AboutSteve

How I spent the week of April 29th, 2007

2007-05-10T23:26:00.000-07:00

April 23rd - 29th, 2007

Monday

11-5 pm - 1:1 meetings with my direct reports. Most Monday's are back to back meetings all day with my direct reports. I think this is one of the most important parts of people management, this is our only semi-structured time for career development discussions, mentoring, coaching, catching-up, etc.

Although sometimes I have to reschedule these as other meetings come up at the last minute, I really value this time with my team.

If you aren't having a weekly 1:1 with your manager and a quarterly 1:1 with his manager I would strongly advice you doing that. Also I think it is important to have semi-regular 1:1's with your direct peers (i.e. the other people reporting to your manager) and your project team peers (i.e. those people in a similar level in different disciplines working on the same project as you).

This is a great time to step back from the day-to-day work and think about the longer term, where are we going, why, what is important for us to be successful, what is important for me to be successful, what does success look like for our team, how can we learn from our past mistakes and make improvements, what more can we be doing to be even more successful.

Tuesday

10-12 pm - project update/status meeting. Well at least that was what it was supposed to be, but when I arrived our internal partner team had invited an external potential business partner. I wasn't too happy about this. I like to be prepared for meetings with external partners, not know left me unprepared. I don't like to be unprepared.

12-1 pm - weekly lunch with my peers. Just an opportunity to stay in touch on a more personal level.

1-3 pm - 2 hours with no meetings booked. I sat in my office staring out the window thinking what I was going to do with myself for 2 hours, then realized I had 300 unread emails in my inbox of 2000 messages and worked on email for 2 hours.

3-4 pm - 1:1 with my manager. Talked mostly about recruiting and hiring.

4-6 pm - Continuation of the feature review meeting from last week.

Wednesday

10 - 11 pm - 1:1 with engineering manager.

11 - 12 pm - sync up with PM in redmond on partners team about long term planning.

12 - 2 pm - My manager asked me to attend a Leadership meeting for the MSR-A lab.

3 - 5 pm - There have been a lot of organizational changes recently within our larger organization and within our main partner team in Redmond. This meeting was an opportunity to begin talking about our long-term strategic direction, what success looks like, what is our core competence, how can we capitalize on the current opportunities, etc.

I think we had some good discussions and will be meeting more on this in the near future.

Thursday

10 - 11 am - Recruiting call with US Product Planner candidate.

I took the rest of the day off, as my parents are visiting from Canada and I wanted to have some time to show them around Beijing.

Friday

8 - 9 AM - Weekly ship meeting with Redmond product team.

9 - 10 AM - Virtual team sync-up meeting.

10 - 1 PM - Email and lunch.

1 - 2 PM - Project planning review, woring on finalizing product plans for each of our major projects for the next six months.

2 - 4 PM - Met with my peers in Development and Test to talk about longer term planning, group strategy and resource allocation.

April 30 through May 7th was a national holiday in China called Golden Week. I spent most of it with the my wife, daughter and parents in Hong Kong. You can read more about our trip on our family blog at http://aboutmacbeth.com/family.

How I spent the week of April 22nd, 2007

2007-05-10T23:25:00.000-07:00

Sorry this is a little late. I actually completed this posting, but it somehow got lost before I could post it. The editor for Sharepoint Blogs is terrible.

April 16th - 22nd, 2007

Monday

10-11am - recruiting phone call with a Product Planning candidate in the US, we are trying to hire a Product Planner for the work we are doing around Search in China. In Microsoft a Product Planner is half-way between Marketing and Product Development, they are generally responsible for longer term product strategy, competitive analysis, etc. More of an externally facing role, understanding the market, business strategy, as compared to Program Manager who focus more on the product/feature.

11-1pm - 1:1's with my direct reports

1-2pm - project post mortem

2-3pm - A few key people from our partner team in Redmond are leaving their current positions, we met to review what impact that would have on us in the long term.

3-5pm - Review with Harry Shum. Harry has recently taken a new role as Chief Scientist for the Search & Advertising Platform Division. This was a review to help Harry get up-to-speed on the work being done in MSR-A around Internet Search.

Tuesday

10:30 - 12pm - Executive review with Craig Mundie, I presented an overview of the Search Technoogy Center to Craig Mundie, the Chief Research & Strategy Officer. With BillG starting to get ready for leaving Microsoft Craig is taking a more active role, and direct management resposibility for Microsoft Research.

1:30-2:30pm - project status update for a new project we are starting to work on. I usually attend project status updates only at the beginning of new projects, so that I can ensure I understand what we are planning and provide some guidance around how it fits in with the other projects we are working on and our longer term strategy. Once I project has it's own momentum I usually leave it to the individual PM's to drive and try not to get too involved in the day-to-day execution.

3-4 pm - sync up with a PM from a partner team.

4-5 pm - STC PM weekly meeting. This is the only time all of the STC PM's meet, since most are engaged on different projects. This is an opportunity to review organizational changes, talk about long term strategy, discuss HR issues and process, learn a bit about the other projects, and generally just stay in touch with what each of the PM's is focused on.

Wednesday

8-11 am - hosted Vietnamese business delegation. Microsoft has a very strong working relationship with the Vietnamese government and business, I was asked to speak with a delegation of business people from Vietnam about work we are doing in China regarding Internet Search.

11-12 pm - lunch 1:1 with a direct.

12-2 pm - another Harry project review.

3-4 pm - meeting with a PM colleague visiting from Redmond, she manages a team that we work closely with, so I wanted to make sure we had a chance to review how things were going and what we could do to improve the working relationship. We have had some challenges in the past getting on the same page, nothing major, but definately an area that I think we can improve on.

4 - 5 pm - 1:1 with one of our engineering managers, I have started having monthly 1:1's with all of the engineering managers in order to better understand what we are working on, get feedback on the PM team, and generally find ways for us to help the engineering managers more. This is also a rare opportunity to talk a little more about the future and where things are going, as usually when I meet with engineering managers it is very focused on a specific problem or project.

Thursday

10 - 11 am - UI review for a demo we are developing.

11 - 12 pm - sync up on next steps for a problem we are having with an external partner.

11:30 - 1:30 pm - Harry project review.

2 - 4:30 pm - Harry project review.

4:30 - 6:30 pm - Harry project review.

Friday

8 - 9 am - weekly sync up meeting with Redmond partner team. Our main partner team in Redmond is the Live Search organization, we have a weekly ship meeting to review progress and blocking issues on all of our four main projects.

