I don't really have a strong idea for what the post is gonna be about, it'll probably end up being kind of long, and directionless. Kind of like the Switzerland post on the Europe blog. Sorry about that.

Randi (my sister) was just here for 5 days. As I mentioned in my top 50 post (number 2), my sister is my best friend. So needless to say, her visit was awesome. We hung out with the b team lots, walked around the neighborhood, saw some stuff and ate out at some good restaurants. In addition, there were a few good longer term things that came out of the visit:

1) When we rented a movie from blockbuster, they had a remainder bin that was '2 for $20', and there were two movies that I was considering getting anyway that both happened to be on there: Across the Universe and Sweeney Todd. So I bought them both and am rather excited about it.

2) My go-to list of places to take people when they come to Seattle for the first time is starting to firm up, and this is awesome because I usually get pretty up in a curfuffle when someone is coming to visit. I always get worried that I won't be able to think of things to fill the time. When I try and think of "things to do", I experience the same thing I experience when I'm put on the spot to tell a story, or come up with a random idea. The best way I've been able to describe this phenomenon is that when put on the spot you can envision me in my brain, "swimming through black." So the goal is to build up a big enough go-to list, so that I never need to come up with something random. The big wins are that I really feel like the "downtown loop" as I've come to call it is a solid day. On it you see some good views, some sites and get a good amount of walking done. I also added a restaurant to the go-to list: Kingfish. It's this southern restaurant (Louisiana type area?) which is absolutely awesome. I would take anyone ever there.

3) We walked around a couple neighborhoods that I never walked around before and can now add them to my arsenal of places I know about in Seattle, which is embarrassingly small considering how long I've been here (10 months!)

One of the things my sister commented on right away was how nice and happy everyone in Seattle seemed. Bus drivers would have random conversations with people on the bus. The person at the grocery story checkout would actually want to talk to you about how your day was and what they are doing when they finish their shift. She said, "it must be crazy in Portland, where everyone is supposed to be even nicer!" I agreed with that sentiment. It was hard for me to imagine a world where everyone was significantly nicer or friendlier.

WELL.

I don't need to imagine it anymore, and I didn't need to go to Portland to find it. There is a magical way to get random people to be 20 times nicer:


Yup, bring a dog around with you and instead of just minding their own business on the bus, people will just start asking random questions:
"Is it a boy or a girl?" "How old is she?" "I used to have a retriever. They're great dogs aren't they?" "Does she like riding the bus?" "Can I pet her?"
Even people who don't like dogs get in on the fun, "The person who lives upstairs from me has a dog that scratches the carpet all day and bugs the hell out of me. Why do you think they do that?"

Another thing that was in my top 50 is that one day I will own a basset hound named Bunker (recently Randi gave him a middle name: Boo -- Bunker Boo Gordner):


Well, on Saturday it was SO NICE outside. It was 94 degrees or so and perfectly sunny and clear. Now, 94 degrees is probably too hot for me but I felt like I needed to be outside. However, Sean and Urmy, my normal partners for playing outside were off doing a 7k run. So I was on my own.

I asked my friend Alida, who was in Atlanta at the time, for advice. She suggested I either go to this park, discovery park, which has a 3 mile loop trail around it, or pick up her dog Maizie Moo (the relation to the name Bunker Boo is entirely coincidental) and take her to the dog park. I decide to combine the best of both worlds, pick up Maizie, bus her to downtown where there is a dog park (though I found this by accident at the intersection where I needed to transfer busses) so she could run around and play in a little turtle pool and play fetch with me and sniff other dogs and get a treat from another dog owner and generally have a good time. Then we headed to Discovery Park.

Most of the 3 mile trail was shaded with lots of stuff to sniff around for so we had a good time. Then at the top there is this super duper view and since it was clear, it looked great. And there were water fountains and a dog bowl for maizie at the top. I drank a big bottle of water, and Maizie drank two. By the time we got back, Maizie barely wanted to move and didn't even want to stand up to get off the bus. She was so tired. I was a little proud of myself for outlasting the dog. But a little worried that the poor dog would go home, fall asleep and never wake up.

I hung out with Maizie and Alida tonight and it was quite clear that I had, in fact, killed her dog. Almost. She was walking kind of gingerly, and was quite clearly still feelin' the burn from yesterday's adventure. I figure that's a good kind of sore, so I didn't feel too bad.

But anyway, this whole experience made me want a dog even more. Sucks that he wouldn't fit into my lifestyle too well -- what, with me never being home ever. Observe.... here is my social calendar for the week:

Monday: Improv Playground (like a "jam session" for improv -- these things will give me some good practice for our showcase which happens at the end of the term. Performing for real people! yay!")
Tuesday: Indiana Jones practice (last week we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, on here we are watching Temple of Doom)
Wednesday: Improv class, then midnight showing of the new Indiana Jones (others are watching The Last Crusade beforehand, but improv means I can't go to that)
Thursday: (in the morning) Office is doing a "morale event" where we all go to see a movie. I'm gonna see Narnia, which should be awesome. (in the afternoon) My team is doing a "morale event" with another team (who I get along with very well) and doing wine tasting! (if I were telling this to Sean, he would ask me for the fifty thousandth time, "does your team do any work? at all?")
Friday: Going to see a musical
Saturday: Sasquatch (headlining band for the day is REM, but i'm most excited for Throw Me the Statue)
Sunday: Sasquatch (headlining band for the day is The Cure, but i'm most excited for Death Cab for Cutie)
Monday (Memorial Day): Sasquatch (headlining band for the day is Flaming Lips, but I'm more excited for Flight of the Conchords)

So in conclusion, until I start living in a way that is fair for a pup, I will have to kidnap Maizie.

I'm normally a peace loving kinda guy, but when a machine of mass murder that is so ingenius is created, it needs recognition...

I was having lunch at work and Andy, one of the guys I was eating with was telling me about how he created his own mouse trap. The idea of it sounded cool, so I asked him to send me some picutres. 



