In-Between-Jobs-Project, Part 4: More help ...

you can't do it without help
Originally uploaded by jmeyer.

After I built the two sides it was time to assemble the basic structure. After that, a bunch of 2x4s needed to be cut. To make hauling wood back and forth easier on my old back I recruited my two boys again. They were very eager to help. And it was much easier to keep them busy this way and away from the tools ...

In-Between-Jobs-Project, Part 3: Almost Done ...

Look, almost done
Originally uploaded by jmeyer.

... well, not quite but in the picture you can see the first of two sides. The plan calls for 6 4x4 redwood posts set in concrete. I slightly modified that. INstead of putting them in conrete (which makes the whole thing unmoveable), the whole structure rests on pressure-treated 4x4s. I know, I know, you shouldn't expose kids to pressure treated stuff but no worries, they will be covered. Anyway, that pressure treated 4x4s are then anchored in the ground using big construction stakes (scary looking nails (3/4 " thick and 3 feet long). That thing ain't going anywhere...

In-Between-Jobs-Project, Part 2: Find a site and hire helpers

Jonas hard at work
Originally uploaded by jmeyer.

After we got the pile of wood we now need to figure out where to put it. Oh yeah, and hire help. We recruit from our own family. Even though Jonas doesn't quite know the difference between centimeters and inches, he more than makes up for it by being big and strong (for a 2-year old).

Now that we leveled the site, we can start building the structure. The plan for it I bought on the Web. Makes it much simpler than trying to guess the dimensions from just a picture. Plan was cheap too, only $14 and it gives you the list of things to get (pile of wood, etc.).

In-Between-Jobs-Project, Part 1: A pile of wood

A pile of wood
Originally uploaded by jmeyer.

You may (or may not) remember that I did a little post-IBM project between my jobs at IBM and Yahoo!. This time I am not redoing a bathroom. before starting to work at Google I decided to do something nice for my two boys. I bought a pile of wood and turned it into a playstructure.

My new job ...

... will be at the best company to work for in 2006, according to Forbes Magazine. Yes, you guessed right, it is Google. I am leaving Yahoo after 16 months and will be heading over to Google in a couple of weeks. I have my last day at Yahoo! on Wednesday, will then take some time off to build a play structure in the backyard for my two boys and then show up at Google towards the end of the month. It was an interesting time at Yahoo! but hasn't quite matched my expectations. I am pretty fired up about joining Google and will let you know how it goes ...

Go Sharks!

The guy in the picture is my buddy Chris at the Shark Tank, home of the San Jose Sharks. We have been enjoying a 10-game plan and it was the last regular season game. Although it was fan appreciation day and they were handing out prizes left and right, we didn't win anything. The game was pretty exciting, although the Sharks lost in overtime. But the good thing is, they qualified for the Stanley Cup playoffs. Can't wait to go to the next game.

An Inconvenient Truth

If you haven't already, go watch it. It's Al Gore's documentary about Global Warming and I think it's very well made. Watching it leaves you with this feeling of sadness and depression. I hope as many people as possible get to watch this and maybe start worrying about it so that eventually a politician with an interest in the environment and its protection gets to be the president of the United States. Oh yeah, and tonight, I hope Al Gore wins the Oscar for his film. That would be well-deserved and add extra publicity to his cause. Hopefully, there are not too many oil companies sponsoring the academy awards.

And if you really think about it, there is so much we can do. But as long as the government doesn't promote alternative fuel/energy the people are unlikely to change here in the U.S. unless it hurts or helps their wallets. So make alternative fuel cheaper by subsidizing it. Pay half the cost for solar electricity and require every new house built to have some form of alternative energy usage, whether it is using solar to heat water or produce electricity. Just like Al says, we have the technology, let's use it.

What I do at Yahoo!

What I do at Yahoo!
Originally uploaded by jmeyer.

Here is a screenshot of what I have worked on at Yahoo over the past 12 months. It's called Contextual Shortcuts and it's running as part of Yahoo! Mail. As of today, you will have to use the old style interface, we are hoping to add it to the new Yahoo! Mail Beta sometime this year.

You can read about what it is in the Yahoo! Mail help pages in the Shortcuts section.

The system has many parts to it but in short the Contextual Shortcuts platform tries to indentify interesting and relevant pieces of text and then offer you an in-place user experience that is appropriate for the detected item. For example, if we detect an address, we will show you a map and let you add it to your address book. If we find the name of a place (e.g., New York City) we offer you Search results and a map. All of this without requiring the user to leave their current context (that's one of the reasons we named it Contextual Shortcuts).

We are adding more features and improving detection right now and if all goes well you will see this elsewhere too. Wish us luck.

