Arrogance through ignorance

I've bitten my lip several times in the last weeks when it comes down to the American commentary on the World Cup. Leading the pack of the ignorant are Pete Wilson and Rich Walcoff (on KGO AM810 radio).

I've been creating my short list on why Americans do not like the game. Here's what I came up with.

• In soccer, size or quantity does not matter

"The low-scoring thing, I get that now, how cool one goal can be when you have to work 90 minutes for it. Hey, when a guy goes to a singles bar, is it a disappointing or boring night if he doesn't walk out with 83 women?" - Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle

• In soccer, there is no script.
  "Make some noise" does not need to be announced on a big billboard. You do not get regular beer breaks or commercials. Only half time. Anything can happen any time. Supporters will respond to the game, not to a dancing monkey or chicken. Cheerleaders would however be welcome ;)
• In soccer, stats do not count
  Nobody soccer fan I know keeps track of how many tackles a defender makes. Or how many times a team in the last 10 minutes came back from a 2-0 deficit. Or the total weight of the defenders on a squad. Goals, yes, they are tracked per player, or how often a player is selected.
  
• In soccer, loyalty is part of your blood. Teams do not move
  Teams are rooted in the town. Can you imagine Manchester United to move out of Manchester? Lately, I've seen some soccer teams merging: i.e. two neighbouring towns join the teams into one stadium close to both town centers. But you will not encounter a move like the Raiders moving from Oakland to Los Angeles for a couple of years, and back to Oakland.
  

Day 1

06:00AM - Korea vs Togo (2 - 1)
08:00AM - Say bye to my wife and kids + Coffee
09:30AM - Stroll over to RTI on the 6th floor of the Mission Towers at Freedom Circle

10:00AM - First day at RTI

My new little office, all ready to go.

Second Harvest

Over twelve thousand pounds of food! That's how much food we sorted and repackaged last night at the Second Harvest Food bank in San Jose. With a group of ten Belgians and one Italian, we joined a team of volunteers to sort through pallets of donated food. And although the work isn't very difficult or strenuous, everybody was working at an incredible pace, as if Hurricane Katrina was looming around the corner. There wasn't much chit-chat going on. Instead all you heard were the grunts of everybody hard at work: from creating and preparing boxes, to sorting the food, cleaning up the trashed items, to handling pallets and empty boxes.

The Second Harvest Food bank is an amazing organization, unlike anything you find in Belgium. Check it out (More statistics on their website):

• Each month we serve an average of 163,500 people; enough people to fill Candlestick Park more than twice. Of those that we serve:
• 60% are low-income families
• 37% are children
• 20% are seniors
• The average income of the households we serve through our direct service programs are: $1,270 for a family of four; $900 for a two-person senior household; $700 for a two person volunteer household.

• We are the primary source for donated, surplus and purchased foods for non-profit agencies and our direct service programs. In fact, we distributed 27 million pounds of food to our local communities last year.

Power

Yesterday, we hosted a get-together for the group of Argentines at my wife's company : un asado argentino. Mind you, this is a Saturday. A Sunny afternoon. The sangria is ready. A big bucket is full of chilled beer. And the barbecue is already cooking the sliced zuchinnis.
An hour late (which is expected - la hora argentina always runs about an hour late), people start trickling in ... with their laptops. And not immediatly thirsty for a beer. No no, thirsty for power, to recharge the batteries. Only in Silicon Valley. And yes, we did dive into the sangria and had plenty of grilled meat and beer afterwards.

In a month, we'll celebrate yankee doodle day - Belgian style. There won't be a problem of electric power: Belgian still run on primarily on ethanol.

While on Saturday, we cooked on a traditional American Webber barbecue, I couldn't help it to add a picture from our recent visit to Argentina: an asado en El Trapiche, San Luis, Argentina:

The number: 2687

On January 29, 1999, I joined officially Sun Microsystems. I had interviewed months before that, accepted the employment offer as soon as the traditional first quarter hiring freeze had passed, and had been awaiting the transfer of my H1B visa. I have worked in Market Development Engineering the entire time. I have had three different positions in the organization: first in the I/O Technologies group, then in the eBusiness team and finally in Horizontal Technologies.


