mike's web log

Writing for Games

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:08:35 GMT

My friend John is interviewed for the Microsoft JobsBlog on how it is that a technical writer works in the Games division:

How did your career start off at Microsoft Game Studios?
I was working as a technical writer for Microsoft on error messages for Office 95 and telephony projects and that sort of thing. But, like a lot of technical writers, I had a secret life. When I wasn’t at work, I was busy as a screenwriter.

I started working in games in 1996 when a former copy editor of mine from Office asked me to create an online help system for Mind Aerobics, a new puzzle game by Alexey Pajitnov - who invented Tetris. In many ways, my first game writing job was still technical writing.

A while back, I heard a presentation that John did about how the role of writer works a little differently in games than it does in the kind of writing we do. To me this is still one of the most amusing summaries of why reading technical documentation can be less than fascinating:

In technical writing, we want to get to order as quickly as possible.

In story telling, we play with the state of disorder and give out pieces of order a little at a time, strategically, so we can maintain dramatic tension and drive interest forward.

So a technical writing approach to Star Wars would have a big bolded notice on the first page that said, Important! Darth Vader is Luke’s dad!

Geek cred and projects

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:03:59 GMT

Raymond Chen, who is a geek's geek, recently got Windows Home Server so he could back up his machine(s). In the course of recounting his experience, he said this:

Of course, the first thing you do with a new gadget is tinker with it, and I installed Whiist and created a photo album. It was so easy to do, I feel like I'm losing my geek cred. I mean, this sort of thing is supposed to involve hours of staring at the screen, scouring the Internet for information, and groveling through hundreds of settings trying to get things working. If anybody can get a home server up and running with automatic nightly backups and an online photo album by just clicking on some fluffy GUI buttons, then what will I have to feel superior about?

This struck a chord with me. While I have never had near the geek cred of a guy like Raymond, I have certainly had the general guy thing of "I bet I could do this." Create a slide-show application? I bet I could do that. Replace an alternator? I bet I could do that. Install a water heater? I bet I could do that.

And yes, I could do that, and I did. The results were definitely not better than if a pro had done it. Cheaper in money, if not time. (The slideshow, of course, was markedly inferior to what a pro might do).

But as I am coming to realize, my days of having to do everything [more]

That unmistakable sound

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:02:23 GMT

I think that one of the disks on my server computer is dying -- it's making that spin-up-spin-down noise that they make just before they break. (Break your heart, that is.)[1]

If the blog disappears, it's because I'm, you know, servicing the server.

Once again I wonder whether it's really worth it to maintain my own server. Hmmm.

[1] As an aside, I got this image from a site that obviously is auto-translated. From what language, who knows. Here's an excerpt about the warning signs of incipient failure:

Symptoms of harder drive failure

The pre-warnings of harder drive abortion are not consistently accustomed by declining harder drive, if sometimes the agnate absurdity letters may arise and sometimes not. The a lot of accepted signs are beat or abrading sounds, while others, lower in ratings, cover aspersing arrangement achievement and abrupt behavior.

Sounds phishy

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:04:27 GMT

It must be my week to attract folks with malicious intentions. I have some ads in on craigslist, so I was happy to get an email this morning about one of them. Until I read the email, I mean:

Dear Seller

I 'm interested in purchasing your advertised item and i will like to know the final price if is okay by me.And if I can pay with a cashiers check, If this is okay with you do get back to me immediately for me to arrange the payment. Concerning the shippment, my shipper will come and pick it up from your location as soon as we seal this transaction. Do get back to me immediately with your Full Name, Contact Address and Phone Number for me to issue out the payment check to u asap cos am right now out of town but i can instruct my client overthere to issue out the payment check to u as soon as u get back to me here also im paying you an extra $50 to get this advert off the internet cuz am really interested in buying it. Hope to hear from you soon.so u can get back to me via my email at kellyqueen06@yahoo.co.uk

Best regards,
Ann
NB:- i will be looking forward to hear from you soon. Do attach the picture if available. Thanks

The prose is wretched, but that's par for the course on craigslist. The real tipoff was the offer of a cashier's check, which is a well-known scam. And the fact that the responder is offering to buy my item and ship it. To the UK. Which is slightly suspicious, given what the item actually is:

It was 30 years ago today ...

