dac's blog

Thursday, July 13, 2006

Making a run for the border...

With my wife and parents-in-law, we're infiltrating deep into Canada this weekend.

Ok, not exactly that far beyond the border, and parts of B.C. which are south of the 49^th.

Hm... we insisted on carving Point Roberts out of Tsawwassen, yet we let them keep all of Vancouver Island?

Monday, July 3, 2006

Grr. I have managers up my ass this morning, asking me to help get this nasty bug fixed. We've proven it's a compiler bug; I've shown it can be fixed by updating our compiler from its 1998 vintage to something a tad more recent, like 2002 or 2003 . We're now trying to write code which does nothing, but coaxes the compiler into doing the right thing.

In the meantime, the entire Amazon build infrastructure is conspiring against me.

"Your password is about to expire in 37 seconds. Change it on this page -- oops, sorry, we broke that page!"
"This host isn't bootstrapped for builds -- oops, sorry, you don't have permission to bootstrap it."
"You haven't deployed the build infrastructure to this host -- oops, sorry, our deployment servers aren't responding."

This wouldn't normally annoy me to the point where I'm posting about it except for the aforementioned managers in my ass. I don't really like anything in my ass, thank you, let alone managers.

Sunday, July 2, 2006

For those who are feeling that sense of rejection...

From FOUND Magazine.

Monday, June 26, 2006

Is it just me, or has the use of "misspoke" increased in the last few years?

... and let God sort them out.

Ah, the brilliance of Antonin Scalia:

The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment - in deterrence, and perhaps most of all in the meting out of condign justice for horrible crimes - outweighs the risk of error. It is no proper part of the business of this court, or of its justices, to second-guess that judgment, much less to impugn it before the world ...

So if we end up executing someone innocent, it's ok! Because, you see, it's what the people want.

Maybe we can save a bunch of money by abolishing our courts entirely and having the attorneys duel it out in a press conference showdown. The people demand it!

Wow. It's not every day that someone donates $37 billion to charity.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Monday, June 19, 2006

One of the perks of working at Amazon is that we get to meet some of the authors and musicians whose works we sell on the site (as part of the Author Fishbowl series, not to be confused with Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher, which stole the internal fishbowl name). Last Friday, I got to meet Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and Microserfs. He was on a book tour promoting his new book, JPod. (We got free signed copies! Woot!)

Very interesting guy. Very strange guy. The eclecticness of his novels -- he will occasionally take a break from the story and just fill a page or three with random words and phrases in varying sizes -- is not some cute act; he is like this in real life.

I don't know what to compare the experience to. Maybe it's like meeting a crack addict who is just coherent enough to lucidly convey the train of thoughts that are rushing through his head.

Not much else to report. I was the primary on call last week, which meant I got very little sleep. Tamara and I went hiking yesterday on the Olympic Peninsula, this time up Royal Creek near the Dungeness River (which feeds Dungeness Bay near the old town of Dungeness, which lends its name to a species you've probably heard of, Dungeness Crab).

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Reorg'ed... again!

My group underwent a reorganization today. This is the fourth reorg for me -- seventh involving my group -- since I arrived last August. That's about one every other month.

Admittedly, however, most of them made business sense (including today's). That's unusual; my personal experience with reorgs at previous companies was that they were initiated so someone could make a power grab. These have mostly been optimizing tweaks (though today's was a fairly major shift).

Ah, well. Life in the corporate merry-go-round, I suppose.

Well, this has certainly been one of my more interesting commute experiences.

Apparently, some intoxicated/deranged guy crashed the gates and drove onto the ferry. They arrested him on the Seattle side, but bomb sniffing dogs detecting something in his vehicle. They evacuated the ferry terminal as a result.

I had to give my group's manager-on-call a ring to let him know that I was stuck without internet access (I'm on-call through noon tomorrow and have to respond to incidents within 15 minutes).

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

... and the day only went downhill from there.

It's bad when someone asks, "Was blah caused by the sev-1*?"

It's ugly when your response is, "Which sev-1?"

(* sev-1 = Amazon-speak for a critical bug which is causing the company to hemorrhage money.)

Ah... what a way to start the morning. On the ferry ride in, I started getting multiple pages about our services being in distress. Having an unknown, abusive software client threaten to take down the site is a very effective wake-up call -- perhaps moreso than the morning coffee.

Now, to track down the offenders and beat them into submission...

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

We have returned from the Canyon. I am now leaner, healthier, and more tanned than I've been in recent history. Paddling 130 miles in the hot Arizona sun will do that to you.

It was a most excellent trip. Pictures and details will be forthcoming; alas, I'm too sleepy to do this right now (our schedules followed the sun -- bed around 9 pm, rise around 5 am), so this will have to happen later.

Discovered at work today that I will be mentoring two interns instead of just one. They're both working on the same project, though, which makes things easier; they're also quite sharp. This should be fun.

Friday, May 26, 2006

I'm off to the Grand Canyon in a few hours. See everyone in 1½ weeks!

(Ugh... I have to catch the 5:20am ferry. At least it should be on time since it's the first run of the day -- most holiday weekend ferries have trouble keeping to the timetable.)

Thursday, May 25, 2006

The folks over at Overheard in New York have a new, related site: Overheard in the Office.

Including gems like this:

Boss: Where the hell were you? I need to call someone.
Assistant: I was in the bathroom.
Boss: But I needed you.
Assistant: You told me to be more efficient, so when nature called, I answered on the first ring.

151 El Camino Drive
Beverly Hills, California

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Good or Evil?

I'm beginning to wonder if this being good thing is paying off. So I ask you:

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Ah, sometimes I love the New York Times. Their review of the upcoming Da Vinci Code movie describes it as "Ron Howard's adaptation of Dan Brown's best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence."

I couldn't have put it better myself.

Monday, May 15, 2006

The job interview from hell...

