I was digging through my OneNote today, organizing stuff and reading old notes and whatnot, when I found a page I wrote on 7/13/2006. I don’t know why I wrote it in OneNote, but it is something I’ve talked about to my direct reports, colleagues and others for a long time.

It was simply titled “Rules of the Road” and had the following content:

1. Don't stress out about things you can't control - ignore them
2. Don't stress out about things you can control - fix them
3. Confront someone as soon as you recognize the problem - don't let it fester!
4. Help people who sincerely ask for help
5. Fight for what you believe in
6. Admit when you are wrong
7. Reserve the right to change your mind
8. You do NOT have to justify saying no to someone

My dad taught my 1-3 when I was growing up. He had ulcer issues as a younger man because he let stress build up too much. Those rules help you get grounded when you feel stressed and show you simple ways out, even when, as in Rule #1, the out is to ignore the issue.

Numbers 4-5 are extensions I’ve added over time to help me guide my life. Help your friends. Admit when you make a mistake. Do not be afraid to change your mind. Don’t let other people convince you that “flip flopping” in the presence of new information is somehow bad. When you know better, do better.

The final one is the newest addition to the family. Sometimes many people, when presented with a request they has to say no to, will seek a rationalization or a story that they can use to justify saying no. Here’s the thing… you don’t have to justify saying No. You shouldn’t be rude, you should be always polite and respectful, but you can just say, “No, I’m sorry but I can’t,” and leave it at that.

I’m always amazed at the things people will believe. Today I got trackback spam from a “water for gas” site on my miles per gallon post. (The trackback has since been deleted.)

I hadn’t run across this particular “technology” yet, so I dug into it a bit. It turns out there are dozens of sites out there claiming you can add a water-based fuel system to your car to significantly improve your gas mileage.

The gist of what they’re claiming is simple:

1. You use energy from your car’s electrical system to electrolyze water into Hydrogen and Oxygen.
2. You then run the gaseous hydrogen and oxygen back into your intake manifold where it burns in your engine’s combustion chamber, resulting in more power with less gasoline used.

Sound oh so simple. Except that this is yet another instance of someone peddling a perpetual motion machine.

Here’s the problem: The first law of thermodynamics states:

The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added by heating the system, minus the amount lost as a result of the work done by the system on its surroundings

In layman’s terms, this means you can’t get something for nothing. Applying that to the water for gas system, it basically means you will use more energy electrolyzing the water into hydrogen and oxygen than you will get combining them back together when you burn them in your engine.

In other words, if you took the gasoline completely out of the equation, you would eventually have your battery die because the engine wouldn’t make as much energy as it produced. (See this breakdown of the math if you want more info.)

What is more interesting than the bunk science displayed here is the willingness of people to be duped by this and respond with things like “but my friend has one and it works great”. Here we have some guy in middle-America (with little or no scientific or engineering experience and certainly without any of the proper equipment necessary to actually test this) telling you that the last 200 years of science and engineering are false and that perpetual motion (or snake oil) are real. The fact is, most of these scams are actually MLMs and Pyramid Schemes, do I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at the misleading information.

Remember people: If something seems too good to be true, it almost always is! The ultimate test for this in on, however. Bruce Simpson has offered up a million dollars to the first person who can prove it works. Read more over at the One Million Dollar HHO Challenge site. (He’s got a bunch of other great links to the real science involved here in case you want more info.)

So thanks to the trackback guy for letting me learn a bit about this new form of Snake Oil. Hopefully this will help a few more people save their money for things that actually will save money on fuel, like cars that get better mileage.

This week my MakeZine newsletter had an interesting article in it that referenced a post called Miles per Gallon vs. Gallons per Mile.

Suppose you had a household with two cars, and each car needs to be driven 10,000 miles per year. One car consumes 34 MPG, and the other car consumes 18 MPG. Since gas is expensive, you want to replace one car. Because of utility constraints, you have two choices:

Replace the 34 MPG car with a 50 MPG car — a 16 MPG improvement

Replace the 18 MPG car with a 28 MPG car — a 10 MPG improvement

Which car replacement would save you the most gas?