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:35:22 GMT

Today -- September 1, 2009 -- is the 30th anniversary of my arrival in Seattle. I moved to Seattle from Denver in order to go to graduate school at UW. I hadn't ever been within a thousand miles of the place; the closest I'd ever been to Seattle was San Francisco. It's worked out, tho, apparently -- I'm still here. :-)

30 years is a long time. I'm still not a native, but I get a kind of indirect nativeness by virtue of having two kids who are from here. I personally did not graduate from a Seattle high school, for example, but my kids graduated from the storied Garfield High, which makes me almost like being from here.

I arrived on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, which was poor planning in some senses. For example, I wasn't able to check into the department at school that was expecting me, or even go and look for housing. But I had a place to stay, courtesy of a relative of a friend of my mother's, and it was Bumbershoot weekend, so I had a hospitable introduction to my new home.

Seattle was a different city when I moved here. It was smaller, for one. (Altho most of the growth since then has been in the suburbs.) Some of the institutions that put Seattle on the map -- Microsoft, Starbucks, grunge -- had yet to become famous. In those days, it really was still Jet City. The city expansion of the 50s and 60s (including I-5) had engendered a backlash of opposition that we feel even today in endless dithering about how to improve the urban infrastructure, and the city limped along for decades with roads and mass transit that had been designed for a fraction of the population. (We're catching up ... the story of Seattle while I've lived here is its gradual acceptance that it's a big city.)

[more]

Eyewear by PhotoShop

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 23:45:24 GMT

My daughter has been a big fan of the site ZenniOptical.com, where you can get eyewear astonishingly cheaply. (Normally I go to Costco, but Zenni beats even their prices.)

The downside of ordering by web, of course, is that you can't put the frames on and then squint at the mirror to try to decide if you like the way they look. (Those of you who have serious correction for nearsightedness will probably understand what I mean when I talk about squinting at the mirror.)

Ah, but combine a clever daughter with PhotoShop, and you can get a darn good idea. After I had flagged a number of frames that I thought I might like, Sabrina got my Facebook profile picture, copied the picture of the frames from the Zenni site, and then did a little mashup in PhotoShop. The results were, I thought, excellent:

The site needs a preview function like this, wouldn't you agree?

Two things at a time

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 01:28:15 GMT

Have I ever recounted my Theory of Two Things? The theory is this: there are many things to attend to in one's life, but I can only attend to two things at a time. For example, here are the sorts of things that are part of my life:

family
work
friends
reading
home improvement
guitar
blogging
exercising
taking classes
teaching classes

And etc. Per my theory, I can only really be putting serious energy into two of these at a time. So, if work is intense and I'm practicing guitar diligently, I'm ignoring family and blogging. If we're doing family things and I'm working on some house project or other, work and guitar and all the rest get short shrift. I can prep to teach a class and work, or I can work and have a busy social life, or I can work out regularly and do home improvement, or I can blog regularly and read a lot, or ... anyway, you get the idea.

Clearly there are people who can handle three or four or more of these types of things concurrently. (I seem to work with a lot of people like that.) But one has to know oneself, no? And I have to recognize, after long experience, that taking on some attention-sucking task means I have to jettison something else, until the total count of tasks is, like, two.

What's your limit for number of concurrent tasks?

The many dimensions of fasteners

Sun, 03 May 2009 22:50:16 GMT

I’m going to propose to you that each of the items in the following picture is an eight-dimensional object:

Eight? Yes. Or more. Or fewer. It all depends.

Of course, I’m screwing with you. (haha, get it?) I'm using a mathematical definition of dimensions: In Cartesian terms, an object's dimension is "correlated with the number of coordinates that is required to map it."[1] It seems probable that when Descartes was inventing analytic geometry, he did not realize that he could have been analyzing a problem I've been having with coffee cans. Which I'll get to in a moment.

So, eight dimensions? Here are eight attributes/characteristics/coordinates/dimensions to identify this object uniquely:

Fastener type	screw
Category	machine screw
Drive type	Philips
Length	3/4"
Diameter/Gauge	#8
Thread count[2]/pitch	32
Material	Zinc-plated steel
Head style	pan

Go on down to the hardware store and take a stroll through the eponymously labeled Hardware department. Screws, nuts, bolts, washers, pins, nails, anchors ... this department consists of a very large number of small boxes. The boxes are grouped by the categories listed above, and probably several more, like measuring system (US or metric)[3 [more]

Speaking of large numbers

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:59:51 GMT

Another blog milestone today -- sometime during the night, the blog hit counter rolled over to 7 digits:

As noted earlier, compared wtih actual, real blogs, this is nothing -- most of the people whose blogs I read pick up a million hits in months, if not weeks. But hey, it's sumpin' special for this blog, anyway.