A few days ago, I tendered my resignation from Sun Microsystems and have decided to take on an exciting new job at Real Time Innovations in Santa Clara.
Ironically, RTI headquarters are located in the big Mission Towers building next to highway 101, with a big "Sun Microsystems" logo on top of it - although there aren't any Sun offices anymore in the building. (In Silicon Valley, big building facade has important advertising value). It's a little freaky: the offices, the furniture, the layouts, even the carpet I believe: it looks all too familiar.

June 9th will be my last day at Sun. All together, I will have been 2687 days at Sun Microsystems.

Technorati: Sun Microsystems Real Time Innovations

Flex

Since recent, I have given my 'official' office (see How I work), and have gone Flex. This means that I have no regular office, but can reserve an office anywhere. I work two days in Menlo Park (Tuesday is our staff meeting), and three days in Santa Clara. Each office is fully equiped: phone, SunRay, paper, pens. The things you give up is a place for your books and your pictures. My files and books are in a locker in Menlo Park. But that isn't a big deal, since I hardly used them. Googling for information is much faster than trying to find something in a book. Here are a couple of more pictures from the Sun Microsystems Santa Clara campus.

My old office - for nearly 8 years, this obscure building (MPK24), about 3/4 mile from the main Sun Menlo Park Campus has housed my windowless office. Sure this warehouse style building provided big lab space, but it was remote from the action at the main campus.

Here are a couple of picture from my current flex office at the Santa Clara campus.
A view from my current flex office:

The restored historic clock tower building (originally part of the Agnews Insane Asylum - how ironic) . The office shot (above) was taken from the left windown at the second floor.

Technorati:Sun Microsystems

Our next vacation destination: Lake Wobegon

A recent post on the Google research blog discussed the hiring strategy of Google:

We rely on the Lake Wobegon Strategy, which says only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees.

I didn't stand still at the name of the strategy, until a colleague pointed out it is a reference to a fictional place in Minessota part of radio show on National Public Radio (NPR). Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all children are above average". Wikipedia (always to the rescue), points out the term has been used to describe a real and pervasive human tendency to overestimate one’s achievements and capabilities in relation to others. The Lake Wobegon effect, where everybody claims – impossibly – to be above average, has been observed among drivers, CEOs, stock market analysts, college students, and state education officials, among others. Know anybody else suffering Lake-Wobegonitis? Well, now at least, the name of the Google hiring strategy and curve in the blogpost make a lot more sense to me.

Technorati:Lake Wobegon Google

Emulating Gene Bob and Geoff Arnold: Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts/events, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

Events:

• 1895 - Tchaikovsky's ballet "Swan Lake" premieres, St. Petersburg
• 1970 - Muammar al-Qaddafi is proclaimed premier of Libya.
• 2001 - Wikipedia, a Wiki free content encyclopedia, goes online.

Births:

• 1908 - Edward Teller, Hungarian-born physicist (d. 2003)
• 1929 - Martin Luther King Jr, American civil rights leader, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (d. 1968)

Death:

• 41 - Caligula, Roman Emperor (b. 12)

Update (04/10/2006): I learned today that the above little fun tidbit is what is referred to in blog terminology as a 'meme'. My first meme.

Definition: In the world of blogs and bloggers, a meme is an idea, question, statement or project that is posted in one blog and answered to in many other blogs. Memes are used to propagate ideas in the blogosphere. Some blogs or web sites post memes on a daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. (Referece: about.com)

Technorati:blog meme

How I work

Fortune magazine has great series, called How I work, on how several succesful business people work: the tools, the schedules, the habits. Interesting how Hank Paulson, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, has never even used email. Or how Bill Gates uses Outlook across two monitors (and still believes Outlook is great - what's up with that?). Google-geek Marissa Mayer, like some of my colleagues, wouldn't trade Pine (text based, courier font) for any other email tool. I bet ya, she authors her documents in vi.