Of course this is one of those tricky math tricks that your average American gets totally wrong because the curve on this kind of think is non-linear.

After a nice analysis in the blog post, bunnie confirms the unexpected:

When you run the numbers, replacing the 34 MPG car with a 50 MPG (a 16 MPG improvement) car saves you 94.1 gallons per 10,000 miles, whereas replacing the 18 MPG car with a 28 MPG (a 10 MPG improvement) car saves you 198.4 gallons per 10,000 miles — more than double the savings.

Or, to give an even more clear-cut example, replacing a 5,000 MPG car with a 10,000 MPG car saves you just one gallon of gas, whereas replacing a 1 MPG car with a 2 MPG car saves you 5,000 gallons of gas, using a fixed mileage of 10,000 miles driven for comparison.

Read the entire post for all the info. Nice work bunnie!

Do you listen to Internet Radio stations like Pandora or other online stations? If so, then you might care about an issue pending in the US Congress. From SaveNetRadio.org:

On March 2, 2007 the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), which oversees sound recording royalties paid by Internet radio services, increased Internet radio's royalty burden between 300 and 1200 percent and thereby jeopardized the industry’s future.   

At the request of the Recording Industry Association of America, the CRB ignored the fact that Internet radio royalties were already double what satellite radio pays, and multiplied the royalties even further.  The 2005 royalty rate was 7/100 of a penny per song streamed; the 2010 rate will be 19/100 of a penny per song streamed.  And for small webcasters that were able to calculate royalties as a percentage of revenue in 2005 – that option was quashed by the CRB, so small webcasters’ royalties will grow exponentially!

Before this ruling was handed down, the vast majority of webcasters were barely making ends meet as Internet radio advertising revenue is just beginning to develop.  Without a doubt most Internet radio services will go bankrupt and cease webcasting if this royalty rate is not reversed by the Congress, and webcasters’ demise will mean a great loss of creative and diverse radio.  Surviving webcasters will need sweetheart licenses that major record labels will be only too happy to offer, so long as the webcaster permits the major label to control the programming and playlist.  Is that the Internet radio you care to hear? 

As you know, the wonderful diversity of Internet radio is enjoyed by tens of millions of Americans and provides promotional and royalty opportunities to independent labels and artists that are not available to them on broadcast radio.  What you may not know is that in just the last year Internet radio listening jumped dramatically, from 45 million listeners per month to 72 million listeners each month.  Internet radio is already popular and it is already benefiting thousands of artists who are finding new fans online every day.

Action must be taken to stop this faulty ruling from destroying the future of Internet radio that so many millions of listeners depend on each day.  Instead of relying on lawyers filing appeals in the CRB and the courts, the SaveNetRadio Coalition has been formed to represent every webcaster, every Net Radio listener, and every artist who enjoys and benefits from this medium.  Please join our fight for the preservation of Internet radio.

My wife and I each have our most hated English language abuses. One of her favorites is "these ones" (you should omit the "ones" and just say "these"). One of mine is "I'm good" (it should be "I'm well" or "I feel good" because "well" is an adverb and "good" is an adjective.)

Anyway, for some reason last night I looked up "these ones" in Google and found this excellent list of common english language errors. Take some time digging through it... you never know what you will find.

Back when I was in the consulting world, I got a lot of email. Or so I thought. Then I came to Microsoft.

The amount of email I get here—and I'm not talking about junk mail—is unbelievable. Microsoft is an email driven culture. And that is fine, it works for the most part, but it does require adjustments to how you deal with it.

Somewhere along the way my wife taught me a system for organizing stuff that she called FAT: File, Act, Toss. It was about focusing your attention on the right things, but it always felt slightly lacking.

When I was involved in a startup, one of my business partners loaned me one of those “personal productivity” courses on CD (sorry… I don't remember which one). I spent a month or so listening to them in the car, but only some of it stuck. One of the two things that really stuck was a thing called TRAF, which re-ordered the FAT system a bit and introduced Refer as the second option in the workflow.