This is definately a critical success factor for remote development, have a regularly scheduled ship meeting with people on your partner team that can effectively unblock issues and be an advocate for the work you are doing, plus this is an opportunity to make micro-course corrections based on real-time developments in Redmond.

9 - 10 am - virtual team sync up, one of our new projects is still in the early stage and is still being driven by a virtual team.

This is not a critical success factor, in fact I would say it is likely a critical success inhibitor. The fastest way to doom a project to fail is to create a virtual team. If you can't find the right person to drive, you can't execute effectively. Hopefully in the very near future we can move from virtual team to more accountable model.

9 - 10 am - project sync up. We recently signed a big International deal and I was asked to step in and help with a few issues related to the execution of that deal in China.

You will notice that this meeting overalps with the last meeting. This is actually quite common for me and forces me to make difficult prioritization decisions. Generally I try and attend the most strategic meeting, other factors are if we already have good representation from our team at the meeting.

In general in this blog I have only been indicating the meeting I attended, to avoid confusion. In this case I attended this meeting and missed the virtual team meeting.

10 - 12 pm - we are trying to lock down our plans for one of our main projects based on feedback from our last round of reviews in Redmond, this was a meeting to review the feature list for that project and prioritize and review the resource allocation.

1 - 2:30 pm - mid-year career discussion with a direct report.

3 - 4 pm - go/no go decision meeting for launching a new feature on one of our projects. We decided "no go" as the benifits were quite small at this time and their was reasonable risk.

Canadian missing in Syria!

2007-05-05T07:27:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Vancouver I played a lot of ultimate frisbee, one of the teams I played on a lot was called The Fluffy Bunnies. When I return to Vancouver for vacation I often have a chance to play with the team. A few years ago, when I was still living in Redmond, WA I went up to Vancouver and played with the team for a few games in the summer, I think it was probably around 2003 or so.

There was a new player on the team that I hadn't met before, but was quite good (especially since she had never really played Ultimate before) and was a super nice person. Her name was Nicole (Vienneau), I didn't know her last name until very recently.

I received the following information about her from a friend in Vancouver and wanted to do everything I could to help. Here is her story, hopefully someone that reads this will be able to help, or at least pass the story on to someone that can.

Nicole (Vienneau) has gone missing during the final weeks of a trip to Northern Africa, the Middle East and Turkey. She was last heard from at the end of March, and we believe she was in Syria at the time on her way to Turkey.The Canadian embassies in Syria and Turkey, the RCMP and Interpol have been involved in searching for her for the past two weeks.I am sending this to you for two reasons: 1. the story will be in the media today. Since Nicole is a resident of Vancouver, there may be somewhat more media attention there than in Toronto. I wanted you to be aware of this from me before you heard it elsewhere2. if anyone has any connections, or knows of anyone who does, with people in Syria and possibly Turkey, we would most appreciate if we could take advantage of contacts there to help in our attempts to track where she has beenHer brother Matthew has set up a blog entry (link below) which has a lot of the details.

Website: http://vienneau.livejournal.com/39588.html

Her brothers blog postings also got dugg on digg, if you don't know what that means, you probably will want to stop reading now.

Here is the story on Digg:

People often talk about how Web 2.0 is the future and the future is now, using Digg as a key player in the life altering transformation. When I read the commentary on Nicole's story on Digg I was sickened. The maturity of many of the comments is frighteningly low, I hope this isn't the future of the Internet and our society. It reminds me of the kind of behaviour you used to see on Newsgroups and BBS's in the early days of the Internet. In fact these are probably the exact same people, just a generation removed. They are not blazing a trail to the future, they are just wasting their lives away wading through their own muck.

Have a read of the comments on the story, I would be interested if you really think these are the people we want to be representing the current climate in our high-tech society. I for one would emphatically say "NO!!!".

I Hope there is a turn for the better in Nicole's story, I will be thinking about the brief time I spent with her and remember the lasting impression she made.

How I spent the week of April 15, 2007

2007-04-18T03:44:00.000-07:00

April 9-15, 2007

Monday

This Monday was a more normal Monday for me with no training or other events plan. I was able to spend most of the day in 1:1's with my manager and my direct reports. It was been quite a few weeks since I have had a chance to meet with everyone, as I was in Redmond, then in training.

I am just in the process of completing Mid-Year Career Discussions (MYCD) with my team and my manager. This is a process that we use at Microsoft to provide some formal structure around career development. Unlike the annual review process which is in the summer and is more about reviewing employee performance, the MYCD process is more about employee career development.

This year HR has introduced a new process and a new set of tools that introduce a lot of new structure around this process. If you follow any of the external Microsoft blogs you will know that many people are unhappy with the new MYCD process and added bureaucracy. Personally I think that it is helpful, mainly for people that are either new to the software industry or new to Microsoft. For me and for most of our group (Search Technology Center) that is pretty much everyone.

10-11am - Met with my manager for my MYCD. Had a good talk about future opportunities and the impact of recent Live Search re-orgs on STC and my role. We didn't spend much time on performance feedback and will need to schedule some additional time to work on that.

11-3pm - Had 1:1 meetings with my direct reports, since for most people we have just recently had MYCD and I have been away from the office for many weeks we spent a major of the time talking about project status, next steps, blocking issues, etc.

In the middle of this time I had a phone interview with an intern candidate. I am trying to hire 1 or 2 intern(s) that will work on a project I am collaborating with Microsoft Research Asia (MSR-A) on. So if you know anyone that is interested in query classification/clustering and web-page classification. I will try and talk more about this project in a future blog posting.

3-4pm – Every other week the whole management team of the group I work on (Search Technology Center) meets to talk about organizational issues, HR, corporate policy roll-out, strategy discussions, future planning, etc. This week we spent most of the time talking about the recent re-org in the Live Search organization, which has recently merged with the Advertising group to form the new Search & Advertising Platform group, lead by Satya Nadella with the help of Harry Shum as Chief Scientist. Harry is currently the Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, which is the parent organization of STC.

4-5pm – 1:1 with direct report.

5-6pm – PM Interview.

Tuesday

8-8pm – I was at a MSR-A Management Offsite in Beijing all day. We spent a fair amount of time talking about general lab management issues; Human Resources (HR), Public Relations (PR) and University Relations (UR), as well as talking about how Harry's new role in the Search & Advertising Platform group will affect the MSR-A lab.

In addition to these more administrative issues there were many lively debates and discussions around training/on boarding of new college hires, how to better share/leverage the computing infrastructure we have in MSR-A and the longer term view of where Internet search is going. I participated in the working group that was looking at on boarding/training for new college hires. This is a topic that I am particularly passionate about, so I want to share a few of my thoughts in this area.

