40' Satellite Dishes and other things

In a recent post I talked about the house I grew up in, which had, among other things, a 40' satellite dish (one of 5 working dishes) in addition to two towers, tracking domes and a whole treasure trove of cool electronic gear. I had several people comment that it was hard to believe, so just to add some more proof, here's a shot from Google maps:

Each circle is a satellite dish, with the biggest towards the bottom being the 40-footer on a patch of land we purchased from our neighbors. If I could zoom in more, you'd even be able to see the ex-NASA tracking field command center building that my brother got to use as his "playhouse" growing up. Good times.

Call me anything you want...except in Quebec

My official title is "Premier Field Engineer" which means that I travel a lot working with our customers who hold Premier contracts. Because of the world-wide nature of our business, we sometimes have to travel to different places. This often means that we have to deal with different cultures. Turns out we now have to be careful what our title is, too:

 

On Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 the Quebec Court of Appeal denied Microsoft's motion seeking leave to appeal the decision of the Superior Court which held that only engineers, member of the Ordre d'ingenieurs, can use the designation "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer" in the Province of Quebec.

 

Microsoft respects the Court's decision and has met with the Ordre d'ingenieur's to agree to a phase out plan. Non members of the Ordre d'ingenieurs of Quebec may not use the title "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer" in Quebec without risking legal proceedings being commenced against them by the Ordre d'ingenieurs. In the Province of Quebec,the acronym, "MCSE" is the designated title by Microsoft and this designation cannot be elaborated even by MCSE's of other Canadian provinces, when working in the Province of Quebec.

While that ruling is specific to MCSE, it looks like it applies to anyone who is an engineer who isn't a member of that society. So it looks like I am a Premier Field E from here on out (at least in Quebec)

Using Team System with WSS 3.0

Brian Keller has posted the notes from the presentation on converting Team Foundation Server to use WSS v3.0. I'd personally still recommend teams wait until Orcas when 3.0 should be baked in, but if it is a need in your organization, here's the info. 

I've been tagged...

Oh dear. I've been tagged by Alan Ridlehoover. I've seen it go around, and I figured once it got past Brady Gaster I'd be safe, but I guess not. So, here's 5 things you may not know about me:

1. Like Alan, I am a drummer. And a Guitar player. And a keyboardist. And a bassist. In fact, I spent many years in a Christian Punk/Ska band called Atomsmashers Named Suzie. Our really good friends were in a band called SaGoh 24/7, but they kept going and are hitting it big as Anberlin. I also own two gigantic stuffed Animal things, one of which is in the picture hanging over my cubicle wall at one of my previous jobs.

2. I've always been a geek, but I wasn't always going to be a geek as a career. A lot of my family is in the medical field as nurses or paramedics, so I was going to follow in their footsteps. I ended up joining a local fire department, and made it all the way to Assistant Chief before I got married and moved.

3. I don't have any certifications, nor do I have a college degree. Actually, I think I got the Java Certified Programmer certification one time, but that's about it. Of course, my current job requires me to have them, so I'll probably have several before October (since that's when my review is).

4. I grew up in a household my friends wanted to film a Sci-Fi movie in. We had 5 satellite dishes (all working, one of them a 40-footer), a 200' tower in the front yard, a generator housed in an old army shelter that could power ours and our neighbor's houses, and all sorts of other random stuff.

This is the main satellite dish. He bought it for $40 from a local TV station under the pretense that he move it. Luckily we already had a base for it (it was supporting a measly 32' dish at the time), so it was a no brainer. You can also see yet another tracker - it's the domed looking thing which rotates 360' vertically and nearly 180' vertically. The one in the front yard has 2 10" telescopes last time I checked. You can also see yet another tower.

 

5. I have a secret passion to take over Microsoft with Ruby. I was very excited when I heard MS hired John Lam, because I want to see the Ruby/.NET platform grow. Perl's fun, and I never really got into Python, but something about Ruby tickled my ribs, and I hope to find new and creative uses for it.

So that's it. You've just wasted probably 15 minutes reading meaningless drivel about myself. But, since I had to play along, so are Corey Haines, James Carr, Tobin Titus, Ron Jeffries and Andy Hunt.

Tech Support and Profits

Recently I was looking through some stuff, and found a quote I posted from Kelly Anderson on the Maverick Software Development list:

Quality in real money terms (and that is the way we keep score in business) is the inverse of the expense of technical support. If technical support is a profit center, then quality in the terms you think about normally are inverted. Therefore, if you wish to have high quality, you should ensure that technical support never becomes a profit center.

This is suddenly relevant to me again because the organzation I work for is a cost center for our company. However, because we are part of the "Services" organization, and because we deliver proactive services that can be seen as "profitable", there is always a debate about how we can increase revenue for the company.

From the time I started I thought this was a bad idea. In fact, some of my coworkers and I had a spirited debate about it over dinner after an onsite visit. My view point is this: If we are to be trusted advisors to our customers, then we can't be involved in selling services or products, and we have to walk a fine line between identifying spots they need help, and services which would just be profitable.

But the clarity of Kelly's quote is really the phrase I was looking for. We can't, nor should we be, a profit center. The fact that we offer proactive services makes that muddy, but our core mission should be to offer solutions and advice which is best for our customers. This may mean suggesting non-company products if that is appropriate, and not trying to shoehorn our customer's needs into our products, just because they are ours.

For example, we had a discussion on one of our lists because a field engineer's laptop died, and he had to use a hotel business center computer to retrieve some information. Now, he did it in a secure way, so it wasn't a problem, but some people made suggestions like wiping the computer after you used it, or carrying around a custom Windows PE disc with lots of NIC drivers.

But why not carry around a Linux LiveCD? Sure, I could see lots of people being up in arms, but if we don't have a solution, and there is a need, then we should identify that need to the right people, and find tools to fit the bill in between.

If we aren't willing to do that, then it becomes harder to be in the trusted advisor role. I want our products to work and fit the bill just as much as the next person, but I also don't want to force things just because they are ours.

The one thing you have, above everything else with your customers, is trust. If you can look them in the eye and tell them that your product is crap, and that there is something to fit their needs in the interim until you can get it fixed, that really means something. Look at our unit testing, or MSBuild, and compare them to NUnit and NAnt. To be able to say to a customer that NUnit is a better unit testing framework, but that our Unit Test has good integration with TFS and is getting better gains a lot of respect, and usually wins the customer over. Helping a customer use TFS with Linux and Rails probably won that team over.

So thanks Kelly for driving home something that had been floating around in my head for a while. I just hope that people pay attention to it.

Not speaking at Agile 2007

Well, we got the rejection letters today saying that our proposals for Agile 2007 weren't accepted. I say "we" and "our" because it looks like some bug sent out the rejections for everybody to everybody - so I got to see that mine was rejected alongside Bob Martin, Joshua Kerievsky, and others. I was pretty excited to see that the committee said it was an excellent proposal - until I realized they said that about most everyones, because they also sent out the comments.

I just realized that they also sent out all of the acceptance notices as well. Looks like there will be some good stuff this year!