Doug's Blog

On the move..

2006-08-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

Head on over to http://dwelzel.spaces.live.com/.

Bluetooth on the Desktop

2006-07-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

I love the Bluetooth capability built in to my car. I get in, it recognizes the phone and everything is handsfree.. perfect!

Why can’t I have the same thing sitting at my desk? I want my computer to recognize my phone and pop up a little message telling me who is calling. Maybe this could be taken a step further and allow me to initiate calls from my computer to my cell phone. I’m sure there are many cool extensions on this idea, but I just want the basics. Why? Simple, I constantly miss calls when I’m listening to music. The only way to get my attention when I’m listening to music is via IM, which isn’t exactly what I want.

I’ve been doing it all wrong…

2006-07-25T08:42:00.000-07:00

Eye opening, but not too surprising: This paper essentially argues that bike commuting isn’t as beneficial for the environment as you might think because it increases longevity, and during that time you use more resources than everyone else who ate sat around eating potato chips and dropped dead early. Combine this with Kate’s recent post about how much energy cars really consume and my world is upside down.

It’s pretty clear to me now that I should stop bike commuting, get a Hummer (actually, probably a Scion) and chow down. It is a relief actually. Every time I’m about to head out for a ride I’m faced with the question: should I ride or stay home and eat jelly beans? In my mind, jelly beans are one of the most perfect foods on earth, right up there with peanut butter (no, I’m not a fan of peanut butter jelly beans). The decision is so much easier now! I don’t have to go out and ride for a few hours just to enjoy some fresh beans. I can grab the jar, head over to the couch and call it a day. Hell, since I don’t have air conditioning, I could even take the jelly beans into my huge air conditioned SUV and drive around for the afternoon. This is going to be awesome.

Mountain Biking

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

After almost two years away from the dirt, I finally got the chance to hit the trails last weekend. Boy have I been missing out on some serious fun! Mountain biking is what drew me into this sport, but for some reason I always neglect going back to my roots. I think it comes down to the fact that road biking is simply easier. I can roll out of my garage and get a great ride in. Mountain biking always takes more preparation, as well as a drive.

Anyway, as I said, it was great to get back out on the trail. I went over to Tiger Mountain, which is about 20 minutes from my place. The route there starts with a 3 mile climb up a fire road and then rewards you with a magnificent 3 mile single track descent. This is followed by some more fire road riding and then another few miles of single track to get you back to the parking lot.

Right away I noticed how my skills have changed over the years. I remember how the initial climb used to kill me. In fact, I once wondered if I’d ever be able to make it without stopping. Now I can pull off the climb nonstop without even using my smallest front chainring. On the flipside, my technical skills have definitely deteriorated. I’m more timid on the single track and wasn’t taking the usual risks. It took me a while just to trust the bike’s capability and cruise over roots and small drop-offs.

Let’s hope it isn’t another couple of years before I get out there again..

I’m Going to France

2006-06-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

Since it looks like just about everybody is going to be thrown out of the Tour, I’m going to catch a redeye over there and do my part. I don’t need drugs, just an ample supply of Clif Bars.

More Impressions

2006-06-29T08:50:00.000-07:00

My tour of the Microsoft language/tool suite has been continuing nonstop. While I have many more thoughts about C# at this point I figured I’d take a minute to talk about the tools. Like many other people with a Unix background, I’ve spent most of my time with Emacs and make. Only in the past year did I spend significant time with Eclipse when I worked on a Java project. I was extremely impressed with Eclipse and was expecting the same from Visual Studio.

Unfortunately I have been a bit disappointed. I want to be fair and say that I believe Visual Studio is a far bigger and probably better product. My experience is limited to working with Visual C# and comparing that with writing Java with Eclipse. Anyway, I struggled for a long time to find some of the features I was used to in Eclipse and have learned that in some cases they simply aren’t there.

Two that come to mind are “organize imports” and incremental builds. In Eclipse you can simply write code and then hit the organize imports command to have all of the correct import statements added to your code. It is even smart enough to remove import statements if they are no longer necessary. There is no equivalent in Visual Studio. Sure, it has ways to auto resolve types and add the proper using statements, but the functionality is not as slick as that in Eclipse.

I’m still struggling with not having my IDE continuously building my project. In Eclipse I could just write code and instantly know what compiled and what didn’t. In VS I actually have to click Build to get the results. IMO, this has noticeable lengthened the build/compile/test cycle.

