This is a all the contestants lined up before the competition. I don't know exactly what that sign says, but the second and third Kanji are "Nippon" (Japan), and the fourth and fifth are "Ninja", so I assume it says something along the lines of "All Japan Ninja Championships". [Later comment: According to babelfish the first Kanji does mean "All", and the next 3 Kanji after "Nippon" and "Ninja" do in fact mean "Championship". The one after that means "big" by itself, and I think the next one means "combine", but I don't know what they mean together (babelfish just translates them back as "large combination").]
Here they are throwing shuriken (throwing stars) at targets. Although they dressed like ninjas, don't kid yourself that there is actually a secret society in modern Japan; or if there is, it wasn't this crew.
This is the "jump over a wall" part. I have some recollection that the middle part of the wall could be raised up gradually, so the event proceeded like a high-jump competition, based on the highest level that each contestant could clear.
Here we see our heroes running along a narrow plank. Note the modern footwear! Most of them wouldn't have lasted five minutes in the Tokugawa shogunate.
I remember this guy, with bib number 1, begin the closest to having actual ninja skills. At least he had authentic ninja shoes.
This is an event that simulates storming a castle. The event was held in a small town called Koga, which evidently has all this stuff lying around.
Storming the castle phase 2. According to Wikipedia there are three towns named Koga in Japan; this was the one in Shiga Prefecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dka,_Shiga. Getting to Koga required taking a train towards Nagoya and then getting off somewhere in the middle and changing to another train going to Koga, which was just about the limits of my self-navigation skills in Japan.
Nearing the top of the "castle". I had planned out my trip ahead of time with the help of someone who spoke Japanese, but when I got to the station where I had to change trains, there was a train pulling away on the designated track. I went up to a conductor and said "Koga?" in a despairing voice, luckily he knew the English word "next", so with a little gesturing he was able to explain that I had NOT missed my train.
Another shot of the wall they had to climb (the camera was crooked, not the wall). It turns out that Koga (aka Koka) is the home of "infamous ninja leader Mochizuki Izumonokami's former estate", as described on this page: http://www.city.koka.shiga.jp/english/sightsee/sightsee_ninja.htm. I assume that is where the event was held.
The trick here is to cross a shallow pond on pieces of plywood floating on the water. If you go fast enough, you don't sink. Note that this ninja is actually a ninjette.
Ninja style! The whole thing was a little hokey (if you hadn't noticed). Also my "110" camera was a little lame (if you hadn't noticed).
I didn't have a memory of what was going on here, but then I found this article http://www.comicscommunity.com/boards/pop/?read=23021 which clearly describes exactly the same event, 14 years later (I was there in the fall, so the October timing lines up). This, then, would be the "Water Spider River Crossing".
According to the article this event was a relay. That made me recall that the guy on the right is carrying that white T-shaped object on his back to simulate carrying somebody; I think the last person on the relay team had to do that.
Water Spider fail. The article explained that those donut-shaped things actually float, and the competitors try to pole their way across. It also says that Moat Wall Climbing and Castle Wall Climbing, seen in earlier photos, were separate events, which I don't doubt. Although it doesn't mention the wall hurdle and the plank walk events. Maybe they were demonstration sports that didn't catch on.
This is an American couple I met there. Their last name, I believe, was Hourigan; he was a US government scientist of some sort. They had heard about the event the same way I had, by reading a short blurb in "Time" magazine that mentioned the event, the data, and the location, and made it sound a lot more mysterious (and talent-laden) than it actually was.]]>
Their lineup really is a succession of .231 hitters giving way to .181 hitters, followed by somebody hitting .216. Out ninth batter last night, Josh Wilson, was hitting .241, which is sort of what you expect, except he actually had the fourth-best average in our starting lineup. Except for Ichiro, nobody on the whole team is hitting above .257. the most amazing statistic in the ESPN article is the claim that our designated hitters are hitting .190. Is there an option to decline the DH and let your pitchers hit? As the article says, "you still managed to field a lineup with more hackers than a convention of former Microsoft employees."