You sign in at reception for your interview. Before you get a chance to sit, someone comes by, mumbles your name, and asks you to follow him. The next thing you know, you're fitted with a microphone and are being interviewed on live TV about the Apple vs. Apple case.

Sounds like a bad dream. However, it happened to Guy Goma [WMV], a candidate for an IT job at the BBC.

The man they were supposed to be interviewing -- Guy Kewney, editor of newswireless.net -- was sitting in another reception area watching the interview, somewhat astonished.

I've been extremely busy. Recapping the last few weeks:

Tam and I went to Denver for her brother's wedding (29 Apr). Much fun was had seeing the extended family again, especially the younguns. My niece and nephews are growing by leaps and bounds...

We've also been getting ready for our rafting trip down the Grand Canyon with friends from college. Tamara leaves in a week (she's doing the two-week trip); I'll head down a week later (for the one-week portion) and meet them half-way.

Work's been insane, as usual. There's one guy on the current project (which I'm offloading today -- yay!) who has taken it upon himself to constantly refactor everyone else's code. This also means he's constantly introducing new bugs (as well as reintroducing bugs we've already fixed) during a period when this project is supposed to be stabilizing.

Today I've officially started working the Microsoft Project plan for the project I'm managing. Alas, does this mean I've entered the managerosphere?

Still trying to sell my house in Pittsburgh. The folks who originally put in an offer but then backed out have hired an attorney . So I get to deal with that now. I also just found out that the rains that have been hitting New England hard have started to make their way toward Pittsburgh and have caused a leak in the family room, and a tree has caused some damage to a fence. It never ends...

So nothing terribly exciting has been going on. Thanks to being an Amazon employee, I don't have much of a personal life...

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

More airline cutbacks...

American Airlines started it by removing an olive from each salad in the mid 80's.

Then they started adding rows and cutting back on the legroom.

Nowadays, you're lucky to get a meal or snack at all.

Tomorrow? They'll eliminate the seats altogether.

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Wow. 75 minutes of sleep last night. People paging me about things being broken (when it's clear that I'm already working on it), and then claiming they didn't.

Then, to top it off, someone from another group decides they know better than us what's wrong and breaks the site even worse than it was before. Everyone playing the blame game rather than trying to fix things.

I came very close to quitting today. Very close. The main thing that kept me from doing so was the knowledge that I can't afford to do so.

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Ach! Mein Augen!

I was trying to debug something on our internal development site, and this travesty was on the recommendations page.

I would have preferred going to my grave without knowledge that such a book existed. Eeech.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Let me take this brief pause to say:

Being primary on-call on my team really, really sucks.

Thank you. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Friday, April 14, 2006

Even more lights

I just found out they have them for cars, too. They are appropriately called the Pimpstar there:

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Remember the ceiling fan display I mentioned earlier? Someone has done it with a bike:

Thursday, April 6, 2006

A picture of my new workspace at work:

Office picture

Strangely, the lava lamp is a "gift" from someone who had this office three or four moves ago. So it doesn't belong to me... just to the office itself.

Other items in the picture:
Coffee mug from Avalon, laptop showing an entry from APOD, printout of a hairy database schema between laptop and desktop keyboard, one of my desktop's monitors showing some random JavaDoc from our latest project, and a Firefox poster in the upper left.

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Pictures from my commute

My daily commute, entirely outside of the borders of the interstate freeway system.

Colman dock, Seattle's Pier 52.

Boarding the 4:40 ferry to Bainbridge. This or the 5:30 is probably the most crowded sailing to Bainbridge on your average weekday, carrying up to 2,500 passengers.

A not-so-great shot of the Merchant Vessel (M/V) Tacoma, one of the WSF's Jumbo Mark II Class vessels. This is taken after exiting the waiting lobby, before boarding.

The reverse view, taken from the No. 2 end of the ferry, of the northern third of the parking lot. Most of these cars will not make it onto the boat.

Cars loading onto the ferry. The truss adjusts the incline of the ramp from the ferry to the parking lot for the tides. In the upper-right corner, you can see the last few foot passengers boarding.

The No. 2 bridge of the M/V Tacoma. Below that is the sun deck. I am standing on the main deck, one level below, and just ouside the main cabin.

Piers 54 and upward, north of Colman dock. These tend to be the more "touristy" attractions.

Piers 48 and downward, south of Colman dock. These are the piers used for the commercial hub of the Port of Seattle.

Something I've never seen before: A mechanic up in the No. 2 crow's nest, fixing the radar. Actually, he just seemed to turn a bunch of screws; I never saw anything come apart.

A picture of the Seattle skyline, showing that the Space Needle -- despite how it is usually depicted -- is definitely not downtown.

West Seattle.

A Hanjin Shipping freighter sitting in the middle of Puget Sound and the M/V Wenatchee, the other WSF Jumbo Mark II Class ship, on its return trip from Bainbridge to Seattle. I'm not sure why I often see the Hanjin freighters just sitting out there; perhaps they're waiting for customs to clear them?

A not-so-great shot of Bainbridge Island taken about two-thirds of the way there. It's only slightly more visible in real life, though.

A mere 10 minutes into the 35 minute trip, people on these sailings will already queue up to disembark. They are standing behind a yellow line, where one of the deckhands will set a barrier just before unlocking the railing.

Eagle Harbor, Bainbridge Island, which houses the ferry terminal and one of WSF's ferry maintenance yards (a source of annoyance to some Islanders). Despite what you saw on the map above, ferries don't sail directly into the harbor from Seattle -- there are rocks and shallow waters just east of the harbor. Instead, they aim for the midpoint between Eagle and Blakely Harbors and make a sharp jig north before jagging west into Eagle Harbor.

The old creosote plant in Eagledale. This will eventually become a park; first, though, they need to clean up the plant.