Basically, the mouse climbs up the garbage can walks along the wire to the can of pop, tries to eat the peanut butter and falls to his clean death in a pool of water at the bottom. Mice can't swim. You don't need to reset it, and mouse after mouse can do this without you having to do anything, except occasionally burying your victims.

Instructions on how to make it are on Andy's blog: It's genius: http://andysimonds.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!C8D09C1D0AFD9B52!717.entry

Apparently Andy left this in his attic for a week and caught like 20 mice.

And voila: a better mousetrap.

I have a new job at work. I'm the sports property master. I have the UEX team football, mini-football, putting machine and golf balls, and will soon have a frisbee. We've broken into random games of catch in the halls in recent days. Lotso fun. I wonder who gets in trouble if a football hits and sets off the sprinklers...

My last post involved a poem. I was told I didn't have what it takes to make it by friends and family (my own sister!). My friend Riggs said that I should stick to computers. I posted this poem as a reply to him:

-----------

Riggs thought my future was elsewhere
He thought I'd do well at other gigs
He said on the side of caution, I should err
I'm all in with my poetry, Riggs!

Riggs thought my poetry did suck
He thought he could tell me what to do
He unfortunately was out of luck
I'll write all the poetry I want, foo'

-----------

I challenge all you LJ readers (including Riggs) to top this poem with an original work of your own.

POETRY SLAM ON!

A POEM

Some things make sense to me
I can fathom why birds like to sing
Some mysteries, I don't have the key
Like why I get bad headaches every spring


Unrelated Note: In the last few days I've started listening to the Sweeney Todd soundtrack a lot. It's good. I'd like to see it performed.

Sidenote: When I typed the word “Aeroplane” in Windows Live Writer (which is actually pretty good), it put the red squiggly underline on it. When I right clicked, it suggested that maybe I meant “Aero Plane” – what does that even mean? I assume it means that it is an aircraft made out of bubbly milk chocolate (for non-Canadians, see the Nestlé Aero Bar).

A few weeks ago Clay (my uncle boss – my boss’s boss has two direct reports, one is my boss, and one is my uncle boss) said that there was an event going on in my building, where each team in Microsoft Office sets up a booth, and college recruiters walk around, and learn about the different Office teams, why they’re awesome, and what kind of candidates they should direct to each team. Clay asked me if I could remember why I ended up joining the team I did, what would be good selling points for candidates, and why it was better than a place like Xbox, where every college hire naturally wants to go. I ended up giving him some answers, but also telling him that I’d be available to man the booth with him, since it seemed like fun. And it was. I enjoyed telling recruiters what Kool-Aid to get college kids to drink in order to think UEX was fun, though I would have much preferred to talk to students themselves. When I was in school I would go to information sessions for companies and I would always wish I could be the one making the presentation, and answering the questions.

Well, yesterday I finally got my chance! On Monday, Clay said he was asked to go to Berkeley to do a tech fair where a bunch of Microsoft teams go and set up booths and tell students why their teams are great. He wasn’t going to be able to go, but figured I would want to, and he was right! It was short notice – the event was on Thursday and I only had a few days to make arrangements. I tried to throw together a bunch of plans and turn my one day trip to Berkeley into a proper vacation since I would be getting free flights, but I was foiled. My longtime pal Bon Bon (Yaron) works at Google, but was going back to Toronto on the weekend, and my friend Brian Glick who recently left MS to work for YouTube was also going to be out of town. But when I was talking to Yaron, he was saying, “too bad you’re not coming a day early, since the Raptors are playing in Oakland on Wednesday.” This was great news since I’ve gone from watching every Raptor game in a season to watching maybe 2 or 3 because of the time difference. I’ve read Raptor articles and kept up that way, but without watching the games you really lose your emotional connection to the team. You stop living and dying with the team, and stop caring as much. So yeah, I figured I could easily fly in a day early and so I was excited to be able to see a game live. And it was also a good chance to catch up with Bon Bon, and I would have missed him otherwise.

The plan was to fly into Oakland on Wednesday afternoon, do some work, see the raptor game, go to sleep, wake up, eat breakfast, do some work, drive to Berkeley, walk around campus, go to the recruiting event from 5:30-8:30, come home, go to sleep, wake up at 5am, fly out at 7am, arrive in Seattle at 9am, go to work, have a day full of meetings, have dinner with Katie (my old mentor from my Xbox internship), see Be Kind, Rewind.

Things have surprisingly gone according to plan, so the thing that makes this blog post won’t be the hilarious mishaps that happened. In fact, I’m not sure anything will “make” this blogpost. But I will just sort of describe what the recruiting event was like, and maybe you’ll find that interesting. Or maybe I will remember some funny story, and that will be the good thing about the post. Or maybe not, and you will never want to read my blog ever again. But regardless of how this turns out, it is a play-by-play sort of post, so I'm guessing it'll be long.

Berkeley campus is nice. Back when I interviewed at Google, I spent some time on Stanford campus, and it was interesting comparing the two. They both had these big clock towers --

Sidenote: Ha! Writing "clock tower" shifted my internal monologue from dictating what to write next to the old woman from the present saying, "Save the clock tower! Saaaave the clock tower!" (From Back to the Future)

-- that you could theoretically go to the top of and see a nice view. I say theoretically because both were closed when I tried to go up. They both had a ton of people walking about –

Sidenote: As I’ve been writing this post, my internal monologue has been dictating to my fingers what should come next. When I wrote that last sentence, the little voice in my head said, “walking around” not “walking --

-- Another Sidenote: They just came by with snacks and drinks and I now have a ginger ale! Ginger ale is my pop of choice, but I don’t really drink much pop these days, so aeroplanes are really the only time when I have it.

Back to the first Sidenote: – about”. I don’t know how that happened, since “walking about” is probably the kind of thing I would hear some British person say and chuckle at it and think, “I should talk like that.” But I never actually do! It appears that my fingers are tired of all the talk and figured action was necessary to get me talking more awesome. It reminds me of how when my dad drives, sometimes he just takes wrong turns because he’s used to going one way even though we need to go the other way. “The car goes where it wants”, he says. I guess that’s what’s up with my fingers, too.