Last year when we brought on a large number of college hire to the STC team we ran two intensive training programs, I think these were about three weeks in length. We intend to do something similar this year with the next batch of college hires. Anecdotally I have heard that Google China sends all new hires to Mountain View, California for a few months of training before they start in the Beijing office. I don't know if this is true, or exactly how long they go for training, but I would be interested in hearing if you know.

In STC we have made a very conscious choice to not grow very much during this year, in order to stabilize and mature our foundation, so that we are in a position to grow the team in the future. Often when groups grow too fast and too early you find that long term they are not very stable. They lowered the hiring bar bringing in people that aren't strong enough or experience enough. Or they promote people to a level that is new to them, this is often done across the organization, so you end up with a Dev. Manager that used to be a lead, and a Test Manager that used to be a lead and a GPM that used to be a lead, all in new roles. This is usually not a very good strategy, as these people are often learning a new domain, learning a new role and building a new team. This is a challenge that most people cannot be successful at. When taking on a new position you should always try and minimize the amount of change. For instance if you are going to work in a new country, you should probably work in position and domain that you are already very comfortable in.

I think this strategy of growing slower at the beginning will long term allow us to grow faster and stronger. However, I think that we haven't gone far enough in terms of initial training and on boarding of new college hires. My proposal is that all new college hires spend roughly three months when they first join in "training", and two months the second year and finally one month the third year. We should think of this three year indoctrination as a sort of apprenticeship program.

The purpose of this is to provide a framework that will transition new hires from a structured learning environment into an unstructured learning environment. And prepare them to be successful engineers, researchers or program managers. This first three month program will set the foundation for people to understand how to get things done at Microsoft, how to be a successful engineer at Microsoft and how to be a life-long learning. It will also stress the soft-skills necessary to be successful and a future leader at Microsoft and in any company.

If you compare successful group versus unsuccessful groups and successful engineers versus unsuccessful engineers you will often find the major difference is in the soft-skills. Things like communication skills, cross-group collaboration, planning and priorization, conflict resolution, etc. Certainly when you get to the level of lead, manager and high these skills also exclusively differentiate the best people from the average. You have to remember we aren't talking about what differentiates the best form the worst. We don't hire the worst. Obviously there are many things like raw intellectual horsepower, analytical thinking, problem solving, etc that play an important role in differentiating good from bad. At Microsoft we have a recruiting system that screens for only above average candidates, so we are really focused on going from good to great.

My theory is that this first three months should be a very experiential learning environment, last week I talked a lot about the theory and benefits of experiential learning. This would provide a great learning environment for people to really practice they skills they were learning, allow them to understand their personal learning style and more easily transition from this "training" into the real project work they were hired for.

Wednesday

9-10am – phone interview with a International PM candidate.

10-11am – 1:1 with one of the STC dev leads to learn more about his project work, understand how we can work better together and talk more about the long term plans for STC and Search in China. I decided to schedule monthly 1:1 with all of the engineering leads, as I found we only talk when there are urgent project related issues and I wanted an opportunity to spend more time with them understanding how to strengthen the partnership between PM and engineering, explore the future plans for STC around their area and just better understand what they are working on and are passionate about. This was my first meeting of this type and I think it was very usefully, I got to learn a lot about the challenges this dev lead was facing and where he thought we should be going.

If you are outside of STC and are reading this (I know that is probably a little too hopeful on my part!) you will notice I generally use the term engineering not dev/test. In STC we have been experimenting with a slightly different model for organizing our team. We have a dev manager (John Liu) and a test manager (Peter Zeng) and dev leads and test leads. This part is pretty standard for most Microsoft product groups. Below that we mostly have what we have been calling engineers, these are people that are working on both dev and test activities for a specific project. We believe that this model allows us to do better resource allocation, enable people to learn more about the end-to-end engineering process and produces significantly better engineers. As people progress in their career we would expect some to specialize across domains (server, front-end, etc.) and some to specialize across disciplines (test, dev). But early on we expect all engineers to be proficient at most dev and test activities.

11-1pm – caught up on email and had lunch. Spent a little time preparing for my next meeting.

2-4pm – Offsite meeting with China Telecom to review progress on our search syndication partnership. Last year we signed a major partnership between China Telecom and Microsoft, in which we provide syndicated search results from Live Search to China Telecom's portal and to their ISP customers. China Telecom is the largest ISP in china, and we are very excited to have this opportunity to work closely with them on Internet Search.

Thursday

12-1am – We were making some operational improvements to our Live Search site and rolled those changes out at mid-night, so around 12:30am we had a conference call to review the progress and decide on next steps. Unfortunately we ran into a few technical glitches and needed to roll back.

10-11am – One of my goals in coming to China was to help move the PM discipline forward across the development organization in China. My strategy was to start by focusing on building a world-class STC PM organization. I think we are starting to make great progress on that front, and compared to where we were a year ago when I joined STC we have come a long ways. Second I wanted to focus across China Research & Development (CRD) and hopefully leverage the learning from the STC PM team to have a broader impact.

I truly believe that the biggest obstacle to growth in China (and probably other areas as well) is the ability to hire and/or grow senior Program Managers. If you look at the most successful remote development organizations, I think you will find a strong PM team. Even if you look at the strongest development groups in Redmond you will usually find strong PM teams.

I wanted to start this process of looking broader by meeting with and understanding the challenges my peers in China are having. I recently created China Program Manager and China Lead Program Manager aliases in order to begin facilitating communication amongst the PM located in China. We had a kick-off meeting with a number of the leads in China and started working on a framework for moving the PM discipline forward. Initially we are going to focus in three broad areas; "development", "recruiting" and "retention".

11-12pm – email

12-1pm – Met with recruiting to review the needs of the STC PM team. In case you are interested or know anyone that is I am currently looking for a Senior Product Planner to help drive our strategy/roadmap for Search in China, a Network PM to work on the Autopilot project (autopilot is a set of operational infrastructure and software we use to manage our Search data centers) and a Feature PM for the Search in China project.

1-2pm – email, prep for STC all-hands meeting

2-3pm – STC all-hands meeting

3-5pm – email, project related discussions

5-6pm – Met with Search in China team to determine machine allocation for next fiscal year.

10:30pm – conference-call to review status of go-live, unlikely last night everything went well and we rolled out the new changes. Go team!

Friday

9-10am – conference call with Redmond about a new partner we are engaging with in China.