A view of the No. 1 end as we dock in Bainbridge. The turbulence in the water is due to the reverse propulsion applied by the captain to slow us down.

Mooring the ship. In addition to the lines, the captain will apply a small amount of forward (Dockward? Fore/aft/starboard/port don't make as much sense on a dual-ended vessel...) thrust to keep the vessel docked.

Bringing the passenger ramp down.

Meanwhile, on the car deck, bicycles get off first. They'll be followed by motorcycles, ambulances (there was one on this trip), carpool/rideshare vans, and then all other cars. Sometimes this will include a school bus or two.

The sea of people leaving the ship. On these sailings, it will take far longer to get all of the foot passengers off than the cars.

Cherry blossoms near the ferry terminal.

I've wondered for a long while if anyone had died in a pinsetter. For some reason, they've always fascinated and terrified me at the same time.

Friday, March 31, 2006

Borometer

I'm sitting in a meeting right now, and just got this in an ACM TechNews e-mail. I found the coincidence amusing.

Device Warns You if You're Boring or Irritating
New Scientist (03/29/06); Biever, Celeste

Researchers are scheduled to present a device that will inform people with autism that they are boring or annoying the person they are talking to at next week's Body Sensor Network conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The "emotional social intelligence prosthetic" device is an improvement from previous computer programs that detect the basic emotional states of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust because it focuses on the more complex states of agreement, disagreement, concentration, thinking, uncertainty, and interest, which appear more frequently in conversation. Built by Rana El Kaliouby of MIT's Media Lab, colleagues Rosalind Picard and Alea Teeters, with Peter Robinson of the University of Cambridge, the device consists of a camera (small enough to be attached to eyeglasses) connected to a handheld computer that uses image recognition software, and software that can read the emotions of the images. The software makes the handheld vibrate when its wearer does not engage the listener. The device, which gets emotions right 64 percent and 90 percent of the time when presented with video footage of ordinary people and actors, respectively, is based on a machine-learning algorithm that was trained by showing it more than 100 eight-second video clips of actors expressing different emotions. The researchers say they still need to reduce the device's computing demand for a standard handheld, find a high-resolution digital camera that is easy to wear, and train autistic people to use it. In addition to autistic people, teachers could benefit from the device.

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Ok, trusty friends list, I need your help.

I need a backronym for "Balboa," the Spanish conquistador and currency unit of Panama. Not (well, at least outwardly) to be confused with Rocky Balboa, the fictional Italian Stallion featured in endless sequels (including another coming out this year), but, hey, the cheesier, the better.

This is for a software component which deals with payments. I've already argued that it has the Portugese/Spanish theme (almost a requisite at Amazon) and currency relation going for it, and since it is being delivered to replace existing legacy services it is a sequel in and of itself. My manager is trying to veto it, though, because of its cheesiness, so I need a stronger case here.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Looking for a new bed or mattress? Be glad you don't live in Germany.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

My desire/willingness/motivation/whathaveyou to do work today has hit rock bottom. Then again, I've been tasked with writing specs and attending meetings -- how did I ever have the motivation to do this?

Thursday, March 9, 2006

I've started declining meeting invites sent out by my boss that clearly don't add any value to the work we're doing. We'll see how this goes.

I've also started the process for transferring to a different group.

Wednesday, March 8, 2006

Large scale late-70s/early-80s game show

I need some help trying to recall the name of a one-off game show that was broadcast in either the late-70s or early-to-mid-80s.

This was a fairly standard quiz show which eliminated contestants from one round to the next. The twist was that it started with thousands of contestants assembled in a stadium (I think in Los Angeles, which would point to the Coliseum). They would select their answer (2-part multiple choice) by moving to one half of the field or another.

After the field was whittled down a fair bit, the remaining rounds took place in other parts of the world (I remember London being one such site; maybe Hong Kong was another?). There was a lot of camera time devoted to showing the location itself, along with the plight of the eliminated contestants.

The only question I remember is from the stadium rounds: "Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon with his left or right foot?"

I don't think I'm just imagining this... does anyone else remember such a show?

Edit: found it! It's The All-American Ultra Quiz, which aired in 1981:

This two-week game show special (aired 11/10/81) was emceed by TV comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. The program started with 932 contestants at the Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. After a series of elimination competitions, the remaining 84 contestants were then shipped off to various cities around the globe (Washington, D.C., London, Rome, Paris and Athens) for additional competitions. The winners moved on to the next challenge and the losers paid their way home. When the two finalist returned to the NBC studios, they competed for a $100,000 grand prize. Craig Power was the winner.

And it wasn't thousands of contestants. Then again, everything seemed a lot bigger back then (my parents' old house, my grandparents' house in Chicago, etc.) -- I've been astonished to see just how small they really are when revisiting them.

55 saves lives. [Google Video]

Wednesday, March 1, 2006

Happy St. David's Day to all my Welsh friends!

Ok, so just here, but hey... I'm all for more holidays. And Wales was cool enough to put a red dragon on their flag.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Forbes points out how silly the stock market can be.

According to the stock market:

1		= 10 = 3
		= + + +
		> , , , &

Friday, February 24, 2006

Very, very dorky. I love it. (A coworker did this.)

Amusing and sad more than anger-inducing...

Today, someone on another team stopped me in the plaza because he thought I was someone else, and then proceeded to bad-mouth me behind my back... or so he thought.

He was angry because they filed a high severity bug report against my team. I was working it late into the night; at 2 am, I deduced it was a problem on their side. I reassigned the ticket to them, and he got paged about it.

(He had me confused with one of the managers, also named Dave...)

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Worst -- or best -- company name ever. You decide.

I got e-mail -- non-spam -- mentioning a company called Vibra Screw, Inc. And, yes, that link is actually safe for work.