Putting Toss at the front felt very right to me. I'm kind of famous as a development lead for saying “nothing makes me happier than deleting code”, so it shouldn't be all that surprising to find that I also enjoy deleting email.  So, I loosely applied it to my email, but didn't really get aggressive about  it. I basically kept my old way of doing things in place--lots of folders, rules, etc.--with a little bit of a prioritization system on top. And for the most part it worked.

But as my responsibilities here at Microsoft have grown, so has the volume of email I receive. As a result, the system I've been using is starting to show scaling problems. Too many folders that aren't actually helping me find things, too many items in my Inbox, and most importantly a feeling that I'm losing control of it. So I've been spending a lot of time over the past month or so talking to different people about how they organize their email.

Many people just keep a giant Inbox folder with no real plan, and depend on search and sort to find what they want. If something scrolls of the top page, it may get lost and not dealt with, but that is just how they work it. Others have very complex folder structures where every thing has a special place. Brad Wilson and I used to have frequent discussions about this stuff. Folders or no folders? Search folders or a good search engine? Categories? Unread flagging? The options are endless.

But I kept coming back to TRAF. After Brad left the patterns & practices team, he started similar discussions with a PM on his team named George Bullock. George had also spend a lot of cycles thinking about how to solve this problem and had come to his own conclusions. Apparently Brad shared some of my TRAF ideas with him and it sounds like it influenced his thinking based on this recent blog post.

After reading George's post, I've been putting together a new system for myself. Unlike George, who replaces File with Follow-up, I stick with the literal definition of TRAF: Toss, Refer, Act, File. I use TRAF as a preprocessing system for managing my Inbox.  It is about triage--the act of sorting things into a priority list in an efficient and effective manner. From wikipedia:

Simple triage is used at the scene of a mass casualty incident to choose patients who require immediate transport to the hospital to save their lives as opposed to patients who can wait for help later. First aiders performing field triage on the battlefield or at a disaster site usually do not need to assess resources until transportation becomes available.

As George points out, the challenge comes with dealing with the Act part of the process. Even with this pre-processing approach there is still too many things that are in the “Act” category. So much of my process (and his) is about dealing with that problem.

So let me show you how I have decided to implement my email triage system...

When an email arrives, it starts as an unread message in the Inbox folder. Periodically during the day, I execute the following process on the Inbox, focusing primarily on the Unread ones.

1. Toss: Can this message be deleted? If so, then delete it. Yes, I mean deleted. As I mentioned above, I'm not one of those people who thinks I need to keep every email that is ever sent to me.
2. Refer: Can this message be handed off to someone else? As George rightly points out in his post, this is different than having something that you must act on that requires help. This is about actually giving this problem to someone else.
3. Act: This is my problem. I have to deal with it. There are two alternatives:
• Immediate: It must be dealt with now. Do it and then mark it as read and move it to the Archive folder.
• Not Immediate: Flag it with a priority flag and mark it as read. Leave it in the Inbox. Since I'm using Outlook 2007 for my email, I have the nice new Priority flags labeled Today, Tomorrow, This Week, Next Week or Custom. I don't know if I need custom or not, we'll see.
4. File: I can't delete it, it isn't someone else's problem and I don't need to do anything, so file it away by marking it as read and moving it to the Archive folder.

That is pretty much it.

A couple of times in there I mentioned the Archive folder. Here at Microsoft we have a policy that only allows a very small amount of stuff on the Exchange server. Whether this is to encourage us to get rid of old mail or because the guys in IT don't want to deal with the disk space, I don't know. Regardless, this makes us use the Outlook Auto Archive feature aggressively.

But this system really depends on the Inbox being the place where I keep my TODO list. I don't want Auto Archive coming along and grabbing stuff that I haven't done yet and moving to my Archive.pst file. So, I introduce an Archive folder underneath the Inbox and move items there when they are ready to be filed. I configure my Auto Archive rules to process this Archive folder and to ignore the Inbox.

Astute readers will see that I don't describe any other folders in this system. That is correct. No folders. For non-mailing list mail, I've given up on folders. (For mailing lists I use Inbox Rules to move them into folders, one-per-list.)

The next part of this whole new process is about metadata tagging. If you think about the problem I was trying to solve with  folders, it was about having a way other than searching to find things when I need them. Search is good, but sometimes you have other information you can apply and you should be able to apply it.