So, 5-1/2 years, 2000 posts, a million hits, half a million words:

Blah-blah, yadda-yadda, a milestone hit today
A million times the server has been asked for to display
These pages of Verdana 8-point text all bluish gray
And weeks ago the blog post count inched slightly past 2K.
A half a million words, by god, so little to convey
You'd think by now I might have had some useful things to say.

Haha.

I had this dream where I wasn't prepared ...

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:22:34 GMT

I'm going to teach a class this weekend that's an intro to Microsoft Word styles and templates. I am a, shall we say, avid proponent of using styles (see also), so I look forward to an opportunity to spread the, um, good Word.

The class is specifically an intro class (I got to write the course description, in which this was emphasized). Even so, I get ... nervous. My anxiety derives primarily from a fear that I won't know enough. This manifests itself in a certain compulsiveness. In the time leading up to the class, I start obsessing about ever-more-arcane details, like "How do you remove a multilevel list template from the gallery?" and similar esoterica that a) no one will ask and b) even if they did, I could legitimately say "Dunno, I'll get back to you on that."

Realistically, and in my experience, people for the most part sign up for the class precisely because they are a bit confuddled by this styles business and just want an intro. As described in the catalog. (A few people in the class are usually even still a bit unsure even about general formatting issues, coz let's face it, unless you use Word all the time, this stuff ain't obvious.) You'll always get a question or two from left field, but you don't have to know everything, do you?

But it's hard to let go. And I'll tell you a story. Many years ago (24, to be exact), I started at a new company, which had hired me due in part to my (alleged) expertise with their product. I had barely been there a week when they told me that I would be flying from Seattle to the east coast to do three days' worth of training for a big corporate customer. Big customer. I'd done training before, so this wasn't unreasonable. But I was nervous and because it was mid-winter and I was stressed, I started to get a cold.

[more]

You have (outbound) mail: Outlook mysteries

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 10:41:35 GMT

I have used Outlook for email for years and have no reason to complain. Just in the last little while, tho (wait, am I about to complain?), I've started seeing some odd behavior in my various and many individual installations. This has to do with how the Outbox is being handled.

My, um, desired setting is that email be dumped into the Outbox before it goes out the door. This helps me solve the hit-Send-and-only-then-notice-the-typo problem, and the less common but more important prolly-I-shouldn't-even-send-this problem.

I regularly use four separate instances of Outlook (four machines[1]), and in each one, something different happens with outbound mail:

Machine 1 (Outlook 2007, work): Email stubbornly refuses to leave the Outbox unless I explicitly click Send/Receive. Result: come in to work in the morning, yesterday afternoon's emails are still sitting in the Outbox, oops.
Machine 2 (Outlook 2007, home): Email refuses to leave the Outbox when I click Send/Receive, but eventually wanders away on its own accord after a few minutes. Result: "C'mon! Can you send the file already!? " It's coming, it's coming.
Machine 3 (Outlook 2003, work): Email does not stop at the Outbox, it passes Go, like, immediately. (I suppose it's in the Outbox for the blink of an eye, but effectively it's sent immediately.) Result: Be dang sure before you click Send.
Machine 4 (Outlook 2003, home): Works as expected. Result: Satisfied customer.

What's weird is that all of these instances of Outlook are configured exactly the same:

(My normal setting is 3 minutes, but I've been playing with this to see if it makes any difference.)

[more]

2K

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:55:34 GMT

This is my 2,000th post. You'd think that by now I'd have something interesting to say, wouldn't you? :-)

I think I'm in love

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:10:27 GMT

Over the holidays, our household became CRT-free because I love, love, love LCD monitors and think everyone should have one. I have long since become a fervent believer in the benefits of dual monitors. (I do not as yet subscribe to Atwood's thesis that the ideal number of monitors is 3.) And I have been quite happy in my relationship with my two LCD monitors.

Ah, but yesterday my head was turned, and how. For reasons I shall explain another time, an HP w2408h monitor has fallen into my hands, and I am weak-kneed at how wonderful it is.

We've read together, we've coded together, and we've gotten cozy and edited together. We watched a DVD together, and it was awesome. One special time we got a little wild and I flipped it 90 degrees, and we could edit whole pages together, with room to spare for comments.