My work environment
My preferred system is my personal Apple Powerbook laptop. However, since my work (files) live on 'the network', I use a variety of systems to do my work. All I need is power and a network. Both my work email and calendar are on Edge servers. This means they can be accessed over a secure (SSL) link, from anywhere and any machine. Normally one is required to log in (over VPN) into the private corporate network. With our Edge mail and calendar servers, I no longer need to log in. This allows for a great level of flexibility. My office is in Menlo Park. My office desktop is a Sun Ultra 20 Opteron based desktop running Solaris 10. At least 3 days a week, I work from other locations within the company using a SunRay. SunRay's a nitfy thin client. Using a JavaBadge, my work environment (my files, my graphical user interface, my open documents, etc.) follow me around throughout the Bay Area: all I have to do is pop in my JavaBadge into a SunRay, and voila, there is my screen. At home, I use my Apple Powerbook, or a company Toshiba M2 laptop, running Fedora 3.

The Tools
I read email using Mail.app (MacOS X) or Thunderbird (Solaris 10, Linux). Both are configured with many filters, which put my emails in the right buckets, priorities and label them accordingly. On average I get about 150 emails per day.

My personal email is shielded into a Gmail account. I access my gmail via both the brower interface (because it has chat easily integrated), as well as POP to Mail.app.

I use both Safari and Firefox, and opt for ad-blocking proxies.

I keep up to date on technology news, news in the world, friend's blogs via RSS. I use Ranchero's NetNewsWire (MacOS X), Sage and Google Reader as my RSS readers. Recently, I started to use Google Reader a lot more, due to the fact that labeled feeds can be spliced and automatically included in my blog (the right side bar - Interesting bits I read).

Chat: AIM/iChat (waffletchnlgy), Google Talk
SMS: my calendar at work reminds me via SMS about upcoming appointments. I used to synchronize my cell phone with iCal (MacOS X), but due to an incompatibility, it was inefficient to synchronize both personal, work and mobile calendars.

I live on the network, love small and efficient tools. I use quiet a lot of Twiki throughout the day for status updates, product tracking, documentation etc. Oh, and I do carry around a notebook. All work gets divided weekly among five categories: Urgent, Important, Other, Personal and One-on-One. It helps prioritizing all the things to be done.

Where I work?
My 'official' office is in Menlo Park. I work in the Sunnyvale campus (once a week), the Santa Clara campus (two or three times a week) and from home. I get around via both my car, the company shuttle, sometimes the train, and in summer on the bicycle. Here are a few pictures from the Santa Clara campus I work out of regularly.

Technorati:Fortune work tools Bill Gates Marissa Mayer

Hasta la Vista!

I consider myself a computer tools junkie. I detest inefficient tools, broken processes or complicated steps with just too many clicks. I am always on the look out to try a new and more efficient method or tool and consider myself very much up to speed on the multiple useful (and no so useful) tools from Apple, Yahoo, Google, 37 signals and similar companies. An exception to this must be the $200+ mobile devices, which I consider too expensive for their functionality. I have no idea about Treo, Palm nor BlackBerry.

Since efficient and interoperable tools and Microsoft do not go together very well in one sentence, I hadn't paid much attentention to Microsoft Vista and Office 2007. Yes, I knew they were delayed, but that is hardly news from Redmond. In Barron's this week, I read an article about the financial impact of both products on Microsoft, as well as a summary of the new features. Let's run down the new features of Microsoft Vista 2007: (ha!)

1. Security: Windows moves from 'the user is the administrator' to 'you need a password to be administrator'. This is touted as an example of Microsoft being serious about security. Unix - 1969. More modern and more secure operating systems have already moved away from the all-none user security status. For example, Solaris 10 introduced two years ago Process Rights Management (aka Privileges), a feature it imported from Trusted Solaris, a military grade version of the operating system. There is no 'god' in the system. And users and programs need the correct privilege to execute an operation.
   
2. Vista embeds search. MacOS X Spotlight 2005. Google Desktop Search.
3. Vista introduces a sidebar with widgets. MacOS X Dashboard 2005. Konfabulator, now part of Yahoo Widgets.
4. Microsoft Vista introduces parental controls, a feature AOL and MacOS X provide for several years.
5. Microsoft media will be able to handle high-definition video. Apple Quicktime 7 2005.
   
6. Internet explorer introduces tabbed browsing. No kidding.
7. Outlook will include an RSS reader. Thunderbird, MacOS X Safari 2005.

Balmer summed it up best:

"But what have we had in terms of innovation over the last few years? Frankly, as an industry, not all that much."

Wow, I rest my case.

Technorati:Microsoft Vista Office 2007 Apple MacOS X