Woot! This is evidently the week of good mail. In my work inbox I got my 24th Ship-It Award yesterday. Since you can put eight per plaque, that means I'll be getting my fourth plaque shortly since I already know my 25th is on the way ¹. How exciting. While it is true that some hold the Ship-It in disdain, I think it's just a nice minor stamp recognizing your contributions. Stupid? Maybe. Cool? To me, yes. I've got a wall of tchotckes (my favorites being the moo-ing "Got ASF?" milk container and the Windows Media 7.1 canteen) and boxed software (XP N, Windows Embedded), but ... those just take up space. Just give me a great review for great efforts and a minor stamp and I'm pretty happy.

And I won a Zune 4GB yesterday for my contributions to the Zune team!

I'm also in the Leadership Circle of givers at Microsoft (which basically means you donated above "N" amount), and each year they send out a mail saying that some small small number of people will be invited to some particularly strange or interesting event - First To Respond Wins. And dammit, I've lost that race every year ... until now. Ballet rehearsal here I come. =)

All in all, a most successful week of winning. =)

_{1: NetShow 1, NetShow 2, SiteServer 3, WMP 5.2, NetShow Server 3, IE 5, Windows Media 4, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows Media 7, Windows XP, Windows Media 9, Windows Server 2003, XPSP2, Windows MCE 2005, Windows Media 10, Windows 2003 x64, Windows XP N, Windows Vista, Windows XP KN, Windows Server KN, Windows Media Player 11, Windows XP Embedded, Vista SP1, XPSP3}

Saturday night on the way to a birthday party and Hawaiian food, Greg and I ended up stopping in the middle of Seattle and having our first meaningful relationship talk in way too long. We're around the three year mark in our relationship, and it's about the time to figure out which way we're going here. She mentioned not really wanting to get married until she's 52 or ever. I don't know how I feel, but I do know that she's been talking about moving out of her apartment - and I think that if I can't commit to having her move in with me, it's probably best not to keep up the relationship.

I've simply been extremely uncertain about where to go next. There are days when I'm ecstatic, and days when I'm really frustrated. As everyone is with their partner over time, I suppose. It's been hard for me to think about this meaningfully because I've been in an unstable head space for a long while now - perhaps the past six months or so? It seems that most every comfort area around me (friends, family, house, job) has been undergoing too many transitions, and I know that that really distracts me and colors my thinking. Plus, we both have fairly intense jobs - when I'm busy she's not, and vice versa. It makes it hard to take the time to treat each other properly.

I think this trip to Hawaii is pretty meaningful to both of us, to allow us to see more facets of each other. We really haven't had any non-theme park trips for ourselves in at least a year. That's probably a bad plan.

I certainly am still not sure where we're going, but it was good to have (restart?) that way overdue conversation at long last. Even if we did miss both the party and the Hawaiian food (ending up at one of the stranger restaurants I've been to in Seattle).

In very exciting news, Robert Holdstock is finally publishing a direct sequel to Mythago Wood, one of my top twenty favorite books. Avilion. That's such an intoxicating and thrilling idea. I lustily look forward to its February release now. :D

Since I do love to jinx myself, Thursday I remarked to Greg that I was just tired of all the disruptions and strange or bad life events lately, and that I was looking forward to two weeks of absolutely nothing at all happening. I have the ruined carpet in the basement being replaced this Friday, and -- I can see now the light at the end of the tunnel, bringing me back to a normal life.

So Friday night I get the great phone call from my brother - "Zach, this is Dustin - mom and dad were in a car accident."

For some reason (read: end of days), it's been snowing here. In late April. My parents had been driving back from Snoqualmie Ridge (near the always troublesome Snoqualmie Pass roads) when they hit ice and started sliding. Their Volvo ended up embedding itself in the road barriers, and mom and dad ended up getting taken on stretchers together in an ambulance to the local hospital. (The other side of the car has the girder embedded into it, and there's a ravine over there.)

I checked in with Dustin throughout the process, and even talked with dad once. I've never heard him that shaken before. He's probably the best bad conditions driver I can think of, but -- that just helps you minimize the badness, not avoid it altogether.
Right now the car is supposedly totalled and my parents are OK as far as we currently know. (It can take some time for issues to show up.)

I love girders. Thank you for helping ruin my parent's car but hopefully saving their bodies. (My high school friend Jennifer Beach, one of the sweetest girls ever, plunged off a girderless hillside near our house in Redmond back in 1992. I really do love safety railings.)

Anyways, world, please be nice to my parents. They're great people and deserve better.