In other Mariners new, Felix Hernandez is having statistically the best season among AL pitchers; he's is in first place, although sometimes by a small amount, in every statistical category you can think of. Nonetheless, due to the anemic Mariners offense, some blown saves the bullpen, and bad luck (even among Mariners pitchers he has the worst run support), his record is 12-11. Comparing that to C.C. Sabathia's 20-6 record on a good team brings up the question of whether he has a chance of winning the Cy Young Award. I actually think David Price of Tampa Bay should win it; he is statistically ahead of Sabathia but behind Hernandez, but looking over his season log he has only had one really bad game, whereas Hernandez and Sabathia have had 3 or 4 each (one of which Sabathia actually won, due to Yankee bats bailing him out). But I suspect Sabathia will win it, unless Price gets to 20 wins (he's 17-6 right now) in which case it will probably come down to one of them pitching particularly well during next week's Tampa Bay-New York series, or failing that, whoever's team wins the AL East.
There has also been a bit of a dust-up because Mariners CEO Howard Lincoln is sad that Mariners fans think he's incompetent. In this case there is no doubt; Howard Lincoln is in fact a gigantic idiot. Forget the managers he has chosen or the players he has signed; the fundamental flaw is his persistent strategy of developing the farm system so he can trade young players for 33-year-old former stars. His current complaints, coupled with other weirdnesses like his statement that the Mariners didn't win the World Series in 2001 because of 9/11, only raise the question of whether he is merely terrible, or actually a kook.]]>
I mention this because when software designers think of productivity they seem to focus on the first kind of productivity--helping the user do something they already do, but faster--not the second--preventing the user from losing work they have done. What really annoys me about computers is when I spend time on something and then it is lost. When I worked at Softimage back in the mid-1990s, I discovered they their 3D editing product, and its competitors, were notorious for crashing a lot. But they also all had really good auto-save, so when they crashed you just restarted them, and you only lost a few seconds worth of work. This would horrify a typical Microsoft developer--just engineer it not to crash, and then you don't have to worry about auto-save! But very niche-y products like 3D tools tend to be designed by people who used to be the customer, so to them it can make perfect sense to crash and recover, because they understand that from a user's perspective, that is the behavior thet will make them feel like they lost the least amount of productivity.
In fact I realize that this is why Outlook's incessant "the attachment to this email has changed, would you like to save it" messages annoy me. A little bit of it is because I have to think, and make sure I closed the right email--the one that I just opened that Word decided to reformat on its own, not the one that I've spent 15 minutes typing. But it's mainly the attitude, that the designers of the software have chosen not to distinguish between work that the computer did for me, which is completely repeatable, and work I did myself, which I can only do by spending the same amount of time again.
Just today somebody I know posted on Facebook, "screwed by cloud computing again (hit send on long email, says service is down and email is gone)." This is actually my biggest complaint about cloud services--the fact that you are often dependent on a browser to store your in-progress work, and browsers don't auto-save things. It's not that browsers couldn't do this; they could fairly easily remember that you had a chunk of form data typed in the last time you visited a particular page. They just don't, for no obvious reason except that people don't think of "not losing the user's time investment" as the key to making them feel productive. Instead they prefer improvements like making their javascript execute half a second faster, which may in the end make the more productive, but doesn't make them FEEL more productive.]]>
A man is sentenced to die by the king. As the verdict is announced, the man says, "Wait! If you spare my life, I promise that in one year, I will teach your horse to talk. If I fail, you can kill me then." The king is intrigued, and figures he has nothing to lose, so he agrees. Afterwards, the man's friend says, "Are you crazy? You'll never teach the king's horse to talk." The man laughs and says, "Think of it this way. I have an extra year to live, and a lot can happen in a year. I might die. The king might die. And who knows, maybe the horse will learn to talk."
This is actually one of my favorite stories (see, Pop-Pop, I was listening). I like the bias to action and the "What do I have to lose?" attitude, but also the wisdom that if the worst thing that can happen isn't worse than what's going to happen anyway, why not give it a shot? I recall telling this story during my PowerShell days, possibly in regards to the alleged virus fiasco in 2005 (of course, what actually happened there was I got yelled at by the security team, and Lee won an award from our VP for customer engagement; not sure what the moral of THAT story is).
I was reminded of this story because I'm watching an internal presentation where somebody told this same story, except a) It took them 7 1/2 minutes, not the 20-30 seconds it would take to tell my version above, b) they told it badly, and c) they completely botched the moral, trying to turn it into something about "People like to convince themselves that the horse will learn to speak", which has absolutely nothing to do with the original story.
