Puzzlepieces – Michael Fagan’s Blog

So I got laid off from Microsoft on Wednesday. I wasn’t really bothered about the job, as I wasn’t happy with it already and had been looking to find something else for quite a while. The unfortunate part is that it affects my immigration status and so I can’t stay that long right now in the US, where many of my friends are. But I had been planning on returning to Toronto within a year or so anyhow.

The Details

Since a lot of people have asked me, here are all the details I’ve got. There have been three rounds of layoffs at Microsoft this year (this is supposedly the last). I knew people who had been laid off in both prior rounds. In those cases they were all relatively new employees, but that is partly the bias of me being friends with people my own age. In those rounds we also lost several members of my team.

My manager found out on Monday, and I was told on Wednesday. I’d figured it out earlier on Wednesday due to the odd nature of the meeting invitation. Anyhow that was Wednesday and by end of today I will be fully out having taken my stuff from my office and returned all work property. Various things like my work e-mail and building access ended on Thursday or today. As to why I was chosen, I presume it is a combination of having low seniority (been at Microsoft a bit over a year) and my record (my annual review wasn’t stellar, long story), although I didn’t ask and I’m not really interested.

What Now?

I’ve got a couple of weeks that I can stay around Seattle to look for employment, otherwise I’ll head home to Toronto. Even then, if I find a job in Seattle it will be much easier to return that it was for me to get here to begin with.

That’s pretty much it. I’m not really sure that I want a job at all right now (whether in the Seattle area, Toronto area, or otherwise), but for the time being I’m considering all options. If you’re really that eager to hire me or have something else in mind, let me know.

So I already knew that despite asbestos being banned in Canada (among many other places), we still export it to countries with poor health and safety regulations, which I find pretty horific. I was watching a CBC news segment on a flight a couple ago of days about it which brought it back to mind. For one thing, they pointed out that only around 500 people are employed by this in Canada. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of us doing the wrong thing.

So I figured there must be a petition on this, so I’d just go online and find it and sign it. Not so simple it turns out. There are, and have been, lots of petitions. As recently as the last few weeks, there is a new petition, but it seems like only companies can sign it; I’m not entirely sure what the point of that is. Here is a petition received by the government in 1997 along with what I would describe as an extremely pathetic and predictable government reply. The reply basically says that we tell other countries to use it safely, and it’s not our fault if they don’t listen and die as a result.

Finally I find the Ban Asbestos Canada website, which includes a broken link to an actual petition, and I managed to figure out what the real link is supposed to be. So go this petition page and from there you can enter in a few details to send a letter to all of the federal party leaders. If I were them I would also add on the relevant cabinet ministers (Health, Trade, Natural Resources, Public Safety, maybe a few others), and the MP and MPP for the riding that includes the remaining asbestos mine.

Oh, and I checked Facebook too. There are at least seven petitiony groups on this (of course), but the largest has only 230 members.

Last week Google replaced thier base maps in the US, no longer using data from TeleAtlas. The new data isn’t from OpenStreetMap either. I think we are finally starting to figure out where it all came from: MapDotNet : Blog : Google voice recognition software used in street data collection process?

Yahoo!’s Term Extraction Web Search is about to be discontinued. very sad

wait, nevermind

Imprint Online - So long Waterloo… - I never quite got around to finishing my series of concluding blog posts about the University of Waterloo, but this article raises a lot of points that I’d planned on discussing.
Overall, the school itself seems to be quite poor on educational quality and absolutely terrible in terms of the administration. Since I haven’t attended any other Canadian university, I can’t really compare them, but if they are all that bad, then that would be pretty sad.

There are some excellent people who work there. Several, anyhow. But overall the administration is a black hole of not-caring. They will hardly do anything to help students, although they are more than happy to take credit for anything that students do. This was going to be a slightly more intelligent criticism, but I haven’t the energy right now.

The Point Blog » Blog Archive » Company to Donate to Charity if Patent Litigation is Dropped great idea from Desire2Learn. They’re an educational software maker in Waterloo with a pretty neat product fighting BlackBoard’s completely pointless patent.

I’ve been working (for a long time, but more lately) on both reducing what I see in my email and newsreader as well as differentiating the two.