It's interesting that in the run-up to our Hawaii trip I randomly gave a hitchhiker with Expert Hawaii Advice a ride back from the slopes. Now I've got an interesting place to stay if we switch islands and a couple choice restaurants away from Tourist Land. Plus Ruby is taking Kate and Steve over there today, so she should have some great advice when she gets back.

I like it when an excited guy who's quietly singing a song to himself sings the word "spectacular", sees my "Marvel" license plate, and asks if I might be headed to Kirkland. Then it turned out he went to Western too, grew up part of his life in Sumner too, and generally was a hilarious warm-hearted reincarnation of Kerouac with a snow board bum twist. I like the kind of guy who talks about the relationship he's trying to build with a woman in Argentina.

Dear Pretty Lady at the"Beats For Obama" Concert at the Nectar Lounge,
If you're really going to answer your cell phone in the bar during a pretty quiet spoken word performance (by Verbal Oasis), maybe you could die in a fire.
kthxbye! kisses!
♥Zach♥

I imagine it was the drinks she had had, but my next poem at the reading will be "Shut The Fuck Up Or Get The Fuck Out You Loud-Mouthed Philistine". Eventually she went to the bathroom to continue her yell conversation, but I applaud Verbal for not jumping off the stage and shoving the cell phone up her posterior.
This unfortunate turn of events (which sadly included the spoken word segment, and was followed up by a horrifying attempt at political rap by one of the organizers) interrupted a wonderful night of drum and bass. Grr.

The Habit is back! It'll have Mark, John, David, Ryan, Jeff, Mara, Luke, and Tommy - they're all back and performing again. I'll be going on the 22nd.

This is most highly recommended comedy. I suspect it will make The Stranger Suggests and thus pop up on people's radars, but either way - here's your advance warning. :D

I respect and admire many people. I consider it an honor to have the job I do and have the ability to cause things to happen in the future that make me excited to upgrade to Version Next, and I love the ability to twiddle around in the current world to make it so that problems get solved and people's computing life gets easier. Maybe those less stressed people then can do better in their own fields, helping others, making the world a better more enjoyable place.

But I'm still surprised about how many people love to second-guess everything. At some point you'd think that people would understand that they're probably not the foremost expert on anything, and take the patient time to listen and understand.

I promise to applaud for the next five people who get up on their soapbox second-guessing experts with stuff they would have sorted out in the first thirty minutes of thinking through their thoughts.

On the other hand, while tracking down a particularly insidious issue, I did take someone to school, in the parlance. It's weird to me when I'm suddenly randomly an expert. I always feel so ignorant. I suspect that that's a strength in this crazy industry.

On the plus side, after naming a feature I didn't like "FUE" (pronounced .. phooey, of course - and the name has stuck for years now), I'm now in a position to own a new gloriously named project (for a cool project this time). Some frustrating days, a glorious project name does wonders for your morale. Woot!

We now return to our irregularly scheduled night of extreme coding wired on Mt Dew and chocolates.

I went to a co-worker's office to get a project review and upon seeing my newly beardless face he said, "Ah, a new UI."

He's clearly going straight to Hell.

I forgot that one of the reasons I enjoyed having a beard was that it always felt new. I always felt that I was in disguise. Now that the beard is (temporarily?) gone, I feel exposed to the world. The new chills from winds are nothing compared to losing my secret identity. Sigh.

So far the response has been pretty negative / critical. I don't know if I'll keep the beard off, but it's at least a change of pace for a while.

After the completion of last year's Seattle To Portland (STP) bike ride, I thought to myself, "Well, that was a fun but overwrought excuse to eat some ice cream. Too bad there weren't as many rest stops with free ice cream as there was last time I did it." This immediately inspired the glorious notion...

... doing the STP on an ice cream bike.

After lustfully dreaming about this for a while, I finally broke down and found out the price and plausibility of my dream tonight. It looks like it would be about $2000 or more just for a (new) bike itself. That's not too bad for a high-end bike. And there's a "vintage" one on eBay for $700, so the price isn't awful.

The problems?

that umbrella has to go

they aren't designed for speed

they aren't designed for stopping going downhill

they're not really designed for "turning"

So now I feel that if I am serious, I should actually call one of these companies and inquire about the rationality of my plans. I suspect that they're designed for dawdling around town doing one to two miles per hour, which is a great idea, but would be a really really time-consuming way to travel two hundred miles. "Slower" is OK, where "slower" maps to "about 14 miles per hour", but I don't know how viable pushing up a tank of ice cream up the hills of Washington would be if even going down them is an Exciting And Painful Adventure(TM).

