Neel's Space

No parking pictures today.  I am working from home today.  While the commute into work probably wouldn’t have been too bad today, it can not compare to the commute to the living room.  Amazingly enough I had no meetings scheduled for today so it is a perfect opportunity to spend some quality time on my spec.  Specs (and spec reviews) are how program managers communicate what it is that needs to be built.  Just as there are many different types of program managers, there are many different types of specs and specs usually change as the process moves along.  At the beginning most specs are not very detailed.  Good specs start with a high-level view of what the goals are.  This step is really important, because without all the people involved having the same understanding of what needs to be built and why, it is unlikely the results of the process will be what everyone expected. 

Once the goals are covered, it is necessary to indicate how those goals are going to be met.  This can be done with a set of requirements and some flow diagrams, but not every spec includes this level of detail.  Most specs cover the mid-level view.  At this level, with some effort, one can figure out what pieces of the project do, but most of the details are “left as an exercise to the reader.”  The detail level is very important to include so that everyone knows what is supposed to be built and it is easy to tell if the product meets the requirements or not.

I didn’t think it would be so soon.  It must be the picket-fence syndrome.  This morning I found another example of exemplary parking.  The BMW is clearly over the line.  The Acura looks like it is just on the line, which is probably why the BMW is over the line.

Bad parking seems to be on the rise.  Twice this week I have witnessed fine examples that made it impossible for someone to use at least one space.  It was not such a big problem until last week, when all the spaces started being occupied by about 9:30 AM (even the not quite legal ones).  Since I had my camera with me today, I figured it would be good to see if the offenders were repeating.  So here is the first installment in the Bad Parking Hall of Fame.

The other day I must have been somewhat to particularly cranky.  Normally when I get a piece of e-mail for which I did not sign up, I just delete it.  But, this time it was a newsletter that was extolling the virtues of no spam in our inboxes.  It was just too funny to me.  Here was a piece of unsolicited e-mail (i.e. junk/spam by most definitions) touting the benefits of the spam reduction capabilities of Exchange and our IT group.  I also noticed that the e-mail was sent from the same alias used to distribute it, which meant even if people used reply instead of reply all it would go to the whole distribution list.  I had to do something.

I found an alias buried in the newsletter that was for feedback and provided some.  I didn’t really expect an answer and figured that I would just have to blog about it.  So I was somewhat surprised when I received a long reply from someone who actually took the time to read my feedback, think about it, and then respond.  Since this person took the time to respond and had some questions, I had to continue the conversation.  We had a nice thread going back and forth.  I learned that it was really someone else who was responsible for the alias abuse and that the people who sent this e-mail had thought of the issue of people responding to the whole list.

There was quite a storm of e-mail sometime back, when there was a service announcement that went out to much of the company.  One of the things that they explain at orientation on the first day for new employees is never ever send e-mail to a distribution list asking to be put on the list or taken off of it.  They also explain that to forget this piece of information will likely cause one to look stupid in the eyes of everyone else.  That must have made quite an impression on me, since it has been many years since I took that class and I still remember it.  Anyway back to the story, apparently some people forgot this advice and when they got the e-mail and replied all that they were not interested in getting this e-mail and would somebody please take them off the list.  Of course other people were quick to point out that it was bad form to send e-mail to the whole list for this (why they sent this to the whole list I do not know).  There was even an executive who sent an e-mail to his assistant to remove him from the list, since by now there were a significant number of replies to this one service announcement.  Unfortunately for the assistant, she must have forgotten the rule, because she forwarded the executive’s e-mail to the whole list and asked to have him removed.  Later in the day there was an official e-mail explaining to everyone how to use the tool to remove themselves from the list.  Unfortunately, there really was no way to do this.  The list used to send the mail included other lists that contained everyone in a particular building.  They did change the rules on the list to limit the use of the list to specific people, to help prevent a reoccurrence of the mail storm.  However, since the notifications were of no importance to me, I just added an inbox rule to automatically delete them.  That way my inbox stays just a little bit less full.

Before joining the Spaces team I was working on the Broadband Networking HW team.  I was the PM for the setup experience and figured out the update strategy so that we could provide automatic notification of new updates.  While you can’t buy the products new anymore, you can read about them here: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/broadbandnetworking

Before Broadband Networking I worked on the Server Appliance Kit.  You can learn more about it here: http://whidbey.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnanchor/html/anch_srvrappkit.asp

It was while I was on the SAK team that I met John who is now a developer on Spaces.  Sometime ago, John moved to the building I was in to join the Spaces team and told me all about it.  He said I should join the team, but at the time I was not looking for a new job.  Later, when I decided it was time for a change, John talked to me again.  This time I decided to seriously look at the opportunity.  I liked what I saw and so here I am.  The really funny thing is that I stayed in the same building and moved to the office directly above the one I was in.  So, now I get to see the middle part of the tree instead of the bottom part.  Maybe on my next move I’ll get to see the top part of the tree.