bengt-erik norum

i'm sitting in the san jose airport waiting for a delayed flight to seattle. my work mail is syncing slowly, so i decided to clean up my personal inbox. doing so, i noticed a trend.

i've received a relatively large number of messages from people that read similar to: "hey, how've you been? haven't talked to you in awhile. life's good here (insert details). i ran across your blog. how's your health?"

i'm horrible about replying to personal email. i get distracted with things that aren't nearly as important and lose the mail behind a few hundred pieces of spam. i think i need to adopt some work habits for my personal mail. in the short term, i'll post here and reply to these people that think i'm ignoring them.

having tapered off to a slow trickle of posts, there's alot of "big" or "important" life events that have passed unmentioned:

• i'm engaged to a beautiful woman, katherine brown, i met through work. wedding isn't until sept. of 2009, mostly because we've been busy with the rest of this list
• we moved to duvall, washington, a town of ~7000 people
• we bought a 3 bed, 2 bath house on 15 acres.
• kat is working in redmond, i haven't changed jobs and am still working in microsoft's silicon alley campus. i fly alot.
• my kids still live in idaho falls, id. celeste turned 8 a couple weekends ago and eva turns 4 in march. did i mention that i fly alot?

on the health front, in short, i still have barrett's and am looking for a gastroenterologist up here. the aciphex has done a pretty good job of controlling symptoms (and further damage), as long as i'm careful about what and when i eat. i'll post more on this, later this weekend.

when viewing a jpg in internet explorer (uri ends in .jpg), why doesn't "right-click, properties" get me exif data?

and where's my flying car?

i'm a geek.

i can geek out on almost anything. in trying to figure out how i'm going to structure the work my team will do over the next year, i did a fair amount of research on the topic of "innovation". i totally geeked out on it, and came out the other side feeling dumber for my efforts. connceptually, it seemed a little odd to research "innovation". in my mind, research is an attempt to uncover "prior art" (what other people have done), while innovation is all about the forward looking and the "radical departure from status quo."

having said that, i really really really like talking to people who have a novel approach to solving an old/common problem or a clever application of a new technology and want to give my team some space to do that. i have some ideas about how i might acheive this, but wanted to back them with "measurable goals".

the earth-shattering outcome of my research? i'll save you the frustration and brain damage:

• i'm really glad i'm not the director of it for some small company.
  
• lots of people think their reuse of something clever someone else did is "innovative".
  
• "innovation" is a good way to explain something that you spent a bunch of time on that still hasn't paid off.
  
• people who do innovative work don't generally use the word in a sentence without "air quotes".
  
• and... the only thing i'll retain... there are two approaches to innovation, supply driven and demand led. (more in the following paragraph)
  

two simple thoughts:

supply-driven innovation occurs when you have a new technology looking for a problem. ("oh, look! new hammer! where nail?")

demand-led innovaiton occurs when you have a problem looking for a solution. ("pile of nails and i got nothing heavy.")

yep. that's it.

it's not much, but it's what i took from three hours of reading papers on innovation, metrics to evaluate the impact of innovation, and a fair amount of meaningless drivel.

side note: in the right light diana krall sounds an awful lot like queen latifah. (see also: various artists: we all love ella: celebrating the first lady of song)

this is my 100th post to bengt.org. based on some pretty weak apache log analysis, i estimate that roughly 165 people will read this over the next year. i apologize in advance.

music that's made the last few weeks bearable.

billy talent
black strobe
eagles of death metal
hazel adkins
idaho
tortoise
metric
ratatat
dean martin
spiderbait
the smiths
white stripes
elvis
elliott smith
skinny puppy
portishead
fujiya and miyagi
bad brains
the black keys
ladytron
the donnas (yes, still)
the apples in stereo
lisa loeb
yardbirds
reverend horton heat
billy bragg
the knife
neutral milk hotel
cracker
x
johnny cash
bmrc
le tigre
morphine
magnetic fields

the official windows live hotmail launch was monday.

a lot of very talented developers put a lot of long hours to make this specific release happen. i have the privilege of working with many of them and am frequently impressed by their desire to 'do the right thing.' this is one of the reasons i love my job.

i've worked for microsoft for 7.5 years and had something to do with hotmail that entire time. i've seen many many talented people have a profound effect on the service we run. many (most, in fact) have moved on, inside or outside the company. some have gone back to school, some have moved north to redmond, some have left to work for other companies, and a fair number have left to pursue careers with our competitors.

it wouldn't be right to congratulate the current product planning, customer support, business, marketing, dev, and ops teams on this major release and re-branding of hotmail without highlighting the incredible legacy left by their predecessors. there are hundreds of people who've worked on hotmail over the past 11+ years, most of them will go unrecognized. hotmail works, in part, because of a number of very wise decisions that were made many years ago.

congratulations to all of you who used to work on hotmail. any success we have is partly your doing.

i haven't posted for months, but endeavor to do so more.

i've returned from a great vacation and despite feeling alternately tired and overwhelmed by the flu-like symptoms, i'm pretty optimistic about my life. ;)

a few quick updates:

- i'm procrastinating the surgery but have been managing my diet closely. symptom-free for the most part.
- my kids are now 7 and 3. i feel old, in this context.
- work is going well. i'm frequently reminded of how kick ass my team is. makes my job easy.

i might even post again, later tonight, but figured it was worth getting something out there, even if i don't.

i contacted the thompson center, after procrastinating for a couple months. dr. overholt is out until march 20th, but i will likely have my surgery the last week in march.

i'm nervous, but optimistic about getting through this phase of the treatment.

i've almost entirely lost my voice, today. horrible cough, too. i'm tired of being sick.

i've been working through a bit of a haze.  headed to redmond, tonight; returning tommorow evening.

it's been a pretty crazy week.  the whole thing has left me drained, but optimistic.  been really introspective and figuring out what i want in my life.

giving up on the mayo clinic.  i'm just going to schedule the barrx for january and be done with it.

more later.

i'm sitting in the boise, idaho airport.  i woke up at 4:30 mountain time (3:30 pacific) to catch my 6:00 (mountain) flight to boise.  i'm sick and anticipate completely falling apart, mid-afternoon.  i'm going to work anyway, though.  too much to get done.

there's a man sitting next to me with a really chunky hp laptop.  he's running a localized copy of xp in japanese.  he played one game of 'go' and sat looking confused for 10 minutes before he changed the settings to 'computer vs. computer'.  his laptop fan kicked on and it's madly playing game after game of go against itself, emitting this horrible clicking noise with each move (4-5 a second, most of the time).  is he learning?

well, i'm off to take my $3 dose of dayquil and make sure my mail's synced for the flight.  (the boise aiport has free wi-fi; amazing how much more pleasant it is to endure a layover here, as a result.)

couple days ago, i received a nondescript envelope from palo alto medical. the dr. who performed my last scope had written a two paragraph note stating that there was no significant change in the barrett's cells. he did mention to me, while i was in recovery, that the swelling, inflamation and ulcers were substantially better than they were during the last scope, a couple months prior. good news (that wasn't reflected in this letter).

i initially mentioned this to a couple people at work and the response was universally confusing. people seemed to hear "it's all better" instead of what i actually said. i adjusted and when i told anyone else about it, i said "the swellings improved and the pre/early cancerous cells aren't any worse." that avoided the awkward situation of having to explain to people that i wasn't "all better."

today, i called dr. sharma at the mayo clinic. dr. overholt at the thompson center suggested that i contact him, as he's geographically closer to me. very helpful coordinators told me that the entire gastroenterology department was at a convention until the 30th and would hear back around that time.