10-11am – meeting to review the launch from last night

11-12pm – we had a round of project reviews in Redmond a few weeks ago, I met with the feature team to review the feedback and make sure we were all on the same page in terms of next steps.

12-1pm – conference call to plan for a visit from a delegation from Vietnam, I was asked to host a discuss with them about some of our initiatives in China

1-2:30pm – email (unfortunately I don't really do much other then go to meetings and do email, I should but I don't seem to find the time. I have two emails I want to write; one on the long-term strategy/goals for STC and one on my general thoughts on Internet Search for Harry. I have notes for both, but never seem to get the time to write the emails. Hopefully next week I can find the time).

2:30-3pm – met with my manager about recruiting priorities for STC PM team

3-5pm – email and project discussions

How I spent the week of April 8th, 2007

2007-04-08T04:35:00.000-07:00

In a recent 1:1 (at Microsoft that is what we call meetings with only two people, usually between a manager and his staff) I was asked about how I spend my time. It got me thinking that many people, at work, my family and friends often have asked the same question. What exactly is it that you do? Some with more skepticism in their voice than others. Once you move from writing code (which people don't necessarily understand but will except as a legitimate job) to things more esoteric (like cross-group collaboration, vision setting, strategy development, etc) it gets incrementally harder to explain to people around you want exactly you do, and eventually you just give up and say I develop software. Or as my wife likes to say, I draw circle and boxes and connect them with sometime straight and sometimes curvy lines.

While for all of those that care I will try the following experiment. For the next 6 months I will add one blog post per week that is a summary of how I spent my time the previous week. Since this is an external blog I will need, on occasion, to make some of the activities more opaque than you might like, this isn't an effort to hide how I spent my time, just necessary to preserve Microsoft confidential information.

I don't get many comments on my blog. In fact I don't think I have ever received a single comment. Which makes this more of a diary than a true blog. Anyways I will judge the value of this over the next 6 months based on the feedback I receive, so if you find this interesting please let me know.

April 1-8, 2007

Monday

Normally on Mondays I have 1:1's with most of the Program Managers (PMs) on my team, these meetings are an opportunity for me to get an update on how things are going on all of the projects we are working on, provide help/coaching on any problems my directs are having and to talk about any other issues they may be having. In general I try and have a 1:1 with each of my direct reports on a weekly basis (but with travel and other emergencies I probably only have about 3 per month). I like to have a 50/50 mix of project and career development discussion in these meetings. This isn't to say that each meeting is exactly a 50/50 mix, more likely one meeting will be almost exclusively about project issues and others will almost exclusively be about career development/personal issues.

I had a 4 day long training event this week, which I thought started on Monday, so I cleared my calendar last month in preparation, it turns out the training actually didn't start until Tuesday, so I ended up with a pretty light Monday. Here is how I spent my time:

10-11 am - getting feedback from the current manager of a PM I am thinking about interviewing, I find that I spend probably 10% of my time on recruiting. For internally transfers I almost always talk to the persons current manager before committing to a full interview loop. Interview loops are pretty expensive (in terms of time) at Microsoft. The average candidate will go through about 5-6 full interviews, each person will spend one hour in the interview and probably around 30-45 additional minutes in prep work and providing feedback. In addition I spent probably 3 hours, including sending out interview guidance, preparing the interview list, preparing for my interview, reading interview feedback, etc. Add to that an additional 3-4 hours for HR/recruiting and we probably invest about 15 hours in a full interview loop.

11-12 pm - we are working on a demo for a potential customer in China for mobile search. Our group is working on porting technology we have in the US to work properly in Chinese. This meeting was a review of the User Interface (UI) for that demo. The output of this meeting was a list of changes to the UI. I rarely get involved at this level on many projects, however this demo is the first time we have really worked on mobile search, so I wanted a chance to influence the approach we took and ensure I was happy with the demo. During a recent trip to Redmond I made a commitment to get our team in China to help with the demo, so I felt it was necessary to stay involved with this project until we get some good momentum.

12-1pm - had lunch in my office and worked through emails. I probably eat downstairs in the Chinese restaurant about 3-4 times per week, but many of the people on my team that I usually eat with were not in the office, so I ended up just cooking some noodles and having a power bar.

1-2pm - I was in Redmond reviewing with our partners our plans for the next 6-9 months. This meeting was our first chance once we were back to review the feedback from the reviews and make sure we had owners assigned to each item and generally agreed what needed to be down. This involved the dev leads, test leads and PM from this project. This is the normal group of people I would meet with for project specific discussions.

Since I don't want to reveal too much about what we are working on specifically I will for the rest of these blog postings refer to the projects as follows:

Project A
Project C1
Project C2
Project D
Project S

This particular meeting was to review the feedback for Project C1/C2. The UI review I mentioned earlier is for Project C2.

2-3pm - One of my directs recognized that I was actually still in the office and quickly reschedule her 1:1.

3-4pm - worked on emails.

4pm - I went home early today as I was going to be at an off site training course until Friday and had only just returned from 10 days in the US, so I wanted to spend some time with my family before I left.

Tuesday - Friday

I was at a course call Management Excellence Foundation Event. This is an experiential training event focusing on management and leadership. For more information on experiential training you can go here. I'm sure there is a better description on wikipedia, but I am at home and in China you can't access wikipedia.org, so I can't find it right now.

I have attended a number of these times of training events in the past. And was reasonably prepared for the week. Basically the instructors spend a brief amount of time talking with you about some core skills, then create a fake work environment (some people are leaders, some people are managers and some people are workers), usually you rotate through these positions, other times you are stuck for the whole event with what you get, then they introduce some project work that the new teams need to accomplish and let you go.

During the event there is very little interaction with the facilitators. Their job is to make suggestions, provide feedback and coaching, but pretty much stay out of the way, no matter how hard you beg. And trust me I have seen some people beg pretty hard.

This type of training can be very powerful. I have usually walked away from these course with some powerful insights into myself and how I impact the systems around me.

These types of events are usually either tightly or loosely based on the work of Barry Oshry, although maybe there are others in this domain that are equally impactful. Most of the reading I have done is based on his work. You can read more on him and his work on power & systems here.

These events are always unique, as the participants are always different and the event is largely based on the system created by the participants. This event was particularly unique as almost all of the participants were of Chinese heritage and cultural background. In generally the most insightful moments at these events are caused by the pressure the system creates, under pressure people tend to break down and their unmasked self emerges, when you have this happen on a widespread basis you get a lot of friction and interpersonal conflict. This creates tremendous personal learning opportunities and challenges even the most seasoned managers and leaders.