– wearing school sweatshirts and t-shirts, but it feels like Berkeley made a bigger deal of their sports. I saw a bunch of references to the “Bears”, the name of their sports teams (though maybe its the "Golden Bears") and I couldn’t even tell you what the Stanford equivalent is. Stanford’s campus was more open and walking around it felt like walking around an outdoor mall, while Berkeley seemed like therj –

Sidenote: The guy in front of me just reclined his seat which is why I typed “therj” instead of “there”. His seat got caught on the top of my laptop screen and he was all confused that the seat wasn't reclining all the way. It was kinda funny. But I guess now the joke’s on me because my laptop doesn’t fit. It's times like this that a Macbook Air would seem awfully appealing. Or even my mac, as opposed to this clunky work laptop.

– there were more buildings, and that they were taller, and closer together. BUT, the area between buildings was still really nice with patches of green with places to sit, or rivers that you could sit along or gardens and that sort of thing.

At 5:15 I made my way to the Wozniak Lounge in Soda hall and waited for everyone to set up. I met a bunch of the other people who were going to be manning booths, and I recognized the recruiter who was organizing it as Katie’s boyfriend, Josh. A fun coincidence. It turns out there are a lot of people who were there from various parts of MS Office. That kinda sucks since the kids would be seeing a lot of the same product, but I know I probably have the coolest stuff to show out of everyone from Office, so that made me feel kinda good. At 6 the students start streaming in. It was kinda fun because less than a year ago, I was them. I remember going to this same event when it was at Waterloo last year, asking some of the same questions that people were asking me.

I didn’t really have any signage, or business cards, or anything that would indicate what team I was from or why people should bother asking me questions or talking to me. I was just showing off the new Office User Interface, so if I had PowerPoint open, that doesn’t really give anyone information about why I’d be interesting. So I made a slide, and had this screen showing on the monitor on my table:

Once I made this slide, I started getting more people coming up to me and asking questions. It actually inspired a bunch of great questions:

Q: It’s boring software, as long as you can write your documents, or create your spreadsheet, who cares if you love it?

A: For this question, I was happy to use a line that I heard Jensen (my grandpa boss) use in a speech he did in Las Vegas last week, “People, on average, spend more time with Microsoft Word than they do their spouse.” It’s kind of sad, but it’s even sadder if they don’t enjoy themselves during that time. Making Office enjoyable to use can have a real impact on people’s happiness in general. This question was also a good chance for me to talk about what I’ve observed about successful emotional design – “Look at the iPhone. It may have bugs, and in fact it crashes all the time, but you’ll never hear an iPhone owner complain about it to someone who doesn’t own an iPhone. They’re willing to forgive problems with it, because they love it so much. People don’t give this kind of leeway to software that they don’t like using.”

Q: OK, fine, it’s important for people to like it. How could you possibly do it? It's just a Word Processor...

A: A great question! I had two demos ready that I used to show what we had done to make people like Office better and it was all about the Ribbon (you can see it in the screenshot above – The Ribbon is the “big toolbar” at the top. I used this slideshow:

And turned it into this, with about 4 clicks:

And I didn’t have to go into one dialog box, or learn one command name. I was able to just look at a bunch of graphical choices. People said “that’s pretty”.

Then in Word, I took this doc and said I wanted to make this suitable for a magazine:

And again, making some really simple choices, without having to memorize any commands or go into any dialog boxes, I was able to turn it into this:

Everyone was impressed between these two demos. The good responses were always, “wow, I think I’m gonna upgrade”, but the best ones were when people were saying, “and your team did this? For Word AND Excel AND PowerPoint?” How did you do all that? Do you guys have internships? Room on your team? (those last two were the best to hear)

I told them about how my mom figured out how to insert a table into Word on her own, after I had shown her how to do it tons of times on Word 2003 and she never seemed to remember. She doesn't need to remember it now because she can find it all over again as easily as she did the first time.

The most rewarding thing, I think, was getting to talk one on one with people who were genuinely interested about the PM role. Talking about what they are interested in, and telling them which teams and what role really has what they want. I encouraged people to e-mail me if they have any questions about anything, and I really wanted to make them feel like they had a friend in the company. I don't know how well it worked, but it was fun to try.

The funny thing, though, is that I didn't get a whole lot of time for that 1 on 1 kind of talk. The trouble with having a cool demo is that if one person comes up and asks you a question, and then you stat demoing to asnwer their question, if the thing you're showing off is at all interesting, you quickly get a crowd around you. It's tough then to direction chat with the one person because the audience is so much larger. I really enjoyed getting a bunch of people interested with what we do on UEX, but it's hard to personalize it with a big group watching you. I felt kind of bad because the people next to me (Excel and SharePoint) complained that I was drawing people away from them with my demos. Such is life when you work on the User Experience team, I guess.

Some of the teams got to do presentations (on the big projector, and the microphone talking to the whole room at once), and hopefully next time I get to do something like that. You know, if there is a next time.

After the tech fair some of the people at the booths and the recruiters went out for a drink in Berkeley. We had a surprisingly hard time finding a bar to go to, but eventually we did, and I had quite a good time. It's always nice getting to chat with people who do things that you aren't too familiar with. And then eventually I went home, got 5 hours of sleep. Woke up, got to the airport to find my flight delayed by 4 hours, got rescheduled to a different flight so I only had to wait 2.5 hours, landed, got to work at around noon, and worked for a good long while.

Portia and I bought slices of pie for everyone in the office and distributed them at 1:59 PM to celebrate Pi Day (It is March 14th, so at 1:59, it was 3/14@1:59 ... 3.14159, which are the first 6 digits of Pi. It's a thing we picked up at Waterloo where every Pi Day we would get free pie in the math building which was always yummy.

Happy Pi Day, everybody!

I stayed at work a few minutes too long and now I need to wait another half hour to catch the next one.