I won’t even start on the lack of refactoring tools. Anyway, all is not lost. I figured Visual Studio is a great product and I must be missing something, so I picked up a copy of Visual Studio Hacks and starting poking around the web. The good news is that by adding several plug-ins I was able to reclaim much of this functionality, save the incremental builds. I’m still learning my way around and I’m sure I’ll find more goodies in my exploration.

On the plus side, it is a very stable/fast product. Eclipse was a bit slow and prone to strange bugs. I have encountered nothing like that with Visual Studio. It is always very snappy and I can leave it running for days with no trouble. Now if only my fingers would adjust to the Windows keybindings….

First impressions of C#/.NET

2006-06-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

Now that I've been messing around with C# for a couple of weeks I figured it is time to report on some initial impressions. Today's topic: web services. The quicky summary is that I'm very impressed with the ease of putting together both a simple web service and client.

Writing a class which exposes methods via web service is just like writing any other class. The only difference is that you mark the methods you want exposed using the [WebMethod] attribute. For example, let's start with a very simple, classic example:


public class HelloWorld
{

    public Service () {
    }

    public string HelloWorld()
    {
        return "Hello World!!";
    }
}

To turn this into a service, you only need to make a few changes:


public class Service : System.Web.Services.WebService
{

    public Service () {
    }

    [WebMethod]
    public string HelloWorld()
    {
        return "Hello World!!";
    }
}

The rest is taken care of for you, including generation of the WSDL. I come from a world where you start writing the WSDL by hand and then use it to generate stubs for your service code. Believe me, building services this way is a huge relief.

Now, coming from an environment like Amazon makes you immediately skeptical of anything this automated. You start to wonder if it can really perform and how hard it will be to do anything "outside the box". I'll be honest, at this point I don't know the answers. I do know that I was able to get a service running in about 30 minutes, which is a huge productivity win even if I have to get more hands on later in the development process.

What about the client? Writing the code to call the service is just as simple. Once you have your WSDL generated, you can just point one of the provided tools at it to generate your client code. Out of the box you get a client library that can call the service both synchronously and asyncrhonously. Nice.

New Commute

2006-06-07T08:27:00.000-07:00

Now that I've settled in a bit, I've started bike commuting to Microsoft. All I have to say is... Wow! My commute distance when from 20 miles to 11 and is on much safer, more attractive roads. Yesterday's ride in took 35 minutes, which is about the same time it takes in a car. Of course my commute to Amazon, at 1:15 was better for training, but this fits in with life so much better. I can always make it longer if I really want to.

Day 2.2+

2006-06-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

Grumble.. Blogger totally ate my last post so I'm going to make this one quick.

I'm pretty well settled at this point. The second day included another half day of orientation and then I made my way over to my office. Waiting for me was a very nice Dell system (2 dual core processors) which I spent the remainder of the day configuring.

I wasn't brave enough to install Vista, but I did install the Office 2007 beta and have been enjoying it so far. My officemate pointed out that I installed Office before Visual Studio. That could be a bad sign.

I did in fact install Visual Studio and even took a minute to write my first C# program. I'll let you guess what that was...

Day 2.1

2006-05-30T22:02:00.000-07:00

I am now officially a Microsoft employee! That is a scary thought. It is still hard for me to believe that I actually left Amazon. Even more scary is that it really doesn't feel strange at all. You would think after being at a place for so long that a change would be hugely disruptive. So far.. not really. It will be interesting to see how I feel in the coming weeks.

Anyway, today was fully occupied with New Employee Orientation in which we covered anything and everything Microsoft. Hmm.. well, I guess not everything since orientation continues tomorrow.

In other life transition news, I concluded the day by trading in my single man car (a Jeep Wrangler) for a Volvo. Yes, I think I'm officially a grownup.

New stuff

2006-05-21T08:49:00.000-07:00

I neglected to mention what I'll be working on over there. Well, you can read for yourself. I'll be working to build out Microsoft's Experimentation Platform.

Day 2

2006-05-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

After almost 7 years, today is my last day at Amazon. It's hard to believe so much time has gone by, but it's definitely been a great experience. In a sense I've grown up here, both as a developer and an individual. I started fresh out of school and have gone from writing small scripts to designing and developing full systems. Outside of work I've gone from being a single guy living in an apartment to being married with children and a house (note: ok, I was technically single, but Jen has been with me through all this). Yes, it really has been a journey.

So what's next? Well, I've decided to jump across the lake and join Microsoft. Its going to be a very different environment from Amazon and I'm really looking forward to taking it all in.

