Shedding Some Light

Yesterday I returned home to Detroit from a business trip out west. I returned to Michigan to find ice and snow had glued my windshield wipers to the windshield. As I scraped the ice off one of the wipers ripped. No problem since they were wearing out and I had the new ones in the trunk. This is where my “I am not an idiot” story starts.

It was cold but sunny yesterday so I decided to drive home and not worry about the wiper. I figured it would be easier to change the wiper in the garage than in the middle of the airport parking lot. No problem getting home, but I wanted to catch up on email, and one thing led to another and I forgot about the wiper until this morning. So I look at the wipers and try to figure out how to remove them. It was not obvious so I cracked the user manual. The index and table of contents were very helpful, but this is where it ended. I turn to the page to change wiper blades. Step one is to turn your key to the accessory setting. Step two is to turn on the wipers. Step three is turn the key to the off position when the wipers are up in the middle of the windshield.

Sounds easy, right. No. Every time I did this the wipers parked themselves down at the bottom of the windshield. I am not an idiot, but..

So I tried again and again. Each time worrying the metal of the ripped wiper blade would scratch the windshield. What engineer thought this was a good idea? You need to turn them on to change them? Stoopid. Plain stoopid.

I decided to take it to the dealer and let them explain to me how you change a wiper blade. The service person was nice, but her face was revealing her thoughts something to the effect: “Another male idiot who can’t simply change his wiper blades. I bet he has an I.Q similar to the rock he crawled out from under this morning…”

I mentioned that I followed the instructions in the owner manual and the blades would not stop in the middle. She told me the owners manual is “useless, and should not be followed.” I agreed with her, but it was the only thing I had to go on because the user interface to change them was not intuitive. I revealed to her that I am a software developer to hopefully get her to think my I.Q. level was higher than the rock I crawled out from underneath this morning {g}. I believe this did not affect her perception of me one bit.

She offered to educate me on the finer points of wiper replacement and then failed miserably. The words out of her mouth as she battled the steps to not reproduce the problem made me want to laugh, but I figured this would only worsen the situation. Long story shorter, it took a couple of mechanics to wrestle with this and finally get the blades replaced. Sadly, they did not teach me how to do it, but it does not matter since my lease is up in a few months and I will get two new blades with my new car.

So the lessons learned are simple:

1. Update the manual with the reality of changing the wipers to include a free visit to the professionals at your local dealership because our engineers are not bright enough to make it easy. In fact, just include one piece of paper instead of the book, the one page could be a list of dealers in your area. This would be a huge time saver for all of us.
2. Reengineer the problem so end users can perform the simple task and not waste the professionals time and save money for the car company. This does not have to be hard by design.
3. Improve the help interface for cars. I suggest voice activated link back to the central office call center. Any time the car senses you are swearing or cursing at it the call should be placed. OnStar, are you listening to me? This would actually make it worth the US$17 I pay you bozos every month.

Did I mention I hate hardware and cars?

I have not played tag since grade school, but Alex Feldstein caught me on the virtual play ground. Nobody told me where the “safe zone” was so I got caught. I am innocently working hard on three client’s projects today and now someone wants me to write about stuff people may or may not know about me. I have actually enjoyed reading some of these over the last month this meme has been going around. Guess this is someones way of telling me to take a break. OK, here it is…

1. I have had more than 125 stitches in my head at one time (doctors stopped counting) when I dove through a plate glass doorwall when I was 8 years old. I am sure this explains a lot for those of you wondering {g}). I was sleep walking/running/diving at the time. I had a swimming test the next morning that must have concerned me at the time. According to my grandpa who came over while I was being stitched up, it was a near death experience because the remaining glass at the top of the doorwall shifted down, but got stuck. Otherwise I likely would have been fatally wounded. The largest scar is along the right side of my head. It makes for interesting conversation when I get my hair cut. I usually tell them about a gang fight I was in years ago {g}. I lost a lot of blood that night, but did not require a transfusion. And for the record: this is not my only near death experience.
2. My dream job is being an astronaut, but sleepwalking is something they frown upon so I took up my second favorite job instead. I almost blended the two while I worked at EDS. EDS had a job opening for systems engineer on the shuttle maintenance software. I wanted to apply for the job, but Therese did not want to live in Titusville for a couple of years. It had nothing to do with Florida, and everything to do with living more than a short drive to visit family. I love my wife more than my work so I turned down the opportunity.
3. I did horrible in my first computer science class (CIS 101) at Oakland University. I finished with a “B”, but I was use to all-”A”s in high school, and it took a near perfect score on my final to get the lowly-”B”. As my first semester was ending I went to my grandparents for lunch since they were close by. I was telling my grandpa (who never finished high school) that I was thinking about moving over to the business school. He talked me out of it and before lunch was over I knew I was not going to give up so easily. He gave me some of the best advice, and in this instance he told me school is where you make mistakes and learn from them. He also told me to go into a career where I was going to have the most fun. Turns out he is one of the wisest people I have ever known and I wish he was still alive today to benefit from his guidance. I believe I caught the pay-it-forward mentality from this great man.
4. I live in the motor city and have no interest in cars. In fact, I don’t like them because they cost a lot and lose value quickly. I don’t like working on them, have no interest in fixing them up, I hate when they breakdown, and pretty much would do without them if there was a better mode of transportation available.
5. I rarely drink alcohol as most of you know, but I use to collect beer cans when I was younger. My dad would occasionally let me taste the different beers when I got a new one that was not yet opened. I still have an unopened Billy Beer, which is the beer President Jimmy Carter’s brother’s labeled back in the 70′s. I threw out most of the collection years ago, but kept some of the more unusual cans.

