Michael A. O’Neill

Author: Michael

  • One year since Joe passed

    It’s been one year and one day since Joe passed. It was yesterday, around 10am.

    Chanel and I spent a good part of the past two days cleaning out Joe’s basement office. It seems like he saved every scrap of paper he scribbled on over the past thirty years. He didn’t of course, but it seemed like it at times. My nose has been flowing like a toddler’s with a cold from all the dust and mold that has collected and grown on his books and papers. But it’s gone. It’s empty. Just a few books left on the five bookshelves the man had down there (this is on top of the eight bookshelves in the living room).

    Found lots of fun little mementos. For example, a letter that I scrawled out when I was five or six: "I hate Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is crazy. Ronald Reagan doesn’t know 10×10." Ah, the effect parents have on their children’s politics. We also found my report cards from grade school, which perhaps explains why I didn’t choose a more challenging multiplication task for that icon of Republican politics: "Michael needs to work harder on his multiplication tables from 6 to 9." Still not good at six through eight, but I figured out the nines.

    We also started the leaving bits of Joe all over P*******n. Mom brought five ziploc baggies of his ashes on a walk along the D&R canal. Finn, Ellie, Chanel and Mom each dumped a bag of Joe along the canal. I saved mine, and on the ride home, I deposited little bits all over: at Borough Hall, at Morven next door, at Aquinas House (where Joe first lived in P*******n when he was still a Jesuit), and at the theological seminary (where Joe was a Ph.D. student, and where mom and Joe first lived after they got married).

    Mom admitted that she hasn’t been able to banish her recollections of Joe’s last moments. I suggested she write it down. I know that my blog entry about Joe’s last minutes on this Earth helped push it out of my mind.

  • Jellyfish

    I have this vision in my head of the perfect jellyfish picture. Actually, it’s not just in my head. I’m not sure exactly where I saw it first, but I know it’s a picture from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It’s a single jellyfish with a long tail trailing off the edge of the picture… a solitary golden jellyfish on a royal blue field. I can’t find an example of that exact picture, but this shot by Declan McCullagh (website) gives you the idea.

    I’ve wanted to take this picture ever since I learned of the jellyfish exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Unfortunately, the dim lighting utilized by these artistic jellyfish exhibits requires a tripod, and the rules on bringing a tripod are rather strict. You can only use one when it will not get in the way of other guests. Considering that the Monterey Bay Aquarium is packed weekdays during the school year with field trips, weekdays during the summer with tourists, and weekends year-round, it’s nearly impossible to find an appropriate time.

    Anemone_closeBut the Seattle Aquarium has no such restrictions. I discovered to my delight this past weekend that tripods are allowed at any time–there’s no way I could have taken this shot without a tripod [click to enlarge]. I wouldn’t have discovered this for months if it weren’t for Heather’s trip up to Seattle this past week. With Sunday’s weather forecast for rain, we needed some kind of activity indoors. Since she has always wanted to see me take pictures, I thought the Aquarium would be a perfect Sunday morning destination.

    [I have no idea why she wants to see me take pictures. It’s boring. I can sit in the same place for hours waiting for the right shot. In Guatemala, I spent two hours one afternoon taking pictures of a troop of spider monkeys in the trees directly above me. I only stopped because the pain in my neck from having a 6+ pound camera resting on my face became overwhelming. At the Seattle Aquarium, I spent 20 minutes taking pictures of the jellies. Heather stuck around for about five minutes before heading to the tidal pools to touch a starfish. She also blogged briefly about the trip.]

    Jelly5And the Seattle aquarium has jellies. It’s a small exhibit, and the lighting scenario wasn’t quite as breathtaking as those at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The light bulbs were painfully obvious behind the red gel; it was the only jelly exhibit in the place, limiting my photographic flexibility; and the exhibit was designed as a walk-through, meaning my tripod camera was inconveniencing other guests who didn’t want to block my shot (making me feel guilty for sitting there for 20 minutes).

    None of that mattered, of course. What mattered was light. For that exhibit, the ideal picture would be a black background with a glowing red jellyfish. The shutter speed for that picture was far too slow, however. Even the slow drifting of the jellies came out as a red blur. My only option was to include the illuminated red band in the picture.

    I snapped 90 frames. They’re in a new Aquarium gallery on my photos site. They’re not perfect, but they look pretty damn cool.

  • Practical Jokes

    I can’t help but mention another bit of Microsoft culture shock. Of course, it’s less shock now, more amusement.

    When Brian (from Oracle) went on his honeymoon in Honduras over a year ago, Kevin had the brilliant idea of doing… something… to Brian’s office when he was gone. Kevin’s inspiration: a practical joke pulled at his prior employer, PeopleSoft, where the floor of a golf lover’s office was lovingly covered with sod. We never got much further than ideas, though, but the thought was there.

