Heather's Virtual Scrapbook

Nature walk photos now published...

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 13:46:51 GMT

So I treated myself to a new Canon Rebel Xti Digital SLR last summer and yet I never really fully tried all the features on it to improve my photography skills. My friends at work (who are much more of the "SLR" experts than I) have been so kind to offer their time over the past year to take me on a series of photo walks so I could practice taking pictures with them and learn from their tips and tricks...

Well on Friday, we finally had our first "nature walk" to start practicing my photography. We walked around the Microsoft campus (aka "SVC" = Silicon Valley Campus) - if you're interested in seeing the results, click here and let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement.

The first skills I learned last week was how to use "P mode" on the camera which is essentially manual mode where I can control the speed of the aperture and the lightness of the pictures. The other skill they were trying to teach me was composition, basically what you choose to include and put into a picture when you're deciding what you're going to take a picture of. I still need to practice a lot more but I'm feeling OK about my initial photos - they're not perfect but it's a start... I'm already looking forward to the next photo walk.

What it sometimes feels like to work on Live QnA

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 06:58:38 GMT

Tonight I found a good question on the QnA site - I stumbled upon it by mistake actually when I was just browsing around but the timing struck a nerve and I felt I had to respond (which I did in a comment on the actual question that Paulcon61 posted on the QnA site). In all fairness to all the other members who have posted other similar great questions both in our message boards and on the QnA site itself, this is a question that is posted and discussed often but the timing tonight when I saw this hit me at the right time and made me stop to think...

Sometimes I wish the members of the QnA community could only see and hear how much we DO listen to their feedback and input - how much we discuss, research, and investigate their ideas to understand and prioritize the features and improvements we're going to release next to improve the QnA site. If only they knew how much time we all spend working on this site day-in and day-out... how many extra hours we put in late night (um... like right now that I'm blogging and QnA'ing at midnight on a weeknight) and on the weekends, trying to actively participate and reach out, to show them how much we truly care!!

I can only say that we are learning, and adapting, and learning more, each day from the community, our most active and engaged users, and we're creatively brainstorming new ways to solve these problems technology-wise in the future. I only wish all of our ideas & technology problems were simple and straightforward to solve, unfortunately they're not. I wish I could fix each and every problem on the site tomorrow but some issues take a longer time to fix than others.

All I can say to the QnA audience is to please keep the feedback coming but if I can ask nicely, can you all go easy on us? It's OK to criticize the QnA site - to tell us what's wrong, what needs to be improved, to be critical - this is exactly the great feedback to provide to a beta site such as Live QnA... but let's "keep it clean..." let's not attack specific team members of the QnA team nor call out other members in the community...

You may be asking yourself - so big deal, it's your job, deal with it!!

But it's funny (in an interesting way, not in a "ha ha funny" way) -- I've never had a job before where my "bosses" were constantly reviewing, debating, and pointing out all of my faults to me each day, day-in and day-out. Imagine if you came into work each day and had a sticky note left on your desk describing to you everything that went wrong in the past day ... then multiply that 1 sticky note by the sheer volume of members posting questions and issues reported in our QnA site and message boards each day. I think my whole office would be covered in sticky notes in about 1 week telling me everything we've done wrong!! That's a little bit of what it's like to work on QnA...

All I can ask of our Live QnA loyal members is to continue being you... the great QnA community that is caring, that reaches out to one another to help in dire times, that provides great advice and information, and provides us with great feedback on what we need to do better... this is what differentiates QnA and makes it a great place to hang out. And in case I haven't said it enough lately, thank you to our great, loyal QnA community

Coming soon: Updates to the Live QnA Beta web site

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:16:52 GMT

Yesterday, we posted a new blog on the Live QnA team blog web site announcing that on Monday, April 28th, 2008, the Live QnA site will be down for the day to undergo some "remodelling" improvements.

While I can't say too much publicly about the April 28th release right now, I can say that I am super excited to finally ship this next release of Live QnA Beta. This has been in the works since I joined the team as Lead PM last fall and I'm just very proud of the extensive effort and teamwork that went into this release... all I can say is that there was a lot of blood, a lot of sweat, and a lot of tears. While we weren't able to add all the features into this particular release that we were pushing for, this release is going to be a great start towards the future of QnA and really getting it to the great, useful and fun community site that it should, and could, be.