For some reason my blog started being right aligned, so now I've changed the theme of it, and I think it looks better, and now it's left aligned again. So enjoy!

I'm going to spend time writing my first ever business trip wrap up post.

I live in a neighborhood of Seattle called Capitol Hill. I guess it's kind of like The Annex in Toronto, though maybe not as student-y. There are definitely students around (there is a college right near my place), but it also has lots of people in their mid to late 20's. It's the kind of neighborhood that has people who dress funny and go to great coffee shops and dessert places. There are music stores (Sonic Boom, not that I go there that often) and concert venues (The Comet, Neumos). There is a lovely brewpub that I like to go to, too (Elysian). It's a fun place to live, and there's lots around, but I don't think I really saw what Cap Hill was about until tonight.

After going to SPF (single performer festival -- it's a two week festival all about one man or woman shows) and seeing an evening of monologue type things, we went up to Cap Hill to the (coincidentally named) Annex Theatre. This is a theatre I have walked by countless times before on my way to Neumos for a concert or Elysian for a beer and I always wondered what went on inside. Tonight, I found out.

After SPF I asked, "so where are people going now?", "oh, we're going to Spin the Bottle at the Annex." I didn't draw the connection to the theatre at all and instead just thought it was some bar that hosts a game of spin the bottle. Since it was apparently in Cap Hill, I asked if I could get a ride and on the way I was asked, "are you sure you want to go home, instead of seeing some more performance/theatre/stuff?" Hearing this, I started putting 2 and 2 together and was immediately in for what came next.

On the first Friday of every month, The Annex Theatre hosts "Spin the Bottle", a monthly Cabaret with local performers of all sorts to fill the evening. We saw some comedy, some a capella, some monologues, some short scenes, a short movie, and more!

In my last year at Waterloo I was in the 400 level acting class and we focused on Dada, Cabaret and English Music Hall. The problem with that class was we were trying to reproduces scenes, monologues, songs, etc. that were intended to have no meaning or was specific to their audience and their times. Very few of us in that class were able to really capture it. Some of the stuff I saw tonight was exactly what we were trying to do in that class. The monologues that were all gibberish that we did in our Dada unit didn't really resonate with me, even though everyone tried super hard to give it meaning. There was a monologue tonight that was all in Japanese, and it was so clear, and hilarious. When we did songs in class, a lot of effort was put into giving the singer onstage character, and people in my class did a great job with it, but it still didn't feel for me like I imagined it must have felt for the audience in Germany watching these cabarets in the '20s. There was a girl who played the saw as an instrument and told the story of the dinosaurs at the same time. It was great, and it worked.

When I was asked how I liked it, I answered that I loved it. That it was like my 4th year acting class, but real. I felt like it was the first time I saw what Cap Hill was about, and I'm already excited for April 4th.

My new awesome friend Alida made a list on her blog of 50 random things that make her awesome. I found it quite entertaining, and so when she challenged me to make my own, I decided to take up the challenge. This may be the longest post I've ever written so feel free to skim.

Without further ado...

1. I can only see out of one eye (though I can't shoot lasers out of it, like Cyclops in X-Men can -- if I could, then there would only need to be 1 thing that makes me awesome... and that would be it).
2. My sister and I are best friends.
3. I love collecting loyalty cards at shops and restaurants. Once I stood at the front of the Subway line asking for stamps from the people behind me. It wasn't really for the stamps, but more because every time I did it, the girl behind the counter broke out into fits laughter.
4. I love making people break out into fits laughter.
5. When I was young everyone always said my sister was a good writer and I was an "idea person" -- since then I always wanted to write some kind of book to prove people wrong.
6. Despite that I love reading books, I only ever sit down and do it when there is nothing easier to do (like TV or Internet).
7. I have a drama minor because I missed hanging around with creative people when I was in the Math building taking CS classes.
   
8. The following have all been my favourite TV show at one point in my life for at least some time:
• Saved by the Bell
• Simpsons
  
• Seinfeld
• Quantum Leap
• Star Trek: The Next Generation
• Lost
• Belle and Sebastian (I don't remember the show but I've been told I used to love it. you can read about it here: http://www.toonarific.com/show.php?show_id=434)
  
• How I Met Your Mother (but only for Season 1)
9. Sometimes I'll narrate what I'm doing in song. If I can make good rhymes  then I stay happy for at least a few minutes afterwards.
10. When I first listen to a song I usually hear the lyrics as just another instrument, not as language. As a result, a lot of times I can sing along to the whole song before I have actually listened to what the song is about.
11. I love going to concerts, but I find encores terribly obnoxious.
12. When I was a kid, I remember my best friend always called me "annoying". That made me sad even though I didn't know what annoying meant.
13. I have traveled to 3 continents: North America, Europe, and Africa. The coolest thing I have seen in my travels was a giant mountain in the middle of the desert in Africa. I'm glad I don't have a picture of it, because I think it's more impressive in my memory.
    
14. In the summer I will be going to South America and am real excited about it!
15. I don't own a camera and am fine with that.
    
16. My favourite animal to see at the zoo is a Polar Bear
17. While I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what my life will be like in 5 or 10 or 20 years. However, I do know that I will have a Basset Hound and his name will be Bunker.
    
18. On his 8th birthday, he will look approximately like this:
19. My favourite genre of music is Indie Rock/Pop, though I'm embarrassed every time I say it because "Indie" isn't a real genre.
20. I went on a Kevin Spacey kick for a while. I printed out his filmography, and watched almost every movie he was in from 1992 until 2001.
21. While not my favourite, the one that I really discovered during that period was Swimming With Sharks (1994)
22. My love of singing along with things tends to annoy people because I don't sing very well.
    