    At Microsoft, it’s all about execution. P——-, my boss’s boss, regularly works from home and anyone who would like borrow his office when he’s out may do so. Last week, someone adjusted his chair. P——- was not pleased, and left this note on his white-board.
    Ps_message_1

    I’m not too sure who started it–I remember being confused on Tuesday seeing P——-‘s chair sitting on top of his desk. But by Friday morning, every conference room in our building had been raided (just one chair per conf room), and his office looked like this:

    Ps_chairs_3

  • Biking to Microsoft

    For the past two weeks, I’ve been trying to replicate my commute experience at Oracle. In San Francisco, I was one of dozens to put my bike on Caltrain at 22nd Street, and, when I wanted some exercise, I would get off at Burlingame or San Mateo and bike the eight+ miles to Oracle. It was a beautiful way to start the day: all but 1 mile of the ride was on a bike path hugging the shoreline of the San Francisco Bay. No car traffic, completely level, and a peaceful 30-minute ride. I averaged 19 mph, sometimes higher, and got a wonderful work out.

    In Seattle, I strap my bike onto the front of the 545 express bus to Redmond. There’s only space for three bikes (as opposed to 36 on CalTrain) but I’ve only been bumped once, and that was going home. I get off at Evergreen Point just across the 520 bridge, and take off. I have a choice for the first mile or two: ride along an extremely narrow and bumpy jogging trail through the woods along the north side of 520, or take a residential street with wide shoulders on the south side of 520. Recently, I’ve been taking the side street: not only is it smoother, but the hills are less… hilly. Then I cross back to the north side of 520, go up another residential street, which turns into an incredibly long, steep downhill. Fastest I’ve gone is 38 mph. Then another couple of miles on secondary (non-residential streets) with barely a shoulder to speak of. And all uphill.

    Finally, I’m on the bike trail that runs along 520 all the way into Redmond. Of course, Microsoft is just barely in Redmond so I’m only on that trail for a couple of miles. It’s almost all uphill, of course, and my average speed for the whole ride is 10 to 12 mph.

    It’s a good workout, and I do like starting the day with a ride. But
    it’s not as picturesque as riding along San Francisco Bay, and I get
    caught at a lot of really long stoplights.

    What’s humiliating about the morning rides are the hills. Well, the
    hills aren’t really humiliating. It’s the old guys with gray hair who
    are blowing past me on the uphills. I had three in one morning. Nobody
    passed me on the trail along the Bay.

    "Why don’t you take the ride after work, when it’s all downhill?" I hear you cry.

    I do, actually. When I bike in the morning, I almost always bike back in the evening. That’s mainly because there is so much demand at the Microsoft bus stop, one bike is almost always bumped. And even if you’re not bumped, by the time your bike is on the rack on the front of the bus, every spare seat is taken. Standing in the aisle as the bus lurches in the agonizingly slow, stop-and-go traffic at the 405 interchange is murder on my knees. Plus, at Evergreen Point, I can take buses other than the 545 to Stewart and Denny.

    But the evening ride isn’t quite enough of a workout. It’s only 6.75 miles, so with all the down hills, it only takes 22 minutes–just barely an aerobic workout.

  • Festering Oktoberscoot

    This weekend was Festering Oktoberscoot. When I first heard of the rally–a scooter-based tour of Seattle breweries–I thought this would be a singularly bad idea. A half a glass of alcohol on a two-wheeled vehicle feels like two to three full glasses when driving a car. There is just so much more that you need to pay attention to.

    But this isn’t a young and irresponsible scooter crowd (I’m probably the youngest person in the crowd other than Hottie Ms. Headlights). At every brewery, it was just about a taste. A dash of beer in a shot glass.

    That’s not to say that the ride went perfectly smoothly. Kelly went down after the first brewery this morning. She was slowing down and pulling to the right to block a car that was edging into the pack (it boggles the mind, but some car drivers will utterly ignore motorcycles and just pull in like we aren’t there). But the move was sudden enough that Marty, right behind her, had to slam on the brakes. He didn’t have quite enough space, and he didn’t turn out of the way (maybe there was another bike directly to his left, don’t know). A perfect accident: no single person was at fault, but everyone contributed just a little bit.

    Kelly had a little road rash on her legs (like someone else I know, Kelly chooses fashion over protection) and went into mild shock. I got a little worried when she laid back down on the sidewalk a second time after refusing to go to the hospital–I didn’t see the accident, but I was worried she banged her head. So I called our family ER doc, Trish. It only took a few minutes for everyone else to convince Kelly to stop by the emergency room, and by the time I reached Trish, Kelly was in a cab with Sugar Bear following behind on his scoot. (Kelly, a fellow Softie, claimed she wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been for our employer’s fantastic health benefits).

    Kelly joined us about six hours later at the barbecue at the end of the ride, bruised but in good spirits.

    All said and done, I do like this scooter crowd. They’re all laid-back and easy-going and low drama–just like the handful of people in the San Francisco crowd that I enjoyed spending time with.

  • The Company Meeting

    1_3The Microsoft company meeting was held this past Thursday, 21-SEP-06. At Safeco Field. For those of you who are not familiar with baseball, Safeco Field is the home stadium for the Seattle Mariners. In other words, it probably holds 40-50,000 people. Now, we didn’t take up the entire stadium. A lot of longtime employees pass on attending the company meeting because they’ve seen it before and have too much 2work to do. But it’s strongly recommended that you attend your first year at Microsoft, and as you can see from the photo above right, a lot of people did show up.

