Ultranormal

Author: Kevin Lawver

  • Epic iFail: AT&T and the Circular Phone Tree from Hell

    When I left AOL, I gave them back my Blackberry, and have since been either without a phone completely or using Jen’s bright pink Razr. I want a new iPhone, but waited a little while to get past the initial rush. Well, this afternoon was supposed to be the day. I called up the local AT&T store to see if they had any, and got a menu. Here’s what happened:

    • I pressed 2 to order new wireless service or hardware. Waited six minutes to talk to someone
    • Asked the guy who picked up if the Savannah AT&T store had any in stock. He asked me my zip code and then asked me to hold. I spent three minutes on hold (there’s a timer on the phone… handy).
    • He told me he could transfer me to the store. I then spent 8 minutes on hold.
    • I ended up at the original phone menu and pressed 2 again just for fun. I waited for 5 minutes before my head exploded and I hung up.\
      That was twenty-three minutes to go basically in a big circle. AT&T, you suck. I mean, you’re a phone company and I can’t dial a local number and talk to the local AT&T store? How stupid is that?\
      Thank you, AT&T, for wasting almost half an hour of my life. You’re the balls.

  • My Least Favorite Time

    It’s already begun, and I hate it. You know what I’m talking about, the primaries are over, we know who the candidates are going to be, and they’re taking their first ham-handed swipes at each other like boxers who’ve never met during the first round. There are jabs, feints and dodges, but the things you originally loved about your candidate get compromised. That punishing left uppercut is muted and turned in a jab.\
    OK, forget the metaphors. The race to the middle has begun. The compromises and purely political tricks to try to woo the middle (who aren’t paying attention anyway) have started, and I hate it. The operatives, salivating for months, are now pouncing – pulling out all manner of diversions to show that the opposition is really a fan of terrorists, a tax cheat, a Bad Guy™ or gasp, an elitist.\
    Can it please be November already? I’m tired of politics. I’m truly tired of playing political games and scorekeeping when our country is in a deep deep hole created by stupid and evil men. We need big solutions, not petty bickering. We need real change, not compromise. For Senator Obama, I believe in your because you believe in change. Don’t compromise that now. You’re not going to attract the middle by pandering to them. You got us all excited because you passionately shared your vision. Don’t dilute it by playing games and compromising that vision (your FISA stance is disgraceful). And Senator McCain, I loved you. In 2000, I crossed over to vote for you in the Virginia primaries. You were an honest man. What happened? Stop listening to Karl Rove and the idiots that got us into the mess we’re in now and take back the fire and honesty you had eight years ago.\
    Please, let’s make this race about the future and taking our country back. I’m afraid it’s going to be about inspiration versus fear, and I don’t want any part in that. Let’s make it grand vision versus grand vision, not who paid their taxes and “terrorist fist jabs” (come on, that’s the stupidest damn thing I’ve ever heard).

  • Three Weeks In, A Look Back

    I know I’ve been rather quiet since leaving AOL and joining up with Music Intelligence Solutions, but as you can see from Jen’s entries, we’ve been busy. I’ve been going back and forth to Savannah, trying to both get to know the team, the vision and the plans we have for launching, and at the same time, designing architecture, doing training and helping folks get up to speed on scrum and other stuff. It’s been a lot of late night, long conversations, whiteboard sessions (note to self, get a bigger whiteboard), and late-night epiphanies while trying to get to sleep.

    I keep thinking about what I learned over thirteen years, and the people who took their time to mentor me, and the excellent managers I had who showed me how to deal with both pressure and conflict. I keep thinking about one of the first technical meetings I had way back in 1999 about AOL Search. We were just getting started with the project, and I was the front-end guy, and one of the only people involved who knew AOLserver and Tcl. So, there I was in a room with two PhD’s, with them asking me what I wanted the API to look like. Joe Dzikiewicz and Tom Donaldson sat there and asked lots of questions, we drew on the whiteboard, and I was freaked the hell out…

    There are hundreds of people I should thank for helping me over the years. I tried to count up all the people I worked with at AOL, and it’s easily over a hundred and I got close to two before I stopped. But, the person I keep coming back to is Joe. He was one of the first computer scientists who took me under his wing. I don’t have a degree – everything I know about technology is either self-taught or through experience and others helping me out. I’ll never forget an IM Joe sent me while we were working on AOL Search. It went something like:

    • Joe: Hey, things are looking good, but it seems kind of slow. Are you threading the requests?
    • Me: Am I what?
    • Joe: … I’ll call

    I think I scared him; but, he very patiently explained it to me, and then sent me off to figure out how to implement it.

    I learned so much from Joe, and from the hundreds of other people I worked with at AOL – from my first manager, Judy Winger, who “saved” me from getting fired from a really stupid e-mail I sent to the wrong manager (well, that manager was the intended target, but…), Priscilla Serling for encouraging me to take the job in Virginia, to Robin Vinopal and Mark Robinson who taught me so much about how to treat the people who work for you, and to Bert Arians and Alan Keister for giving me all the room I needed to try new things. And all the nerds, geeks and smartasses I worked with.

    It’s only now that I’m gone and have a couple weeks away that I see how lucky I was to work with all the people I did.

