I am very proud to announce that Layla Ruiqiu Kaim was born at 5:16AM on March 15, 2008. She checked in at 8lbs, 21 inches. Both mother and baby are doing very well.

(Ruiqiu is a Chinese name pronounced like "Rachael" without the "l".)

3/15/2008 7:32:44 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  

We launched the Boost Online Media Service earlier this week. It's a service designed to simplify the integration of user-generated content, such as video, music, files, etc, into other sites.

For more details, please check out the site at http://www.boostonlinemedia.com.

3/6/2008 4:16:30 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

I co-hosted This Week on Channel 9 with Brian Keller. Check it out at http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=385240.

2/22/2008 10:17:35 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [1]  

...and the gift I ordered my wife was still not here. I had ordered something online on 12/28 with 2-day shipping via FedEx. I figured that it would arrive on Thursday but, leaving room for unexpected delay, thought it would arrive on Friday in the worst case scenario.

It’s now Monday the 24th and we never got the package. Here is the online tracking:

I was annoyed that the packaged didn’t arrive by Friday, so I called customer service, who assured me that it would be delivered by the 24th at the latest. As you can imagine, I was pretty upset that today was the 24th and they didn’t even bother putting the package on the truck. They determined it was a business holiday—although not a holiday for them, us, or even the US government!

When I called customer service to find out why my package wasn’t delivered, they told me that it was a busy time and they couldn’t get to it. For four days?!? They were completely unapologetic and even went as far as to imply that I might have received my package by Christmas if I had ordered it earlier.

Unbelievable.

Ironically, I ordered a package via UPS 2-day (Amazon Prime default) on Friday, and it arrived this morning. That’s right, it was early.

I’ve never had a serious problem with any of the major shipping companies in the past, so they were sort of a commodity to me. Not anymore. I will now actively avoid FedEx and talk trash about them anytime I can. When I receive a package from the FedEx guy, I will pretend it smells bad and then will act like I didn’t really want whatever came in it.

Sure, I was disappointed that the package will be late, but the real kicker was the awful customer service experience. My company has made mistakes from time to time and I couldn’t image telling a client to take a hike. I understand that things like this happen, but handling the situation poorly multiplies the effect.

This gift is for my wife, who can take the delay in stride. I couldn’t image what it would be like if this was for one of my kids. How could I explain to them that Santa didn’t bring them their gift because he was surprised that there were so many gifts to deliver this year? These guys could have really screwed me. 12/24/2007 10:58:51 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [1]  

It's been three years now and we're still going strong. Every day I'm amazed at how much I've learned, and yet somewhat apprehensive about the lessons I haven’t gotten to yet. Some of the times have been rough. Really rough. Yet somehow, everything always seems to work out and things get better and better. Year four looks to start out strong, and I’m excited to wake up tomorrow and get it started.

10/4/2007 10:17:29 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [1]  

We recently launched PuckLink, a social network designed for recreational hockey players. After playing for a few years in the northwest, it seemed clear that people needed a better way to manage and coordinate teams, games, and practices.

You can check it out at http://www.pucklink.com. If you know anyone who plays hockey, please let them know!

9/4/2007 11:47:19 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

For those who don't get why this is funny, you should know that AdCenter is Microsoft's competitor to Google's AdSense.

7/11/2007 12:24:50 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

I had an interesting meeting with my old friend Mike Culver this morning. Mike and I worked together back at Microsoft when he ran the evangelism efforts for the mobile developer platform and I was the .NET Compact Framework product manager.

Early in the conversation, Mike asked me if I was familiar with Amazon’s developer platform. Years ago I had dug a bit into their commerce Web services, so I figured I could bluff my way through the exchange. After all, SharpLogic is The Developer Marketing Company, right?

Wrong. Mike now works as a developer evangelist at Amazon. He knows when I don’t know.

Sure enough, Amazon’s platform has grown way beyond what I would have expected. Among the various services available, the two that became immediately intriguing were the Simple Storage Service (aka S3) and the Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2).

In a nutshell, you can use S3 to cheaply store and serve a virtually limitless amount of data and EC2 provides virtualized servers (Linux-only for the foreseeable future). The neat thing about these is that you can scale up and down as much as you want and you only pay for what you use. Each EC2 node, for example, costs $.10 per hour. If you only use an hour a month, you only get charged $.10 a month. If you happen to have a huge load for 24 hours, you can continue to add more and more nodes, and then turn them off when the load is gone. You can even upload your own OS image. Amazing.

Microsoft and Google have some interesting offerings in a similar vein, but I haven’t seen anything public to meet this head-on yet, so Amazon is out to a huge advantage. I’m excited to see where this goes.

5/30/2007 3:46:52 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]