    Something was conspicuously absent at the company meeting, however. No, it wasn’t Bill Gates (that’s him on the big screen in the photo to the right). Even though he is retiring in a year or so, he gave a keynote covering some of the fascinating things that Microsoft Research is working on.

    What was missing were laptop computers, which to me seem surgically attached to the vast majority of Microsoft employees. For example, at the first Visual Basic product team meeting I attended, only two people out of a dozen had not brought their laptops. I was one of the two people.

    What made Microsoft employees leave their laptops at home was security: when Bill and Steve are around, it means no laptops, no cameras, and no bags.

    [I actually wanted to bring my laptop. I was behind on my marketing plan, and the first draft was due to my boss the next day.]

    Most of the company meeting was just a dog and pony show. Mind you, the dogs and ponies were bloody impressive–we got to see the best Microsoft has to offer–but there was still a big focus on features rather than benefits.

    The thing that really surprised me, though, was that my cynicism was beaten down, at least for long enough that I drank some of the Kool-Aid being served. Part of it was just being a part of it. 20,000 people were in Safeco Field with me, all Microsoft employees just like me.

    The other part of it was realizing that, as a user-focused company (as opposed to a datacenter-focused company like Oracle), Microsoft was changing parts of the world (albeit small parts). There was this incredibly sappy promotional video shown during the first keynote about a school in rural China to which Microsoft had donated computers and software. Watching it felt like reading George Antonious’ The Arab Awakening (published 1939), a deeply biased work of Arab nationalism that is nonetheless profoundly persuasive and managed to push my college self down the road of caring deeply about the Middle East–in spite of my general skepticism and resistance to manipulation. In other words, I knew I was being manipulated by this video, but I couldn’t help but be touched. The video included a high school girl who was brought to tears when trying to explain how much Microsoft’s contribution to her school meant to her and her future. Of course, this is a company with a ridiculous amount of money, so they couldn’t just leave it at that. After the video, they brought the school superintendent, the student and her mother up on stage. Microsoft had flown them in just for this event.

    I was in a baseball stadium, and I could just imagine the hawker walking down the aisle, calling out "Kool-Aid, get your Kool-Aid!" I raised my hand to this imaginary vendor, passed him a few bucks, and happily drank my Kool-Aid down.

  • Back on two wheels

    New_scoot
    I bought a replacement for my Vespa yesterday.

    Same model: ET4.
    Same year: 2002.
    Same color: platinum.

    Of course, it has 7,700 fewer miles, it doesn’t have this little rattle when I start it up, and it doesn’t ride quite as rough. Those are all to the good, but I had grown fond of the rattle and the grind and the squeaky brakes. And of grumping about them.

    Even better, I paid less for this bike than Geico paid out for my old one.

    Heather asked me if I rode around all weekend on my new ET4. It had been a month since I’d scooted around, and I really wanted to get back on my bike.

    But on Thursday evening, Chanel called me to suggest she and Finn and Ellie drive up from Portland for the weekend. How could I say no? And you can’t really put a three-year-old on any kind of motorcycle.

  • Uncle Mike’s Hotel

    Apparently, I live in a hotel. This is according to Finn and Ellie, who don’t know anyone who lives in a multi-story, multi-unit building. I tried to explain that I live in an apartment building, and I thought the message got through.

    Until the next morning, when Finn asked if the restaurant in my hotel serves Froot Loops.

  • Soon to be back on two wheels

    Geico has stepped up to the plate now that the G****s have accepted responsibility for the accident.

    I had a rental car for a few days, which helped with the move and made my commute easier (I’d rather be stuck in the 520 parking lot on a 1.25 hour commute, than be stuck at 5th & Virginia waiting for the bus to Queen Anne on 2 hour commute). I could have kept the car for longer, but now that I’m in Capitol Hill, finding parking is more trouble than it’s worth, so I returned it Monday morning after almost a week with four wheels.

    Geice valued my scoot at $2,950, which is about right for a pristine ET4 bought from a dealer. I’ll get the check this week.

    Interesting side note: the Seattle Times recently reported that new Washington state laws have made a big dent in accidents caused by new teenage drivers. Not that it helped me, but… Technically, the kid who totaled my scoot should lose his license until he’s 18. It takes two mistakes for this, and he made them both at the same time: causing a collision, and driving with non-relatives his own age in the car.

    More important, I found the exact same Vespa model, year and color selling for $2,800, and with 1/3rd the miles.  I would have bought it on Saturday morning, but without a local bank branch, I’m sorta stuck. I’ll be withdrawing the max from ATM machines all week to get the cash together.

    This Saturday morning, I’ll be back on two wheels.

  • The Oracle baby boom

    Almost all of my close marketing friends at Oracle are pregnant: Kevin, Mike, Nelly, Brigitte and Brian are all expecting in the next couple of weeks/months. Well, Kevin, Nelly, Brigitte and Mike are expecting soon.

    Madison Louise D***** was born yesterday at 3:42 pm to Brian and Julie.

    Yeah!