stav's little corner

Open Screen Project announced: http://www.adobe.com/openscreenproject/

Adobe’s Research Team would like to meet with individuals who 1) work in Engineering, Legal, Human Resources, and Sales and Marketing who create and distribute information such as training materials, sales presentations and product overviews; 2) these materials are emailed, posted to a website or server for others to view independently and are not generally presented in person; and 3) these individuals may work with other departments in developing materials but should create some materials themselves.

The team is planning to visit sites in the Bay Area in mid-February, but is also interested in conducting phone interviews with those in other locations. The sessions will last from 60 – 90 minutes. Participants will receive $100 as a token of appreciation.

If you know of individuals who may be interested, please ask them to respond to a brief questionnaire at http://www.adobe.com/go/share_survey. If they are eligible to participate in the study, they will be contacted via phone or email.

The Global Market Research team is looking for adults 18-35 years old to participate in an upcoming user research study on social networking and online communications tools. For this study, we are asking each participant to bring along one to two close friends with them to the session. Each person will receive $125 for their participation in the two-hour session. If you are interested in participating, or know someone else who might be, please go to the Adobe User Research website: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=NqMP2i9dQc7_2f3Kkie_2bmj_2fA_3d_3d to fill out a short questionnaire.

External Participants Needed for User Research Study—Sponsored by the User Research Team

The Adobe User Research team is looking for individuals who make analog (scrapbooks, comics) or digital (videos, animations) creations to participate in an upcoming research study. Participants must be at least 13 years old. Students are encouraged to apply. The study will take place during November and December in San Jose, San Francisco and via Connect for other locations. Participants will receive $100 for a two-hour 1:1 interview session. If you know someone who might be interested, please forward them the link to our screener: www.adobe.com/go/gmrsurveys_ccs

I just used the gift certificate I won from my company's commute alternatives on a pair of insoles for my crosstrainers. How apropos...

Adobe User Research is looking for participants for an upcoming research study that will take place in early October: People who (1) regularly take digital photographs (2) have a home network and 3) use a variety of devices when engaging with their personal media, e.g. PDA, media phone, iPod or mp3 player, TiVo, Windows Media Center, Apple TV, etc. Participants will receive $125 for a 2-hour study, either in the SF or SJ Adobe office or in the participant’s home.

If you know someone who might be interested, please forward them the links to our screener:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=FCVKbfplGwBmVAK3bjBi1A_3d_3d

Wednesday, I hit up the UCB Technical Career Fair, where I represented Adobe. Amusingly enough, Melissa and Jerry were both there, representing Apple and Lockheed, respectively. A bunch of people showed up from Crossroads (our college fellowship), which was also entertaining. Probably the oddest moment was when someone walked up to me and said, "Hey, you were in my dorm freshman year." And sure enough, it was Warren.

They all flock back to the campus, apparently.

Melissa and Jerry were both nice enough to shift their lunchtimes to accommodate mine (thanks, guys), and we had a good time catching up, now that we're at three different churches in three different cities. But it was interesting seeing how life changes us - I've known Jerry since he was an irresponsible 13 year old, and known Melissa since she was in high school.

~~~~~

The most interesting person I talked to was a spacey looking girl, brown hair, fair skin, freckles - you know, how you would imagine Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm looking. She walked up and asked a fair amount of vague questions in an annoyingly childish, singsong voice, and over-enunciated each word, often looking beyond us. I'm sure she thought she was being professional, but it was really hard to give a straight answer if the question was vague in the first place.

The least interesting person I talked to - or maybe the one I felt the most sorry for - stepped into my personal space (foreign student), had poor dental hygiene, and repeated her spiel from the beginning when I interrupted her to ask a question. Poor girl. She was so shaken.

~~~~~

After standing for six hours and talking my throat dry, I went to martial arts and worked out for just under three hours. My arms and legs were exhausted afterwards. I'm just surprised I didn't completely fall over on my walk back to transit.

~~~~~

Today, I got even less work done. I did make it to my optical appointment on time, and proceeded to spend about two hours there. Thankfully, it was two hours with a friend, but let me tell you... I paged through about three "People" magazines while I was waiting, but couldn't read anything because my eyes were dilated. And then I had to wear the embarrassing roll-up sunglasses because I drove home with my glasses.

~~~~~

In other news, I now have flowers for the wedding. I suppose I should contact Melissa about them, but I have a feeling Kiki will take care of that first. (And I put this in here because I know Melissa has me on RSS.)



I'm trying to be more interesting, really.