23. When playing a game with someone, I'll flip out (but maybe only on the inside because I'm pretty mild mannered -- like Clark Kent, only without the glasses) if they say any of the following phrases when they are losing:
1. "I'm not trying, anyway."
2. "You've practically won anyway, there's no way I can win."
3. Any combination or variant of the above two comments
24. I feel like I could win a best of 7 series of Rock-Paper-Scissors with anyone on the planet, and I think anyone who thinks it's all luck is a fool. I remember once getting into a huge fight with my friend Tom about it.
25. The first time I ever heard an exclamation mark referred to as an "exclamation point"  in the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry and Kramer have an accountant who they think are on drugs.
26. I won two awards in the first year that I went to sleepover camp (I think I was 10):
1. Best song solo in a camp play -- I was both the prince, and the guy hired to kill Snow White. It was a song where they changed the lyrics to the Beatles's Revolution...
   "You say you want an executiooooon,
   Weeeeell you know....I'm pretty handy with an ax
   I'd like to make a contributioooooon,
   Weeeeeell you could.... consider it instead of tax
   
   I must admit I'd like to kill Snow Whiiiiite
   She's really strange her crown is way too tiiight
   
   Don't you know your majesty's, always right
   you'll never have to seeeee, Snow White
   'Cause you know your majesty's, always riiight
   Alriiiight"
2. Best sailor under 5 feet
27. Sailing at camp made me want to buy a computer game about sailing, but my dad didn't know of any that existed, so he suggested I learn how to make one. That's why I learned to program and doing that led to me working at Microsoft. I never made that sailing game.
28. I can sing all the words to Newsies. In fact, if the soundtrack comes on, I can't help but sing all the words to Newsies.
29. I never hit the snooze button on my alarm clock, and I can't understand people who do.
30. Rock Band is the best video game ever because it incorporates singing and socializing -- two things I love. After the first time I played Rock Band, I started subscribing to the Zune Marketplace ($15/month for all the music you can download) so I could download every song in the game, listen to them a lot, and learn them so I could sing them better
31. My Top 5 Disney Movies:
1. Newsies
2. Aladdin
3. Little Mermaid
4. All Pixar movies ever (except I haven't seen Cars)
5. Lion King
   
   The top 3 items on this list all had music made by Alan Menken
   
32. I love giving people nicknames. I don't need the nickname to catch on (though it's a bonus if it does). I will just persevere until they respond to it. The best nicknames I've ever given out (or done my part to help have them catch on):
1. Spaghetti (or the more popular short form: Spaghetts). My housemate at school, Alex, was given this nickname, and through the hard work of Waffles and myself, like spaghetti thrown at a wall, the name stuck.
2. Waffles. This is the nickname that Sergig and I gave Geoff for a number of very good reasons.
3. Sergig. This is what we called my longtime roommate Sergio. Simple, yet effective.
4. Scrubs. This was the first truly random nickname I ever gave anyone. It was high school, and I decided that my friend Danny needed a nickname. I suggested Scrubs for no reason at all. He eventually went to McMaster to school, and bought a pair of scrubs. That made my day.
5. Bon Bon. My friend Yaron's family calls him Bon. I decided to extend it. I supposed I could call him "Candy", but everyone knows that's a girls name.
6. Butch. Not so original, but this is my solution to the problem that there are two people with the same name on my team. There is Erin Dean, and there is Aaron Butcher, my boss. Butch also used to be a football player. I think a football player who's a boss and is named Butch just fits.
33. Ironically, I don't have a nickname myself. Lots have tried though. The most creative was Zeke, invented by Waffles. Bon Bon extended that to be Govna' Zeke. I don't know what happened to that.
34. I lived in New York for 4 months. I loved it because people there were always up for doing things, there was always a play, symphony or opera that I could go to. I would never live there for an extended period of time because in the 4 months I was there, I don't think I breathed fresh air once
35. Since the Soup Nazi episode aired, I have been to New York 4 times. Each time I have tried to get soup from him. Each time I have been foiled for a different reason:
1. Once I went in the summer and he travels to South America looking for new recipes in the summer
2. Once I went on American Thanksgiving, and he is closed for holidays
3. When I lived there, he was moving shops and so was closed the whole time
4. Once I went over New Years and we were on a tight schedule. We went at 11:45 and he opened at 12. I could smell the soup, but he wouldn't sell me any.
36. I can't describe how much I enjoy getting presents. Whenever my mom used to go to the store and would ask if I needed anything I would always say, "A present!" On good days she would bring me back a Cadburry Egg.
37. I directed 3 one act plays in high school. The directorial decision I was happiest with was in the play Medea by Chris Durang. In it, an angel, named Deus Ex Machina comes onstage to solve Medea's problems. I had him enter casually from upstage center, carrying a step ladder, take a few steps downstage, set up the ladder, hop on the third step from the back, and then gracefully walk down the step ladder. He did the opposite for his exit.
    
38. I am a member of the B-Team. This is what we call the circle of friends including me, my roommate Sean, Urmy, Justin, Kostas, Punit, Astha and Natasha -- all Waterloo grads working at Amazon or Microsoft, except Urmy, who's an Aussie. Like all Aussies, she likes Vegemite! I learned about Vegemite while backpacking through Europe.
    
39. Baseball is one of my favourite ever things. My dad stopped liking Baseball after the strike in '94. It was very sad. But one day, I'm gonna come home to Toronto, and say, "Hey dad, you wanna have a catch?" and then he will play with me and it'll be just like Field of Dreams, except he won't be a ghost on an corn field baseball diamond. He will be old and frail in the backyard.
40. Road Trips are one of the most fun things. Not for the destination, but for their own sake.
41. My favourite ever road trip was with Waffles -- we drove for 11 days, and 3500 miles. We saw 7 Major League Baseball games, 2 Minor League games, 1 pre-season Packers game, 2 games in the Little League World Series, and the real life Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.
    