An important part of these events is constant feedback. Unlikely in the workplace, were feedback is rare and often very guarded, you tend to find the feedback much more open and direct, and nearly constant. As that is the design of the course.

The pressure created by the system, the constant open/direct feedback and the complete lack of structure usually causes at least one person to break down in tears and one person to storm off in rage during the first 4-8 hours. I have been four times to these types of experiential learning events, this has happened during three of the events.

During the event in China this did not happen. I think this is primarily a culture artifact and for me I think it really limited the opportunities to learn and grown, for myself and for others.

The most complete version of this type of training is offered by Barry's company Power + Systems, they have a one week version where they essentially lock you in a fake town with nothing but the clothes on your back and a role as a leader, manager or worker. Below are some excerpts from a video they created from one of these events:

"Power Lab, Living in New Hope" Video 1
"Power Lab, Living in New Hope" Video 2

Well worth watching. I am hoping on attending this event at some point in my career. I have a copy of the full video and will plan on showing it at Sigma (that is the building I work at in Beijing) at some point in the near future.

In the past I have learnt a lot about how my style (communication, management and interaction) effects others. Over the years this has enabled me to make a lot of progress towards creating an environment that is more conducive to positive collaboration, higher morale and to building long term partnerships. In this event I re-learnt the importance that climate/morale play on group productivity and how people feel about an organization. Also about the positive effects diversity can have on climate.

In addition in this particular event there was a lot of focus on group identify and the power of shared vision. These are things I have understood and tried to practice, but as of late haven't been very focused on. It is easy for all of us to get very focused on managing the present, and forgetting the longer term work of creating a positive climate, creating and nurturing identify and helping the team to define a shared vision.

I hope I will be able to take many things that I learnt at this event and apply them to my everyday work.

Free hugs!

2007-03-29T23:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when you feel the world has few redeeming qualities you get a wake-up call out of the blue. Here is mine:

While reading about the current hostage situation in Iran, I stumbled upon this video. It recently won the YouTube video award for most inspirational video.

You have to marvel at the ability of technology to move you from utter despair to elation in a few mouse clicks. You can read the whole story here.

Anyways, I hope it helps you get through the day with a smile.

Diamond Exchange Summit

2006-10-20T18:57:00.000-07:00

I am currently in Naples, Florida at the Diamond Exchange Summit. Diamond is a management and technology consulting organization. The Diamond Exchange assembles an exclusive forum of select C-level executives to explore ways of winning in a marketplace tranformed by technology. It is made up of an influential group of Diamond Fellows, that during a number of events per year provide insight and moderate discussion with C-level executives from fortune 2000 companies.

I have been invited to speak on a panel about the future of Internet search and how it will impact business. The panel discussion is on Tuesday afternoon, but there are a number of other sessions that I will be able to attending during the weekend and Monday. Also on Saturday I will be meeting with the Diamond fellows to have a smaller scale discussion about the future of Internet Search.

The Diamond fellows include Gordon Bell (one of the inventors of DEC VAX), John Perry Barlow (lyricist for the Grateful Dead, founder of Electronic Frontier Foundation) and Dan Bricklin (co-creator of Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet).

The conference is being held at the Naples Ritz Carlton Golf Resort, so hopefully I will have a chance on the weekend to get in a round of golf. This is supposed to be one of the best golf resorts in the country.

It is around 85 F here during the day with high humidity, so I don't know how much time I will want to spend outside.

We've arrived!

2006-08-19T10:45:00.000-07:00

It's our second day in Beijing. The flight when very well, Zoe was well behaved and only acted up a few times when the seatbelt light was on and she couldn't move around. She slept for about 3-4 hours during the 11 hour flight, had a good dinner and lunch (we ordered her the kids meal, which Chris and I both preferred to the regular meal). She had great fun walking up and down the aisles, there were a number of older Chinese ladies that all wanted to take turns holding her, playing with her and getting their pictures taken with her. She also met a 3 year old Chinese boy in the airport and they would walk up and down the aisle holding hands.

We have been in the apartment for two nights now. Last night Zoe woke up at 3:30 am and didn't go back asleep until 11am, then she slept until about midnight. So right now it is 1:30 am and everyone is up. So we are all pretty screwed up in terms of sleep cycles. Hopefully everyone will be able to get back to sleep shortly and we can get on a regular schedule tomorrow. Tomorrow is Sunday and then I have to go to work on Monday.

Well just wanted to make a quick update so everyone knew we arrived safely. Look for more details in the coming days.

Last days in Redmond...

2006-08-12T21:22:00.000-07:00

Well the time has finally come to take the big plunge. Friday was my last day of work in Redmond. Thursday of next week the family and I fly to Beijing for the start of the next chapter in our lives. You often hear that "the next chapter in my life", and I have occasionally even said that myself. However, I've never kept track or thought through what those chapters would actually be. So here goes:

Chapter 1 - the early years (1969-1980)
Chapter 2 - bytes & dragons (1980-1988)
Chapter 3 - a basic education in software (1988-1991)
Chapter 4 - a canadian in the cout of three kings (1991)
Chapter 5 - an advanced education in software (1991-1996)
Chapter 6 - the entrepreneurial haydays (1996-1999)
Chapter 7 - two become one (1999)
Chapter 8 - the entrepreneurial death spiral (1999-2002)
Chapter 9 - a microserf in the american dream (2002-2005)
Chapter 10 - two become three (2005-2006)
Chapter 11 - an interlude in the middle kingdom (2006-????)

You'll have to stay tuned to see how the rest turns out.

Any ways we have a pretty hectic week ahead. We have sold the house, but still have to pack, both cars are sold (or almost). Next week we have packing and then a trip up to vancouver for a day to visit family and friends before we fly to Beijing.

We will be staying at the Somerset in Beijing, the number to reach us at will be my skype number, which will ring through as a local call on my computer. That number is +1 (425) 296-6946.

We will likely be back in Vancouver and Redmond in December for Christmas and New Years, but haven't made any plans yet.

Final Travel Plans

2006-07-31T16:10:00.000-07:00

We have sold our house, so the big items left before the move are selling the two cars, packing and then making the trip to Beijing.

We will be leaving Seattle on August 15th, right after we finish packaging the house and loading everything for the trip to Beijing, then we will drive to Vancouver for a direct flight to China. We will have one day in Vancouver to visit friends and let the grandparents see Zoe one last time before we leave.

Our next trip together back to Vancouver will likely be around Christmas. We haven't made any specific plans yet, but will likely try and combine a business trip to Redmond with our christmas vacation. We likely will be in Vancouver for at least two weeks.