I’ve decided that my email (Gmail) is for personal communication, as in mail that people specifically send to me, and important computer-generated emails like bill payment reminders. My newsreader (Google Reader) is for news and alerts that while interesting to me, are not crucial. This aligns with the fact that I always check my email first, and that if I had to, I could just mark newsreader items as read without any real consequences.

I am using three things to do this: one policy and two web-based tools.

Policy-wise, I examine more closely what emails I get. In the past I might have deleted an email from some company or website that I wasn’t interested in, but now I take the extra time to go to their website and either unsubscribe completely or uncheck certain parts of what they send me.
I already use my newsreader to subscribe to feeds when possible, but a lot of sites still only have email newsletters. There are a few services which will allow you to convert emails into RSS feeds and I’m finding MailBucket to be the best. I create a filter in Gmail so that all mail from the newsletter are automatically marked as read, moved to my archive (so they don’t show up in my inbox) and forwarded to that-newsletter-name@mailbucket.org. That way, I don’t have to give these websites an alterate email, they still use my gmail address, and I still archive all those emails in Gmail, but I will never see them there unless I want to. Instead, I subscribe to http://mailbucket.org/that-newsletter-name.xml in my newsreader, and I see all the content there. Perfect.

Getting items from my email to my newsreader is one step, but then there are many feeds I read for which I am only interested in some of the items, not all. For these, I create a Yahoo Pipe that takes in a particular feed and filters it by excluding items which match various criteria or only including items that match. I unsubscribe from the original feed and subscribe to the filtered version, immediately reducing how much stuff gets into my newsreader. Very nice. There are some minor drawbacks to this, such as that anything which uses my newsreader’s data won’t be perfect, such as Google Reader recommending feeds to me based on what I already read, and for Google Reader’s crawler telling websites how many people have subscribed to their feeds. Either way, tiny problems compared to the great benefits.

New Craigslist Search Features (by Jeremy Zawodny) - it’s great to see the work that Jeremy’s been doing. I’m most excited to see that I can now do decent boolean queries using ORing and phrases on Craigslist. I will definitely be using this.

Yahoo! Search Blog » Blog Archive » Fighting Duplication: Adding more arrows to your quiver - another item I meant to blog last week. It’s good to see the search engines finally agree on something that’s been needed for years.

Official Gmail Blog: Four changes to Gmail contacts - I meant to blog this a while back, but Gmail finally adding contact merging was infinitely needed. Glad to see it’s there.

LendAround - I got an email from LendAround, who saw my earlier comments on borrowing websites and gave me an invite to the beta site. Like many of the other applications out there, they are only used for a dedicated good (in this case, DVDs), but the site is quite well done (autocomplete in data entry, good design, facebook integration), and according to them, will expand beyond DVDs eventually. Once they’ve expanded to allowing goods of any sort I’ll give them a real try-out.

WhiteHouse.gov’s New Robots.txt - geeky, but this perfectly symbolizes the differences between the two administrations

Welcome to the Washington State Department of Transportation - so just about all public institutions are far removed from those they serve. The WSDOT is a rare exception, and they do an excellent job. I read their blog, which is written as a real blog, not just PR. They talk about how they care about the issues. Last week when their was flooding I could immediately see photos of that online. Today I’m looking at a series of slides they just posted assessing the current state of Washington’s transportation, given several recent problems. These guys are with it.

in response to those who thing I only (and always) critisize the design of everything, I present an example of something extremely well designed: the lids of liquid laundry detergent jugs. I would link to something, but I can’t seem to find a good link for this…

…was the creation of the internet. The web’s been around well over a decade and practically every newspaper seems to still think it was the worst thing that could have happened to them. The important thing about newspapers - as I naively thought - was reporting on the news, not the physical manifestation of that on dead trees. Newspapers would have to be pretty silly to let non-news organizations usurp them completely on news, right?

geoupdater - does something very similar to what I was working on.

I’ve got my location set in FireEagle, which I update via the site and Dopplr. I also found an app that turns FireEagle into geoRSS which allows me to include the updates in friendfeed and plot my location easily on a map, which I will shortly be adding to my personal homepage.

This tool (via Ogle Earth) will read from FireEagle and post updates to services like Facebook, and via an RSS feed that includes past locations, allows you to pull in updates to friendfeed, etc. Not bad.