42. One day my mom and I are going to go to Dunedin, Florida and see the Jays in Spring Training. Maybe next spring!
43. My name is Jon Gordner and I'm a Type II Beer Snob. (your cue to say, "Hiiii Jon")
    
44. I never learned to play a musical instrument.
45. Not knowing how to read music, or anything about music really came back to bite me when I was in Our Town at Waterloo, and one of my jobs was being in the choir. Oh man did I suck.
46. I love performing. I'm not sure why, but I've always found being onstage to be superfun.
47. Marathoning things is a favourite pastime of mine. Once my friend Karim and I sat down and watched all of Twin Peaks in one sitting (that's 29 episodes, kids).
48. I spent a good portion of grade 10 science learning how to twirl a pen through my fingers. It's a trick that's stuck with me to this day.
49. I am extremely fidgety. In my office, I keep a slinky, a koosh ball, a stress ball and a number of other things to fidget with. I can regularly be seen walking up and down Microsoft hallways throwing one end of a slinky around and then pulling it back up.
50. My favourite slang in the world is Aussie slang. They call sunglasses sunnies, and bathing suits cosies (short for swimming costumes). They call mosquitoes mosies, sandwiches sangers or sambos, avocados avos, and afternoon arvos (and because of the accent, avo and arvo sound the same). The list goes on!!

While the list of Aussie slang may go on, the list of random things that make me awesome  does not. I think this is a pretty comprehensive list, and I challenge all you people in internet land to come up with one of your own!

One of the things that I make myself on a regular basis is tortellini with some sort of tomato based sauce. When I mix the pasta with the sauce, I don't like to use a fork, or any utensil at all, because it can smush the tortellini, or make the stuff inside fall out. So lately, I've been trying to mix it around by having the pasta fly out the edge of the pot, and then land in the pot again, like they do on Top Chef. Normally this results in pasta all over the place, but I feel like this is a skill I need to master, so I will keep at it.

This morning I was making myself a couple of sunny-side-up eggs and I decided before I took them off, I would make them over-easy instead. I went to grab my spatula and then it came to me. A vision. In my mind's eye, I saw myself flinging the eggs into the air and them landing perfectly, all on their own, face down. It was sort of like when Ray sees the completed baseball diamond out in his corn field in a vision at the beginning of Field of Dreams.

This was a high risk, high reward situation. With my tortellini, if I messed up, I got a bit of sauce everywhere, but the pasta was still good. With these eggs, if I missed, the eggs would be ruined and the yoke would spill everywhere. If they landed funny, they would be all crumpled and yucky. I was scared. I grabbed the handle and gave a little flick. The eggs grazed the side of the pan, then returned to center. I did it again and they got a little closer to leaving the ground.

I was reminded of how one time I went to the terrain park when I was on Snow-Blades (mini skis that are designed for trick skiing). I kept skiing on the half pipe, getting right up to the top afraid of actually getting some air. One time, I actually tried it with some speed to get air, and then fell and it sucked.

I looked at my eggs playing the same game with the pan that I did with the half pipe.

I couldn't do it.

I put down the pan. But then I heard a voice: If you flip them, they will land.

I mustered up all of my courage, grabbed the pan, and flipped the eggs high. Time stood still as the yolks danced in mid-air. As if trying to see how high they had flown, the eggs' uncooked sides rushed to turn themselves over to face downward. And then: Plop. The eggs had flipped. I'd done it! With my newfound confidence, I quickly flipped the eggs back over, and put them on a plate. I casually told Sean and Urmy about what I'd done and they were pretty impressed, but I passed it off, "It was nothin'." And then went on my merry way.

I wondered where the voice came from. The one that made me take the plunge and go for it. Later that day I talked to Kostas, my friend who cooks and teaches me things about cooking. I told him my story and he smiled as if he already knew. I realized the voice was Kostas, the experienced cook who I'd seen do the flipping trick dozens of time. I said, "The voice... it was you..." He paused, looked up and laughed. "No Jon, it was you."

As you may remember I went to Whistler for Thanksgiving. As you may also remember, I am from Canada. As you may not remember, I went to New York when I was 15 on American Thanksgiving to visit my cousins Stephanie and James and had my first real life Thanksgiving Turkey dinner with all the trimmigs. It was one of the best meals that I can remember and ever since, I loved turkey, and American Thanksgiving in general.

Since that trip to New York I have not had the pleasure of a tradiitonal Thanksgiving dinner. Even though I've been in the US for he last two Thanksgivings, I have been around people who have wanted to take advantage of the 4-day weekend by going to Canada of all places. Don't get me wrong, Whistler has been a ball, but it just isn't the same as a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner with traditional Americans. That's the other thing: I'm primarily friends with other Canadians. So even if we decided one Thanksgiving to stick around and have a delicious meal, there would be nobody to lend any tradition to it. We would't know to give thanks that Plymouth Rock landed on the Pilgrims.

This year I have been prsente with an opportunity that is too good to be true! Clay (one of the leads on my team) is hosting a Valentine's Day Thanksgiving Turkey Party! He's taking the day off to cook and at 7 we will make the pilgrimage to Clay's house and stuff our faces with delicious food normally not seen until November. We will have some sort of Olympics I'm told and eat pumpkin pie and all the rest.

What a way to spend Valentine's Day!

My friends and I are planning a trip to Peru for September, and Sean was sending out an email with the skinny to get people to commit to the trip so we can make travel plans and such. I wrote this poem to go at the bottom of the email:

Peru
There is not a better way
To celebrate Labour day
Than to take in great Peru
From atop Machu Picchu

We'll, like Carmen Sandiego,
Go to Lima and back, so
Admit this trip is a must
Labour Day: Peru or bust

1) Helping friends move can be fun!


2) Our fridge/freezer broke, so now I'm eating cereal with warm milk.

1) Played Monopoly for money. I came in 4th out of 7 people. I did not do so well. I started off behind (in the first two turns I didn't get any properties) and everyone felt sorry for me, but then I started rolling and quickly jumped to a lead in how many properties I owned. This turned the court of public opinion against me, and all of a sudden I was like Scrooge -- I had wealth (lotso properties), but nobody loved me and so I felt empty inside. Further, everyone was trying to make me lose, and so I ended up with some difficult trading partners, and ultimately with worse "completions" (the word of the day for monopolies) than I could have. Also, I made the common mistake of trading for properties without keeping in mind how much money I had, so I was unable to build much and ultimately got killed when I had to pay for rent at a few hotels. It was still fun though, and I think whenever people play, it should be (if not for, then) with real money (1 real cent = 1 monopoly dollar).

