December 17, 2006

No, I’m not dating Martha Stewart

Apparently Martha Stewart was on the Howard Stern show and revealed she was dating an ex-Microsoft executive who invented Word and Excel. That would be my former boss and mentor, Charles Simonyi. I have no problem calling Charles the inventor of Microsoft Word – all I did was write the code. Charles had the brilliance to hire me.

I have never met Martha.

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December 4, 2006

Charles in Space

Although his name is not a household one like Bill Gates, my former boss at Microsoft Charles Simonyi is one of the legends of Microsoft culture. I worked under him at Xerox in the late ‘70s until they completely fumbled the ball on office productivity software: by 1980 we had the world’s first personal computer—the Alto—with Ethernet, GUI word-processing (Bravo) and email (Laurel) software, laser printers, and bitmap displays. OK, the laser printers took up a room and cost $100k, but still… Xerox had the mindset that what we had accomplished was simply prototyping. They hired 200 new people and designed new hardware and software from the ground up to attempt to productize what we had done. The result was the ill-fated Star. It took five minutes to boot and couldn’t output a document longer than a few pages.

We bought one at Microsoft and kept it in the office next to Bill’s, just as a reminder.

Charles, who has always loved aviation and is licensed to fly jets and helicopters, is currently in training to be the next space tourist. He’s bivouacked in the formerly super-secret Star City, built in the woods outside of Moscow in the ‘60s to train Cosmonauts, and if all goes well will blast off in April on Soyuz TMA-10 to the International Space Station.

It’s hard to overstate the leadership Charles gave to the newly formed applications division at Microsoft in the early ’80. If you looked up “hard core” in the dictionary, you wouldn’t be surprised to find Charles’s picture. One time Charles yelled at the manager of the McDonalds across the street from the newly developed Bellevue Square, one of the nation’s ritziest shopping malls, for his unusual decision to cook all burgers to order rather than leaving them in a heating rack for up to 10 minutes: “Come on! We have to get back to work! If I want to wait for my food, I go to Benjamin’s!” Benjamin’s was the fanciest restaurant in Bellevue, where every Sunday Charles sat at the chef’s counter and ate the brunch buffet before heading in to work.

Charles became an American citizen during our tenure at Microsoft, and was very proud of it. He was always working on his English pronunciation which, although good, bore noticeable traces of his Hungarian upbringing. One day he was walking around saying what sounded to me like “wuddum fuddum.” In response to my quizzical look, he explained it was an exercise in vowel sounds. He was saying “worm farm.” I said I supposed the exercise in consonant sounds was next. He liked to say “artificial” with the stress on “TIF.” I gently corrected him a few times, which he genuinely appreciated, but I’m not sure it took hold. The impish Doug Klunder, wizard behind Multiplan and Excel, once pulled a cruel prank on Charles. When Charles said he thought a certain decision was a bit “cavalier,” Doug stared him angrily in the face. “It’s pronounced 'ca-VAHL-yay,' Charles,” and Doug turned on his heel and slammed himself in his office, leaving Charles puzzling. “No. Really? Ca-VAHL-yay?”

I have no idea how much Charles is paying for the privilege of doing something only a few others have ever done, but I do know Space Adventures wants over $100k just for a sub-orbital flight (American Express is forever offering me charming bargains like this). These guys know how to charge. If you’d like to go to Russia and watch Charles make history, they offer a VIP four-night tour. You’re on your own getting to Moscow, but once you land there, they take care of your hotel and the round trip to the launch site in Kazakhstan for the nominal fee of $15,595. Coach.

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November 6, 2006

Twenty-Four Seven

I finished watching season two of 24 on DVD, and despite some outrageous plot devices and a few technical slip-ups (“that uses Huffman encoding so you should be able to use it anywhere”) I liked it a lot. At the end of every episode I laugh out loud at how they manage to create a cliffhanger every hour, on the hour.

It may just be that Jack Bauer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is the perfect embodiment of some of my most important values: freedom, loyalty, and progress. Elisha Cuthbert, who plays a blonde version of my first wife, doesn’t hurt either, and the constant Kafkaesque shifts in the characters’ realities make for gripping, if somewhat far-fetched, spy drama. The final season of West Wing just came out on DVD, so I’ll watch that, intermixed with Paul Phillips’s movie recommendations, before getting season three of 24.

Being a guy who bleeds Microsoft blue, I faithfully downloaded Internet Explorer 7 when notified it was available by Windows Update. I was excited to try out the tabbed browsing that users of alternative browsers are always crowing about. I still can’t see much advantage to it other than speed, and the implementation by Microsoft has a couple very poor design decisions. Now I need to train myself to close tabs in two different ways: the X on the tab for all but the last one, and the X on the window to close the browser itself if I am done with the last tab. It’s just silly for there to be no X on the last tab; it should bring you back to a blank page or the home page as you opt.

The second problem is there doesn’t seem to be any way to get all new pages to display in a tab by default. Why on earth would you want it do default to a whole new browser window once you have these tabs? And if you use the nifty little arrow on the Favorites menu to open a new tab, it takes three clicks (plus the click to drop down the favorites menu) to actually see the new page! As Bill used to whine in design-review meetings, “Doesn’t anybody actually try to use this thing?” I guess it’s unreasonable to expect such a megacorporation to maintain what Charles Simonyi used to call “the craftsman’s fine hand” but come on! This is the flagship product! Guys, just call me any time and I’ll make your design decisions for you at only double my usual rate.

I found and plugged a leak in my Chuzzle game and I am now very close to even on the non-illegal Skilljam non-gambling site, non-illegal because you gamble with Chuzzles rather than cards I guess. Look for me at the final table of the World Series of Chuzzle. Oh yeah. I guarantee a win.

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