Yes, I have been smitten. My only problem is figuring out how to accommodate my Big Love for this and my other 19" monitors. But I'm sure it will all work out.

The rough-and-tumble of craigslist (and where I fail)

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 12:10:04 GMT

My friend Michael B has been wanting to get rid of some stuff, so I suggested craigslist, which was an institution that he had no experience of. (But it went great for him.) I'm actually a pretty terrible craigslister, but I'm learning. Here are some tips I've come up with, some of which I passed on to Michael.

1. Keep the ad up until the stuff is out the door. It might look like you've sealed the deal, but there's no downside in keeping the store open till the merchandise is sold.

2. You don't have to respond to every inquiry. As with the hard lessons we've learned in our dating lives, if people seem interested but they don't get a response, they get the hint.

3. Make it first-come, first-served. People will tell you all sorts of things about when they’ll get back to you, meet up with you, whatever, and I’m sure in many cases they mean it. And then you never hear from them again. (Thus the preemptive note that people sometimes include in their responses to the effect of "I'm not a flake!") As a corollary, you don’t need to put people into a queue in the order they responded, and you can (and should) give the stuff to whoever shows up with cash in hand.

4. Make the buyer do the work. It's great for you that someone who lives 60 miles away is interested in your old stuff. If they want it bad enough, they'll come to you to get it. Be ... slow ... to offer to meet up, bring stuff to them, etc. See also previous point.

5. Know your price [more]

Yes We Scan - Pt 2

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 09:41:39 GMT

I don’t have an exact count, but I scanned well over 1000 photos, possibly as many as 1400 or so. Once I got started, the fever came over me and I began snatching pictures off the walls and rooting through albums of ancestors. In the end I extended the bounds of the project to pictures from as far as back as 1894, I think the oldest was. I scanned pictures of my grandparents and parents. I scanned pictures of myself in my younger days, from infant through the photographically embarrassing years of high school and college. I scanned the pre-kid days of the mom and me. I scanned photos from the mom’s youth. I scanned pictures of Dogs We Have Owned. And on and on and on.

My mom, 1948

I sorted all these scans roughly by year, as best I could. A practice that I now can strongly recommend is label your photos. Names and dates will be less obvious to each subsequent generation of viewers, and one of the sad aspects of this job was that I threw out a lot of old pictures of people I didn’t recognize and who were not identified in any way.

Senior portrait, 1974

I had trouble even with the dates for my own kids, so I recruited the mom to look at some undated photos and venture her own guesses. Sometimes I played a version of Concentration with the photos – I’d scan a photo that had no information and file the image in a folder somewhere. Days later I’d find another copy of the photo, this time with a date. Then I’d have to find the scanned version and try to match image and caption. Given how many copies of photos I found, often I ended up with multiple scans of the same photo, done days apart.
[more]

Yes We Scan - Pt 1

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:08:45 GMT

My kids are amply documented, photo-wise, starting within minutes of Zack’s arrival and continuing up through and beyond their flight out of the nest. We lived in the UK from 1990-1992, for example, and I once counted that we had about 2000 negatives from those years alone, a significant percentage of them involving the kids.[1]

Boxloads of pictures have followed both me and the kids’ mom around from house to house, largely neglected. Round about Thanksgiving, however, I got this notion that I should scan a bunch of these photos and present them to the kids. I did not really think that the kids would treasure these old photos – nostalgia is for old folks – but I was interested myself in having digital versions of photos that I remembered as being cute. Anyway, preservation of artifacts of the past is a thing that old people get into, as is well known.

We have a so-called all-in-one printer/copier/scanner, which suffers from the jack-of-all-trades problem. So after some desultory research, I obtained an HP Scanjet G4050.[2] No question, there are better scanners on the professional end, with suitably professional prices, but in matters such as these, I am an advocate and practitioner of Good Enough.

[more]

The old ways are best (?)

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:42:38 GMT

My maternal grandmother epitomized the stereotype of the old lady with a home remedy for every ill. I seem to have developed a chest cold, and each time I hack my way through another bout of coughing, I think about what my Oma would have done: make a mustard pack.

I was a sickly child, I guess, and would duly be put to bed when an illness had reached the point of no going to school. (This was not achieved merely with a few tentative coughs; you had to sound like a three-packs-a-day smoker before staying home from school came under discussion.) And under my Oma's care, being put to bed for an illnes did not involve the somewhat pleasant experience of, for example, getting to watch daytime television and sipping at some juice. No, by golly, she was going to cure what ailed you.