    I’m having a blast at MIS trying to implement all the stuff I learned over the years at AOL, and all the stuff I wanted to try but couldn’t, either because of upper management (I can only say that I learned a whole lot about what not to do from AOL’s upper management over the years) or because I wasn’t in a place to do it. It’s been a lot of fun seeing my new team embrace all the things I’m throwing at them (and I’m throwing a bunch, everything from The Cluetrain to web standards).

    It’s going to be an adventure, and before I get too far along in it, I have to say “thank you” to everyone I worked with at AOL. Without you, I wouldn’t be here, and I’ll be forever grateful.

  • And I’m Out!

    \
    They (big thanks to Shawn for organizing it and Andy, Bert and Frank for picking up the tab!) threw an awesome going away party for me Thursday afternoon, which was a great idea, because yesterday I was super sick and just barely made it in to turn in my badge, laptop, blackberry, etc and grab my boxes and mini-fridge.\
    I love the people at AOL, always have. I’ve worked with, literally, hundreds of people in my thirteen years there, and I’m sad that I won’t see them every day now. But, it was definitely time to go. Now, I’m unemployed for two whole days before starting my new job down in Savannah. If I weren’t so sick, I might actually enjoy it!

  • Building Rails and Standards Tribes in Savannah

    I was thinking this morning about moving to Savannah, since the new job’s down there, and what I wanted to do to find a tribe. I have several great non-geospecific tribes already, my W3C scattered around the globe, my SxSW tribe and then my AOL tribe also spread around the globe, but mostly local to Northern Virginia (this includes “escapees” at various startups and places around the area). But, I’ll be moving to a new city, and I like having a local tribe.\
    I went looking this morning before heading over to the conference, and there’s no Refresh Savannah or Ruby Users Group that I could find through Google. So… it looks like we need to start them! I’ve got the domain names registered. Who wants to help?

  • The Triangle Will Keep on Turning

    I made it to thirteen years at AOL. It started as a summer job way back in 1995 at the AOL call center in Tucson. I talked to AOL members who needed help. I was there for the summer of busy signals, and took more than two hundred and fifty phone calls in an eight hour shift (“Yes, it’s busy. No, it’s not your computer. If you’d like credit, I can transfer you to billing. Sorry!”).\
    I’ve built all kinds of web apps, worked with wickedly smart, fun, weird and great people. I’ve had better managers than I deserve and mentors I’ll never be able to repay or express to them how much they helped me.\
    I’ve written dozens of e-mails today to folks inside AOL and out, posted to twitter and to the ficlets blog. I’m emotionally raw at this point, because I’m going to miss working with everyone and seeing them every day. I’m not good with good-byes, and I’ve said enough for one day.\
    If the previous three paragraphs aren’t clear, after thirteen crazy years, I’m leaving AOL. Yep. Last Monday, I got an interesting e-mail from a recruiter asking me if I’d be interested in a VP of Development position at a small company. I said, sure, I’ll talk to them. Several dozen e-mails, a dozen or so phone calls and an offer later, I’m joining Music Intelligence Solutions on 6/9. I’m more excited and nervous than I’ve been since Jen and I packed up and moved to Northern Virginia nine years ago.\
    There are, of course, many more things to say, but I’m worn out.

  • Brian and Jen’s Birthday Party!

    Jen and Brian declaring Brian's age (he's four).

    We had a lovely birthday party for Jen and Brian. It was a lot of fun and Brian was a little ball of energy. He was so excited, he couldn’t sleep and came downstairs several times saying, “I’m done going to sleep now.” The rest of the pictures are up on Flickr. Enjoy!

  • Nerdy Songs

    Jason posted a tweet about writing songs this afternoon and I must have been in a particularly suggestible post-nap state and instantly came up with several extremely nerdy song titles. I think almost all of these fall into to Nerd Country n’ Western, but whatever. Here they are:

    • I’m Semantic, But Wow, You’re Well-Formed
    • Since You Left, I’ve Been in Plain Old Semantic Hell
    • Why Do Our Tags Have to Branch?
    • If You Won’t Mock My Markup, I Won’t Jeer Your Scripts
    • What’s in a DOCTYPE?
    • I Sold My Soul to the W3C, and All I Got Was a Long-Sleeved Tee
    • Baby, It’s Not Really a Microformat!
    • Let’s Go Home and Append Some Child Nodes to Your DOM
    • If You Leave, All I’ll Have is Twitter\
      I’m sorry. I really am, but you’re welcome to add to the nerdy nonsense in the comments…

  • Shut Up, Indeed

    \
    Next January can’t come fast enough.

  • On Morale

    In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget–but never shows up in a budget–is morale. [what’s true for a movie is true for a startup!] If you have low morale, for every \$1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every \$1 you spend, you get about \$3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.\
    I’ve had this quote pretty much plastered in my subconscious for the past month. It’s from Brad Bird, the guy who directed The Incredibles. You can read more from the interview over at Om’s site.\
    You could replace “movie” with “project” or “product” and I think it’s still true. It’s next to impossible to motivate an team with crappy morale. It’s like trying to light a campfire in the rain with just matches. Having a high-morale team is like lighting a campfire covered in kerosene. You just need a match, and then stand back.