Scott Blomquist

Most of you have probably heard me rave about Microsoft’s video blog for developers called Channel 9. It’s named after my favorite feature of United Airlines—namely the ability to plug a headset into your armrest and listen in on the cockpit’s radio by tuning to channel 9. As I was flying back for a visit to Seattle, our pilot did something that put the original United channel 9 in the same class of coolness as Microsoft’s Channel 9. He invited us to tune in to Channel 9 for a 10 minute "talk show", where he proceeded to talk us through a bunch of trivia about our airplane and our flight. He talked about why we fly so high, why the cabin isn’t pressurized all the way to sea level pressure, what it is that pilots actually do, and some performance numbers for our airplane.

One of the neater things that he talked about was that technically the only part of the flight that the pilots pretty much have to do is taxi and takeoff. He talked a little about Category III ILS operation, pointed out that both Seattle and Denver are equipped for Category III operations, and then went on to explain that the only reason they have visibility minimums for Category III is so that once your autopilot has you safely on the ground you can see far enough to safely taxi clear of the runway.

If you want to see just how eerie Category III operations are, there’s some great video of a Horizon Airlines Category III ILS approach into Portland up on YouTube.

Update: we had clear skies down to a few hundred feet above Seattle, at which point it turned to very dense fog. As I was deplaning, I gave the captain kudos for his radio show, and said "speaking of category III, what was the RVR when we touched down in Seattle"? He told me it was 5500 ft. That was way longer than it looked, but I’m sure he was right. He said that they worried they’d have to do an autoland because the RVR number kept going up and down on them.

Hey, everybody. I’ll be back in Seattle this weekend (January 27 & 28). Anything fun going on?

I can’t believe I’m coming up on the end of my second month at my new job in Tulsa. Here’s a picture of a normal day for me.

I wake up around 7:20am to an NPR station. I love the little fanfare that Morning Edition uses to introduce their business section. One of these days, I’ll figure out how to record it—I think it’d make a good ring tone. There’s also this guy that talks about "the Oklahoma state temperature". He says "the Oklahoma state temperature is 34", just as if it’s the same sort of observation as "the Oklahoma state flower is mistletoe" or "the Oklahoma state bird is the scissortail flycatcher". I don’t quite understand how an entire state can have a temperature, unless we’re talking Rhode Island. But I guess that’s neither here nor there.

Like most cities in the plains states, Tulsa is laid out on an enormous grid with 1 mile between points. Also like most plains cities, it has a fabric of highways woven throughout the city (not "freeways" here, unlike the west coast). My drive to and from work is about 20 minutes. That’s about twice as much of a commute as I ever had in Seattle. Unfortunately, I don’t live right by one of the highways, or that could be 10 minutes shorter. The flatness here means that I always have 2 bars or more of cell phone signal instead of the 2 bars or less that I’ve grown accustomed to in Redmond or Bellevue.

If I don’t sleep in, and can get out of my house by around 8am, I usually swing by one of two Starbuck’s locations—most of my new coworkers will recall that I spent most of my first week trying to figure out where to get a good coffee in downtown Tulsa. There really isn’t a good place to get a good coffee in downtown, so I bring one in with me from suburbia. Any snobs out there who feel like telling me that Starbuck’s hardly counts as good coffee either can keep it to themselves—I’m completely fine with commodity coffee. I don’t have the time to invest in figuring out why coffee that solves the 95% case isn’t as good as the real stuff.

I get in a little before 9am every day, and park somewhere near the 4^th floor of the Bank of America building in downtown Tulsa. I take the elevator past the 8^th floor, which smells very strongly of bacon throughout the day. I get off on the 24^th floor and let myself into Vidoop’s offices using a code on a keypad by the door. I stop by the kitchenette and grab some coffee and some instant oatmeal (and you thought free soda was cool…). I’m the first one there about half the time. The other half the time some of the business types beat me there.

My development team has a daily scrum at 9:15. I spend my day wandering back and forth between my office, and about half (maybe a little less) in the incredibly cool 24^th floor corner office that the developers get to share. When I’m at my desk, I have numerous ways to stay busy ranging from writing or reviewing technical documents, contributing to the business plan, studying up on all things Identity 2.0 (ask me about sxip, SAML, OpenID, CardSpace, or pretty much any other ID2.0 hot topic, and I’ll probably be fairly informed and extremely opinionated), reviewing code, pitching in my own few-dozen-line code changes to our main product, writing email, taking phone calls from our early customers, giving design advice or constructive criticism to the developers, or taking time out to think "on paper" (which usually means either in OneNote or on my personal MoinMoin-powered wiki).

When I’m in the developers’ office, I spend my time helping troubleshoot build issues, giving guidance on C++ syntax, helping choose technologies for new features and projects, beating Windows into submission for the Linux- and Mac-weenies that we have around, and keeping the team unblocked and having fun.

By shortly after noon, it’s time to go get lunch from one of the several places around. One of my current favorites is a place called "Lou’s Deli". Every time I go there, or even every time I think about their tasty meatball sub, I’m reminded of the scene in fight club where we get to meet the namesake of Lou’s Tavern (Search for "who am I" on http://www.hundland.com/scripts/Fight-Club_third.htm).

We push on through the afternoon, and by around 7pm, some of the developers disappear for the evening. Most nights, we still have a few people around at 10pm.

I go home and get some sleep so I can get up to my alarm the next morning at 7:20am.