The best part:

Vibra Screw’s Absolute Guarantee of Satisfaction
No other industry source stands behind its products with the confidence and assurance of Vibra Screw, because no other company engineers and manufactures to our uncompromising standards. This is our commitment to you:

VIBRA SCREW EQUIPMENT IS UNCONDITIONALLY GUARANTEED TO PERFORM IN THE SERVICE FOR WHICH IT WAS SOLD OR WE WILL REFUND YOUR MONEY. PERIOD.

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Watching the Olympics on CBC is a bit nicer (less annoying hosts), though weird. I mean, watching NBC you'd think that 90% of the competitors are from the U.S., with token representatives from other countries. Same is true for CBC and Canada.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Ceiling fan

This, believe it or not, is a ceiling fan:

I'm tempted to try to build one of these beasts.

Wednesday, February 8, 2006

I have power now (actually, as of 11:30 am yesterday). Still, though, 3½ days without electricity... ouch. At first, I was wondering how people in earlier times tolerated the dark and cold; then, I realised, they didn't. Their homes had wood stoves, they had candles and gas lamps substituting for our electric lamps, etc.

In other news: I've been working too much. As a result, I completely missed the news about India's ( and 's daughter) third birthday (and other random LJ-announced events, but this bums me out the most).

Monday, February 6, 2006

Do not walk in front of me today.

I am pissed.

Today is the third day I've gone without electricity. I want heat, I want light, I want to take a warm shower. Damn you, Puget Sound -- there's a cluster of 400 people here and you can't be bothered to send a crew? Hell, we even know where the problem is -- those two lines lying across Wyatt Way which arc every time you try tossing the switch remotely. Even the cable company has brought out a generator to power their amplifier.

I didn't get to watch my Steelers win the Superbowl. I had to settle for listening to the local sportswanks on the AM radio talk about how the Steelers didn't win the game, that the Seahawks were the better team that just made some mistakes.

Do not cross me today. I will bite your head off for the smallest perceived slight.

Friday, February 3, 2006

Shamelessly copied from :

Monday, January 30, 2006

Sucktastic.

Dac,

You need a new cell phone.

I found yours on the ground next to the car when I got back to the
apartment. It still works, but the display is dead.

Tamara

Friday, January 27, 2006

Holy crap. Frozen tsunamis?!

Thursday, January 19, 2006

I lost my lunch today. Literally, not figuratively.

I was rushing back from Uwajimaya to make a 12:30 meeting and had everything in a takeout container. I was balancing a project notebook and various other papers and my lunch while swiping my badge and opening the door to our floor.

It didn't work out so well.

The floor, for once, got to enjoy some tasty orange chicken. I don't think it liked it very much, though.

Debating whether I want to spend more money and get another lunch, or if I should just tough it out until dinner.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Sudoku

Tamara and I have been somewhat addicted to sudoku (that number game in a bunch of papers these days) lately. I decided to write my own sudoku puzzle generator.

It's harder than you might expect.

The basic logistics behind puzzle generation are easy enough -- start putting given numbers (givens) down randomly, enforce row/column/block constraints, backtrack when a constraint is violated. Writing this in a functional language makes this almost trivial (I used Python, which isn't what purists would consider a functional language, but it's functional enough).

What's hard is creating puzzles of a certain difficulty.

One of the rules of a sudoku puzzle is that it must have a unique solution (and not require any guessing; I believe this is a corollary to uniqueness). Standard sudoku puzzles have 81 (9x9) squares; apparently, it's not possible to have fewer than 17 givens (and generating a puzzle with this few requires days of computation). The puzzles being generated by my code have between 25-32 on average and are graded as being "easy" according to the sudoku program from that link above.

This will require more thought, but I think I'm becoming disinterested in the problem at this point.

Friday, January 13, 2006

Never, ever ask me to look at something and then complain that I'm getting too involved. You will get the full force of my fury.

That is all.

Actually, wait. You and random object within my grasp will get the full force of my fury. Fortunately, my work laptop seems to be no worse for the wear.

That is all.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

We have the inventor of Ruby on Rails coming to our internal developer conference next week. I've heard a bit about it, didn't know much about it, so I went to the website to glean a bit of information about it.

After about an hour, I've deduced that Ruby on Rails is a lot of hype; scenic landscapes; greased, eurocool hair; and more hype.

Having browsed other sites since then, I've figured out that it's a framework for generating web pages on the fly, much like PHP or Perl/Mason, and other stuff that I'm generally not interested in.

The testimonials, though, talk about how easy it is to edit live websites, see your changes instantly, etc., and skip the develop/test/deploy/test cycle. This seems a tad dangerous (and we go through great lengths to prohibit this at Amazon).

To sum up... .

Meanwhile, my workload, which was supposed to get lighter after the end of the year, has continued to get heavier. I am less than pleased. We managed to snatch a project out of the clenched jaws of defeat (mainly because some of the other service owners failed to own up to their commitments), though with much agony (including having to essentially forego Christmas). As a result, it's been decided that this is an acceptable working environment for us. We have a new client coming on board, the launch date has been set, but the requirements and specs are long overdue from the account management team. In short, they've eaten a month out of our development time and we still don't know what we're building.

Wednesday, January 4, 2006

Mainly for you software folks out there...

Am I nuts in thinking that having less than 48 hours to research a problem domain (payment instruments, in my case) and come up with a detailed spec for implementing a tier-1 service is ludicrous?

(FWIW, I've discovered that Amazon doesn't really have a good definition of what makes a tier-1 service beyond, "If it goes down, we start hemorrhaging money.")

Monday, January 2, 2006

Random Screen

Relaying this from , because it's cool enough that it should be relayed.

http://www.datenform.de/rscreeneng.html

Saturday, December 31, 2005

I just got this bit of spam sent to me: "The Body Bouncer, taking the gravity out of sex!"

The diagrams are highly amusing, though probably not safe for work. I wonder at the mind(s) behind this sort of oddity.