2) Got chocolate all over my phone. I thought it would be a fun idea to get some chanukah gelt (chocolate money) for everyone at the Monopoly game to celebrate the first night! Unfortunately, two pieces of chocolate fell out of the little bag and stayed in my pocket for the whole night and at the end of the night when I was checking my cell phone it was all fuzzy and had chocolate all over it! Initially I was sad, but then I licked the chocolate off and now it still smells like chocolate, and that is a wonderful thing, so I think I came out on top.

3) Played Rock Band! It's like Guitar Hero, but has drums, and a microphone for singing. I can't tell you how much of a different the additional instruments make. I never really liked Guitar Hero for a few reasons: It wasn't much fun since I only wanted to play the songs that I knew, and since I'm bad, I just butchered them and they sounded bad. Also, it was pretty boring for other people (but that's not a whole lot different from most video games). Rock Band solves all of these problems!
Why is Rock Band so much better than Guitar Hero?
1) Having the variety of instruments means a lot of people can play so everyone can get in on the fun
2) Having the microphone means that even if you aren't playing, you can laugh at how badly the person is singing the lyrics
3) Having the microphone lets me sing songs loudly and it's ok that I sing them badly
4) If I screw up, the song still sounds good because everyone else is playing well
5) Since more people get involved, there is WAY more socializing that goes on while it's being played
6) There are some songs that are really really good (better than the good ones on Guitar Hero, and they are the original versions for the most part) and they are going to be releasing a lot of new tracks, like all of Nirvana's Nevermind, which I think I would just play over and over and over)

Playing makes me want to buy all the songs in the game so I can learn them really well and then be really good at Rock Band. But oh man, knowing the song does not guarantee that I can sing it -- I thought i would rock Electric Version by the New Pornographers, but I realized that A.C. Newman is WAY out of my vocal range. I need to learn how to go down an octave, but I never took any sort of music classes for an instrument or anything and don't really know what an octave means. Oh well! If I keep playing, I'm sure I will learn someday.

Anyway, it's 2:30 and I have a 9am meeting tomorrow (this is really really early for Microsoft, I normally only get in at 9:45 or 10). Toodaloo!

I just got a bill in the mail from Primera (my insurance provider) and they are charging me with 3 counts of restorative dental work, where I owe $80. But get this... I don't even have a dentist! let alone a dental restorator! I have't been to the dentist since leaving Toronto.

I know that in America they charge you for health care and such more than in Canada, but this is getting out of hand. They should have charged me for child birth while they were at it.

I went to Whistler for Thanksgiving. I'm not going to go into too much detail about that, but will instead post this video documenting our non-skiing adventures.



Needless to say, I had a grand old time. We took many pictures and videos. Maybe I'll post some of them later.

This year I did less skiing than last because the guy at Alpine Hut sold me boots that were a size too small which made my toes look like I had slammed a car door on them. The only way I could describe how I was feeling while skiing on Thursday was that there was a ball of white hot pain living in my foot and it was eating all that was around it. Needless to say I wasn't too excited about skiing on Friday or Saturday, so I didn't. Today (Sunday) I decided to rent equipment and forget my boots that were too small. I skied for the whole day and was much happier.

So now that my 4 day weekend is through it is time to get back to work. Luckily my super busy time at work is over and I have been able to do things like read on the bus instead of checking e-mail, and come home from work and watch TV instead of drawing pictures for designs I wanted to show people the next day. It'd be nice if this keeps up for a while. I like being busy at work, but it's nice to have some downtime at home. Also, now that I have some extra time, my boss has hinted at me getting some neat things in the new year, like being the guy who looks into all the competing software, and looking at all the different features and presenting it to my team and stuff. This kind of research is stuff I do anyway, so it'd be fun to do it as my job. I think it'd also help me look a little more critically at other office style products out there.

One day soon I'm going to be playing real money Monopoly at my Uncle Boss Clay's house (he's not my team lead, but he is the other lead that works under my boss's boss -- thus my uncle boss). We will play that a dollar is a cent so landing on Boardwalk with a hotel could cost $20 in rent. But first we need to settle on how all the rules are going to work and such -- once you play for real money then everything has to be real clear before we start! Deciding on the rules will be half the fun!

Anyway, we went skiing today and then drove six hours so now I am awfully tired. Toodaloo!

On Sunday I went to my first Pumpkin Party. It was at Clay's house (he's a lead on my team) and it was one of those minimal costume things so I wore my blue jays stuff and saved my real costume for real halloween.

The way it works is Clay provides pumpkins, carving tools, food and drinks. He posts a list of categories and then you pick a category and start designing and carving your pumpkin.

I teamed up with Paula (from the Office Design Group) and she helped me design my pumpkin. Then I set to work carving it out. Then Paula gave him a bath to wash off all the lines that we drew on him and stuff.

I carved Pumpy the Pumpkin, who through an unfortunate series of events ended up in jail for the night. He was very sad and afraid. This was the first pumpkin I have ever carved and I thought Pumpy turned out quite well indeed!

The way the judging works is Clay goes through the categories one at a time and then everyone else nominates some of the pumpkins for that category and then we vote to see who wins (so you can win in a category that you weren't even going for!).

Unfortunately I didn't win, but I'm still proud of Pumpy. He tried his best!


This was the winner of the "Best In Show" category:


You can see the whole album here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/claysatt/sets/72157602781741143/
Some of the pumpkins are really really good.

Today I had a meeting with Word where we talked about how a certain feature would look. Traditionally, a new version of Office is released every 2 or 3 years. Last release took 4 years, which is unusually long. The specific feature I was talking about today is very forward thinking and probably won't show up on people's screens well beyond our next release, so lots of years from now. It's like putting something in a time capsule. Working out all the details of a user interface now, and knowing that nobody will see it for years and years, imagining how the crazy computer users of the future will react to it. I assume that there will be videos of people travelling in space at light speed using Microsoft Word, commenting on this feature. I will be seeing this video from my industry leading 6th generation Zune since it is being delivered wirelessly straight from the space shuttle. This is a conservative estimate of what the future will look like.