I'm so excited and I can't wait until we ship, ship, ship!!!

Live QnA surprises, even me, sometimes...

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:43:09 GMT

As many readers to my blog already know, I'm the Lead Program Manager of the Live QnA site. I started my position late in Fall 2007 and have learned a tremendous amount since then.

Despite the fact that Live QnA has been in beta since it released 1.5 years ago, it still has an amazingly vocal, dedicated and helpful set of users in the community that provide regular and ongoing feedback on the site. It's funny because at past projects I've been on at Microsoft, I've had to seek out end user feedback through support or a blog, or through other channels to understand what people are thinking and feeling about my software. Whereas on QnA, it's the exact opposite, there are *many* places where people can provide input and solicit feedback from the product team. If I spent all day, everyday, just reviewing feedback, we'd never be able to spend time working on the next generation of features and ideas around what we want to develop QnA to be in the future. But with that said, the community continues to challenge us to fix issues and as we fix those issues, they're great at having another set of new problems ready and waiting for us to solve next - that is what makes Live QnA such a great and interesting project to work on and makes me excited to come to work each day.

Regardless, I'm digressing... I had an incredible experience yesterday on QnA that I had to blog about (I have many great experiences each day on QnA but this one was extraordinary for me). I tend not to blog much about my work here because I spend so much of my time at work, I figure my blog should be about other observations I have so I'm not blogging today as "Lead PM on Live QnA" rather I'm blogging as "an active and interested member of the Live QnA community."

I bought and moved into a home in San Francisco last year. With our home purchase, the previous owner was super organized and saved all the related appliance instructions, manuals and documents related to all the electronics and appliances in the home... except the electronic timer switch that controls the ouside light. So while I somehow figured out how to set the time for when the light turns "on," I still hadn't figured out how to turn it off. The device had no brand name nor logo on it so there was no way for me to even look this up on the internet for assistance. Out of a mixture of desparation and frustration, I asked this question on QnA yesterday and voila, I found a pointer to my answer... within minutes... truly AMAZING!

Most of the answers I received to my question were relevant and helpful but when I clicked on the link that user "BMC" posted, it took me to a web site from device manufacturer "Intermatic" and while the actual link that BMC posted wasn't 100% what I needed, I clicked a few times and quickly identified the EXACT electronic timer device that's installed in our home.

EVEN BETTER... I was able to download the .pdf file with instructions for how to install and change the timer settings. When I got home last night, I couldn't stop talking about how cool and amazingly helpful this experience was to my husband. He quickly reviewed the documents and updated the timer settings. When I woke up this morning, for the first time ever, the outside light was off .... because it had turned itself off.

This is not a laughing matter, this was irritating me so much, for so long, and I finally asked QnA and within minutes of me posting the question, I had my exact answer... I wish everything in life was this easy.

Thank you to the QnA community that continues to be passionate and helpful at helping others get answers and advice to answer their questions!!!

San Francisco & Bay Area "Earth Hour" tomorrow night from 8-9 pm

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:40:44 GMT

Interesting event that's being organized in the Bay Area for tomorrow, Saturday 3/29, from 8-9pm in the evening. More info available here and a few snippets below...

Join thousands of your Bay Area friends, neighbors and businesses and millions of people around the world to make a bold statement about climate change on March 29, from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. Turn out your lights for one hour. Earth Hour. San Franciscans are often in the forefront of environmental responsibility and action. Earth Hour is another example of that commitment. Buildings from Nob Hill to the Embarcadero will go dark during Earth Hour. Iconic structures and office buildings will take part, as will homes and apartments throughout the Bay Area.

Even the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge will apparently turn their lights off during this time.

You can also find out more in San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s press release.

Wireless internet comes to first US airline - JetBlue launches BetaBlue (with caveats...)

