Ok, so I’m sure I could live without these but I wouldn’t want to.

1. Motorola E815 Phone – Simply the most gorgeous screen I’ve seen on a phone this size. Feels just so right in my hand.
2. DirecTivo – Dual tuners, perfect for catching the shows you enjoy and pruning the commercials you don’t.
3. iRiver H-120 MP3 player – Traded my iPod for this one. A bit of a learning curve but you’ll be rewarded with a feature-rich device.
4. Altoids Tangerine Sours – Painfully sour and expensive. But oh so yummy.
5. Volvic 1 Liter Spring Water – Perfect size and easy to refill from company water cooler. I keep a refreshing bottle at my desk all day.
6. Andiamo Tote Bag – Looks like it’s been to hell and back but I don’t leave home without it.
7. Logitech Z-2300 Computer Speakers – Bone crushing sound on a budget. Your neighbors will hate you when you crank the Zep.
8. Maui Jim Sunglasses – How did I live without these? Even my wife demanded a pair.
9. Sirius Satellite Radio – Get ready for Howard and Martha. No more annoying commercials.
10. Puget Pass – All the bus and Sounder trains I can take in the greater Seattle area.

Jose Canseco is looking vindicated these days. Rafael Palmeiro is busted for steriods and now Seattle’s Ryan Franklin gets caught. Does anyone care about baseball records anymore? What an absolute joke MLB has become. I will not pay a dime to see another game until the game is rid of drugs. I’m going to scream if I hear another millionaire player say, “I have no idea how the substance got into my body”. Do these athletes believe us fans are so stupid to actually believe that?

Nothing like planning a move to show which companies strive to keep me as a customer and which don’t give a damn. I’ve been dealing with both Sprint and DirecTV this past week. I’ve been a customer for over five years with both. But Sprint doesn’t seem to care if they lose me as a customer. I moved from the Seattle area to Utah last year and called Sprint to get a new local phone number for Salt Lake City. Sprint provided me with a new number but automatically extended my contact with them for another year even though I’d been a longtime customer. What does the contract extension mean? It means that if I want to terminate my service with Sprint within a year I’d be charged a $175 fee per line (we have two lines). Even though I’ve spent an average of $150/month for over five years with Sprint they would not make an exception even when I wanted to go from two lines to one line. I had to keep both lines active for a year or pay the $175 extortion fee.

So I went into the Sprint store in Bellevue, WA this week to see if I could upgrade my phones. I’d give Sprint one last chance to keep me as a customer. Both our phones are on their last leg and I figured Sprint might be able to cut me a deal if I purchased two. No such luck. The lady told me I’d be eligible on Aug 5th for a $75/rebate if I were to purchase a phone through Sprint and extend my contact another year. I told her that both of my phones were not working well and that I really needed a phone now and asked if she could make me a deal. She said she couldn’t do anything until Aug 5th. I asked when my contract is up and she said Aug 1st. I told her that I’d be leaving Sprint the day my contact expired and she didn’t seem to care at all.

Contrast that with my call into DirecTV today. I called up DTV and told them that we’d be moving into a new home shortly. DTV offered to schedule a professional installation at my new home including a brand new 40 hour DirecTivo receiver for $99. I asked the guy if I could get a better price since I’ve been a DTV customer for quite a few years. He took a look at my account and said, “I’d be glad to give you $50 off and upgrade you to a newer 80 hour DirecTivo receiver”. Now that’s how you keep a customer! The DTV consultant was friendly and acted like he actually gave a damn about me.

Both Sprint and DirecTV are large companies that face strong competition. No wonder Consumer Reports ranks Sprint near the bottom of customer satisfaction in their industry. DirecTV has to worry about Comcast and its new HD DVR. But I’ll bet that DirecTV will survive the storm if they continue to treat customers like I was treated today.

It’s been a stressful but exciting last couple of weeks. I left LearnKey and started working as a Group Program Manger for Morse Best located in downtown Seattle. I’m having a great time working with a group of very passionate and creative coworkers. Whereas it sometimes felt like we were working against what the customer was asking for at Learnkey, at Morse Best everybody is very concerned and committed to deliver exactly what’s expected from the customer. This requires us to be open to ideas and suggestions that come from customers who use our services.

It’s great to be back in Seattle. I thought I’d miss working over on the comfortable Microsoft campus but I’m enjoying the downtown area and all interesting people, foods and smells it has to offer. For lunch I’ll walk a few block to Pikes Market, grab a lemonade and take in the sun at the small park overlooking Lake Union. I’ve been commuting on an express bus from the Lake Stevens area until we move into our home mid August. We found a nice home near the Silverlake area with a big yard for our kids and dog to enjoy.

I’m in dire need of a new cell phone. Kim needs a new phone more than I do so I’ll probably replace both phones very soon. I was sold on the Treo 650 for Sprint service but after having a Windows Mobile based GPS system to play around with last week, I might be better off with a Windows Mobile based device with GPS. But that still leaves my phone problem to solve. I look forward to the day that my PDA is able to handle phone, mp3, GPS and PDA duties.

After nearly a year in Utah, we’ve decided to move back to the Seattle area. I’ve accepted a position with a technology company located in downtown Seattle. We figure it would be easier to move back now before the kids start school and the opportunties in technology in Seattle are so great. I’m so excited to get back to the Northwest but will miss the slower pace of life here in St. George, Utah. I will miss working with such fun and interesting people at LearnKey.