Back to the roots - another name story

I started this blog a while ago because I thought I'd share my experiences using my first name here in the U.S., especially in coffee shops. Now, that doesn't happen that often anymore, simply because I now get my caffeine fix at work. One of the more enjoyable benefits at Yahoo! is the free coffee. We have fully staffed espresso bars where you can get everything from a simple espresso to something more complex like Low Fat Sugar Free Vanilla Half Decaf Latte with Extra Foam. Personally, I'd like to outlaw the latter but unfortunately I don't have a lot of say in this. Anyhow, the name problem in coffee shops went away but one problem that still lingers is the email problem. The email problem is this. I sent someone an email and end it with the line

-Joerg

Clearly, I don't know how to spell my own name because a large number of people (especially first timers) will start their reply with Jeorg. Drives me nuts. Makes me wnat to butcher their name too. Now how hard is it to get Joerg right? It's only five letters and only 4 if you were to use the proper umlaut ö. Do people not proof read? One thing everyone should do is to at least get the name right. But maybe that's too much to ask.

Super Bowl XLI, the Inverted TiVo Experience

Everyone always talks about the Superbowl ads and how great they are. So I programmed my TiVo (it's really a Comcast DVR but everyone knows what TiVo is) to tape (oh excuse me, record) the Superbowl, all 4 hours and 5 minutes of the broadcast. And as I was watching the Superbowl yesterday it dawned on me that A Superbowl TiVo recording is probably one of the only shows, if not hte only, that people fast-forward through, just to get to the commercials. In a way, it's inverted TiVo. Kind of odd, isn't it. Oh and by the way, most ads were rather boring, except for the Bud commercials. They are mostly funny or cute but the beer still sucks. With that, congrats to the Colts and too bad for the Bears. At least Rex Grossmann lived up to the very low expectations that compared him to one of the worst quarterbacks in SuperBowl history, even before the game had started.

Scientifically Funny - Nailing jelly to a wall

I have been enjoying the blog from Improbable Research for a while and found a post today that investigated the feasibility of nailing jelly to a wall. It is scientifically funny.

When seemingly good ideas backfire ...

... or the 101 dumbest moments in business. Check it out.

Painful Presentations at Work

We have probably all witnessed one of these, either at school, at work or at some event in our spare time. A painful presentation. What makes a painful presentation you may ask? Here is my list of things that indicate a painful presentation:

1. The presenter apologizes for the readability of his/her slides. Never a good thing, if you know it's unreadable, don't use it or break it into more than one slide. Making good slides takes skill and a few tries but everyone who gives presentation should know that a picture says more than thousand words and is a good thing. On the other hand, too much text on a slide and too many slides make for a bad presentation.
   
2. Soft-spoken presenters. I know not everyone can have a booming voice and assert himself well and look confident. However, if the entire audience has to collectively hold their breath to be able to hear the words than you are witnessing a painful presentation because a listener spends all his concentration on making out the words.
3. Presenters that can't speak the language. I know, sometimes they don't have a choice but to me it's the same issue as #2. It is so tiring to make out the words and try to understand what the hell is being sad that I lose interest and look out the window. The inability to master a language coupled with a monotone voice simply sucks.
   
4. A presenter who tries to be funny but who is not. Yeah, I know, we all like to be comedians but very few can pull that off. So , unless you have a good feel for an audience and what kind of style they respond to, keep to your roots. After all, in my line of work, most presenters are scientists or engineers and teh majority is not funny.
5. A color-blind presenter. How can you tell? Look at the slides. They may be readable but looking at them makes you want to vomit or reminds youof wallpaper from the seventies? Than you are witnessing a presentation by someone who is blind, color-blind or simply has bad taste.

So, I think you can survive a presentation if only one of the above holds true and the presenter can offset one shortcoming like crowded slides with being a good speaker. But if you can check off more than one of the above issues in a presentation then it is time get out. Reminds me of the Southwest slogan: Want to get away? All I can say is run, run fast otherwise you will be wasting an hour or more of your life that will never get back. What else can save a bad presentation. Well, free food of course but it'd better be good or else your brain and your stomach will hurt.

Cool bike, but ...

The hyperbike probably won't fit in the bike lane and I am not sure I want to take this on the road and take on a Chevy Suburban.

The 8 foot wheels are super cool though. I just have my doubts about stopping when going superfast.

He did it again!

Do you remember Marco Materazzi? He was the cheesy, Italian defender that got head-butted by Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 Soccer World Cup Final. And oh well, it happened again. In a Serie A game in Italy, he got head-butted again by a guy named Delvecchio after allegedly provoking him. Makes you wonder what on earth he always tells the other players. I started playing soccer when I was 5 years old and kept playing on teams until I was 27. I never played professionally but games were still competitive and occasionally tempers flare. Unfortunately, provoking others is part of the game but in 20 years of playing I have never wanted to head-butt someone. And I have been called many things in games. For instance, when I was 14, my team was participating in a youth tournament in Denmark. We were well on our way in beating a norwegian team when things got a little nasty. Many fouls, yellow cards but we scored another goal. It was then, that the other team got frustrated and started calling us Nazis just because we were a German team. That didn't sit too well with us but we didn't head-butt or beat up the other players even though we wanted too. Having said that, it's unfortunate that Zidane and Delvecchio didn't keep their emotions in check. But I can't help to dislike Materazzi. Instead of standing up to others like a man he does it behind the referees back and when the other player touches him, he goes down as if shot with an AK 47. I think Materazzi is the epidemy of soccer. Instead of focusing on skill and being physical within the limits of the rules he chooses provocation to unsettle his opponents. One of these days he will get head-butted again and maybe then, getting up won't be as easy for him. I for one won't feel any sympathy for him.