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

Fifteen minutes

I am completely exhausted and am on the verge of burnout. I'm also very annoyed that I managed to send out exactly zero cards to people, but I might still do that -- they just won't be Christmas/Chanukah/Festivus cards.

Tamara and I have been in San Diego since Saturday night, but that doesn't mean I haven't been working. Quite the contrary; in fact, I got to participate in another all-night conference call on Monday night and have been answering e-mails and phone calls every day (yes, including Christmas).

I have been working ~100 hours/week for the last four weeks. If I were paid hourly, this would be great. Alas, my base salary covers all hours worked.

This is just nuts. I can't believe that I've only been at Amazon for four months and have already become so seemingly essential that people need to reach me 24x7.

Monday, December 5, 2005

Making a list, checking it twice...

If you've moved and haven't sent me your address (or I've never gotten your address) and you would like a card...

Saturday, December 3, 2005

Strange voicemail

I got this on my mobile's voicemail last week. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it -- it's a bunch of random sound snippets and some music. If anyone knows what the deal is with this, please let me know.

600k MP3 file, 5:03

Assuming the caller ID wasn't spoofed, it's from (571) 723-6732, which is in the DC area.

Thursday, December 1, 2005

I'm watching the snow fall over downtown Seattle from my seventh floor office window. The top of the Bank of America Tower (BoAT) down the street disappears in the clouds.

It's quite pretty, and I wish I had a camera.

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Amusing story from the back office...

I haven't had a chance to describe what it is I do for Amazon, and this story needs some background, so here goes.

I'm a software development engineer (read: "Code Monkey") in a group which variously goes by the names Customer Master Systems/Service and Identity (you might say we have a bit of an Identity crisis, but you wouldn't because we'd have to hurt you for such a pun). We're basically responsible for all of the core customer information (names, addresses, etc., though not credit cards or bank accounts) -- storing it reliably, making it available to the various applications inside the company that need it, and enforcing things like privacy policies.

The last bit is surprisingly non-trivial -- keep in mind that Amazon runs a number of third-party sites like Target, The Bombay Company, and the NBA store, whose privacy policies may state that they won't share personally identifiable information with third-parties. It's up to us to make sure the bits associated with, say, your Target account information never mix with the programs running for Bombay or even Amazon itself (!). At the same time, we're constantly monitoring for suspicious activity -- we're often able to shut down hacked accounts before the real owner even knows they were hacked. Multiply this by a few million users on the site at any given moment and you have a lot of bits that need to go from point A to point B without crossing points C, Q, or Z.

So many bits, in fact, that, even though we have some of the fastest network equipment in the world, we're always looking for ways to reduce the load. One of our other engineers implemented a way to offload a significant chunk of this traffic while maintaining all the other features and constraints. We tested it, beat on it, stomped all the bugs we could find out, and declared, "This is good. Let's deploy it."

So we pushed the new software live. We watched the traffic on it grow, and it seemed stable. Things went this way for 12 hours or so, and nobody noticed a thing.

Then a bug was filed. It said, "Hey, 1-click isn't working!" Worse, the bug was from Jeff Bezos.

For those who don't know, Jeff is the founder and CEO of Amazon. He's one of the inventors of 1-click (where you just click on a single button next to each item you want and they magically appear on your doorstep -- you don't need to explicitly check out, fill out payment info, etc., if you already have an account). Whether 1-click is a significant contributor to our bottom line is irrelevant. The rule is: Thou shalt not break 1-click. The corollary is: If you do break 1-click, you scramble to fix it.

You definitely do not leave 1-click broken for 12+ hours and let Jeff (no, he doesn't need a last name inside the company) find the bug for you.

(We did actually test this, incidentally; it's one of those cases where it was only intermittently broken and happened to work in the test case. These are usually the worst kinds of bugs.)

Anyway, I was one of the three engineers on the call fixing it. I was finding reproducible cases where it was broken and transcribing the phone call. Another engineer was actually doing the fix. The third was verifying the fix -- that is, he was going around to all of the broken cases I found and making sure 1-click did work.

Today, he came into the office and said: "Hey, Dave, remember the 1-click bug from last week?"
Me: "Yes..."
Him: "You know how I was testing and making sure it worked?"
Me: "Yes..."
Him: "Well, last night I had about 40 items show up on my doorstep."

The office pauses, then bursts out laughing.

Monday, November 14, 2005

For those who are fans of MythBusters, I have located the video of the water bottle jet pack from the Japanese game show which inspired last week's episode. (2 MB Windows Media Player file)

Tuesday, November 8, 2005

Today marks a monumental point in my employment at Amazon:
On Tuesday, November 8, 2005, I got my first "They're all top priority" message.Thank you, thank you. The Dilbert calendars will be appearing momentarily. Don't forget to tip your server.

Ok... so it wasn't quite that blatant. The actual phrasing from my director was, "I'm not sure that 'best effort' support is suitable here." But it qualifies.

I'm getting wiser (and mellower) in my old age, though. My reply was to outline the consequences for the other project I'm working on and to confirm that he understands and accepts this.

Monday, November 7, 2005

Cat lost... cat FOUND!

Robin has been found!

He somehow made his way down the hill to some folks who live in the woods across the way -- just beyond our search range, and a fair bit farther than I thought he would have gone. Now, what the hell prompted him to travel so far is a bit of a mystery (and will remain so until he learns to talk)... but we're just glad to have him back.

Nice family he stayed with, though somehow I doubt that he and their Yorkshire terrier became good friends.

Ah, relief. I can sleep easy tonight. (I haven't the last two nights.)

Sunday, November 6, 2005

One of my kitty cats is lost. I haven't seen him in 18 hours. :-(

This worries me because my cats don't spend much time outdoors, so if he's just wandering out there...