P.S. Oh gak, the presentation just ended with a little 45-second coda about "How the story turned out", which manages to confuse the moral even more. GREATEST. PRESENTATION. EVER!!!]]>
He spoke for a little bit and then took questions. If you've read his book there wasn't anything particularly new in what he said, although it was interesting to hear some of the stories directly from him. He has said that about 20% of doctors resist the idea of checklists, so during Q&A I asked him about the adoption of checklists (and similar moves away from "fighter pilot" mode) among resisters in industries like aviation and construction. He said that part of it was the older generation retiring, but there also tended to be a point where the government stepped in and imposed rules, which then led to everybody needing to adopt a checklist.
I realized, however, that we have been looking at checklists for software in the wrong way. A typical checklist we have from EE might be a code review checklist which had items like:
The problem with these items is that each of them is something you have to check for on almost every line, which means you wind up looking at a little bit of code, then the checklist, then the code, etc. Or you wind up memorizing the checklist, but if you can hold all that stuff in your mind, you might forget something occasionally, which is what a checklist is designed to avoid. As Gawande explains, checklists are not meant for "heat of battle" kind of checks--that is where your existing expertise come in.
Instead, checklists are for use during "pause points"--natural points where people have a moment to consider a checklist, such as the beginning and end of activities--and are for checking the very simple things that "everybody knows" but that people sometimes forget because they have so much to keep in their heads. The proper way to construct a code review checklist would be to conduct a root-cause analysis of issues that slipped through earlier code reviews, but following Gawande's advice, it would include items like:
I'm making that up, but hopefully you get the idea. These are really simple things that people mostly do right, but sometimes mess up, and there is a natural time to do them that is NOT when your head is buried in the code.]]>
In Engineering Excellence at Microsoft, I think we often come across as being the central government telling other people what to do, with no experimental results to back it up. Here is a recent comment on Mini-Microsoft: "What's up with the EE team? I was listening to a presentation by Alan & most of his ideas are old (some blatantly taken from James Whittaker). Can we get some originality & accountability in that team?" Now, we have been talking about piloting more things ourselves (and encouraging others to pilot more things), but the point does hit home, and is especially important at Microsoft, about which the quote (from Gawande's article) "there was a deep-seated fear of risk and the uncertainties of change; many farmers dismissed new ideas as 'book farming.'" could be directly applied (c/farm/engineering team/). People at Microsoft have a virtually infinite ability to convince themselves that their team faces unique challenges, and therefore they have nothing to learn from other teams that have been successful (I think Steven Sinofsky's book is partly about the challenge of fighting that belief among the different teams in Windows).
Gawande writes, "There are, in human affairs, two kinds of problems: those which are amenable to a technical solution and those which are not." As it happens I recently took a course on "Adaptive Leadership", based on the book Leadership on the Line, which makes the same distinction--it talks about "technical challenges" and "adaptive challenges", with the adaptive ones being the tough ones that don't have a known solution. My favorite quote from the book is: "Leadership is the art of disappointing people at a rate they can tolerate" (see examples under "health care bill, disappointment with Barack Obama over"). The claim is that solving adaptive challenges, by their nature, is going to be disruptive: things that can be solved by business-as-usual are by definition merely technical challenges. I think many in EE expect that we can figure out all the answers on how to develop software and all we have left is the technical challenge of spreading the word. But the more time I spend here, the more I am convinced that the pilot program approach that Gawande talks about is a much better way to go. I think this will disappoint some people; hopefully they will be able to tolerate it.]]>
Yup, sure enough this was the location of one of the new Microsoft retail stores--only the second one in the country, according to Wikipedia.
Microsoft had done a good job advertising the store in the mall; in addition to the banner, those colored signs on the railing glass are ads for the store, and there were also stickers on the food court tables and ads on electronic billboards inside the mall. This is the front view of the store:
and here is the inside:
The merchandise is set up on tables, with an attempt to categorize them, for example these are "Medium laptops":
There is a place to get questions answered:
the obligatory Surface machines:
and the also-obligatory Xbox demo area set up to look like a living room (which they had also replicated in a seating area in the mall in front of the store, I assume as part of the initial advertising for the place):
Naturally, you might draw some comparison to a certain other store, such as this example which happens to be just a few locations down the mall from the Microsoft Store:
(Let's run that Microsoft Store interior shot again for comparison:)
While there are some obvious differences (our tables are natural wood, theirs are white), there are also similarities: the way the merchandise is laid out, the army of bright-t-shirt-wearing staffers, the answer station, etc. (the store also has a small theatre in the back, which I haven't seen in Apple stores, where they give talks on topics like sharing photos and intro to Windows 7).