Thus the mustard pack. I remember only a few details, and even those somewhat hazily. My memory is that she would take a juice can, back when those were small and made out of metal, and cook up her concoction on the stove. This was somehow transferred to bandages or cloths that were then cinched around your chest. A memory I have no trouble with is that this poultice smelled vile. As I say, being sick at our house was not a cakewalk, not when the cure was often as bad, nominally, as the sickness. (I am interested to see that mustard packs are still recommended by some to relieve congestion.)

My grandmother was also a great believer in the healing powers of Mentholatum and Vicks VapoRub, and a whiff of those pungent products instantly transports me to the days of my early youth. My mother reported that when she [more]

Well, I think they're interesting

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 09:23:09 GMT

Sarah and I read a lot, and we typically have multiple books scattered around the house that are at various stages of completion. In spite of our book diet, we still are always on the lookout for new things. For example, no Costco trip is complete without a scan through the books. Instead of buying, tho, we usually write down interesting-looking titles and then add those books to our respective queues at the library.

For all the reading we do, we don't overlap that much. I read about history and technology, and I seem to end up reading novels about middle-aged men (#, #, #). Sarah reads about medicine, public health, and biography, and she'll have a go at all sorts of things might grab her eye on the shelf at the library. Plus she reads novels of all sorts, including, for purposes of parental oversight and solidarity, books currently popular with her girls (#).

The other day I found two books at Costco that seemed interesting: The Airplane by Jack Spenser[1], and Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Mazower. I believe I've established that I have an interest in aviation. Jack Spenser was the co-author of [more]

New car

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:40:33 GMT

You might remember that I had a little collision a couple of weeks ago, which put a heck of a dent in my Toyota Matrix:

The insurance guys sent me to a body shop that eyed it and gave me an initial figure of $6600 to fix it. Long story short, in the end the insurance company totaled it out (to everyone's surprise, including the body shop guys) and sent me a check for around twice the original estimate. I've heard a couple of theories as to why they should have done this, but anyway, they did and so I was in the market for a replacement car.

After looking around for a bit, specifically for 5-door cars in my preferred price range (cheap), I ended up with a Scion xB, aka, a Toyota Camry with a body style that someone referred to as a "baby Honda Element":

The color, by the way, is the oddly named "Black Berry Crush." Not only does this rub me editorially the wrong way -- yo, blackberry is one word -- but I get 12 kinds of grief about my "purple" car. But they don't have nice primary colors any more, alas, so I was unable to secure the bright red that I've come to favor.

[more]

Into the wild

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 22:06:19 GMT

Went up to Paradise at Mt. Rainier today and walked around a bit:

Saw a bear placidly foraging for blueberries:

Ouch

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:23:56 GMT

Got rear-ended over the weekend:

Up, Up and Away

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:05:27 GMT

Many years ago, when I was turning 40, my kids asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and I said "a balloon ride." They hadn't hit the double digits in age at that point, so that wasn’t exactly practical. But they didn't forget, and a decade later they surprised me with, whaddya know, a certificate for a balloon ride. That certificate has been pinned to my wall for a while. But Seattle weather weather has turned balmy, finally, so I called them up. Not so surprisingly, when I told Sarah I was going to make an arrangement to go flying, she wanted to go, too. Sabrina wanted to come watch. Today was the day.

The way it works it that you call them at 5:00 am (which, I'll just point out, means 5:00 in the morning). They tell you whether it's a go and tell you where they're intending to launch from. You drag your tired self or selves to their meeting place by 6:30. (AM.) Balloonists share with rowers a hypersensitivity to the effects of wind, and like rowers, they get up insanely early in order to have the wind working in their favor, i.e., not too strong, not too unpredictable. (As the sun heats things up, our man said, you get unexpected and unwelcome thermals, for example.)

At the office, there is the predictable amount of milling around, but eventually you pile into a van that's dragging a trailer, and they drive to their preferred take-off spot. In this case, it's an open lot next to a medical facility right in Snohomish. The vans act as chase vehicles, which in this case included Sabrina. There were two balloons, each hauling eight passengers and a pilot.

Basket and trailer

Then it's all hands on board, so to speak, and the assembled mob is enlisted to drag the balloon out of the trailer.

[more]

It's the little things, keyboard layout edition

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:58:45 GMT

A couple of months back, when I got my new computer, I was obliged to get a new keyboard. I just ran out and got a USB keyboard that was, um, not expensive. As it happens, I ended up with a Logitech keyboard.

