Happy New Year from Hong Kong.

Alrighty. Time to go to bed.

Here is a picture of the Admiral’s Club at San Jose airport (SJC). I must say, this is the only way to relax before an international flight.

Nice place. Airy, bright, lots of good seating, free trailmix-ish food and cookies.

Here is a picture of the plane that I took from SJC to NRT:

Here is the interior view from my seat (13J) in business class:

The legroom between the seats (measured by the “pitch”), is a nice treat. Unless your bag is under the seat in front of you, and then its a giant reach that only Yao Ming could achieve.

There’s actually a lot of empty seats - probably not a good sign for AA (but that’s what happens when you add a $500 cash fee on top of the 50,000 mileage requirement for upgrading on International flights!). There’s also a surprising number of kids - fortunately they’re all well behaved.

Here is a picture of my lunch:

There was a choice of a “western” lunch or a “Japanese” lunch. While I usually enjoy the filet mignon quite a bit, I decided to be adventurous and go for the Japanese lunch. There was a small appetizer of sushi that’s not pictured here. There were some funny shapes in my box lunch as you can see. And, as is traditional, I had no frickin’ clue as to what I was eating. I thought the white ball was a fish ball. Nope - it was something I can’t identify. I thought it was coleslaw on the right side. Nope - it was calamari. I suspect this “i have no clue what I’m eating and I don’t really want to know” will be a recurring theme for all trips to Asia…

Too bad I have braces, otherwise I probably would be enjoying the fine choices of free sake, champagne, and wine. Oh who am I kidding? The last time I had a full glass of champagne on a flight, I thought my head was going to asplode!

Did I go to the Snack Attack(R) too late? There’s a cart positioned at the galley that is supposed to be filled with snacks - but by the time I got there, there weren’t than many choices left. I ended up with a bag of M&M’s and some pepperidge farm cookies. In any case, I’m just glad I attacked the snacks, and not the other way around.

Anyway, here am in Tokyo. I’m making a phone call over Skype - woot!

And I got a free upgrade for my flight to Hong Kong! Double woot!

I’m on my way to HKG via NRT. Woot! A drink ticket for the Admiral’s Club Lounge!

So you probably heard of the free Tivo giveaway that happened on Friday. I’m not sure what the outcome was, but because of it, I got a Comcast HDTV PVR.

You see, on Thursday, Tivo was spreading FUD by saying that you could get a free Tivo on Friday, instead of waiting for weeks on end for a Comcast PVR. Of course, the free unit doesn’t do HDTV.

So on Thursday I called Comcast to find out what the waiting list was for the HDTV PVR - lo and behold, they have them in stock. On Friday they installed it, and now I can pause live tv.

After I spend some more time with it, I’ll write a review, but so far it has been fantastic. I recorded The Last Samurai the other day, and it looks just great. All for $9.99 a month (with a $15 installation fee).

Here’s a really useful FAQ page for the device (hard to find): http://broadband.motorola.com/dvr/news_faq.asp

Woohoo! I’m Platinum for another year!

I’d like to thank all of those who worked so hard to make this happen. I’d like to thank Microsoft for allowing me to go around the country giving demos on Office 2004 to customers. I’d like to thank the AA staff at SJC and SFO and OAK. And most of all, I’d like to thank the person who set up the arrangement so that you can get AA miles for flying Alaska.

Happy 2005 everyone!

Black hole projects

• They must have absurdly grandiose goals. Something like “fundamentally reimagine the way that people work with computers.” Nobody, including the people who originate the goals, has a clear idea what the goals actually mean.
  
• They must involve throwing out some large existing codebase and rewriting everything from scratch, “the right way, this time.”
  
• They must have completely unrealistic deadlines. Usually this is because they believe that they can rewrite the original codebase in much, much less time than it took to write that codebase in the first place.
  
• They must have completely unrealistic beliefs about compatibility. Usually this takes the form of believing you can rewrite a huge codebase and preserve all of the little quirks and such without a massive amount of extra effort.

• They are always “six months” from from major deadline that never seems to arrive. Or, if it does arrive, another milestone is added on to the end of the project to compensate.
  
• They must consume huge amounts of resources, sucking the lifeblood out of one or more established products that make significant amounts of money or have significant marketshare.
  
• They must take over any group that does anything that relates to their absurdly broad goals, especially if that group is small, focused, has modest goals and actually has a hope of shipping in a reasonable timeframe.
  
• They must be prominently featured as demos at several company meetings, to the point where people groan “Oh, god, not another demo of this thing. When is it ever going to ship?”
  
• They usually are prominently talked up by BillG publicly years before shipping/dying a quiet death.
  
• They usually involve “componetizing” some monolithic application or system. This means that not only are you rewriting a huge amount of code, you’re also splitting it up across one or more teams that have to all seamlessly work together.
  
• As a result of the previous point, they also usually involve absolutely massive integration problems as different teams try madly to get their components working with each other.
  
• They usually involve rewriting the application or system on top of brand-new technology that has not been proven at a large scale yet. As such, they get to flush out all the scalability problems with the new technology.
  
• They are usually led by one or more Captain Ahabs, madly pursuing the white whale with absolute conviction, while the deckhands stand around saying “Gee, that whale looks awfully big. I’m not sure we can really take him down.”
  
• Finally, 90% of the time, they must fail and die a flaming death, possibly taking down or damaging other products with it. If they do ship, they must have taken at least 4-5 years to ship and be at least 2 years overdue.

Wow… scary. Is your project a blackhole project?

Thanks to Mr. Mini-Microsoft for finding it.

In college I wrote a lot of code. A lot a lot a lot of code. Especially Junior Fall semester when I was in these two classes where the students unexpectantly couldn’t finish the coursework and thus most were completing their final projects 2 months after the semester was over.

As a Program Manager, I don’t get to write code. (Except for the code I wrote in Office X for Mac - most of the dialogs have controls that lay themselves out via a mechanism called Dialog Auto Layout. And, in fact, there’s one dialog where I forgot to check in the changes and as a result it looked like ass. Fortunately, it’s a dialog that few ever see!)

I do miss writing code sometimes. In particular:

1. I miss hitting the build and run button. You can’t really do that with specifications or e-mails. There’s often no sense of accomplishment or completion as a Program Manager.

2. I miss listening to music. I found it rather helpful when I was writing code, but I find it distracting when I’m responding to e-mails, drawing up schedules, or writing specifications.

Go figure.

From a mailing list I’m on:

www.dreamhost.com has this really sweet deal, though I think a centaur account is better. I got 800mb of space, 120gb/month bandwidth for about 10 dollars total for the next year; actually a few cents less. You signup for there level 1 (lowest one) account for 1 year and type 777 as a promotion code. It takes off like 110 dollars from the level 1 price, though make sure it shows the new price $9.97. Its obviously shared hosting. They are a bit machevellian with what you can run too.

I signed up yesterday and got a year of hosting for just $9.xx.

WOW.