I don't think there is anything wrong with this, any more than it's wrong for a Honda showroom to look a lot like a Toyota showroom. Apple has figured out a good way to get people to buy computers and get problems fixed, so why not take a similar approach? In fact, when I think back to my teenage years haunting computer stores like Futur Byte in downtown Montreal, it's more amazing that those store were able to sell anything at all: they had some machines laid out to play with, but nobody to show them to you. It was entirely geared towards people who already knew what computer they wanted and just needed a place (in those pre-Internet days) to make the actual purchase. Presumably the owners of the stores, who were computer experts themselves, had the thought "What kind of store would I want", and the answer was what they produced.
Now people realize that a lot of folks who are buying computers are a bit hesitant about which one to buy, and appreciate having a cheerful t-shirt-clad assistant walk them through the decision. In fact, the real precedent for this type of store is a car dealer, but more like a car dealer in the old days, when there was a proliferation of models that changed from year to year, and no readily available source of information on them. In this environment a salesman expected to begin every customer conversation with some variant of "So, what will you be using the car for?" (In a flip-flop which I think might actually meet the book definition of irony, the automobile industry has changed enough, due to consolidation and other factors, that a car dealer is more like an old-fashioned computer store--every time I've bought a car I went into the dealer knowing exactly which model and accessories I wanted, and only needed the salesman to write the order).
As it happens, Microsoft tried the direct retail route once before, with a store called microsoftSF in San Francisco which opened in 1999. You can read the press announcement about the opening, and also an article about it shutting down a couple of years later. It must be ordained that I stumble upon every Microsoft attempt at a retail presence, because I also visited the microsoftSF store, presumably about ten years ago. As proof, I offer this photo of a mousepad I bought there:
Here is a (blurry cell-phone camera, like all the others) close-up of the logo:
You can tell from the press release about microsoftSF, which matches my recollection, that back then the store was set up to sell Microsoft software; it wasn't trying to sell entire solutions like the new Microsoft Stores are. I think the new approach is the right one and I expect the store, which was quite busy when I visited, to be successful. The theatre idea, in particular, is good enough that I expect Apple to borrow it back from us.
The only quibble I have is with the "Microsoft Signature" brand, which is marketed as a mysterious special sauce that we include on computers sold at the Store. I couldn't see anything on the table displays that explained what it was; in a booklet they handed out detailing the services available at the store, it explains that the computer is "modified for even more reliability and streamlined to be as fast as it can be." Then it lists the various Microsoft software that is included with the Signature models--Windows Live Essentials, IE8, etc. In other words, as this geek.com article points out, the computers come without the manufacturer's crapware, but they do come loaded with our stuff...I won't call it our crapware, since it's basically things that a) you would likely download very soon anyway or b) things that shouldn't slow down your computer if you don't use them. But still, to continue the car dealer analogy, to a typical consumer it might sound A WHOLE LOT like the rust-proof undercoating and window tinting that car salesman try to pack onto your new car (for your benefit, natch), and which people nowadays have mostly been trained to say no to, on the understanding that the dealers are really using it to further their own aims (a last attempt to extract $$$ from your wallet after you've used your Consumer Reports dealer cost information to squeeze their profit to a minimum). I know the stuff is free and is actually useful to a lot of people, but I think it might be best if Microsoft rebadged it as an option (similar to how Store employees will install, for free, any other software that you buy at the same time as the computer)--rather than an unadulterated benefit.]]>
Meanwhile, for something a little smaller and more Carribean, Studio East is doing "Once on this Island", also closing on November 1. Another great performance by a great cast, and I think one of my children is in that also.
These are tough times for non-profit theatres--Second Story Repertory needs $80,000 to survive, and Taproot almost burned down. So, please get out there and support the arts. Thank you!]]>
The idea came to me during a class on the book Egonomics. That book talks about how people's strengths can become weaknesses if they do too much of them, which is not a new idea. For example, being dedicated is good, but if you overdo dedication, it turns into obsession. That sort of thing. In class they called this a "counterfeited strength", although that term isn't used in the book as far as I can tell.