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:02:31 GMT

Now I have to admit that it is, with mixed emotions, that I blog about JetBlue's new "BetaBlue" program for providing wireless internet access on their flight. BUT, there are a lot of caveats around access and availability ... you will only be able to check your Yahoo Mail and instant message with Yahoo IM, and access your Blackberry RIM enabled email at 10,000 feet & higher.

It seems like "BetaBlue" is the name of their first aircraft that is piloting this new wi-fi program. From their promotional web page,

"Taste the future of in-flight experience on JetBlue’s BetaBlue aircraft, an Airbus A320 with email and instant messaging services above 10,000 feet. These services are free to customers and provided exclusively by JetBlue and LiveTV™, Yahoo!®, and BlackBerry®.
Customers traveling on this aircraft can use their Wi-Fi® enabled smartphones, BlackBerries and laptops* to virtually connect to home and work via Yahoo!® Mail, Yahoo! ® Messenger and BlackBerry email and BlackBerry® Messenger services**. Additional features can be expected in the near future on BetaBlue. Click here to learn more about BetaBlue."

From JetBlue's help content web page, it seems that they're limiting the bandwidth of this service, so you will not be able to sign up for a Yahoo account in the air, and you will not be able to open email attachments in the air with customized versions of Yahoo Mail and IM (not clear if this is new versions of software that needs to be installed or web based versions of Yahoo Mail & IM).

As for Blackberry wi-fi access, these appear to be limited to newer Blackberry RIM devices that have wi-fi support including the BlackBerry® 8820 or BlackBerry® Curve™ 8320 smartphones.

Internet access is limited to the continental United States, above 10,000 feet. Check out the PR NewsWire "official release" for more info: http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=PZ&date=20071211&id=7926558

I have mixed emotions only because there's something nice about having "disconnected" time when you're flying on a plane, you can catch up offline emails, watch a movie, read a book, chat with your new neighbor, or take a nap... it'll be interesting to see how the other airlines respond and how quickly JetBlue looks to expand bandwidth availability to enable additional internet connectivity scenarios like web surfing and streaming media... My bet is that these will become subscription or for-pay services but we'll see how quickly they can enable the bandwidth to support these use cases.

Staying safe, online, this holiday season

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 03:04:42 GMT

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I had a lot of questions from friends and family about phishing scams - ever growing in savvy-ness and "popularity" for cyber thieves, phishing is an easy opportunity for a criminal to trick even the savviest internet user when not paying close attention to what he/she is doing online...

I just stumbled upon a great article on InternetNews .com with some specific & helpful anti-phishing tips (these tips are a bit better than the average security warnings you typically hear like, "don't share your personal information online" and "don't given anyone your social security number") ...

In this InternetNews.com article, they're quoting Tim McDowd of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group and there were some interesting stats shared about online shopping behavioral patterns around the holiday season that might lead us to be more easily duped than usual. This particular quote rang true to me since we all tend to be drawn to getting the "best deals" this time of year since there's such stiff competition across online merchants... from the article, "A recent study from Microsoft and Harris Interactive found that "63 percent of online shoppers would open an e-mail or click on a link from an unknown retailer during the holiday season if it offered free shipping, and 59 percent would do so for special discounts." "

My favorite piece of advice in the article is the old, but appropriate saying "If it seems too good to be true..." well - you know the rest. Check out the article here

Facebook login down this morning

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 17:59:39 GMT

Anyone else having trouble getting into Facebook this morning? Appears that Facebook login is down - this brings up the question of capacity and scalability planning in web site development, especially at a startup such as Facebook.

Most startups don't necessarily plan for the "10 million active users" case - when we were at Jump.com, we were excited to see 300+ signups per day at the beginning, if our servers fell over, we sent Patrick (aka "Patches") to the cage to reboot them and sometimes needed to make sure he had food with him in case an overnight (or multi-night stay) was required.

I'm interested in seeing what the future of Facebook holds - Scoble has been blogging about the limits of the Facebook friends list. I actually *like* the idea of friend limits on Facebook - the idea of Facebook is super valuable when I'm seeing status and friend updates from people I actually know and I don't think that 5000 friends really would fit into that thinking very well - that would take me way too close to the "who gives a darn" state where I don't really care what the 5000th friend is doing. What I really care about is the people I see everyday and learning passively about their interests in a very simple way.