We are trying to sell both the Volvo XC 90 and the Mustang, so if you know anyone that is interested in either let us know.

I was in Beijing for a one week trip earlier in the month and the weather was pretty good, from what I understand fall is the best time of year, so it is probably a good time to be arriving.

We will be staying at the Somerset Grand Fortune Garden serviced apartments for at least the first month. Once we arrive we will get settle and then figure out our long term plans in terms of housing. We still haven't decided between downtown or the suburbs. Chris is leaning towards the suburbs, especially Yosemite.

Updated travel plans

2006-06-07T22:05:00.000-07:00

I have been back for two weeks after a long three week trip to Beijing (2 weeks) and Edinburgh (1 week). I was in Beijing working with my new team on project planning, we made a ton of progress and I am eager to get moved to Beijing so I can dig in and get started full-time on the new job. I was in Edinburgh for the WWW conference. I also got a chance to spend a day with Ashley, an old friend from Vancouver that I worked with at PCsupport.com. We had a great day hiking up arthur's seat (a decent sized hill overlooking Edinburgh), walking around town and capped off the day with a great dinner at The Dome, a great restaurant in Edinburgh.

I am going back to Beijing from July 16th through the 22nd, for more planning work and to finalize some of the details for our move in August. We will be moving the whole family over sometime around the 17th of August. I will likely attend SIGIR (a big information retrieval conference) in Seattle, then move to Beijing. From what I have heard fall is the best time of year in Beijing, so the timing should be pretty good.

I will be heading to Vegas for a friends stag from June 21st through the 25th. I hope to spend pretty much every waking hour playing poker, since once I move to China there won't be any regular casino poker games for me. I was hoping to play while I was in Edinburgh, but couldn't find any live games. I played online a bit and did pretty well, up about $1000 for the week. Since then I have played a few sessions at Tulalip and have been doing pretty well. I am up about $1,300 for the week. Last Saturday night I played a $3-5 blind no-limit game, with a $200 maximum buy-in for about 5 hours and managed to get up about $300. Then the game broke and I bought into a $5-10 blind no-limit game, with a $500 maximum buy-in and hit a couple of big hands in the first 30 minutes. I got up about $700, so I figure it was wise to head home, since it was almost 2:30 am.

I will try and blog my poker sessions while I am in vegas. I did some research on the Internet and I think I will try and play at Caesars and Treasure Island, they seemed to have pretty soft no-limit games. I haven't done any hand reviews yet, so I will provide some details on one of the big hands from my $5-10 no-limit game last saturday.

I had about $500 in front of me, I had just bought in for the maximum, and the table was seven handed, most other players had about $1-2,000 in front of them. I was in the six seat and was dealt 68s (hearts) in early position. The table was pretty aggressive and I don't normally play this game, I knew the table would try and take advantage of any passive players, so I wanted to come out aggressive right off the bat. So I raised to $30. It folded around to the small blind, a player I didn't really know very well and one with a real deep stack. He made it $70 more. I figured this was a great position for me. He likely had a large pocket pair, and with a 68s that's the hand I wanted to go up against, so I called.

The flop came 589 rainbow, so I had a middle pair and an inside straight draw. The board was pretty non-threatening so I hoped I could get the raiser to play slow and let me draw to 2 pair or a straight. I figured either 2 pair or the straight would be pretty well camouflaged so I could get him to pay off it I hit and I could get away from the hand easily if it got too expensive.

He bet $80 making the pot $295, so I was getting a bit better then 3.5-1 odds on my $80 call. With 9 outs I was more then a 5-1 against hitting my hand, but I figured I could get him to pay me off if I hit my hand, so I figured I would call, then bet or raise out if I hit my hand or a scare card came off.

The turn was another 8, given me trip 8's. He bet another $80 and I called. I thought of raising, but I thought there was a decent chance he would throw his hand away and I thought I might be able to get him to pay me off on the river.

The river was a blank. I bet $100 and he called. Then immediately showed KK.

The call pre-flop was a little suspect, I probably needed a deeper stack myself to really make this play payoff. Plus I probably should have raised him on the turn, but I thought he might make a final bet on the river and I could get more money that way.

Travel plans

2006-04-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

I have tentative travel plans from now until July, when we plan on moving the family to Beijing.

I will be in Beijing from May 8th through May 19th and June 5th through June 16th.

We have started to get things together for the big move, in particular we are working on getting our house in Snohomish listed so we can sell it before we move. We hope to have it on the market by the end of the month, but we still have tons of work to do.

Pack your bags, we are going to Beijing!

2006-03-28T12:58:00.000-08:00

As many of you know we have been thinking about a major life change, moving to Beijing to work for MS Research Asia. Well we have decided to take the plunge and will be relocating in July. I will be traveling to Beijing a few times between now and then to get started.

I will be the Group Program Manager for a new group in Beijing called the Search Technology Center (STC), this group will be a full product development group working on MSN Search related products and features. We will be closely aligned with the MS Research Asia groups that are doing core research in natural language processing, information retrieval & classification and Internet-scale search. We are still working out the specific details of which projects we will focus on, but likely it will involve owning Chinese language search, work on mobile search (which is much more popular in Asia then in North America) and some new object extraction technology.

Object extraction is a technique that enables a search engine to infer structure from unstructured data. For example, on the Internet there is a lot of product information, but there is no well defined structure to the data, so it is difficult to automatically determine which information is the price, which is the title, the description, etc. The object extraction technology is designed to use statistical classification to automatically identify these facets and store them in a database, enable richer and more accurate search over that data.

You can see this in action at: http://shopping.msn.com. This is a very exciting area in search and one where there is a ton of additional work to make this a more pervasive way of searching over semi-structured web data.

I will be using this space to talk more about the move and the new work I will be doing at STC so stay tuned.

Back from beijing

2006-02-03T17:10:00.000-08:00

Well I made it back from Beijing this weekend. It was a great trip. The only problem was that my camera was stolen from my luggage somewhere between Beijing and Seattle. Which really sucks because I had taken about 800 pictures of my trip, including a ton of pictures of houses for Chris to look at.

I talked to a ton of people there about opportunities, there certainly is a lot of opportunity. Especially for Program Manager, there are tons of great developers in China, but people that can think more strategically, with strong communication skills and the ability to drive cross-group initiatives are a lot more rare. Which is great because I would be able to have a significant impact, which is getting harder and harder to do here in Redmond. The limit on growth for many projects, and I imagine on many companies in China, and also I think in India, is on Program Management (PM) resources, which are at a real premium in both countries.