Hm. Still, it is a sweet idea.

I had looked at my ratings on Scrabulous (Motto: Give Us Ad Impressions Before We Get Sued To Obvlivion) and noticed that my rating was "1307". I was stunned and pleased, and hoped that I could lose thirty more points. After a couple more wins, I was "down" to 1357 - but within striking distance, I thought. Sadly, I'm now at Scrabble ranking 1452 - I didn't read the FAQ and thus didn't realize that it's simply a modified ELO rating system. Darn - I had hoped to be 1337 at Scrabble. Oh well: I'm 7-0 right now, no jinx there hopefully.

So my standing room only development presentation had about a third of the people show up who had said they would. That was actually great, because The Process was so simple that I felt dumb having to explain it to people who were obviously incapable of reading up on the relatively verbose documentation we produced. About forty people attended, and it was video taped for my shame other teams' reference. Jim was amused that it was a fairly standard Microsoft meeting: you had one crazy guy asking pretty much unrelated questions, one guy asking questions that were implicitly answered already - but wording his question in a really confusing way that had me stumbling to cogently reparse his question into the very answer he wanted - and one guy questioning the performance benefits of a process that takes a fundamental build process down from perhaps 19 hours to ... around ten minutes for this new particular usage. On the last one, it was a little hard for me to keep a straight face. I did like that people were that interested, though.

Afterwards, I got strangely very positive feedback ("That was awesome!"), and the people from the bigger team we were working with seemed to like it too. I've since been stopped multiple times in the lunchroom by people telling me they were excited about It, and another team requested that Jim and I do our respective presentations for them - plus provide an encore presentation again for our team for those that missed it.

This cracks me up. Encore development presentations? That shouldn't happen. RTFM. *laughs*

In other news, I was at a friend's back-in-town-for-the-weekend party talking with a woman who was studying work habits for people that don't have typically in-office schedules. I pointed out my team (one of us works in Virginia, my boss telecommutes three days a week), but she said that my team was an exception because "once you get to be a ninja, they let you do whatever you want."

I think that's probably the nicest work compliment I've ever gotten. I certainly don't know if it's true - I often feel like my being on this team is a lucky accident - but at the same time, I feel like when I'm left to my own devices, I try to do the user, Microsoft, and the industry a lot of good.

Dear Sirs of the Road Crew,

I don't know whose great idea it was to lay down the little yellow road divider turtles the day before snow flurries, but I for one would like to thank you. The confused little congregations of road turtles in front of my work building is a treat to drive by every day. I realize you likely didn't take into account drift nor snowplows, and the resultant migrated pool of road turtles is hiiiii-larious. Thank you so much.

Dear Scrabble People (Hasbro),

Why the hell is the banner on the Scrabble site a mother and baby? I think Scrabble tiles are simply bad food for babies, and probably not a stimulating game at that age.

Dear Transformers People (also Hasbro),

Damn you for making a 350Z Transformer after I already sold my car. I am greatly displeased with you.

Thanks all,
-Zach

It must be weird to be one of those random girls that tech nerds use as their avatars or signature pictures.

Hm. I just set up development training for a minor new process I'm supposed to be spearheading, and 84 people are showing up so far. I had booked the smallest possible room (76 seats) and figured there would be plenty of room left. But now ... 84 people are supposedly showing up, including a variety of my development heroes. Since it should be a ten minute presentation on drop dead easy technology (a major process improvement deprecating old simple hack technology in favor of new sustainable processes), I'm nervous as hell. There's nothing so easy to screw up as Simple Technology. Plus, hey, I'm admittedly an elitist developer. Why in the world do you need to go to my meeting when my dev wiki on this clearly addresses all your possible concerns already? Sigh.

I don't do meetings. There's ten thousand interesting things I could be doing, so unless it's a Really Interesting Meeting, I'm probably wasting my time by going. We had a micro-team meeting (Scott, Irene, and I) today, and that's how I like my meetings. Just the absolute core people, delving right down into tough calls and interesting decisions. Evangelism? How horrifying. Oh well, I guess that's the price of my job as a ninja. I'm already planning on spiking my slide deck with something interesting: I may have to throw in a ninja reference or two in. After all, I had a nice lunch with Kip and Gabe today, and Kip as usual couldn't help but admire that I get to be a ninja and learn the secrets of instant death and invisibility.

Oh, and Caleb's interview candidate made him stop by my office to tell me how much he loved the hallway decorations (posters, comics, etc) that I've slowly been measling the building with. As much as it is weird to be in a senior role, this is a pretty nice position to be in.