I've noticed two main uses of Facebook for myself:

Staying in implicit touch with the folks I work with - of course it's interesting, in an 'office gossipy' type of way to see who's linking to me and who I'm linked to, but it's also fun to see and learn more about the things I have in commong with co-workers that I never would have imagined
Re-acquainting with folks from childhood and college that I wouldn't normally email with - it's much easier to just see their status on facebook, find out who's engaged/married/has kids/etc... and send an email via Facebook than trying to make sure I have their updated email address that isn't 10-15 years old.

Of course Facebook is a great time waster - it's so fun to go on there a few times a day and see what's going down. A friend of mine, Jeff Kirschner, is one of the founders @ Razz - they have a few neat Facebook apps you should check out b/c 1) they're fun, 2) they're not annoyingly buggy like the rest of the crap Facebook apps out there. Try out:

Razz Movie Message - you can send snippets and famous movie quotes to friends of your fave quotes!
Razz Talking Photos - you can annotate a photo in your Facebook photos with your audio recorded message and send it to a friend.

PS, I just checked Facebook - looks like login is back up so I'm going to head over there to see what's going down in my network... ta ta for now!

AdSense has ruined mom & pop internet sites

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 06:05:51 GMT

Tonight I was surfing for chocolate fondue recipes... why you ask? Well, I received a housewarming gift a year ago that we still haven't opened and I'm looking for a good excuse to try it out.

So I decide to surf for "fondue" and then "fondue recipes" - I found a bunch of sites that appeared relevant in Live Search, opened them all in background tabs in IE 7 and then started browsing...

I used to love finding little mom & pop sites on the internet - random people who would just upload their thoughts, recipes, links, etc... to their own site - this was pre-blogging of course and I might find dozens of interesting sites on geocities or theglobe.com (a blast from the past, remember them?). One of the best and first sites out there with quality user generated/edited content was about.com, I still find great content on about even today!

The sites I found tonight for fondue did indeed have fondue recipes, some looked good enough, and credible enough, to try but each site was polluted with Google ads - at what point will syndicated search ads become the banner ads of yester-year? Remember those annoying, flashing, rotating banner ads? How about pop up ads, remember those? It took a little while before the click thru volume declined, how long will it take before end users stop clicking on syndicated search ads (on content sites) so that folks won't bother putting them on their pages?

I love the idea of targeted search ads alongside my search results - those truly are relevant, but on random small content sites... ehhh not so much.

Social networking ... for books?

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:17:33 GMT

I mean really - I just got another friend request to join yet another cool, whizbang, different social networking site... this time it's for books - yes, that's right - it's a books social networking site called "Good Reads." You can see what books your friends are reading, have rated and reviewed.

I guess if you're a book person, this is amazing... but why wouldn't this be another plug in to Spaces or Facebook or even better... Amazon or Buy.com? I don't need a whole other site, to create a whole other profile about myself, and then have to navigate to in order to find my next best book?

The most amazing part was that they prompted me to put in my Hotmail password and username to suck in my address book and send invites to all my friends - while this was actually of some use when I did this (nervously) on Facebook, I would never do it at a small site like this - that's nutso.

Seems like lately everyone I know is on linkedin and Facebook is starting to take hold again. I joined Facebook when they first launched for the Cornell University market when they were first growing the site, maybe 4-5 years ago - my siblings were still students and were into it. I hadn't used my profile there in years when my social network had a "Facebook Renaissance" sorta speak and now a lot of my co-workers are actively using it too! It's a good way of getting to know people and their interests, and re-connecting with people I haven't touched base with in a long time.

Every customer service center has slow computers

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 07:01:52 GMT

Has anyone ever noticed that every time you call a 1-800# for customer service, when you finally do reach a live person, they immediately tell you how "slow" their computers are today?

So I can imagine that customer service people don't exactly get the most super high powered desktop PC's available in a corporation, but do you really want me to believe that everytime I call, your computers are acting up?

Why do we always blame computers for our problems? Computers are only as good as the software, and owners, that use them...

