Tuesday, December 23, 2008

vision for a company

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-12/ff_ozzie?currentPage=all

intriguing read. It makes me wonder, in VMware, we do have someone doing this kinda stuff, right? We need a vision, a concrete one.

Another thought. Is MS just a good place to foster good managers? Thus far, I have really like Maritz's stuff, he too comes from MS. Cerrtainly Ray Ozzie doens't come from MS, but he works there now.

The interesting thing to watch might be will MS be as good as today when the Maritz and Ray Ozzie generation of managers retire?

better get back to forming a more concrete strategy for the product I manage............

Thursday, December 04, 2008

jump starting the freakin' car

hats off to German sports car maker.........................

You have made jumping a car soooo freaking complicated, and the relevant portion in the manual so disjointed.  Un-Deutsch und unglaublich.

 

We accidentaly left the GPS plugged in. You would think the car would shutdown the aux power when its not running.  Anyway, we were left with a great car that won't start.

We were able to borrow a jumpstart kit from a mechanic but were unable to start the car.  Since it's a mid-engine car, I figured I can't reach the battery leads and the instruction in the manual was what I needed to do to jump start the car.  Remove the fuse box cover, pull out the leads that had the plus sign on it, hook up the red end of the jumper cable to it, then the black end to the car body.  Woowoo, I got lights in the car.

But the car won't start.

We returned the jumpstart thingy, thinking that it just didn't have enough juice for our car.  The mechanic looked baffled.  We borrowed some jumper cables and waited for a friend to get off work.

Did the same routine, and of course, it didn't work either.  Now I am reading the damn manual again, and sure enough, at the bottom of the page in fine print, it said something like: "this won't start your car.  You can now open the front cover of the car (where the motor of a front engine car would be).  It doesn't tell you which page you should read now.  Flipping through the 300 page manual, I found that 10 pages later, you find a picture of a battery and jumper cables hooked up to it.  It doesn't tell you where the damn thing is, it just shows you that you can hook up jumper cables to it.  Damn it!  Well, I guess 2+2 equals 4 and I started searching for something that resembles what the picture had shown.   

After pull out every conceivable cover, faceplate under the hood, I found the battery!  Hooked the jumper cables to the battery and eureka!  

Doing all this while I am sick with a fever really didn't help.............................