Want to buy an island?

If you have enough cash or are in good standing with a bank you can buy the "Principality of Sealand"!! Wikipedia has a nice article about it. For anywhere between £65,000,000 and £504,000,000 it can be yours ... and it's butt-ugly too.

Want to go 300mpH at 70.5mpg?

Do you? Then you will need an Acabion. Apparently, what matters is weight and profile, the opposite of SUVs.

Debugging skills -- It's not Rocket Science!

Every programmer knows all too well that there will be times when (non-trivial) code does odd things. Yes, I am talking about bugs. Often times they are simple because they easily reproducible and the faulty behavior can be seen in a simplified environment. But what if the bug is not easily reproducible. That's where good debugging skills come to play.

Sometimes debugging feels like detective work but in almost all cases it really isn't much more than breaking a big problem into many smaller problems. Yes, simply breaking an input down to smaller pieces until a problem disappears is often a good way of making one's life a lot easier. Besides having a good grasp of eliminating possibilities, a decent knowledge of debugging techniques and tools is certainly helpful. On my last project, more than once I was asked to help fix some bugs by other developers. When I asked them what they have tried so far or found out they usually said nothing. They just needed help. My first thought was that it was laziness. ASking someone else to fix a problem is certainly easier than fixing it yourself. But after interacting with them it dawned on me that they often had no idea of how to get a handle on the problem. Just asking questions about how and when the problem presents itself are often not asked. Well, bugs never come with a manual on how to fix them so you better ask questions if you want to fix them.

Another helpful aspect for debugging is to know the code itself. A lot of times I have found that developers didn't even know how to debug their own code. Having a good knowledge of the structure of the code helps to eliminate potential sources of errors. I can't claim for myself that I am the world's best debugger nor do I want to do that. But I was surprised how few people actually can debug and provide useful information when helping to find fix a bug. Makes you wonder if the CS curriculum should be extended by a mandatory class: "Introduction to Debugging"

It's not rocket science -- like so many other things applying common sense and using the good ol' divide and conquer technique helps a good deal.

Ridiculous ...

As I was reading the newspaper today I saw an ad to lease a Bentley Continental. The down payment seemed normal and for only $2299/month for 42 month you could drive around in a Bentley. My mortgage payment is less than that ... I guess one would need a lot of disposable income.

The most popular sport in the world ... ? Definitely not American Football.

I am a big sports fan and I like to watch sports, especially team sports that involve a ball. I have never been a big fan of American Football but I do like to watch the highlights. However, there is a few things that simply rub me the wrong way about American Football. First of all, things can't get more artificial than in the NFL. Reviewable, non-reviewable play, eligible and ineligible receivers, two minute warning, taking a knee. All bullshit. But what always bothered me the most actually has nothing to do with the rules or any team and it's really not any team's fault. It's the NFL's fault. They call the Super Bowl winner the "World champs". But hey they are not alone, the NBA champion often refes to itself as the World champ and so does the "World Series" winner in baseball. I know, I know, many Americans believe the world revolves around their three big sports and there probably isn't a better American Football team in the entire world than those that play in NFL. But that's certainly not true anymore for the NBA and baseball. Or do I need to remind everyone of how the basketball dream team came up short repeatedly in the last few years. My problem with this is, that you should only call yourself the world champ if you even gave the rest of the world a chance to participate. Either by qualifying or by inviting teams from abroad to play. And I mean to qualify by playing the sport not by buying yourself into the league through means of an expansion team.
Anyway, as I was reading some sports news today, I came across a quote from the San Diedo Chargers coach, Marty Schottenheimer: ""It took me back to the old AFL days where you just try to find a way to have one more point than they do," Chargers coach Marty Schottenheimer said. "It was the kind of game that makes the NFL the most popular sport in the world. If you couldn't enjoy this -- other than coach Lewis and his crowd -- then you might not enjoy football."
He said this after a remarkable comeback of his team which in itself was probably very exciting and one of the better moments in the NFL. But it truly shows how the three big American sports (NFL, MLB and NBA) have a self-perception problem. Yes, they are not the center of the world and there is many people in the rest of the world that don't even care about any of them. But one thing for sure, American Football is far from being the most popular sport. If you search around a little on the web you will find many top 10 of most popular sports and I have yet to find a list on which you can find American Football. The so-called big three should watch the NHL a bit. They are playing for the Stanley Cup and the winner is the Stanley CUp champ. Nothing more and nothing less. The NFL, MLB and the NBA should do the same.

So Marty, the Super Bowl may be one of the most watched sporting events in the world but to me it's not clear whether it's for the actual game or the halftime show. But football is definitely not the most popular sport in the world. Just count the number of people on a given weekend that participate in a soccer game versus an American football game.