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248 days ago
Shortly after the start of the new year, I upgraded to the Samsung Omnia phone on Verizon Wireless. I'm a gadget freak who does a ton of mobile computing, so my phone is like an extra appendage, and I use it heavily for web-based browsing, text & e-mail, and the occasional voice call, too. Given all my use-case scenarios, I seriously considered switching to the iPhone, but decided that I need to stay on the Verizon Wireless + Windows Mobile platform for a number of reasons (I made that decision before the Kindle iPhone ap--if Kindle for iPhone holds up, it may turn out to be a tipping point towards iPhone, and towards online reading in general). A colleague of mine recently got an Omnia, too, and asked if I had any tips to share for getting the most out of this Windows Mobile 6.1 device, which comes packed with other goodies too, like Microsoft Office Mobile, TouchWiz UI, an optical mouse, and a 5-megapixel camera. Here are the tips I gave her, based on ...
305 days ago
A co-worker delicately pointed out to me that it's been more than a year since I've updated my blog. With that in mind, here's what's up since that last post: I started a new job last January with the Office Live team. I'm working as a product manager, helping to drive customer feedback into our planning, marketing, and engineering. It's a fun job with a great team, and it's exciting to be a part of a growing, cutting-edge online business. I bought a new home. It's a beautiful townhouse in the Bothell neighborhood. I've enjoyed owning, decorating, and living in my own place...and having lots of parties in it, too! I'm still having a lot of fun with my church, The Expedition. We continue to meet on Sunday nights in Lynnwood, and we still have dinners together, too--tha'ts really expanded my cooking repetoire! I've read some great books. I've especially enjoyed discovering more YA authors like Stephanie Meyers (yes, I obsessed over Twilight!), Neil Gaiman (Coraline was ...
703 days ago
Three years ago this month, I was entering the holiday season looking forward to switching jobs at Microsoft, and playing around with the latest Microsoft social software. Three years later, I'm ready to switch jobs again, and still playing around with new social software--if you're on Zune Social, friend me as I have a pretty good hunch what's in under the tree! Happy holidays! Lets hope 2008 will provide me with more time for blogging than recent months...
724 days ago
This week, I facilitated another data deep dive session for my team at work. This activity is one of my favorite parts of doing research. Leading the team through our high-level left-to-right look across large sets of data is almost always interesting, and it’s immediately satisfying because helps everyone get on the same page as we work towards the Big Picture. Now that I’ve facilitated a handful of these sessions for my team, I’m picking up a few tricks that make it go more smoothly. Here’s what I’ve learned: 1. The basic approach – data sets in the morning, themes in the afternoon: For my team, we like to take a full day to go through the reports and the themes we’re trying to figure out. Well in advance, I ask individual team members to represent a data set, and to guide us through the deck, pointing out the highlights, lowlights, unexpected findings, and emergent trends. As this discussion takes place, I take notes on a flip-chart. Then, in our ...
740 days ago
It's been another busy month for me! Looking back over my blog, I realize that what was once an almost-daily blogging habit has dwindled down to one lone post per month. That's partly a reflection of the recent pace of my life, and partly due to other technology and hobbies taking over my time, energy, and creative outlets. Since my last post, a lot has happened in my life: I saw my cousin Carrie get married, and enjoyed spending time with family in Texas. I also interviewed for, was offered, and accepted a new job at Microsoft, which I'll transition to in late December (I'll have to blog about that in another post). In my current job, we've entered the time we fondly refer to as our "tax season," the last couple of months of each half when projects hit the hardest (on my team, we're committed to delivering over 400 internal reports in a 5-week span of time. I'm happy to say we saw the first two releases go smoothly this week). Outside of work, we've been planning ...