Not-So-Smart Phone

2006-05-15T09:26:00.000-07:00

I've been in the market for a new phone and decided to splurge and pick up a "smart" phone. I opted for the Cingular 8125 after reading several reviews and deciding it was generally very cool. After playing with it a bit at the Cingular store I decided to take it home with me. That's where the fun ended.

I was drawn to this model for the full keyboard, data access capability and in particular, the wi-fi capability. Being able to use the nearest hotspot (ie, my house) and not pay ridiculous data prices was very appealing. Anyway, I got home, popped it out of the box and started the setup process. My wireless network isn't the easiest thing to connect to in the world, but I figured I'd be able to work through it. By the end of the evening (like 8 hours after I started) I still hadn't managed to get the thing to connect to my network even though I had shut off every single security measure attempting to make it work. However, it did manage to connect to my neighbor's network. Sigh.

My frustration started with the menus. They made absolutely no sense and I was constantly getting confused about where to find configuration for wireless networks. When I did manage to find the correct menu I could never figure out how to get it to prefer my wireless network. It really had a thing for my neighbor's network.. but not mine. Maybe their signals were more attractive.. hell if I know. I did manage to find the modem configuration which made me feel nostalgic the first time through, but incited rage by the tenth.

Oh, did I mention the help was awful? There was no printed user manual in the box. The device itself has a terrible help system and the real user manual was on the included CD. Of course, by the time I needed the manual I was pissed off enough that I didn't want to install anything on my PC just to read some docs.

So at this point I wasn't exactly a happy customer and I hadn't used any of the device's real functionality, but I had had enough. I pictured myself sitting at some cafe, fumbling around for 10 minutes with this bar of soap trying to get the wifi connection to work and decided it wasn't worth the trouble. I don't travel much so much of the functionality is nothing more than a novelty to me. The next day I returned it and got a nice, simple phone that works exactly as one would expect. Ah.. the simple life.

Crash

2006-05-12T09:26:00.000-07:00

On my way to work yesterday I was stuck in an usually large amount of traffic on I-90. I was minding my own business when I got hit from behind with no warning. The impact caused me to roll forward and hit the person in front of me.

The good news is that it looks like everyone is ok and the damage to my car is minimal. It looks like my rear bumper is crunched and there might be some damage to my rear tailgate. My spare tire mounted bike rack is also trashed. Fortunately there was no bike on the rack at the time. I was planning to bring my bike yesterday but opted to leave it at home at the last minute. Good call!

This is particularly inconvenient since I'm about 2 weeks away from selling the car. Of course, when I hopped out and saw that the car that hit me had logos from a well known insurance company all over it I had a nice little laugh.

Anyone in the market for a Jeep Wrangler? :)

Keep on Rollin'

2006-04-21T16:30:00.000-07:00

Since I have been training less than usual I figure maybe I can just throw money at the problem. I found the perfect thing, ceramic bearings. Oh yes.. for a smidge over $300 I can replace my wheel bearings and for another $200 my bottom bracket can get the full treatment of low friction, ceramic goodness. Yes, this and my ultra lightweight, carbon, aero wheels should fill the training void nicely.

Status

2006-04-21T08:06:00.000-07:00

Normally I'd be writing regularly about the goings on in the NW peloton, but I really haven't been racing too much. I did the first two races of the season and then hit yet another motivational wall. It's been very hard to find balance between family and racing. In fact, just last week I pretty much decided I would hang up my shoes for the season. Now I can't figure out what to do.

I think the weather has certainly played a role. When Saturday comes around and I have the choice between driving 2 hours to race in the rain or hang out with my son.. well.. the choice is obvious. On the other hand, things have cleared up around here recently and I had one of the most enjoyable training rides I've had in recent memory. Additionally, last night I went to a criterium in Seward Park and had a great time. So now I'm all excited about racing again.

The most difficult thing has been accepting that it is ok to not be the best. Ok, I was never the best, but I always felt like my fitness was improving and that everytime I showed up at a race I had a chance at winning. Now I'm less confident. I tend to approach these things with an all or nothing attitude, which probably isn't healthy.