On Saturday I did that sketch comedy writing workshop with Joe Flaherty. It was quite underwhelming. He had good stories about working on SCTV and starting Toronto's Second City, but when it came to relating some general principles of writing sketch comedy he really fell short. He spent about an hour talking about interesting things about what elements make up a sketch. Then he spent subsequent hours making points that he could've made in minutes. He was able to tell us about certian things that worked for him, but wasn't great on why they worked. The upside to all of this was that from lunch to the end, he pretty much ran out of material, so people threw out premises they had kicking around, and we tried to turn them into sketches. The only way that Joe knows how to turn a premise into sketches is to improv it (which probably isn't entirely practical for a lonesome sketch writer), but that's what we did. I immediately volunteered to do some improv'ing, and had fun doing it. At the end when I thanked Joe Flaherty for doing the workshop, he told me that I was really funny onstage! It's not every day that a semi-famous and accomplished comedian tells you he thinks you were funny doing improv!

I think I'm gonna take improv classes in the winter.

Concert Watch 2007 (in order of awesomeness):
1. Okkervil River
2. Spoon
3. The New Pornographers
4. Wilco

Up in the next week: Peter, Bjorn and John (PB&J for short), Imperial Teen and Arcade Fire

Still busy at work. And another shortened week. This time it's because of the Jewish New Year on Thursday and Friday. And on Monday I had 5 hours eaten up by a combination of a giant team meeting (where I walked through the 35 slides I made last week) and my softball game, which we lost. Clay and Portia (two people from my team) came to watch. That was nice. And when they got there I caught a sharply hit line drive, then came up to bat and laced a single into left. Then next time I waas up I drove a line drive back up the middle to center. So it helped having fans! But we still lost, and if I were giving a press conference I'd say, "Baseball is a team game. When it comes down to it the stats don't matter. All that matters are getting the W in the win the column. But we gave 110%, fought hard, never gave up, and now we've got to train hard and start thinking about winning that championship next season." We didn't get a pep talk from our captain and that was sad.

I'm on a strange team at work. We guard the user interface for Microsoft Office and make sure that if individual application teams (like Word, Excel or PowerPoint) want to add features, that they don't get tacked on and put in a place that makes things confusing or hard to use. There is a lot of saying "no" in my team, and finding new, convincing ways to say it when the application team comes to you and says, "we want to do it this way." It's taking some getting used to.

On Saturday I'm taking a sketch comedy writing workshop taught by Joe Flaherty (he's from SCTV, though I first saw him as the "youuuu suck" guy from Happy Gilmore, then subsequently as the father on Freaks and Geaks). I'm not much of a writer, and have no aspirations to write for a living (well, write comedy. we don't count specs, because apparently that IS what I do for a living), but it seems fun to learn what makes a good sketch. For a day I'll be able to feel like I'm Chandler from Studio 60. Joe Flaherty is doing a "how to develop improv characters" workshop on Sunday - that'd be fun too, but spending a whole weekend and $200 on sketch comedy seems a little much. Maybe if he's a really really good teacher I'd do both, but he'd have to be really really good and it would help if the weekend is rainy and gross with no temptation at all to play outside.

Concert Watch 2007 (in order of awesomeness):
1. Okkervil River
2. Spoon
3. Wilco

Ted Leo gets a special mention since he was great at Bumbershoot, but I'm not going to count people I see at Festivals.

Up Next: The New Pornographers (Friday)

A few days ago erined showed me the web she made of who has slept with who on Grey's Anatomy. I correctly identified the graph as bipartite. And who says math isn't useful!

I've been super busy at work. Before there was a lot of thinking and drawing going on. Now there is thinking and drawing and writing down the stuff that I previously thought about. And so lots of work, and no work on Monday, and on Tuesday during the day my Softball team has its first playoff game, on Wednesday I have meetings from 10-4, on Thursday is the company meeting (again at Safeco Field, the home of the Seattle Mariners) and on Friday I have a meeting in the morning and then have to be home to wait for my bed. So yeah, lots to do, and will have no time next week to do it. Hmmm...

But yeah, on Friday I'm waiting for my bed. So far I've been sleeping on a futon that has been in the apartment for ages. But yesterday Sean and I dropped it off at my friend Natasha's house (the futon's rightful owner) since her parents were coming to town and needed a place for them sleep. So this morning I went to Sleep Country and made the most nonchalant $900 purchase of my life. It's pretty crazy. Normally when I buy something big I do months of research. When I bought my first Palm Pilot, I did almost a year of research to make sure I bought the right one and that was only $300.

My sleep country experience went something like this:
1) I walk into the store
2) Guy asks me how he can help me, and I tell him I'm looking for a matress and boxspring, he asks me what kinda firmness, i say "firm"
3) I lie on two simmons beds for about 30 seconds each
4) I lie on two sealy beds for about 30 seconds each
5) I do about 30 more seconds on each of the beds again
6) I buy a Sealy Posturepedic bed
7) I leave the store

The whole process took about 15 minutes and I still can't believe how quickly it all went down. I mean, not only is that almost a thousand dollars, but it was also on probably the most important thing that I own since I spend so much time on a mattress every day and I just bought it. Strange.

Anyway, after that I proceeded to go to the first day of Bumbershoot - a Seattle music tradition. I saw a bunch of bands with some things that were expected (The Shins sucked, since they are, and have always been a terrible live band) and some that were unexpected... If you're into good music, check out Grand Archives you can download some songs of theirs here, here, and here. Their first CD will come out in "February'ish" and based on their set tonight, it is going to be really really good).

To close, I leave you with a YouTube video I've been rather obsessed with for the past week. It's hilarious. Really hilarious. These guys are called "Flight of the Conchords" and they are some sort of band/comedy duo. They now have a show on HBO and if I wasn't before, I'm now absolutely convinced that everything that station touches turns to gold.