What I would explain in Leverage Your Weakness is how you should flip this around and view EVERY weakness as the sign of a counterfeited strength, which means that the person actually possesses a strength that they are just overdoing. Take away the overdoing and presto, what's left is a strength. If you have somebody who gets obsessed over their work, don't view this as something that they should just stop; you view obsession as an indication that they have a natural tendency to be dedicated (a good thing) which they are doing too much of. So rather than tell them to stop obsessing, you work to dial it back a bit, so it turns into a positive (I could throw in some fancy math about how if you multiply two negative numbers you get a positive number, that'll impress those MBA types).
The book could list a bunch of weaknesses, show the corresponding latent strength, and then give advice on how to take advantage of that. For example, somebody who likes to show off all the facts that they know. Instead of telling them to shut up, you recognize showing off for what it really is: counterfeited knowledge. This person has the ability to retain lots of information, which is something you can leverage if you just stop them from annoying everybody else while doing it. One example of the guidance there would be to dispatch them to learn new things and then present them to the team in a formal setting where people expect to hear facts spouting out of their mouth. See, just like that the weakness becomes a strength.
I really think I could turn almost any weakness into a counterfeited strength. Somebody can't make decisions? That means they have a counterfeited strength in considering multiple options. Inability to listen to others without interrupting with your own ideas? Must be counterfeited creativity. Yells at other people? Counterfeited passion for the job. And so it goes. Just remember, every time it works I get a quarter.]]>
Reading a wine review site? Watching Masterpiece Theatre videos on YouTube? Reviewing county-by-county results from the 1956 presidential election?
No, it turns out they are enjoying the star attraction of a Windows 7 Launch Party. These events are an opportunity for Microsoft employees to spread the word about Windows 7. I gather the idea is that you invite your friends over and give them a demo--like a party for Tupperware or Stampin' Up, except it's an operating system.
At first I thought this was ridiculous, and I've seen it generate some eye rolls at work, but I actually like it. I mean, why not? I've been using Windows 7 at work and it really *is* pretty slick. Getting to be an early adopter of cool technology is a perk of being an employee. In fact somebody in my group signed up to host (there's a selection process to determine who is actually allowed to host) and it would be interesting to attend. I don't know if I will get quite as excited as the woman in the middle of the picture above, who appears to be suffering heart palpitations at the sight of the new taskbar, but there is enough eye candy in the product to rival anything that Pampered Chef could produce.
Here's a fact: Windows XP came out in October 2001. Going with the generally-accepted consensus on the quality of Vista, and ignoring the (correct) claims that Windows XP SP2 really was a new release of the OS, that means that Microsoft hasn't release an [insert adjective here] operating system since my son was born--the one who just started second grade. No wonder he wrote an essay on our new Mac, which recently replaced a flaky PC, that began, "One time there was a kid who loved the computer, his name was Noah." Hopefully with Windows 7 we can start winning back those hard-to-please seven-year-olds.]]>
Although you might feel virtuous in declaring that our customers are not stupid, it's actually dangerous. I suppose it's better than looking down on your customers. But if you say "Our customers are as smart as us, they are just think differently", then you will be tempted to view their lack of understanding about how our software works as a sign that things just haven't been explained well enough. Once they see the model, you expect them to figure it out.
On the contrary, if some of our customers really aren't as smart as us, then you have to design the software so they can understand it. If they can't figure it out, it's not an explanation problem; it's a design problem. Explaining it again may be easier than fixing the software, but it won't help.
Now, I think what the person meant was something like "Our customers needs aren't stupid" or "Our customers' understanding of how our software works isn't stupid." That is certainly correct; you have to know your customers so you can design software that works for them. But if you get to know them and discover they aren't all geniuses like yourself, then that's the way it is.]]>
Meanwhile "Client+Cloud" really captures the idea much better. You have a piece of software which a rich client of some sort, be it slurped down automatically in the browser or installed standalone, and it runs locally but also communicates with the cloud. So Hotmail, Windows, Xbox, Office, and almost everything else Microsoft is working on fits "Client+Cloud" designation--which means it make much more sense to say that it is the future of Microsoft, since it is also the present of Microsoft.]]>
"The South Whidbey Record welcomes letters from its readers. Letters should be typewritten and not exceed 300 words. They must be signed and include a daytime phone. Send to editor [at symbol] southwhidbeyrecord.com."
The reason I was reading the SWR is because they had an article about Last Exit, a play my son is in. It's performing in Langley, which is a bit of a hike to get to from the mainland, but the play is well worth it.]]>