So, I guess I'll just take it day by day. I'll race when I want and try to just enjoy it. This is going to be tough. :)

Mason Lake #2

2006-03-29T10:32:00.000-08:00

This one really falls under the "better late than never" category since the race was like 2 or 3 weeks ago. Let's see.. it was another 4 laps around the same damn lake. My teammate and I were planning to try and early break to see what would happen. Just after the first corner a guy when streaking off the front solo and disappeared into the distance. I wanted to try an early break, but not that early! We figured we'd go for it on the second lap, but unfortunately when that time rolled around the peloton decided it was time to bring this guy back. With the pace we were pushing there was no way we could get off the front so we just took turns working at the front and eventually brought the guy back.

At some point after this a couple guys managed to jump off the front while the everyone else was resting. My legs were pretty cooked so I just hung in until the end... nothing great to speak of except solid training.

Unfortunately I've had to miss the last two weekends of racing due to other obligations, but there are some kickass one day races coming up in the next few weeks so stay tuned.

Season Opener

2006-03-08T07:58:00.000-08:00

Last weekend was the first race of the season!

Ok, I hesitate to put that exclamation point since I came into the day after hitting a real motivational wall. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me, but I simply didn't want to ride anymore. There were probably several factors involved: having a baby around, putting in too much base training (I started last September), etc. So, I took (most of) the week off leading up to the race to chill out, relax and figure out what I wanted to do.

Come race day I was a bit nervous. Sure, I had been training all winter, but differently than last year. Also, this was to be my first race since last August and these opening races are notoriously dicey. Fortunately the category 5 riders were split into their own field, so my race was a bit more civilized.

Anyway, the race itself was a 48 mile, relatively flat race around Mason Lake (near Belfair, WA). In the opening miles of the race I felt good, quite good actually. An early break formed that contained one of my teammates so I hung back and did what I could do to slow down the chase. I never thought the break would last long, but it did. Well, one guy did.. all the way to the win. Unfortunately my teammate popped inside of the last kilometer and the field passed him. I went on to finish with the field. Nothing spectacular, but nice to get out and stretch the legs a bit.

Burrrrr...

2006-02-16T13:59:00.000-08:00

It it way colder than usual in Seattle these days, as evidenced by the layer counts for my ride to work this morning:

4 tops (1 base layer + 3 summer tops)

3 layers of foot protection (1 pair regular socks + gortex socks + booties)

3 layers of hand protection (2 pairs of gloves + 1 pair of "outer" gloves)

2 layers of arm protection (long sleeve base layer + arm warmers)

1 layer of leg protection (leg warmers)

1 layer of head protection (balaclava)

1 layer protecting my man business (fortunately the chamois in bike pants are thick so I didn't end up with a little popsicle)

Switching to Vonage

2006-02-11T21:35:00.000-08:00

Well, I finally decided to go for it and switch to Vonage. I don't use my phone that much and the Vonage deal was just too sweet to pass up. I have to give them a lot of credit. The process was incredible simple. I plugged in the Linksys box, set things up on their website and I was off and running. Even transferring my old land line # to Vonage was easy (even though it did take a while). I would have done this sooner if they had offered 911 service.

Anyway, something about the process made me realize that, in some ways, it isn't ready for prime time. It first happened when my wife was using the webcam and making a call. Not surprisingly, the call quality was poor. Well, of course it's poor, I thought, Vonage and the webcam are competing for bandwidth. Then I got the sinking feeling... oh no.. I need to start thinking about quality of service settings on my router. This has officially become much more complex than the average user can handle. They will just think Vonage sucks.

Anyhow, much to my surprise my Linksys router did have QoS features. Nothing great, but enough to say "give the port with the Vonage box high priority". I don't think their implementation is particulary bright either since Outlook loses its connection to Exchange when I made a phone call. Sigh.. but it works and the call quality is fine.

Small World

2006-01-10T08:55:00.000-08:00

In another example proving that it truly is a small world, I ran into the guy that helped me with my bike problems at Babies R Us this weekend. That was a little strange.

Fun with iTunes Video

2006-01-09T11:58:00.000-08:00

I recently got into the whole Lost phenomenon and just finished watching all of season 1 from Netflix. Naturally I wanted to jump right into season 2, but since I came late to the party I missed recording it on Tivo. What was I to do? Normally I would wait it out, but I really wanted to find out what was in that hatch. So, I decided to see if I could find it online.

My first attempt was to find the missing episodes using BitTorrent. It took all of a few minutes to find my fix, but I wanted to find a more legitimate way. Ideally, I also wanted to be able to watch on my TV, not on a computer.

After a little more research I ended up installing iTunes and found that I could purchase episodes for $1.99. I also noticed that my laptop had an s-video output. Score! After a relatively quick download I plugged my laptop into my receiver and sat back to get my Lost fix. The picture was definitely not perfect and the relatively dark Lost scenes only helped highlight compression artifacts, but it was good enough. I'll be purchasing the rest of the episodes I missed right away.