I am hoping that part of the contribution I can make is to help MS Research Asia build up a more mature discipline around Program Management, and also to work with the universities on building core PM skills into their curriculum.

Now we just need to decide if we want to move to Beijing for a few years. Chris is still pretty reluctant. But I think we are committed to at least going on a second trip so she can see what it is like first hand. One of the great things about Beijing right now is that they are busy preparing for the 2008 olympics, which means tons of construction, modernization and making it much easier for foreigners to get around and survive.

I spent two days while I was in Beijing looking at housing, a big issue for both Christina and I. I looked at a number of apartments downtown, close to the embassy district, this is where most foreigners live if they choose to live in the city. There are tons of amenities for foreigners; shopping, english movie theatres, restaurants, etc. I also looked at a number of townhouses and houses (usually called villas in china) outside the city proper. This was in the northeast section of Beijing near the airport, which is where most foreigners live that don't live downton. These villa communities are also all self-contained, gated communities that include large club houses, with restaurants, pools, gyms, spas, etc.

In particular I liked the following two apartments:

East Gate Plazo

Which is a full service apartment located in the embassy district, full service means that it is operated like a hotel in terms of cleaning and room service facilities. It is a little older, but many of the apartments are recently remodelled. The kitchens were quite large, at least as compared to many places we looked at in China. The building includes a large playroom on the top floor for kids, the room has a padded floor and many large kids toys. Downstairs the apartment has a full-service gym and indoor pool, and is connected to a shopping center with a lot of stores for foreigners. Of all the places we looked at this one was certainly the most conveniently located.

Central Park

Central Park is a new apartment development also in the core downtown area, it is also right across the street from the People's Park, a large open public park with a lake in the center and many activities for kids. All of the apartments have pretty small kitchens, dark hardwood floors throughout and nice big walk-in closets. There is a nice spa/gym attached to the apartment complex, but no other facilities, although within walking distance there are a large number of shops and restaurants.

Lane Bridge Plaza

Lane Bridge Plaza is a complex of townhouses (or villas) located in an eastern suburb of Beijing called Shunyi. It is a brand new gated community. There is a golf course and driving range located right across the street and located in an area where many foreigners live. Like all of the places there is a large club house with indoor and outdoor pools, fitness center, playgrounds and tennis courts. The units are quite large, with hardwood floor throughout, nice kitchens, big master bedrooms. We looked at units in both phase 1 and phase 2. The units in phase 2 are a little lower quality in terms of fixtures and construction, which means the rent is also a little lower. In general the rent in Beijing for places in western friendly areas are quite high. Maybe as much as twice as high as in most US cities.

Yosemite Beijing

Yosemite is also a relatively new gated community located next door to the Internation School of Beijing. It has the biggest and nicest club house, with an indoor and outdoor pool, large fitness center, two restaurants, full hotel, high-end spa and conference center. The club house feels like a five-star resort. The units are also very nice. They are traditional chinese architecture with gated courtyars, hardwood floors throughout, lots of space with sitting rooms on each floor, decent sized kitchens and large master bedrooms. This is the most expensive place we looked at, and is at the very top end of our housing budget, but is by far the nicest place we looked at. I'm sure chris will like it the most, and may be the factor that most contributes to our decision. Here are some pictures from the web-site: http://www.yosevilla.com/C/gdyb.htm

And here are some floorplans, we are looking at C1, C2, C3, C9 and C10. Chris likes C2 and C3.
http://www.yosevilla.com/C/model_1024.htm

Well that's about it for now.

Beijing: First impressions

2006-01-23T04:45:00.000-08:00

As you may have read from Chris's most recent posting on our family blog I am in Beijing this week to look at a couple of job opportunities at Microsoft in Beijing.

I arrived last night after a 17.5 hour trip from Seattle, through Seoul, Korea. It should have been about 90 minutes shorter but the flight from Seoul to Beijing was delayed. The major leg of the trip (seattle-seoul) was on Asiana Airlines. I had never heard of them before this trip, but did some research on the Internet and most of the feedback was positive. I had a great trip and would encourage any one travelling to Asia to consider them.

I spent the day with a real estate agent looking around Beijing. We spent the morning at the Forbidden City, which is where the Chinese Emperor's used to live. Now is is pretty much just a museum. I have a ton of pictures that I will post when I return. The Forbidden City is huge. Hard to believe that it was just the home to the Emperor. Although when you factor in the whole retinue of the emporer it was probably a small city.

I did a fair amount of research on Beijing before coming, so I had a fairly good idea of what to expect. My main reaction is that most people tend to exaggerate both the good and the bad. The traffic is bad, but not nearly as bad as people make it seem. The pollution is bad, but not nearly as bad as I read about, granted today was a fairly mild day in terms of pollution. It turns out the government can dial the pollution level to some degree, in exchange for production, and since the spring festival is coming they have dialed it down a bit.

I think the biggest challenge with living here would be the pollution. Although I said is wasn't as bad as people said, it is still pretty bad. The good news is that part of the 2008 olypmic bid was commitments around reducing pollution, so at least leading up to 2008 it should improve a lot. I haven't been to the suburbs yet so I don't know how much of it is just in the city core.

It's much flatter and bigger then I am used to. Growing up in Vancouver you get used to a very confined city, with majestic views. Beijing is neither confined, nor clear enough for majestic views. I would be intersted in seeing the city on a clear day, but I don't know if that is likely on this trip.

I'm staying at the Tian Hong Plaza Hotel, which is on the west side of the city, in the University district, about 10 minutes walk from the Microsoft building. I walked there from my hotel today to meet with Harry Shum and have dinner.

Harry is the director of the research lab Microsoft has in Beijing, one of the jobs I am looking at would be in his group working on search products for MSN Search.

Where is Steve?

2005-05-11T17:28:00.000-07:00

I read about this site on an internal alias today.

Where is Steve?

It's a cool web-application that uses Microsoft's MapPoint Location Server and a plug-in that connects to his cell phone operators network to provide a graphical view of where he is on a map.

I was hoping to build a "where is steve2?". But unfortunately T-Mobile, the cell provider that I use, does not currently support this. Maybe in the future.

Click here to see how it works.

NISD Scavenger Hunt

2005-05-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

This friday our whole division at work went on a scavenger hunt in downtown Seattle. There was seven ways to gather points; everything from a traditional gather all of the items on the list, to having to find a specific person in Seattle and say "I'm on the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Joe Friday team".