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Outlook enhancements

When responding to a meeting invite, Outlook gives you three options:

Accept
Tentative
Decline

I need more than that:

Accept enthusiastically because I'm not missing free food.
Accept because I have nothing better to do.
Accept because I'll end up in a lot of trouble if I don't.
Accept because I want to look like I'm taking you seriously but I'm planning on skipping the meeting at the last second.
Tentatively accept because I'm too chicken to decline and I'm hoping something else comes up.
Decline because it's more comfortable to sleep in my cube than in your meeting.
Decline because the last thing I need is more meetings and I don't fear any retribution from you or your team.
Decline because what you're proposing is a damn waste of time.

In addition, I want a checkbox to appear if any of the "Decline" options are selected: [ ] Decline with prejudice.

Friday, October 28, 2005

I think we've learned an important lesson here.

Do not have advisers whose names are in the form "Z. Name Lixxy", where Z is an arbitrary initial and x is an arbitrary consonant.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Another interesting article -- this one real, though.

Remote Control Device 'Controls' Humans

We wield remote controls to turn things on and off, make them advance, make them halt. Ground-bound pilots use remotes to fly drone airplanes, soldiers to maneuver battlefield robots.

But manipulating humans?

Prepare to be remotely controlled. I was.

Just imagine being rendered the rough equivalent of a radio-controlled toy car.

I missed this headline last week, but it's important to bring up -- , let us know how the situation is going there.

Study Reveals Pittsburgh Unprepared For Full-Scale Zombie Attack

Monday, October 24, 2005

There are days when Amazon operates like a well-oiled machine. The gears are meshing and spinning, orders are clicking away, shipments are shipping, users are happy, and the engineers are destressed.

Alas, today does not appear to be one of those days. We appear to have a Category-4 Monday here.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Ah, those wacky Brits. They're toying with embedding MP3 players into breast implants. I guess the rectal fax machine is next...

Today was my third day of commuting to work via ferry. Still enjoying it. I've been using those ~30 minutes eastward to get a head start on work e-mail so far. The westward trip is spent admiring the nighttime view of Seattle.

Thursday, October 6, 2005

Forget the odd political battles, the fact that it's overrun by old folks, and the humid weather. The fact that I'm lower on the food chain than a gator is reason enough to keep me from Florida, and yet they are now being challenged for dominance by Burmese pythons.

My ThinkPad just gave up the ghost. Looks like some kind of severe power issue -- it was making arcing noises with the battery. Without the battery and plugged into the wall, it runs for a few minutes and then just freezes.

Alas, I discovered that it's out of warranty by a few days. :-(

Fortunately, Amazon provides us with laptops, so I don't think I'll be replacing it anytime soon.

Monday, October 3, 2005

For novelty's sake, I'm posting this from the middle of Puget Sound, aboard the M.V. Wenatchee (ferry). Talk about wireless! (High packet loss, though...)

I finally won one of those free Diet Cokes today. I'm actually a bit bummed -- I had a terrific conspiracy theory going about the 8th floor US2 Coke machine, but now it's ruined. It's a conspiracy to ruin my conspiracy theories!

:-)

We're a bit annoyed because we drove+ferried over to Bainbridge (that's $13.30 each way) to sign papers to get a storage place (after Tamara called and confirmed that they'd be waiting for us), only to find them all locked up and closed. Grr. (Normally, I'll be biking+ferrying over and using a monthly pass, which is $70/month rather than $26/day.) I guess we're going to have to go back tomorrow -- but to take a lease with a different place.

Heh... Just found this old entry (thanks to a meme posted by :

Must... get... out... of... Pennsylvania... before... it... sucks... my... life... force... out...

Friday, September 30, 2005

Lucky or unlucky?

The Diet Coke bottles in the vending machine here advertise that one out of every four 1L bottles will win a free 1L bottle. At this point, I have purchased 10 bottles of Diet Coke here and none of them are winners.

Assuming that winning bottles are randomly distributed, the chances of this happening (i.e., none of them being winners) is just under 6% (0.75¹⁰ == 5.63%).

I am starting to get a bit suspicious about this contest.

Maybe such contests are void here and they've "pre-voided" the bottles for us? That would be even sneakier...

Thursday, September 29, 2005

Very windy in downtown Seattle today. This isn't normally something normally remarkable until I realized: I don't think I've felt the wind once in Seattle until now. (Ferry trips, of course, excepted.)

I'm now doing some web UI coding (dynamic forms and all that jazz) for the first time (beyond toy projects). A lot of folks hype this web stuff (XML, HTML, Javascript, etc.) as being the next step in technology. What they fail to mention is that it's a step backwards. If I misspell something in C or Python, the compiler or bytecode interpreter will complain and point out my mistake. Javascript and HTML? Gah, who knows who long it will go before something is wrong, happily passing null or undef values around.

And don't get me started on HTML, XML, SGML, and their ilk. Especially XML. It combines the power of Peewee Herman and the simplicity of a nuclear reactor with the readability of a Victor Hugo novel.

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Back in Seattle. The worst week of my life is now behind me. I hope I never again have to console a mother crying, "They've taken my baby!"

As awful as funerals are, they can be very beneficial. It brought us to accept that Jane is gone. For many of us (myself included), the night after the funeral was the first night of decent sleep in a week. Certainly, there's a lot of healing left, but most of our ghosts have been dispelled.

Jane, you will be forever missed.

Jane

Jane Eileen Cuthbert
1982-2005

Monday, September 19, 2005

Thanks for all the messages of support. It means a lot to me. I'm still doing a bit of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one moment calm and placid, the next a bit of a basket case. I'll be better after the funeral (Friday) and the weekend are over, and there's a bit less media attention on my family.

Tam and I had an excellent time on Sunday hiking with , , and the Inimitable India, as well as their trustworthy canine companions Clyde and Shorty. It was nice to get outside on such a gorgeous day, and it was fun to get to know such like-minded (and very likable!) people. Thanks, guys!