New in Outlook 2007 is a unified Categories system shared between the components where items can have more than one category assigned to them easily and clearly. Just as you can easily right click on an email and assign it a flag, you can right click and assign one or more categories. So my intent is to create a set of categories to use to help me when I want to do this kind of searching.

My straw-man category list looks like this right now, but I suspect I will make changes to it once I figure out how I use it. I do know that I probably want it fairly short, but I also want it to be fairly inclusive.

• Personal
• Family
• Friends
• Projects
• Dev Team
• Group (p&p)
• Division
• Corporate
• Public Speaking
• Training
• Legal
• OOF Me
• OOF Others

One thing to remember, and a thing that is challenging me to get this category list right, is that the category list is shared between the all the components in Outlook (mail, appointments, contacts, etc.). So it is hard to get this right. Things like the two OOF categories are for providing visual queues to calendar items, but may also be applied to emails by my team members when they tell me about their time off. (For that example, I would probably also have the Dev Team and Projects categories on the message as well… I'm not sure.)

The thing that worries me about these categories is that I'm worried that I won't actually use them. But the plus side of this possibility is that I think the new Outlook 2007 search is very good and will suffice. Again, only time will tell. I hope I use them and I hope they help.

One other technique that I like from George's system (I'm not sure he mentioned this in his blog post) is to use Search Folders to help with all of this. Again, I'm not sure exactly what folders I'll use, but this looks like a reasonable starting point:

• Act Today
• Act Tomorrow
• Act This Week
• Act Next Week

I'm considering a search folder per category, but I'm going to hold off on that until I see if Search is good enough. I know you can do it, I just don’t know if I need it.

So, this is the system I'm going to use this year. It probably seems a bit insane to use less organization for more email, but I actually think it is going to work quite well. One thing that I already see that would  be a nice feature (perhaps I'll write an Addin for this) is to be able to easily do a search & replace on categories. I use this in Quicken all the time when I reorganize my finances, and I suspect that will be the feature that enables me to be a bit more agile about my category list.

Questions? Comments? Fire away. I'd love to hear what you think.

Hahahaha…

 I expected it to be a bit higher.

Ha ha ha ha… this blonde joke had me rolling on the floor.

Enjoy!

This has been a very interesting Christmas from a blogging standpoint. I typically spend a lot of time putting together my “End of Year” post which means that I spend much of this week looking back at the last year of posts, thinking about what I liked and didn’t, what I said and didn’t, and what I’d like to do in the coming year. But then, on Dec 20, I posted “Intelligent Design Loses in Dover School District Case”.

I don’t often post about religion and stuff because of a personal philosophy I have. I call myself a “non-proselytizing athiest”. This means that I do not believe in a higher being and that I don’t try to convert people to my way of thinking. This is consistent with my libertarian (small L) political beliefs as well. Everyone can do or believe whatever they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone else.

I was a bit nervous as I wrote that post about the Dover case, but I tried to focus on the case and not the philosophy. I mostly wanted to congratulate the team of people who worked on the case. Why? Because I believed in what they were doing.

I suppose looking back on it, that I should have expected a lot of comments, but I didn’t. I got comments and emails from people on all sides. So I decided to disable comments on that post and posted “A Few Words About This Blog, Evolutionary Biology and Personal Happiness” where I didn’t quite retract the original post, but I tried to explain that I didn’t really want to fight about it. I guess I failed.

The biggest reason I decided to stop the comments on that post was actually because I was afraid that I would offend my readers, which I didn't want to do. Religion is a very sentitive subject for many people and as someone pointed out, my blog is generally a technical blog. Just as many of my readers feel very passionately about their beliefs, I also feel strongly about mine. So I was afraid that if I allowed the discussion (argument?) to continue, someone would get hurt. That was not something I wanted to do.

But it seems that there are people who want to talk about this. Some of the comments and emails have accused me of censorship or dogma at my closing of the comments. Some have expressed regret at having offended me. Some were angry. It seems that I ended doing exactly the opposite of what I intended. It seems that I hurt some people.