There's one funny thing about having a VP that's Australian - you get Emails saying "I'm going to throw some shrimp on the barbie," a full out BBQ, and a lot (read: a LOT) of food. Oh, and the whole "blokes and sheilas" thing. Amusing.

Had a good talk with CT, who is a friend of Mikko and Antti's. Interesting, that guy.

Also had a good session juggling (soccer) with three guys from the team. It had been far too long since I'd had an opportunity to juggle, and it comes back fast! I guess there's also the martial arts thing - I've been working on my hand-foot coordination for a number of years now. We're talking about starting an Adobe soccer team to play in the East Bay. Rock on!

So yeah, I had a good day yesterday.

In other amusing news, my coworker got me a shirt from Norway. It's very pink, and it says "BARN HJELPER BARN" across the chest. It amuses me very much.

External Participants Needed for Photography Study—Sponsored by the User Experience Team

The Adobe user research team is looking for external participants for a photography study (non-Adobe employees, temps or contractors). The team is looking for very basic photo product users. The study involves home visits in the South Bay, Peninsula and San Francisco, and would last approximately two hours. Compensation would be $200. Some pre-visit journaling would be required. If you know of anyone who might be interested, please contact Marisa Lenhardt and reference “Photography Home Visits.”

External Participants Needed for Mobile User Research Study—Sponsored by the User Experience Team

The Adobe user research team is looking for mobile phone users between 18 and 29 years old to participate in an upcoming user research study. The study will take place the week of August 27 or September 3 at Adobe San Jose. Participants will receive $125 for a two hour 1:1 interview session.



If you know someone who might be interested, please forward them the link to our screener:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=OicLIUWWOM1LHQBbNLSgrw_3d_3d

Both of these incidents are significant, and both of these issues took up a lot of my mental time. I am sitting at home right now, babysitting a build, but I hadn't planned to stay at home today... and it's a somewhat long and somewhat amusing story.

Let's take the second story first, shall we? We have a product that has a client and a server, and it was my job to install the beta server, slap our stuff on it, and make sure it worked on a client. Easy sauce, right? Well, server installed just fine, I made my changes just fine... and after a day or so of wrangling with builds, I ended up with a happy database that installed beautifully.

In comes the client. Oh noes! Client is getting no data! Must go talk to members of the other teams! Server QA... no clue what's going on. Client QA... no clue what's going on. Server developer... no clue what's going on. Client developer... tells me about an Email I didn't get. I went back to investigate, checked in with our architect, who then said that there should be nothing wrong with our stuff, even if the Email affected what I was doing. (It didn't.)

Went back to client developers, sat down with two (eventually three) client developers, who finally figured out two hours later what was wrong. It was a server bug. Woot.

So that was about five days out of my schedule, during which time no less than five people approached me, wondering if they could get a database from me that worked on the beta server. Well, we had just come to a good point, where the server team began looking at the bug, I went along my own business, when all of a sudden the client team director comes by: can we have a database to work on our server? Well, duh, no, the server's broken. But we have a demo for an important customer!

So here was the deal: they got us a server to use, I'd install the older server and our build. Happy happy, right? Well, I was leaving for practice early, so I said, "I'll take my laptop home, send me the Email with the IP address of the new server, and I'll install the server."

I didn't get the info until 8:45 this morning, when I was prepping to take off. So here was my thought... I could either work from home, finish it in an hour, and get into work around 11, or get in at 10:30 and only have an hour and a half to work on the server.

I chose to work from home. But of course, I didn't know that it would take a whole three hours to get everything working... by that time, I figured it wasn't worth it to go into work. I would just stay at home and get stuff done. And so now I'm sitting at home, babysitting a build...

Past couple of days have been something else... it began with the eye uber-puffiness on Monday. Andy came over to hang out while I packed for two nights at my parents' house. I participated in a two day international conference at the SJ office, so I decided I'd just crash there. Showed up there at around 10:30pm, made it to bed by about 11:30pm or so.

The first day of this conference started at 8:30am. I was definitely feeling my engineer bones creaking, but surprisingly enough I cranked out the door at 7:30 and arrived at 8:05. Twenty-five minutes early. If you know me and Andy's perception of my lack of perception of time, it's kind of a miracle. We had a day full of meetings about corporate social responsibility, and the only thing that kept on running through my head was, "Andy would call us a bunch of hippies."