Brain exercise

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 05:47:31 GMT

I forgot how much I loved logic puzzles until I was chatting about them last week with Mark from our Silicon Valley MSR group. We were flying back from TechFest last week, last Alaska Airlines flight into Oakland, when we started chatting about logic puzzles.

I loved logic puzzles as a little girl - in 3rd grade, we'd do them on a daily basis in class - I haven't done them in a long time but Mark had an awesome recommendation for a set of logic games made by Everett Kaser. I hadn't heard of him before but apparently he's been making logic puzzle software for a number of years. Mark taught me how to play Baker Street on the flight home and I've been addicted to it ever since!

There's a shareware version that you should test out... see for yourself! You can also select from a whole suite of other games, available for purchase, on www.kaser.com. I haven't tried out the other games yet, will update when I do.

Playing Baker Street is exercise for the brain.

Add Yelp blogbling to your Space

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 19:09:24 GMT

So I was playing with Yelp last night - writing reviews of the various restaurants and dessert places I've been checking out lately in our 'hood here in SF.

Then I stumbled upon a new feature at Yelp - you can add "Yelp BlogBling" to your Blog - of course I was instantly curious and shot an email over to Jay of the Windows Live Spaces team - wanted to find out how I could add this to my Space - here's how...

1. Add the Sandbox gadget from Windows Live Gallery to your Space - this gadget was created by the Windows Live Spaces team.

2. Cut & paste the HTML snippet (of anything, not just the Yelp BlogBling gadget) into the module on your Space

3. Hit "save"

It's as easy as that - now you can see the Yelp reviews I've written about places in my 'hood - check out my blogbling gadget below.

I don't use the search box in IE 7

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 22:48:38 GMT

I'm not sure why but I don't use the search text box in IE 7. I just don't. It's not intentional, it's not something I think about. I just don't. Do you?

I find myself using a Toolbar (if I have one installed on a PC) and the URL box, or if I'm somewhere on the MSN or Windows Live networks, I'll use the web search box built into the header of the page. I like the Toolbar search text box a bit better (and obviously I'm preferential to the Windows Live Toolbar since I worked on it for awhile...)

But I don't use the search text box built into the right side of the IE chrome area - I just don't - it's inconvenient. Everything else on the web that I need & use is on the left side of the page - the furthest I move my mouse right horizontally speaking is to the middle of the page to click on site navigation links displayed on the tops of web pages, but that's about it. I never move right.

I love the tabs in IE 7, now that I've been using them for awhile and have remembered to just close 1 tab at a time (instead of trying to close the entire window & getting the error message asking me if I really wanted to close all tabs), I find tabs to be a lot handier than having to navigate through the Windows taskbar between IE instances like I did before. My browsing experience is definitely faster with IE 7 so that I'm pretty psyched about. Interested in learning more about IE 7's feature set? They have a pretty good overview on their site here.

Another thing that seems a bit jarring for me, I noticed this yesterday for the first time, is that I miss the stop & refresh buttons on the upper left side of the browser chrome in IE 7. Now they're located to the right of the URL box - and as I said above, I just don't navigate to the right corner of my browser very much. And also, these buttons are so small now, they're harder to see & press. The fact that I have high speed connections everywhere means that this isn't *that* big a deal since by the time I find the button, the page usually has already opened, it's just a minor nitpick.

Torres told me that he always uses the search text box in the IE 7 browser window - maybe that's because he was more accustomed to Firefox use than I was (or all the time he spends on his Mac @ home... don't know)...

Help contribute to the education of refugee children by searching on the Web

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 20:15:31 GMT

Nine million children are refugees right now.

Ninemillion.org is a UN Refugee Agency led campaign to raise awareness and funds for education and sport programs for refugee youth, many of whom are forced to spend years of their young lives away from home with little hope of returning. What happens to them now, during their years as refugees, is up to all of us.

We’re at the half-way mark in our Click for the Cause campaign, the Live Search program that turns every search our customers make into a contribution from Microsoft to help educate the world’s 9 million refugee children. You can start by bookmarking this page and using it for your web searches: http://click4thecause.live.com

On a more personal note - Thanks to all of my friends out there who do actually read my blog, makes me feel like this blogging thing does work after all :) I appreciate all the comments - keep 'em coming!

