Something Awful

Buckets of fun photoshopped files here. Some non Microsoft! Wheee!

So the other day I posted this:

I have been at Microsoft for 5 years

Here’s a picture of what you get:

There’s a colorful box, a sticker that says “Ask me how long I’ve worked here”, a card, a clock, some confetti, (not shown) a banner that says ‘Celebrate’, and (not shown) 3 grey balloons.

Given all the crazyness about online local maps lately, I gave A9 Maps another visit tonight.

They’ve got a pretty neat product there right now - check it out:

On certain streets, you can actually ‘walk’ up and down and see all the stores on both sides. That’s super cool.

I did notice that the address/physical picture mapping was a bit off - for example, to get the Ed Sullivan Theater to appear, I had to enter 1700 Broadway (it’s actually at 1697). The Wall Street area was really bad - which isn’t surprising due to the tight narrow streets, and the security related closures. But even on larger streets, not all have maps of both sides.

They also have maps available for a number of other cities like Austin, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston (they have streets? I thought they were just cow paths!) and others.

Pretty neat. I suspect that this must be far more useful in places where street names change frequently - or where people don’t really use addresses. From what I’ve heard, India and Japan are two such places.

Waking up my laptop, I suddenly thought of this post by Mark:

plaxoed! ? Americans obsess over e-mail? Ask a Microsoftie? [Mark Jen?s life @ Plaxo]

At Plaxo, people say they get buried under e-mails when they get maybe 50-75 a day. At MSFT, that?s approximately how much a typical PM gets in an hour

He’s exaggerating a bit, but I went to bed at 4am, and now at 10am I have 30 unread messages in my inbox. And trust me - my inbox is heavily heavily filtered. I suspect that by 11 it will grow to 60 if I don’t take action.

This Friday I will read Getting Things Done.

Omar recently had yet another rant about Alaska Air.

People who don’t fly Alaska regularly don’t quite seem to grasp the severity of what this is such a problem. Delayed flight are normal right?

Well let’s run through a typical scenario: Earlier that day, you had woken up at 5am to fly to Redmond in time for a day full of meetings starting at 10am. 8 hours of meetings later, you leave main campus, fight Friday afternoon traffic and get to SeaTac - where the rental car return lot has moved yet again. You go through the masses of weekend leisure travelers and get to your gate. It’s been a long long day.

And then, you realize that your flight back to home sweet home has the following statistic:

Yes, that’s right. 20%. That means that your flight at 8:46pm has a 1 in 5 chance of pushing back on time.

What this really means is that your flight home has an 80% chance of being late.

Suddenly the odds don’t sound that good, do they?

Your flight will end up departing at 9, 9:20, 9:45, or 10pm. And you’ll get home at around 11:45, midnight, or 12:30.

What a way to end the week.

Now do you get it?

Overheard on Alaska Air SEA-SJC yesterday from some 6 year old boy:

“San Jose is pretty, just like Las Vegas.”

Las Vegas is the new standard? Oh dear.

The last two times I rented a car from Avis here in Seattle, I got a Buick LeSabre, and then a Mercury Grand Marquis.

Well this time I got this car:

A Signature what?

Well here are two more clues:

Still not enough of a clue?

Yep that’s right. I showed up and the Avis agent told me they were short on cars, so I was getting a lucky treat of a Lincoln Town Car!

According to CarsDirect, the MSRP of this behemoth is $42,875.

The BMW 525i has a MSRP that is about $41,800 according to CarsDirect. Of course, with a BMW 5 series though, you wouldn’t get keys like this:

$43 grand MSRP and you get the same keys and early 1990’s style remote as a $13k Ford? Heck, it even says Ford on the back of the remote.

Is it any wonder the actual selling price of this Lincoln Town Car Signature is just $35,372 on carsdirect.com? That’s almost $9,000 off the MSRP. Cripes!

Well maybe it’s the drive train that justifies this price - after all, it’s got a V8, whereas the BMW I’m comparing it to only has an I6. Oh… but… this V8 is mated to a 4-speed automatic. 4-speed.

Needless to save, driving this car was incredibly painful - it would never ‘go’ at the speed you would want it to go. That in conjunction with the amazingly light power steering - sheesh.

It seems to me that this car, much like the Grand Marquis (which I skidded in a slightly wet parking lot) and the Buick LeSabre, would be pretty dangerous. Incredibly light steering, huge lengths, wacky shifting - how can anyone control this car safely?

It’s even more scary when you think of the stereotypes of the typical customers of these particular vehicles - and their age related conditions.

Well, to be a fair review, I do have list some positives: The interior was surprisingly nice, unlike the buick I drove a few months back which had buttons that you could never get to without being made out of elastic. The power seats were uber configurable. And… it was roomy.

Ok, I have to get back to griping: the AC was really weak. The compartments suboptimal - all that space in the car, yet so few pockets and boxes.

Finally, here is the part of the car that offended me the most:

What do these two buttons do? Eject the pax? Open the gas cap? Release an oil slick? Open the trunk?

No it’s not because the photo is bad - there really are no labels! And why are they next to each other? Is this why people always have the gas cap door open?

And actually… why even have a gas cap button?

The other day I read about some sniping between GM and the UAW. GM management claimed that the UAW asked for too much, and that for GM to survive some pension stuff would have to be cut. UAW responded that maybe if GM produced cars that people wanted, that would solve the problem.

Even though this was a Ford, and even though I believe the benefits situation puts GM and Ford in tough spots… Today, I’ll have to side with the UAW.

EDITED: For typos. I wrote this on a plane.

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