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Chicago Sun Times is full of assholes

"Maureen thinks she has an injured knee and injured rib," Martin McNicholas said. "She started to cry because people died on the train with her. She said she saw fingers, brains, and it looked like someone had exploded."

That "someone who exploded" was Jane, you jerks. The same Jane whom I was inner tubing with on a lake a summer ago. Whom I took to dinner on a trip out to Monterey a few months ago. Who got amusingly drunk with her mother at my wedding.

In lighter news...

You can now purchase the same dresses seen on the stars at the Emmys at Target:

Agency Blames Speed for Train Derailment

By MIKE COLIAS
Associated Press Writer
Published September 18, 2005, 5:30 PM CDT

CHICAGO -- A commuter train was going almost 60 mph above the speed limit just before it derailed, killing two people and injuring dozens, the acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday.

Mark Rosenker said the Metra train was traveling at 69 mph and should not have been going faster than 10 mph when it switched tracks at a crossover just before jumping the tracks Saturday.

"Sixty-nine miles an hour is very, very fast when you're dealing with a 10-mile-an-hour restriction," Rosenker said.

The speed information came from a preliminary reading of one of the train's three electronic data recorders, popularly known as "black boxes," Rosenker said.

Part of the investigation included an interview Sunday with the train's engineer, Rosenker said. The 41-year-old man had been on the job for 45 days after completing Metra's six-month training program, which included at least some training along the route where the derailment occurred. He also had worked for more than five years as a CSX Corp. freight train engineer.

The NTSB will also examine records of the train signals and radio transmissions from a control tower, Rosenker said.

Investigators have determined that nothing was abnormal with the tracks, which had just been inspected on Friday, he said.

The double-decked commuter train was headed into Chicago from Joliet on Saturday morning with 185 passengers and four crew members when its locomotive and five rail cars jumped the tracks about 5 miles south of downtown.

The train began to derail as it switched tracks, striking a steel bridge just beyond the crossover. Rosenker said that collision damaged at least one rail car and likely contributed to at least one of the fatalities.

The train and the track had just been inspected Friday, said Judy Pardonnet, a spokeswoman for Metra, the commuter rail system that services the Chicago area.

The train engineer, three crew members and dispatchers were all tested for drugs and alcohol, which is standard procedure, Pardonnet said.

The train's engineer is taking three days of paid leave for "trauma debriefing." She said no decisions have been made about his future employment, although findings from the NTSB investigation could determine whether he keeps his job.

A similar derailment occurred on the same stretch of track in 2003, injuring about 45 people. A preliminary NTSB report found that the train was going almost 70 mph at the location where it was supposed to switch from one track to the other.

Pardonnet said the two derailments may have been just a coincidence. "I don't think it's anything specific to this area, but it's still under investigation," she said.

Jane Cuthbert, 22, of Bourbonnais, died on the train, Pardonnet said. A 30-year-old woman died at a hospital.

They were the first people killed in a Metra derailment since it took over commuter rail services in the region in 1984.

The injured passengers were taken to 15 hospitals and 15 of them remained hospitalized Sunday, Pardonnet said. She did not have information on their conditions.

Train service on the Rock Island District Line resumed about four hours after the derailment, and the cleanup from the accident could cause short delays during Monday's commute, Pardonnet said.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

I just found out that one of the people who died in this morning's train derailment in Chicago was my cousin Jane. She was 22.

September is not a good month for my family. My grandfather died in Sep 2002. Then my uncle Mark -- Jane's father -- died suddenly in 2003. Now Jane.

Not sure when the funeral or other services will be yet.

Friday, September 16, 2005

I think my office is telling me that I need to move around more.

Some background: Many (all?) of the offices in Amazon don't have light switches. Instead, there are motion sensors which turn the lights on for 20 minutes or so after detecting motion. Twice already this morning I've been motionless enough to cause the lights to go out while I've been diligently working. (Shocking: The "diligently working" part is true!)

Amusing.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Seattle surplus

Mostly for my own reference, but thought I'd share the links since a few of you might be interested...

Mostly adapted from Bruce Lane's page

Shop	Hours
Shop	Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
Boeing surplus 20651 84th St S Kent WA 98032-1224				11a-5p	11a-5p	11a-5p	9a-4p
Electronic Dimensions 424 Puyallup Ave Tacoma WA 98421				10a-6p	10a-6p	10a-6p	10a-3p
House of Science 825 NW 49th St Seattle WA 98107	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
RE-PC 1565 Sixth Ave S Seattle WA 98134		10a-7p	10a-7p	10a-7p	10a-7p	10a-7p	10a-7p
Seattle Laptop 7525 Aurora Ave N Seattle WA 98103		10a-6p	10a-6p	10a-6p	10a-6p	10a-6p	10a-5p
Vetco Electronics 12718 Northup Way Bellevue WA 98005 Call to confirm hours		9a-6p	9a-6p	9a-6p	9a-6p	9a-6p	10a-5p
Washington State Surplus (eBay) 2301 C St SW Auburn WA 98001							8:30a-3p

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Guy: You can't bring that bicycle onto the bus! Where do you think you are? Seattle?
--M15 bus

Overheard by: Scourge

Monday, September 12, 2005

Apparently, Meg Whitman got wildly drunk and woke up to find herself in bed with Niklas Zennström.

At least, that's the only explanation I can find behind the eBay/Skype merger that was announced today. Otherwise, I'm not getting it. At all.

It'd be like Amazon purchasing SmartCar to enable our customers to drive to a mall with an Internet cafe, so they can buy stuff from Amazon.com while getting the shopping mall atmosphere. After all, 0.0001% of our customers want to be able to do this...

I guess that I should be applauding this move, since Amazon is an eBay competitor in many respects. We love to see our competitors burn $2.6 billion as if there were no tomorrow. The only thing that would be better is if eBay bought $2.6 billion worth of merchandise off Amazon (and, sorry, but we don't accept Pay Pal).