3 people are with me and celebrities are in cyberspace too!

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 06:50:13 GMT

So apparently I'm not as alone as I thought... at least 3 people have read my blog posting - that is fabulous (that's 3 more than I thought - who knew! ). 2 of my commenters I know and 1, I don't - but hey, great to have all of you here keeping me company in cyberspace. I hope I have enough interesting stuff to say that I don't lose my readers because if 1 of you were to stop reading my blog, I'd lose 33.3333% of my readership.

Tonight I'll tell you that I'm truly sick of two celebrity stories - probably the same ones you're sick of... Anna Nicole Smith & Britney "Shears" Spears.

<anna>I mean honestly, how much more tragic can Anna Nicole Smith's passing really be? The whole story ... it's one tragic issue after another ... an infant girl left alone - the child of a mother who clearly was teetering on the edge for some time before passing mysteriously... truly horrible - let Anna Nicole Smith rest in peace so the rest of us can have our regular evening news programming back.</anna>

<britney>Britney, Britney, Britney - I hate to say it but what did you think you were doing marrying K-Fud? I think you lost touch with reality somewhere between the ages of 16 & 17. Can you please just disappear from celebrity headlines for at least 48 hours? I'm looking forward to the next big celebrity couple hookup to erase Britney's disastrous descent into indecency. Honestly, just go away for 48 hours to a happy place. Check out the Four Seasons in the Big Island - it's amazing and you'll come back a new person - then please make some more music b/c I really like that song Toxic (not sarcastic - I do, I like it - it's on my workout mix). Hey, maybe you should give JT (Timberlake) a call when you're back from rehab, I hear he's available these days... </britney>

Care to see where I get my celebrity blog news from?

I have a few resources but the following are my tried & true - I actually get questions like this a lot - celebrity gossip blogs are the new "it" thing and beat out even Star magazine at the grocery checkout line... these blogger guys are pretty smart, they have relationships with paparazzi and get fresh news photos of celebrities posted to their sites in near real-time. Talk about the conveniences of modern technology... care to see where Nicole Ritchie was earlier today? Just head off to Perez Hilton, he usually has the latest & greatest celebrity photos & sightings...

So here's Heather's hot celebrity blog list rated by the movie standard rating system for your safety (some of this stuff can be a tad offensive, consider yourself warned)... I subscribe to all of these RSS feeds because sometimes 1 or 2 will have a little nugget of news that's unique and hey, why not indulge and read a little bit of juicy Hollywood gossip when I have 5 minutes of downtime?

PG Rating category:

MSNBC - Entertainment news headlines - there's a wide variety of RSS feeds available, take your pick
IMDB News - who would've imagined that IMDB would have some good quality news? surprise, surprise - they do and their feed headlines tend to be much more unique in nature than the other gossipy ones... this feed tends to be more factual "so and so is pregnant, Keri Russell just got married, Hasselhoff sings again, ..."

PG-13 Rating category:

Perez Hilton - Perez is great and he's probably one of the more "official" gossip bloggers re: Hollywood but once in awhile his nasty comments go a bit too far, just like a PG-13 movie, it kinda shocks you for a second, then you move onto the next posting. Sometimes his blog annoys me because he'll post articles with text like "If you are easily offended, don't click here" - and of course you click (you have to click, right?) and so big deal, it's some really horrible photo of a celebrity looking their worst... makes me think he's trying to drum up some extra page views for those big ol' advertising page impressions. I just can't wait until he removes whatever ads keep wanting me to download Shockwave to my PC, I hate web sites that push me to download annoying software.
A Socialite's Life - A little more verbose than Perez but at least tries to give you something to read...

Rated R:

The Superficial "Because You're Ugly" - the photos here may sometimes be a bit more racy than Perez's and I think Perez is a lot more witty

Lonely in cyberspace

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 08:48:09 GMT

Why doesn't anyone comment on my blog? What does it take to actually get a few comments here? I've actually been trying to write some interesting and thought provoking blog posts about stuff I find cool - and I think people read my blog b/c I get a few hundred hits... so when you see this posting, do me a favor and leave a comment, remind me that I'm not alone in cyberspace @ 12:47 am on Friday morning...