Hope you enjoyed this. Hmmm, who to tag next…

Andrew MacNeill
Kevin Ragsdale
Kevin Cully
Mike Feltman
Randy Jean

I see on the Advisor Events Web site they have scheduled the next Advisor Visual FoxPro DevCon for May 6-10, 2007 in Anaheim, California (near DisneyLand). No specific details for the VFP track yet as a link points to last year’s page in Phoenix, but it is good news. Looks like there will be four other Summits on the same dates and same city (and I assume the same location):

• Microsoft .NET, Visual Studio, ASP.NET and SQL Server
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• Microsoft Access
• Lotus (Domino, Notes, IBM Portal Server, Sametime, IBM Workplace, Quickplace, IBM DB2)

I am sure there will be more details to post later.

Google has enhanced Blogger, which is the blogging service I use for this blog.

Earlier today I upgraded my blog to the new version. My favorite new feature allows you to subscribe to comments for a specific post. This is a common feature for other blogging services and one I like to use for interesting posts. The other feature I am looking forward to using is “Labeling”. I can categorize each post and you can read posts specific to a category. So when I post something about Visual FoxPro I will label it VFP. When I write something about the space shuttle I will label it Space Shuttle.

Thanks Google. Your blogging service rocks.

Therese and I attended a holiday party for the band boosters last night. I was talking with a couple of the other dads about kids. The discussion eventually went down the path on how they want so much today when they enter into the real world on their own. It reminded me of a true story about “geek endorsements.”

I was working at EDS as an Advanced Systems Engineer. I was with the company more than five years and had worked my way up the food chain a little bit. I took pride in how I managed my career and learned how to play the corporate game. My salary was decent for my experience, we lived in a nice house and we were raising three children.

Our management hired a kid directly out of college. He was green, very green, and I don’t mean just technically. He did not even know how to write a check from his checkbook. He bought a new Camero along with the big insurance bill, signed a lease on a two bedroom apartment, bought a new stereo, a big TV, and some other luxuries. All of a sudden he realized he was over his head and complained to me how he could not live on US$36,000. First of all it was company policy not to discuss salary between employees. Second, he was making almost as much as I was and he was still wet behind the ears.

He asked me how I survived because I was raising a family. I told him it was endorsements. He did not understand. I explained it to him: Michael Jordan had the Nike shoe endorsements, the Hanes underwear endorsement, etc. I showed him my Motorola pager and told him I have the Motorola endorsement. My Docker pants, the Dockers endorsement. You see this ThinkPad laptop? Only a few of us are good enough to have the IBM endorsement. You can’t get these right away. You have to get your career started and eventually get an agent.

About 10 minutes later I get a call from my manager asking me why I am messing with the new guy. Messing with him? I figured my manager knew all about geek endorsements. After all, how was a guy raising a family with 10 years of experience in software development suppose to make it in this world making a little more than this English major he just hired with no programming experience? I offered to set him up with my agent.

Geek endorsements – I still laugh recalling this unforgettable moment in my career.

I know the rage is to be talking about our Office 2007 experiences, but I have not had the time to load it and get use to the new ribbon control, and find where Microsoft moved all the features. I am still using Office 2003. For the last few weeks I have been battling a bug on and off and last night I decided to see if I could find the fix. (I know – how exciting are my Saturday nights? {g})

The problem is annoying. Ever since I changed my login on my machine to my new domain all the office apps for the new user no longer have the most recently opened files on the File menu. Naturally I looked at the setting on the Tools | Options dialog to turn it on and bump up the number of files it shows to the maximum limit (nine – which is too small), but the checkbox is disabled! I looked all over the Help file and checked for some compatibility settings without any luck.

A Google search lead me to a Web site called Annoyances.org, which sounds appropriate for this problem. The problem is documented for Office XP, but apparently the problem still exists in Office 2003 (and maybe even in Office 2007). The fix is simple as long as you are not afraid to mess with the Windows Registry. Here are the instructions I followed:

• Run the Registry Editor (REGEDIT.EXE).
• Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ Explorer.
• On the right side, delete the NoRecentDocsHistory value.
• Close the Registry Editor when you’re done; the change will take affect the next time you start any Office XP application.