I think (hope) this is the future of content distribution. Obviously it needs to be much easier, but I love being able to get exactly what I want, when I want it. With the introduction of Google Video and other video services, things are going to be very exciting over the next few years.

So, my $2 got me the show I wanted, on demand. Obviously this price includes some cost of distribution, but also needs to take into account that all commercials were removed. I was wondering, why don't they offer free version with commercials included? Since iTunes is handling playback they could even disable fast forwarding. Why not let the customer make the time/money tradeoff rather than making it for them? Besides, you could do some very cool things with the advertisements in the show. Ads could be selected on a per customer basis and the whole show could be woven together just before downloading.. could be very cool.

One final thought. It is amazing (but not surprising) that is it really the content that matters. I didn't need HD TV or 7.1 surround sound. Nope, I just wanted to watch my show and was willing to spend money to watch it at a lower quality.

My wish came true (but with a cost)

2006-01-07T15:56:00.000-08:00

Friday's commute was rain free! Well, pretty much. The streets were wet and I did hit a small shower, but it was a much needed relief. There were even good stretches where the roads were dry.

Life just couldn't be that easy on me though. On my commute home I was on Mercer Island, which is about 17 miles from my house. As I was coming out of an intersection, I downshifted my front chainring and the chain broke completely in half as a link or two went bouncing down the street, never to be seen again. This wouldn't be such a big deal except that I wasn't carrying a chain tool (used to insert and remove chain links). I never thought I would break a chain on the road so I only carry them when mountain biking. Guess I was wrong.

I called my wife to arrange a ride and realized my priority in the household has definitely dropped. I got something along the lines of.. well, the baby just went to sleep and then he needs to eat, and so on. In other words, I was going to be waiting for a while.

I decided to walk up to a nearby coffee shop to wait things out and see if there was a bike shop in the area. As I walked into the parking lot a guy saw me and asked if there was a problem. I explained the whole situation to him and by chance, he was on his way back from a mountain biking trip and had all of his tools on him, including a chain tool. He was kind of enough to let me use it for 10 or 15 minutes while I fumbled in the dark to remove some links from my chain and put it back together. I managed to ride it home without shifting (which could have caused the chain to break again) and I am incredibly thankful for the kindness of this stranger.

According to Jim's fantasy bike commuting score sheet this day would earn me 29 points (30 for the ride, plus 4 for temperature and moisture bonuses, minus 5 for the mechanical).

Please, no more rain!

2006-01-05T22:24:00.000-08:00

I know, I know.. I'm in the Pacific Northwest, what should I expect? I'm just so tired of it. Well, not the rain, but riding in the rain. In my last 2 weeks of commuting I have ridden in rain every single day. Fortunately I had a rest week in the middle of those two weeks so I did get a break, but seriously, it is getting to be a bit much.

I thought today would be different. When I went outside this morning it was unusually warm and perfectly dry so I opted for a longer route to work (through Kirkland and Bellevue rather than following I-90 into the city). About 20 minutes in the ride I felt the first drops. I can live with this, I thought.. the roads aren't even wet. By the time I was approaching Kirkland it was full fledged rain, not even Seattle spit.. and I had a long way go to work.

I'm not exactly looking forward to the commute tomorrow.

Hangin' Out on the Early Adopter Curve

2006-01-02T09:31:00.000-08:00

I used to think I was an early adopter. The fact of the matter is, I'm not. Not with most things anyway. For example, I've only started looking at HDTV seriously for the first time and I just set up Vonage. Even though this isn't exactly news, I figured the perspective of these products from a difference place on the curve might be interesting.

Vonage... so far so good. I picked up the trial kit at Best Buy yesterday and had it running in no time. I made a couple of calls and everything just worked and sounded great. I guess you can't ask for more than that. I'll be curious to see how it works when there is some network congestion.

Vonage sounds really great on paper. Good features, great price. So, why did I wait? Simple, 911 service. When I first looked at them a while back, 911 was still in the works. With a newborn in the house, 911 was a requirement, so I waited. I'm still a little nervous about my phone service being dependent on my internet connection and power, but I'm willing to take the risk. Generally, my internet connection is fine and my power service only flickers once in a while. I suppose if anything really goes wrong I can run to a neighbors house.

Next time I'll cover my explorations into HDTV.