I spent most of the time with Petere Leonard, a PM from the Assistance Platform team. They are responsible for building all of the core infrastructure for in application help and online assistance across the company. When I first started my current job I worked almost full-time on a project to define the charter for and consolidate the AP team from across the company.

We made a pretty big strategic mistake early on, so we ended up coming around 9th I think. We decided to split up the team and then reassemble around half-way through at Pioneer Square. Unfortunately it was hard to reassemble and we ended up wasting at least half an hour. The actual event was only 2 hours, so that was a big issue.

In hindsight the obvious best strategy is to split up into one or two person teams, at the start have one person drive all of the teams around and drop them off near the clue locations (which were spread out all over downtown) and then have everyone meet back at the finish location.

It turns out our division did pretty well. I think the last place team had as many points as some first place teams, at least that's what the Task Master said. Our first place team beat the record number of points by about 100. I think they had around 280 and the old record was 251. My team ended up with 189.

You can see pictures here.

Self Made Man

2005-04-26T21:05:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across the following sculpture done by Bobbie Carlyle. It is one of the best pieces of art I have seen. In fact I think it is probably one of the only pieces of scupture that I have seen that appears to have a message I can understand and share.

Bobbie Carlyle Self Made Man Sculpture, Loveland Colorado Sculptors

There is an interesting double message here. One, that man makes himself. That ultimately man must be responsible for what he becomes. Any end is achievable, since man has the power to make himself into anything. Since this rests with him, the will, actions and beliefs of others play no part. Second that man's work is his life.

This man is a sculptor. Being a sculptor he makes himself from stone. A writer makes himself from words. A musician from music. There is no seperation between work and life. What a man is, comes from what a man does. If you hate your job, it stands to reason you must hate yourself.

I read the following review of a biographical movie about Frank Lloyd Wright:

This Is Not a Movie Picture Book, January 5, 2005
Reviewer: SomeGuy (Chicago, IL USA)

I bought this dvd thinking that I wanted to see homes that Frank Lloyd Wright built, but this dvd does that no justice. This is a documentary of Frank Lloyd Wrights life, not a movie about his work. I do not suggest buying this unless you want to know about the man, not his work.

The great irony is that his life is his work. And his work is his life. Many people believe that Howard Roarke from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is based on Frank Lloyd Wright. I don't believe Rand ever supported this or refuted it. Donald Johnson has even written a book about this theory.

You can't seperate a man from his "true work" without destroying the man. Great men know this. That's why great men are always doing what they are passionate about.

I don't know Bobbie or what motivated her to create "Self Made Man". I believe it is in answer to the question "What is man's purpose?". Clearly the only purpose man can have is to create himself.

Law to make iTunes compatible with Microsoft

2005-04-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

Law to make iTunes compatible with Microsoft

This is one of the most absurd stories I have read in ages. I don't understand why anyone elected to office would think this is a priority for them. I hate when people use "protection of x" as their reason for doing something.

Which consumers are actually suffering from this problem. How many examples can we think of where "software/content" doesn't interoperate with "hardware". Gillette has over 70% market share in disposable razors. Should they be forced to allow their blades to work on all disposable razors. Or tjeir disposable razors to work with anyone's blades. Maybe we should force electric shaver manufacturers to make my disposable blades work with their shavers.

This argument is instantly indefensible once you spend even a minute discussing it. This seems obvious. And shocking that you could convene a congressional hearing in which someone wouldn't say "Pardon me Mister Speaker, but isn't the obvious conclusion of this train of thought complete insanity, and thus this hearing both a sham and a complete waste of tax-payers money?".

But you don't hear that. Instead they complain about how "Apple didn't take their invitation seriously." I would be greatly disillusioned if Apple did take it seriously.

Back to work

2005-03-24T20:46:00.000-08:00

I went back to work today for the first time since the baby was born. I took two weeks off and then plan on working part-time for the rest of my paternity.

I am currently recruiting for a CSG (that's what MS calls contractors) to work on a project on Natural UI. I have started working on an incubation project with a small team in our division. We are looking at what a "natural UI" might look like out five years or so. It's a pretty cool project.

We are taking a very task-based approach to defining natural UI. The premise being that in order to better map computer functionality to what users are trying to do, you need to have an intermediary, since actually figuring out what they want from natural language turns out to be way too complex. So we are exploring using tasks to sit in between users and computer functionality.

Our definition of a task is any unit of work a computer can perform represented in the language of the user. So "create a letter" would be a medium level task, "create a business plan" would be a very high level task and "print this document" would be a very low level task. Of course many higher level tasks will contain many lower level tasks. In this way tasks can be considered fractal in nature.

The theory being if developers build application by exposing a set of tasks that their program can perform. And these tasks are annotated such that we can map natural language to them, similar to how web-pages are annotated to enable web-search to find them, then the problem of mapping users intent (as specified by typed or spoken natural language) to a task becomes much easier. And computers become much easier and faster to use.

Anyway, that's our theory. There is some interesting work going on at Oregon State that is conceptually similar to what we are working on. You can read more about their work at: TaskTracer Summary.

Ultimate Frisbee @ Microsoft

2005-03-14T19:15:00.000-08:00

One of the best things about working at Microsoft is that you get to play ultimate Frisbee three times a week at lunchtime on state of the art artificial turf fields.

Not that I get out three times a week, but I usually try and get out at least two times, especially in spring and summer.

I have attached two sets of pictures from games in early and late January. The weather looks a little more like late summer in Seattle then January, but that's just the type of winter we have been having.

MS Ultimate Pictures

Paternity Starts!

2005-03-10T11:54:00.000-08:00

Well I'm home for the next two weeks on paternity, then I will be back to work part-time for most of the summer. We just had out first child, Zoe Macbeth. You can see her at http://aboutmacbeth.com/gallery/firstdays.

For those of you that don't know I work at Microsoft, I'm a Business Manager in the Natural Interactive Services Division (NISD). I work for Kai-Fu Lee, one of the pioneers of speaker independent speech recognition, he was a professor at CMU, worked at Apple and SGI, and then came to Microsoft to start the MS Research facility in China. Currently he runs NISD, we are focused on making interacting with computers more natural. Our division owns speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural language processing and all help & assistance technology for the company.

My job is to work with Kai-Fu's leadership team to develop a long term strategy to achieve our natural computing vision. It's actually a pretty cool job. I can't think of any other company where you could have a critical mass of people working on next generation UI work and have the amount of impact you can have on the current work across the company.

I plan on being more active in blogging in the future. So if you are interested in this area, watch for more info.