Okay. I’m adaptable. And those who know me certainly would agree that I’m opinionated and don’t back away from arguments. So I have reopened comments on that post. And I will be answering people’s comments with comments and posts of my own.

Before I begin doing that however, I want to point out that you can easily opt out of these posts and stay tuned to just my technical posts by subscribing to one of my categorized feeds. These posts (religion, intelligent design, politics, philosophy, etc.) will always be in the “Opinions, Politics, Rants” category. My technical posts will always be in the “Technology” category and my Geek Notes periodic posts will always be in the “Geek Notes” category. Feel free to choose how much of this firehose you want to drink. It is up to you.

A few weeks ago I saw some old friends who I hadn’t seen in a while. Some of them have been reading my blog since before it was a blog. One of them said to me, "You only write about .NET and technology these days... why don't you write about anything else anymore?" I didn’t really have a good answer, but I had noticed it myself. So I started writing a little more about me, my life, the world around me, etc. And for me, it has been refreshing. I was getting stuck in a rut and I've been enjoying writing about other things. Maybe I'll even write a post in my Haiku category again soon. Who knows?

My post titled "Intelligent Design Loses in Dover School District Case" was nothing more than me congratulating a team of hard-working people whose case I believed in; a case that I think has important ramifications to our society. But as always happens when the topic is religion or politics (or both as in this case), people have come insisting on arguing the creationist case and quoting verse. Oh well..

The first commenter quoted the bible. “Paul, the bondservant of Jesus Christ” wrote:

For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.

Our commenter is either St. Paul the apostle come back from the dead to comment on my blog, or just a plagiarist quoting Romans 1:20 and trying take credit for it. Other readers, however, wanted to argue. As an example consider this comment:

“FACT: evolution theory cannot explain a lot of things happening around us. In fact, life and everything around us, is so complicated, that still many questions can be asked. We already know however, that the evolution theory isn't the answer.

…

While it's a fact, proven, etc, that evolution cannot be the correct answer, even though it seems to go a far way."

As a scientist and a philosopher, I am excited about these kinds of statements. Wow. You have found evidence that proves that evolutionary theory is wrong? That is exciting. I would love to see those references. All I want is to have a better understanding of the world around me, so I'll take any scientific evidence you've got. But there won’t be any arguments that stand up to the standards of science.

But let me be clear about what I believe: I believe that the modern theories of evolutionary biology are correct. I believe they are facts.

Fact means, "the truth or actual existence of something, as opposed to the supposition of something or a belief about something". Notice that the definition of the word fact includes the idea that there is evidence to support it. Evolution has countless experimental and empirical studies to support it. I suppose I could spend a few hours digging up links to study after study, but I'm not going to.

You see, I don't think there is actually any point in doing that. Why? First of all, there are lots of other sites that do this much better than I ever could. But more importantly, in my experience people who disagree with evolutionary biology aren't going to be persuaded. In fact, I don't want to try to persuade them. If they want to actually do the research and find the information, it isn’t hard. Grab your favorite search engine and look it up. Go to the library. Or don’t. Keep believing what you believe. I don't care. All I care about is that people are happy with themselves. If it makes you happy to believe in creationism, great. I don't. No biggie. Be happy. Please.

If you really want to argue evolutionary biology, I would suggest that you visit any of the forums for such things. There are newsgroups, web forums, mailing lists, etc. that are much better suited to this topic. But let me be clear, this is my blog and I will write about things that interest me. Sometimes these things will be religious. Sometimes they will be political. Sometimes they will be about my family. Sometimes they will be about nothing. I'm not going to apologize for this.

This blog is mine and it is about me. I don’t go to creationists blogs and attack their beliefs. I would appreciate the same consideration here.

—Peter

PS. For what its worth, I’ve closed the comments on that post. If you really think you can prove Intelligent Design, get it published in Nature. It will be much more effective for both of us.

PPS. If you are only interested in my technology posts, then I would suggest you subscribe to my Technology feed (rss) or my Geek Notes feed (rss) and not the main feed. For a full list of the available categories/feeds (and their RSS URLs), visit the Archive.