So there's a minor level of concern that the Scrabulous Facebook application (which supposedly makes $25,000 month off of being online Scrabble with only a slight name change) might be shut down by Hasbro because, hey, you know, there already IS a Scrabble that Hasbro is interested in making money from. Gasp. Shock. Imagine that people might try to protect their intellectual property.

HOWEVER, the real nightmare is that Scrabulous cheats! It doesn't actually use the Scrabble dictionary. Not only did it not know the fun Scottish word hae (I realize "fun Scottish word" is redundant because ... if it's Scottish, it's fun to say), it won't let you play invalid words! (Or, more importantly, words that you know are valid that it thinks are invalid....) I cried a little. I may have to start the counter-group "Facebook Users Who Feel That Scrabulous Is Badly Implemented". Once you realize its stupidity, you can change to "Challenge" mode in order to play loosely (and correctly), but - you're screwed for your existing games. Dammit.

So, if you didn't know, I'm a Scrabble nut. There, I'm out of the closet, and Tom Cruise can fit back in. I have six Scrabble boards at home (two portable, one Super, one Deluxe, one rug, one table), at least two Scrabble dictionaries floating around (admittedly, only third editions, not fourth editions), know most of the good Q, J, and two-letter words, and have actually read the rules enough to realize you can do some interesting things in Scrabble. Heck, bluffing with actually fake words is part of a great game of Scrabble.

Anyways, I'm disappointed. Scrabulous can go to fun hell.

I was discussing my frustration with a particular software provider with a friend, and that reminded me of one of the weirder moments I've seen here...

I was working in building 9 at the time, which meant that I was on the main Microsoft campus. (I'm over in the "Safeco" buildings now, as I've followed the slow arc of further Microsoft building acquisitions down 156th Ave.) Microsoft was in the middle of being Really Not Appreciated by some legal agencies at the time (which, if you're paying attention, has become almost a sad given), and the Seattle Times mentioned that some external people were going to stage a protest on the campus sidewalks. I was pretty intrigued by this. I looked around excitedly as I drove in to campus...

... and saw one lonely guy holding a sign. I don't remember what it said now. I left for Taco Bell mid-day and drove by him to see if anybody else would join him, but that was evidently the sum total of the angry protest. It was kind of sad. I felt like joining the guy out there just so he could have at least have a Sancho Panza. They ran a story on him, and I seem to recall he was a dad, and I was thinking he should have brought his kid because hey, you know what, it is noble to follow one's dreams and the kid should know his dad while maybe strange was at least passionate.

There was a WTO-related protest at one point, but I sadly never saw that.

I mentioned the lone protester to Eric, and he pointed out there was a slightly stranger guy out there at one point. Wanting a job at Microsoft, he evidently submitted a resume and then just held up a sign saying something along the lines of HIRE ME for around six weeks in order to get an interview.

In both cases, I like their passion.

So there I was, just casually checking the drainage on the side of my house on the wet slippery hill in the rainy pitch black night (at 6:30PM!) with a flashlight in my left hand, a machete in my right hand, a pair of open gardening shears in my left hand, pulling ivy stuck to the side of my house with my right hand, and can you believe what happened?

One emergency room visit and five stitches later, I think I learned a valuable lesson about why people use "tool belts". And "daytime". And close the gardening shears when they're not in use.

I really had thought that the machete was what was going to be the inevitable death of me. It was a pleasing but horrible shock to realize that in fact the gardening shears (motto: "Sharp and rusty!") were what was out to get me.
Blood immediately started pouring out of the beautiful cleaving I had done, so I grabbed my hand to my chest, walked down the left hill, trekked across the backyard, slipped going up the wet hill on the right side of the house and banged my shin very efficiently and felt yet more miserable. I got to the garage and just collapsed there trying not to pass out. Greg came around looking for me, singing some happy song... and then she took me to the emergency room as I got to be sadly amused by my utter utter stupidity. Sigh.

I was really worried about the depth of the gash, but it turned out while I had done a nice job cutting myself, I didn't cut anything serious. Five stitches and one tetanus shot later, I got sent home and got to eat all the ice cream.

The doctor called me thin, which was nice. (You could see the fat in my hand in the cut, evidently. Yuck!) It was surprisingly painfree, and I did a fairly soldier-like job of putting up with it all, but I must admit I did cling to Greg's nice back as she kept me from tensing up until I cracked. Phobias aren't any fun - I'm lightly medically phobic (read: irrational fear, I can't explain it either), but I did a lot better at the doctor's than I had in years. It helped that I was my usual talkative self and made friends with the ER staff. PA Robin and Patient Robinson: quite a team.