Elevator moments

The scene: Elevator #5 in the US2 building, post lunch.
The dramatis personae: Six random Amazonians.

The six step into the elevator and punch in the floor selections (5, 7, and 8). Elevator doors close.

Then, oddly, the elevator hesitates and decides to clear our floor selections.

Amazonians start joking about how the elevator is not 1-Click enabled.

Oy.

Friday, September 9, 2005

Today's Diesel Sweeties brings back fond memories of Animaniacs.

Tuesday, September 6, 2005

Don't read today's White House press briefing if you don't want to pop a vein in your neck.

I just got out of a code review meeting which I attended solely to find out what's going on elsewhere in my group.

About 30 minutes into the meeting I wanted to run screaming from the room: "Ok, I admit! I'm a fraud! I have no idea what you're talking about! You're using terms like 'recorder' and 'TOPPS' and I think you're talking about a musical instrument and baseball cards!" Fortunately, I managed to contain myself and sit silently.

After the meeting, I found out that I wasn't alone. Others who have been here for awhile had exceeded their level of understanding and started daydreaming or (if they brought their laptops) checking e-mail.

Whew. My secret fraud life is safe. Well, unless they read this LJ entry... :-)

For the physics/E&M geek in you (or how to visualize EE 151)...

Math, Physics, and Engineering Applets at falstad.com.

Found on Bunnie's blog (that's Andrew "Bunnie" Huang, Xbox and general hacker extraordinare).

Saturday, September 3, 2005

Best Overheard in NY quote ever:

Chick: Wait, I really did sleep with that guy? I need to update my Excel spreadsheet.
--Montien, 3rd Avenue
Overheard by: djlindee

Work is going well. Very well. My manager is excited about the results I'm getting -- I'm doing some data mining on our logs to find out why our bits are sometimes slow. I'm a tad nervous because he wants me to present this to some of the VPs, etc., at the start of next week, but I would like to spend a little more time thinking about the data. I have, after all, only been there a couple of weeks and could easily be doing something very, very wrong. Ah, well -- it's good to have a manager who is enthusiastic about your work.

Tam and I are starting to look at places to live. We've already visited Island Homestead apartments, over on Bainbridge Island, and really like it. Alas, we can't afford to buy a house right now -- it's taking a long time to sell our house in Pittsburgh.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

I started to code up an elegant, generalized solution to a problem (trying to parse these damn huge log files) by stuffing various pieces of data into an SQLite database only to come to the ugly realisation: "Hey, wait a minute. I don't actually know SQL."

Damn.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

I've mostly been sitting in my office reading various software engineering documents. Every now and then, though, I need to get up to grab something (usually coffee). When I do, I get a sweeping view of the stadiums and Puget Sound and think, "Wow. I can't believe I work here."

Also, I took the last cup of coffee around 4:15 and debated whether I should make a new pot so late in the day. I decided to go ahead and do so.

It was gone by 5. Heh.

Met with Tamara for lunch (our temporary housing is literally across the street from where I work) at a Korean BBQ place. Picked up some fresh roasted chestnuts on my way back to the office. Been trying to absorb an incredible amount of data in a very short time.

Life is good.

My first day at Amazon was yesterday. It's like no place I've ever worked before.

When I got to orientation, they had a backpack for each new hire. Inside the backpack were some benefits materials and information about how to log on, a laptop preconfigured for our use, and a VPN device. This is... well, definitely a company that is used to hiring people and wants to get them productive as soon as possible!

The amount of training materials for developers is incredible and a tad overwhelming, but a refreshing change from the typical case where you have to find out obscure bits from some other developer who's hidden in a corner of a remote, off-site building but usually only works from home and doesn't answer his phone or e-mail.

Contrast with Cadence, where being unproductive during your entire stay is the norm.

For any fellow Amazonians who want to stop by, my office is US2 811.A1, but my group is moving next week.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

It would appear...

... that I'm in Seattle now. Coolness! (Well, if only -- it's a tad hot here today, though not as bad as Pittsburgh.)

My temporary apartment is right above a market, all in the Japanese section of the International District. I could eat in the restaurants below and have a different style of Asian food every night for a week.

Cats are much happier to be in a place with furniture again and, more importantly, out of their cramped carriers.

House in Pittsburgh is now empty. Hopefully it will sell soon.

Tuesday, August 9, 2005

There are many good reasons why one might quit his job. However, I think we can agree that "To spend more time playing computer games" is not one of them.

Saturday, August 6, 2005

We have two parties coming to see our house tomorrow. Should be interesting. I've spent the past three evenings creating a small patio and fixing brick steps to it. I wish I had done that much, much earlier...

Today was my last day at Cadence. It was bittersweet -- I won't miss the company, but I will miss some of the coworkers, even the ones who annoyed me. Five and a half years is a long time to spend at a place.

Tuesday, August 2, 2005

The house is now up for sale. I guess this marks a milestone of some sort, though I'm not sure exactly what. Perhaps simply the point where the house no longer looks like we live in it -- we've removed all the magnets from the refrigerator, for example, and the counters are almost completely clear. The completely non-functional, model home look... almost as if someone took a house out from Sim City and actually built it.

Monday, August 1, 2005

Is this really appropriate?

CBS News' article on the Boy Scout Jamboree has targeted advertising at the bottom. The links read:

Power Lines
Buy "Power Lines" at Audible.com. Join and save $100 on an Apple iPod, take 50% off your first month of membership or get a free Muvo MP3 player.
www.audible.com

Power Line on eBay
Find Power Line items at low prices. With over 5 million items for sale every day, you'll find all kinds of unique things on eBay - the World's Online Marketplace.
www.ebay.com

Not as bad as Google's offer to let you buy African slaves on eBay, though.

Sunday, July 31, 2005