Sure, I still send a few emails at work. Since we don’t have a corporate intranet at work, I mostly use email to move files back and forth. Microsoft Messenger has nearly replaced personal email for me. My closest friends and coworkers are on my Messenger contact list and I never email them. I wonder when business cards will start including Messenger/Yahoo/ICQ names?

Only a handful of people at my work are “authorized” to run the real version of MSN Messenger. Everyone else can run the web version which isn’t very good. I don’t know why our company goes out of its way to keep people from communicating with each other.

Email has become a big pain in the butt with all the spam, viruses and scams being passed around. I run Outlook with a its built in spam filter which works pretty well. I also run an Outlook plug-in called SpamBayes that adds another layer of spam killing and protection. I then have my popmail checker ban email from certain domains like yahoo.com and hotmail.com before they even hit Outlook. The only time I seem interested in email anymore is when I’m passing on a resume for a friend or expecting an insurance or car quote.

Remember when email was so simple? I’d fire up Pegasus Mail and could nearly always expect a response from my friends. I’m convinced that the closer the friend, the less likely he/she is to reply to an email. They must figure they will catch me on Messenger and say hello.

I attended Microsoft Tech-Ed in Orlando last week. Our company had a booth inside the Expo hall. I have attended dozens of technical tradeshows over the years but hadn’t been to one in over a year. The mood at this show was subdued although it was sold out to the public. A few observations from an exhibitors point of view:

The Expo Hall was Too Large – which made it feel like there wasn’t much traffic. The isles were nearly 40 feet wide so attendees could walk right down the middle without even looking at our booth. From an exhibitors view, it’s not a bad thing when space is a little snug and there’s a bit of overflow from one booth to another.

Little Excitement for Longhorn – I heard very few attendees talking about Longhorn. I didn’t talk to one person that seemed at all excited about this upcoming OS. I just can’t imagine enthusiastic consumers lining up to buy Longhorn when it releases years from now. Lots of talk about SQL Server 2005 and Sharepoint Server.

Big Presentations are Rare – It doesn’t seem that long ago when each exhibitor had a big stage where a marketing dude would stand up and demo the latest, greatest product. These always seemed so phony but they did draw a number of attendees especially when free t-shirts were tossed into the audience. At Tech Ed, I noticed most companies have gone to the “pod” model where exhibitors and attendees and talk 1×1 with each other.

Magic Acts – Those few companies that did have a big presentation in their booth hired magicians and psychics to bring in big crowds which they did! It was odd to see these circus acts drawing huge crowds without saying anything about the company’s products except for a few memorized lines that seemed oddly placed within the act. IBM had an Indy car in their booth hooked up to a large plasma display where attendees could test a cool racing game.

Microsoft Spoils Attendees – You didn’t have to walk 20 yards in order to find food, drink or candy. The table full of Twinkies and Ding Dongs was especially popular. Tons of SWAG here too.

Wireless Everywhere – It used to be a luxury but now everyone expects to be connected everywhere. Even my $59/night Holiday Inn room had free wireless. The CommNet computers lining the hallways didn’t seem to be packed as I remember from past shows. But the wireless beanbag lounges were packed.

No Tablet PCs? – I’m sure with all the Tablet hype coming out of Microsoft bloggers there must have been some Tablet PCs at the show but I didn’t see a single one. I did see quite a few Apple PowerBooks and many iPods.

From PC World

Microsoft and the entertainment industry’s holy grail of controlling copyright through the motherboard has moved a step closer with Intel now embedding digital rights management within in its latest dual-core processor Pentium D and accompanying 945 chipset.

Officially launched worldwide on the May 26, the new offerings come DRM-enabled and will, at least in theory, allow copyright holders to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard rather than through the operating system as is currently the case.

I hope that AMD sees a big opportunity here and tells the RIAA and MPAA where to shove it. I ditched Intel chips three computer upgrades ago and this just cements that decision going forward. I don’t need Microsoft or Intel telling me how to use my computer. The rules are never devised in favor of the consumer.

As I was waiting for my toast this morning I noticed a small carton of nasel spray. On the box, in big black and yellow letters it states, “FOR THE NOSE” and shows a picture of a very pointy nose. The instructions tell me to “use two sprays into each nostril”.

For those who are still confused on its proper usage the following warning is printed down the side: “should not be sprayed into the eyes”.

OUCH!

Over at Creating Passionate Users Kathy Sierra comments on Mrs. Fields Cookie and their policy which forces employees to toss all left over cookies at closing. This made me think how I’ve been treated as an employee at various companies.

I’ve never felt more trusted than when I worked at Microsoft. From day one, I felt like I was able to make decisions and employ resources in order to get my job done. When I needed a new laptop, I got one. When I wanted to play around on Linux I was able to order a machine on which to install it. I felt empowered to learn about Microsoft products as well as competing products. And I wasn’t some hotshot manager either. I was a brand new product manager on the low end of the company org chart.

Another company I worked for had little trust for anyone. This company was a start-up in the Seattle area, and we had a person counting the free sodas to ensure nobody was taking a stash home at night. Not sure how anyone would be able to tell, but the company thought it was a big enough problem to assign a controller to monitor our pop intake.

How a company handles my expense reports has been a pretty reliable gauge in how well it trusts its employees. How many layers of management does your expense report pass through before it’s approved? How long does it take before you see your money? At Microsoft my manager would approve my reports quickly, and I had my money back within three days max. It was a very simple process in which I felt trusted. Companies that exhibit trust like this make me never want to give them a reason not to trust me. I’m very careful with my expenses in this type of setup. But companies that have hassled me over expenses have made me want to spend the very maximum when they question everything.