Sigh. This punishment was definitely deserved just for the sheer stupidity of the actions.

On a related gloomy note, the first people able to even look at the housing irrigation/drainage issues have given me an appointment date of February 15th at 11AM. Hopefully nothing further bad happens between now and then, knock on wood.

The Zune holiday party had Biz Markie and Diplo! (And Kinky too, but Kinky isn't as legendary to me.) I don't even understand how they managed that: evidently they're simply way hipper than my team is. :( They had a graffiti crew making custom hats. I finally met Patrick's girlfriend, and Patrick reminded me, "Zach was the first guy I asked a question of at Microsoft. I asked him some question, he gave me a lot of information, then looked at me and said 'Do you understand?', and I said yes. But I didn't understand." *laugh* That kind of thing happens all the time, really. I asked an innocent "quick question" about performance issues Friday, and then ended up receiving an awesome performance tutorial in response that had my brain gasping for air halfway though. It's so fun working alongside such smart people.

I usually barely know how I fit in, being so ignorant about such wide swathes of the system, but then - the questions come in that I KNOW, and it feels good to be able to knock it out of the park. Thankfully my new team is rather a "expert generalists" group, so I'm slowly able to ramp up my knowledge in strange fun areas such as performance, which I had previously only known within my own limited context.

All the holiday wind had been knocked out of my sails by having to deal with this stupid and expensive flooding issue. Having that happen right before my birthday was rough: I maintained a cheery positive outlook, but ... December wasn't going to be the special time it usually is. I finally managed to get to the Art Walk (and to the New Orleans for jazz and food, where they sang me happy birthday) and got to be with my favorite people on my birthday, had everyone over for the twice monthly poker/gaming party the next day, and all that was good, but I still... just felt like I was trudging along compared to my usual holiday glee. But today my family all made gingerbread houses together, and I think that really helped. We'll see. If not, I'll have to go appreciate the steel drum bands at Westlake. Those always make me feel festive. :(

I kept eating off pieces of my brother's gingerbread house when he wasn't looking, which was fun. And I adore his girlriend: it's so weird to think that they really seem perfect for each other so far. Hopefully that relationship keeps working over time.

Also: rest in peace, Cafe Minnie's. The last one in Seattle just got shut down. I'll miss you.

So: probably pretty bad water damage to the basement of my house.

AllState Insurance of course seemed helpful on the initial call, and then started immediately squirreling away into Cover Our Ass-ville, telling me not to contact a clean-up crew until the adjustor could speak to me - and their office ten hours later tells me I need to contact a clean-up crew so that the crew can determine the source of the water. I appreciate their deep and dark interest in the almighty dollar at the cost of an effective response to a housing emergency. Assholes.

So that was pretty much my birthday week. I had needed a CD from the basement stash on Tuesday, and walked into top-o'-the-carpet-depth water covering my bottom floor, evidently from the huge local rains. (I realize it's strange to call rain "huge", but when you dump buckets and buckets of water, it gains clear physical size to one's haunted psyche.) After wasting 12 hours realizing AllState wasn't interested in pretending to help, I got on the horn and ... got on the waiting list for local water damage recovery services. The storms were bad enough that all the local services weren't able to even take a look for a week.

My brother came over to help me empty the rooms of furniture the next day, and then my dad came over to help me tear up the carpet to keep it away from the walls. All I could do was damage control, which of course sucked. But - I generally feel so ignorant about dealing with housing issues that it really meant a lot to me to be with family and to feel competent working alongside such handymen as my dad and brother.

I rented a dumpster (~$300) and threw out the dripping carpet pad the next day. Some of the carpet pad gushed water as soon as I picked it up - carrying that to throw it out wasn't fun. Even though I used a plastic bin to cart it upstairs to minimize the Nasty, I was overjoyed when I finally got to shower afterwards. I also managed to drain out perhaps 30-50 gallons of water via the ShopVac and dehumidifier: yuck. The dehumidifier is still plugging away down there, but I managed to get a visiting water damage recovery team from Fresno (?!?) to come in tomorrow morning to finally finish the job ($2700, plus whatever the cost is for whatever carpeting replacement is needed).

And: the damage expert said I had done a "good" and "great" job at handling it. That meant a lot to my incompetent little self.
As stupid and as expensive as this will be, it still was nice to work alongside my dad and brother as peers.