I noticed even at the time that the new keyboard had keys in slightly different places, and I assumed that this would take some adjustment. A couple of weeks ago, however, I realized that this adjustment was not happening. I was constantly hitting the wrong key. For example, I'd try to go to the end of the line and end up on the next page or something.

I was surprised by how much this affected my productivity. I'd be editing, for example, completely focused on what I was typing, and then oops! WTF? Where am I? And I'd have to scroll around in the document, find where I was, and then pick up where I was. Which frequently resulted in oops! WTF? Where am I now? Or I'd be typing and realize that I was overwriting existing text all of a sudden.

I've had a laptop for a long time, and I had long since resigned myself to the unfortunate fact that I am way less productive on that machine. I just cannot type as efficiently on that keyboard, and I spend an amazing amount of time backtracking and retyping and such. But it's a tradeoff; being able to work on the bus, albeit at lowered productivity, is better than not being able to do anything.

But to lose this productivity at the desktop was not acceptable. When I finally realized that I was not adjusting to the new keyboard, then -- and only then -- did I have a close look. Oho. This is the relevant part of my work keyboard, which is identical to my old, pre-new-computer keyboard:

This is the layout of the new Logitech keyboard:

[more]

Our bummer song lists

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:20:30 GMT

I've been taking guitar class for several sessions running, as noted before. Although members come and go, over the course of these sessions the median age of the participants just hasn't gone down much, so our jocular appellation for the class ("Old Guy Rock") these days is less humor and more just, you know, fact.

And as it turns out, left to our own devices, we always end up selecting songs that are not the, you know, sunniest pop songs. Let's see ... we've had suicide ("Fire and Rain"), regret ("Best of My Love"), regret ("Brown Eyed Girl"), regret ("Can't You See"), regret ("Layla"), regret ("Wish You Were Here"), depression ("You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"), resignation ("Flake"), despair ("Cold, Cold, Heart"), existential ennui ("Norwegian Wood"), prison ("Folsom Prison Blues"), death ("Gravedigger"), suicidal depression and regret ("Hurt"), and, um, who knows ("Ripple"). As a sample.

Well, it turns out there's a reason. I dug up an old, old quote tonight, and golly, maybe this is relevant.

Rock and roll has outlived its usefulness to most of us who grew up with it. The current hits aren't about us anymore, but that's all right--we're no longer crowding the clubs and record stores. Pop has always existed primarily for the young, the only ones who have time for it. The source of disenchantment is in realizing that the favorite songs of our high school and college years are no longer about us either--they reflect where we were in our lives then, not where we are now. This may be why so many of my friends have developed a sudden interest in country, a style of pop whose subject matter is less often adolescent sensuality than adult wreckage.

-- Francis Davis
"'Vox Populi"
The Atlantic Monthly, October 1993

Johnny Cash, anyone?

11 years

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:39:33 GMT

On Monday, I had my 11-year anniversary at the Evil Empire. In the way of calendars, my first day as a so-called blue badge was also a Monday, which the newly hired get to spend at NEO -- new-employee orientation.[1]. AFAIK, there's no corresponding old-employee disorientation. You're on your own for that one.

In DevDiv, aka Developer Division, the tradition is that on your anniversary, you bring a pound of M&Ms for each year you've been there. Fortunately for me, because Easter was on Sunday, on Monday morning there were terrific sales on pastel-colored M&Ms. (Also, on chocolate bunnies, yay.) I've had several bowls of different types of M&Ms outside my office for the last few days, replenishing them as the supply runs low. My cross-hall neighbor tells me that it's been a popular stop, and I've seen people slow down and scoop up a handful as they pass. Even so, it's a lotta lotta M&Ms, so it'll be a while before they're gone. And not a moment too soon, coz having that much candy that close at hand ... well, not so good for ye olde balanced diet.

I sent email around notifying my extended divisional brethren of their chance to score some M&Ms, and of course why, and got some nice emails back. One theme was "wow!", which I interpreted to mean "Wow, you've been here that long?" The time, she has flown, but I guess it's a respectable number of years to have stuck it out, so to speak. One of the newer writers asked whether I had absolute seniority on the ASP.NET documentation team, and after a minute of cogitation, I had to acknowledge that yes, I believe that I am indeed the old man of ASP.NET User Education.[2 [more]