Hossein (link goes to his English blog) is known as the father of the Persian blogosphere. I met him a couple of years ago (old link takes a while to load), not too difficult since he also lived in Toronto. Anyhow he’s been arrested in Iran on obviously fake charges. Considering that Canadian journalist was beaten to death after her arrest in Iran a couple of years ago, this is not exactly good.

Free Hossein Derakhshan // Libérez Hossein Derakhshan is a Facebook group that seems to be acting as an early petitiony-type thing. I wonder if the Canadian government can be persuaded to actually do anything about this at all.

Goal: find an online tool which allows me to list things that others (friends and neighbours) can borrow, and let me view things that others have listed

This doesn’t seem like an impossible goal. One problem is that most of the websites for this seem to be for only books, movies, etc., few work for just any miscellaneous items. The only thing that matches is Neighborrow. The site isn’t particularly well-designed, but I could live with that.

How this should really work is that I should be able to state my location as the source for all my items, and be able to search geographically. Instead I have to join “neighborrowhoods,” which can either be public or private. This isn’t as good as arbitrary locations, but it would do, except that there are no public neighborrowhoods for my location and it costs $$ to create one, versus private groups (which are not what I want) and are limited to fifty people. I thought that Facebook applications might be another good place to look, but there seem to be only media-sharing applications plus one that matches my idea but is broken and has no users.

So for now, I’ve listed most of my borrowable stuff on neighborrow, which can sadly only be seen if you join the private group I created which so far includes just me. bleh

So for the past few months I have been keeping track of the books I finished reading. Just a text file with ISBNs and dates. I finally got around to deciding how to expose that online, the choices being to publish it myself or use another website. I was looking for a well-done site that allowed import and export, and hopefully a site that was fairly large already so that it wasn’t likely to die, and if it had social aspects it could take advantage of the numbers. Turns out there are tons of sites, but I decided to only look at the two biggest, LibraryThing and Shelfari, both that I had known of, and both at least partially owned by Amazon now. I decided to go with LibraryThing, because it seems like a much more serious and powerful tool, and the attitude of the company (which does not get along with the other) was much more favourable. You can see my profile here. There is a limit of 200 books listed for free, but considering my pathetic rate of reading right now, that won’t be an issue for a long time, at which point I probably won’t be using LibraryThing anyhow. One minor point is that I think LibraryThing thinks I actually own all these books (I own none of them), whereas Shelfari had options for that.

Actually I added the LibraryThing profile link to my home page, but at some point I am going to redo that home page to be more dynamic and actually show information directly on that page via Fireeagle, Google Calendar, and Friendfeed, at least.

WorldChanging Seattle: Congestion Pricing: Can Tolling Be Fair? - WorldChanging Seattle (one of my favourite websites since I moved to Seattle, but also a great site for people anywhere) links to a really well-done report on traffic congestion and tolls, along with excellent commentary on the report.

Maybe this is a sad statement, but real hard data and analysis is so rare that I really appreciate when I see it done.

During election day here in the US, I noticed a church which was acting as a poll location also had a bake sale on that day. Think about how many more people will pass by that bake sale than on any other day that they could choose to do it. Someone there is really smart.

I started writing this post in early August and forgot to finish it and publish. So here it is now

I was an intern at Microsoft the previous two summers, and this week I started full time. Some things change and some things do not. The same people are playing foosball on my floor. Construction is everywhere, and despite a year’s absence, this still includes the street in front of my building. The shuttles that go between buildings are still white, but now have a green stripe. Kitchens finally have compost disposal, and the cutlery and plates etc. are now compostable. Not as good as real cutlery and plates, which I had wished for, but better than before. In many ways, it hardly feels as if I left.

Pie Chart on Pizza Box Advertising - information aesthetics - nice ads… we need to see more information graphics everywhere

Brain Off » Open Source Geo Stack :: Mikel Maron :: Building Digital Technology for Our Planet - since I emailed Mikel asking for a list like this about a year and a half ago, I can take credit for it, right?

Anyhow this is a great list that includes everything except the actual sources of data. The best one for that is often OpenStreetMap, but it really depends where and what you’re mapping.

Pipes Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing iCal and CSV Support - so this news is way old… somehow I never knew that Yahoo pipes supported iCal for both input and output. Pipes is such an amazingly powerful tool, I definitely need to play with it more, especially for events.