What are you doing to stop global warming?

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 04:39:51 GMT

What are you doing to stop global warming? For us, we've made a few significant changes to our everyday lives... while seemingly inconvenient or "annoying" at first - really they're so small and easy ... I don't know why we didn't do them sooner.

1. Composting - Did you know that food and waste together make up 24% of the US municipal solid waste stream? All of this can be easily recycled into nutrients and soil enhancing by products ...

San Francisco is the nation's largest organic recycling city in the country - and all of our food trimmings & waste is recycled into rich soil that is then used by farmers around the Bay Area - including many organic wineries up in Napa & Sonoma wine country. This is really pretty easy to do - San Francisco's garbage pick up services include 3 bins - 1 garbage, 1 recycling, 1 composting and all 3 are collected each week.

So when we're working in the kitchen, we throw our food scraps and paper napkins into a composting bag instead of the garbage and that's it. When we're weeding or picking up the leaves & branches in the garden, we pull the composting bin out back and fill it up... Pretty simple stuff. I have a bunch of friends at work that do their own home grown composting and have a bin full of earthworms that will eat through and recycle all those food scraps for you? Then you can use the materials to enrich your own backyard!

2. Recycling - I mean really, how easy is this? How much paper do you throw out each day... at the office? from your junk mail at home? Just shred it and throw it into the recycling bin instead. From the EPA web site, "In 1999, recycling and composting activities prevented about 64 million tons of material from ending up in landfills and incinerators. Today, this country recycles 32 percent of its waste, a rate that has almost doubled during the past 15 years." This is a great start - but there's always more we can do here.

Here's a list of items that can be recycled in San Francisco county. We are a little spoiled that we don't need to sort our recycling so that does make life a little bit easier but hey - how long does it really take to make a difference? Just 5 minutes a day to sort your recyclables and put them out on the curb right?

3. Use public transportation - these days most households have at least 1-2 cars. But just because you have a vehicle doesn't mean you need to drive it everyday. Have you tried your local public transportation systems? In the Bay Area, there are a number of different systems in place depending on where you're commuting to/from but my husband and I both are using public transportation to commute around San Francisco and to/from work on almost a daily basis.

SF Muni: We just the J-Church Muni line to go to/from downtown San Francisco. For those of you who don't know it, www.nextbus.com is an amazingly accurate web site that will show you when the next bus or transit line is scheduled for a pick up at your stop... so we can see when the next bus is heading towards our stop and make it there just on time!

Caltrain: We also use the Caltrain to commute between San Francisco and the Peninsula. The new baby bullet trains make it between San Francisco and Mountain View in under 45 minutes, it's hard to beat that at the main commuting times on the freeways. It's also more relaxing to take the train - you don't have to worry about stop & go freeway traffic and you can actually get work done on your laptop on the train. Win-win if you asked me

There are many more tips and tricks that people use but these are just a few that have had a significant benefit to both our lives and to our planet in small ways each day. So again I ask... what are you doing to stop global warming?

I am in love... with a little site called Yelp

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 18:49:02 GMT

OMG - I love Yelp - I'm absolutely addicted and head over heels - in the romantic spirit of Valentines' Day... I Yelp! (please don't tell my husband )

Seriously, I've been yelping for the past 6 months - over this time, I've been using Yelp more and more to help me explore all that San Francisco has to offer. Ever since we bought our first home here last summer, I've been meaning to get more involved - to seek out more places in the neighborhoods of the city and to explore and find more restaurants and Yelp has successfully helped us branch out of our normal routines.

Don't get me wrong, I love Noe Valley and 24th Street is most definitely da bomb... we even have our own little community newspaper (if you can call it that) and farmer's market on Saturdays, but there's more to Noe under the covers - walk a few blocks off of 24th Street in either direction and you come across all types of fun restaurants and shops you'd never know about unless you heard about them or actually stumbled upon them on your own and Yelp has helped me explore exactly that - it's the stuff just under the surface that you'd never know about otherwise... I've been writing reviews for Yelp lately. Mostly about stuff I check out in the Seattle area on my business trips - there are fewer reviews for that region right now than SF, but I really love using the site.