I exported the key just in case it created side effects and deleted it from the Registry. Bingo, the option can be turned on again in the Options dialog and all is well again in the world of Microsoft Office.

I also found a feature to export your office settings so I can save a bunch of time when moving to a new machine or a new user on the same machine. Microsoft has a program included with Office 2003 called the Microsoft Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard. I have been using Microsoft Office for more than 10 years, but this is new to me. I am positive it could have saved me hours of my life going through and setting all the options for Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, FrontPage, OneNote, and Publisher. The wizard has two modes, one to export the settings and one to import them. It creates a file on disk with the OPS extension. This file can be moved to the new machine or put in a common folder on the same machine for the other user to use. Brilliant.

If you are looking for this wizard you can find it on the Start Menu | Programs | Microsoft Office (where ever you have this) | Microsoft Office Tools | Microsoft Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard. I obviously have not paid much attention to the tools menu, but this is one important little program and is not easily discoverable in my opinion. I think this should exposed on the Options dialog in each of the Office applications where people like me would see it and think to use it.

The MS Office Help file was not helpful at all in regards to discovering either the fix for the File menu or the settings wizard. In fact, I put “Microsoft Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard” in the MS Word Help search and the first three topics returned are links to:

• The Perfect PC Office Suite: Get Microsoft Office 2003 on a P4 2.6GHz system (Web content marketing slime)
• Save an Office document as a TIFF file
• What happened to the Office Shortcut Bar?

Nothing returned in the list was even close to being related to the wizard. Is it just me, or is the Office Help nearly useless to the average user?

I blogged these two recent findings here mostly to have them documented for myself in the future (they were also added to the White Light Computing Wiki for safe keeping), but also to share them with you in case either of them can save you a few moments of your life down the road.

I know I live in Dilbertville every day, but today’s legacy theme hits particularly close to home.

I was visiting the OzFox 2007 Web site the last couple of days because I am trying to figure out if I can some how attend the conference. I think it would be cool to blog live from down under. Right now it is a matter of arranging my schedule and determine if the business model works.

Craig Bailey has done a real nice job with this site. The only thing it is missing is the hotel cost, which I understand will be added soon. Looks like Craig is doing some things I think are important for future conferences to include or adopt:

1. Promote new speaker talent. OzFox is looking for local talent from Australia and New Zealand. Whil Hentzen was well known for doing something similar years ago with GLGDW. He took risks and grew the speaker pool and thus broadened the materials presented at FoxPro conferences. I have always been grateful to Whil for taking a chance on a punk from Sterling Heights Michigan back in 2000. Last year Bob Kocher dragged Craig Boyd from his basement in Minnesota to participate in the Southwest Fox Keynote and now he is a rock star, and this year Kevin Cully based the entire FoxForward conference on volunteers and introduced the community to some rising stars with Kevin Ragsdale and Bo Durban getting some serious buzz on their sessions (to mention only two). This is tough to balance because speakers and their topics are the number one draw to a conference.
2. Building community – Craig has been banging the Fox Community drum down under for quite a while with his participation in the OzFox Rocks Podcast with Scott Scovell, plus organizing OzFox Lite and previous OzFox conferences. I recall the days when Microsoft held special meetings for user group leaders at DevCon, and Whil had a special dinner where he organized a user group leader dinner at GLGDW. Whil and Bob Kocher offered discounts to user group members.
3. Networking – based on strong feedback from the last OzFox, attendees want more time to network with each other. OzFox will have a session dedicated to networking. I have said for years the in between session material/discussion is as valuable as the conference sessions. While I am not sure a session has to be dedicated to the topic, I think conference organizers need to innovate ideas on how to enhance the networking experience. Interesting decision and hopefully one to start other ideas flowing.

Conference organizers have earned my deepest respect with the effort they put in to bring us these important events. It is impossible to satisfy everyone, yet they do everything they can to make the experience as pleasant as possible for all the personalities involved.

OzFox sounds like a great conference. If you live anywhere within an earshot of Sydney you need to register right away. There are nine days left to take advantage of the least expensive registration cost.

My first crack at airfare on Northwest was taking me from Detroit to Sydney east over the Atlantic instead of directly west. Three days and four or five stops and US$10,000. I laughed until I had tears in my eyes. I would have literally seen the world from 38,000 feet.

All I have to do is see if I can jam a week out of my schedule, possibly work out some resource issues with one March deployment, and see if I can convince the other shareholder to spring for the expenses. Fingers crossed this all works out, but I am realistic when I review all the work I have to do in the first quarter of 2007. If not, I will be reading some one else’s blog to hear about all the cool stuff I missed.