Actually, it wasn't that bad - I think there were only 5 people in that room from California. The rest were actually international, except one woman from Seattle. There was, however, one guy who annoyed me, because every time he introduced himself, he would introduce himself as the CHAIR OF THE COMMITTEE at his location. He must have said it five times during the course of the day. Well, I'm the chair of the committee as well, but big deal. I guess we were the only two that were chairs there, but I guess I didn't care.

We finished up with dinner at Gordon Biersch, which was quite tasty. Now that I think about it, I left my leftovers in the fridge at my parents' house. Oh well. I guess my brother can have it. (Amusing note: I just IM'd my brother to tell him he could have it, and he said, "The fish? I already ate it.")

Afterwards, took one of my SF coworkers to BART, since it's a couple of miles from my parents' house. It worked a lot better for him than CalTrain, I guess. He's a sweet guy from Oregon.

That's when the real fun started. After being in a work setting for about 12 hours, my parents proceeded to "help me" get addresses. Of course, they couldn't just give me a spreadsheet of the people they want to invite - they had to go through their address book in front of me and make me re-read the ones they'd already given to me to insure they had the right one. And then they didn't have all of them, so random Emails have been trickling in since then.

I got to bed past midnight, I was so stressed.

So the second day of this conference started at 8am. EIGHT O'CLOCK. Come on, Margaret! Have some sympathy...

So we met for an hour, then went to the Sacred Heart Community Center to volunteer in their food services. I ended up carrying out groceries for people, and translating into Spanish and back (who knew I would use it?), until it was time for lunch.

Tasty, tasty lunch. Then we had meetings until 2:30pm, at which time I promptly drove to my parents' house (to a brownout) and passed out for a half an hour. By that time, my parents had returned and I carpooled with them to the banquet location for a second tasting.

My mom proceeded to embarrass me the entire time, asking questions like, "You're going to do your best job, right?" to the executive chef. I was dying of shame. Andy reassured me that it wasn't that bad, but... arrgh. Sometimes I wish I could talk to my parents about this thing. Anyway, here I was, embarrassed, stressed out, and my parents just blithely kept on telling me things I had to do.

I am not an auditory learner. I was not taking notes. Having expectations that I would remember this stuff, combined with the stress of not being able to remember very well, was beginning to take its toll on me.

And people wonder why wedding planning can be really stressful.

Well, I guess I'm still alive.

Oh yeah! Wedding invitations just got in. Woot!

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_6636976?nclick_check=1

Last paragraph.

I just won a gift certificate from our company's commute alternatives team! Anyone who takes public transit to work gets entered into a monthly drawing. Woooooot!

I don't know what's going on - I never win anything.

Microvision Signs Agreement with Motorola to Develop Pico Projector Display for Mobile Applications

Awesome, awesome, and more awesome.

Dear Developers,

Asking questions like, "Are you still using the file?" is counterproductive. The reason this company pays lots of money for source control like perforce is so that we can work in parallel and integrate code. This is a part of our jobs. Don't wait for me to check in a file, don't complain that someone else has a file checked out and so you can't check in. Go ahead and check the file back in. Merging really isn't that hard.

Secondly, find and use a good merge tool. The last two times you guys have complained, I have suggested a couple of good ones. Not being able to merge successfully means that I need to go back and reintegrate my changes into the code. If I am expected to do this because of your inability to successfully merge, I think I deserve your salary, but only if it's higher than my own.

While we're at it, don't expect me to sympathize with you when you're confused about not being able to merge. If you have to integrate and you're confused, ASK SOMEONE to help you with the merge. Don't just blast away what was there before and assume it's okay.

I hereby assign everyone who has whinged about merging a twink point. It will be amortized in a year, or when you finally learn how to successfully merge. Funny how I don't have to deal with this with C/C++ developers.

Sincerely,

An annoyed engineer who doesn't even get to put "developer" in her title.

I just won the business unit's first "People's Choice Awards" for collaboration. Whoah.

Firms snub 'mobile for elderly': Would you buy something like this for your family members? I have to admit that my grandmother seems to use her cell phone quite well, but if we were to have one for my grandfather, this might be a little better. (Marginally, though I don't know what the emergency button would map to and whether he would just use it excessively.)

Total Mobile Revenues: Quote: "Worldwide SMS usage shot up 50 percent to 620 billion texts sent in Q1..." Holy cows... 620 billion texts?! I can now believe jesslla's quote on how often her coworker's kid texts.

AT&T Changes Unity Plan. All you need is a regular phone line and a wireless phone line to make this work. I wonder if Andy and I will renegotiate to this kind of plan once we get married and combine households.