One of the coolest experiences was a review I wrote for a local takeout retail shop called Pasta Gina - and less than a day later, I had the owner of the restaurant messaging me over Yelp - telling me about the history of the shop, how he met his wife, and some of the other great homemade stuff they make there - how cool is that! I met Gene of PastaGina over Yelp. We went out to dinner with friends last night and from the reviews on Yelp picked Incanto - I wrote a review this morning of my experience which is already being highlighted as the "selected review" - Selected, does that mean I'm cool or something?

Here's my Yelp profile - check it out - tell me what you think.

A frequent traveler to Seattle, I am, I am

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:04:12 GMT

People I work with constantly ask me why I don't move to Seattle... I'm up there enough on my business trips, wouldn't it be easier just to move out there?

Well folks - here's the story, I'm sitting in my Microsoft office at our SVC campus - I'm looking out the window at a cloudless sky and while we're having a cold spell in the Bay Area for the next few days, it's sunny and when you're in the sun outside (like I was this morning @ the Caltrain station in Portrero Hill, SF), you feel warm. They were reports about the homeless in SF last night on the news - of course with temperatures dropping below freezing at night, there are a lot of concerns about people not being prepared for unusually cold weather here but nothing here is as bad as it's been in Seattle.

I feel SO badly for my friends in Seattle - Garry just sent email that it took them 5 hours to drive home last night. Then, my buddy Mike pointed me to MC's blog about his commute home and OMG, I'm just speechless.

The thing I still don't get about Seattle traffic... is that there aren't that many people up there living in the region (when compared to the Bay Area) but yet the highways are small and aren't wide enough to manage all the traffic that travels on them each way - compound that with the all day commuter lanes on freeways like the 405 and I could arrive into SeaTac airport @ 11 am and it would still take me almost an hour at times to get into campus - all you need is a fender bender around one of the S curves and that's it - traffic for miles & miles

I just feel so badly for my buddies up there - Seattle has been plagued with odd weather this season - I guess we can all chalk it up to global warming - NY and Philly have had temps in the 60s over the past few weeks, and Seattle has had snowstorms, windstorms, and more snowstorms.

Photo Album: August 02 - Nature Photo Walk @ Work

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:41:29 GMT

August 02 - Nature Photo Walk @ Work

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 037

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 038

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 039

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 040

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 042

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 043

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 044

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 045

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 046

Nature Photo Walk 8_1_08 at SVC 047

More Photos...

Photo Album: Wedding Photos

Sun, 25 May 2008 17:19:38 GMT

Wedding Photos

0090600-R7-008-2A

0090600-R1-062-29A

0091010-R5-049-23

0091010-R7-071-34

0091010-R7-073-35

Photo Album: Maui Pics

Sat, 22 Apr 2006 17:14:36 GMT

Maui Pics

Black_Wht_RockBeach

Four_seasons_viewfromPool

Pete_BlkSandBeach

Sunrise_at_haleakala

Sunset_Kona

Blog list: Blogs

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 01:10:58 GMT

Blogs

Rache
Brilliant, adorable and funny
Jared Stern
Friend from high school - a writer in LA
Brandon's blog
Lots of great insights on tech
Nina's Hipster Blog
Friend from childhood with a great eye for "pop culture"
Windows Desktop Search Tech blog
Tips & tricks
Donna's Tsunami Hope Trip
A month as a nurse on a floating naval hospital in the Indian Ocean after the Tsunami
Dennis Cheung
A pal from the Toolbar PM team
Torres Talking
Fellow "softie" - passionate enthusiast
Jay
Love him - hate that he hasn't linked to my blog yet@!@#$!
Bubba's blog
He's hard to describe - you have to live it for yourself
Rob Dolin
Bright & enthusiastic Spaces PM - awesome to work with!

Custom List: Projects I've worked on recently...

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 15:13:50 GMT

Projects I've worked on recently...

Book List: Good Reads

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 18:04:09 GMT

Good Reads