Sometimes I wonder... Other times I know.
Monday, June 12, 2006
 
TechEd Boston
I'm presenting "Windows Workflow Foundation: Building Workflow-Enabled Services with WCF" today at TechEd Boston (session CON314). You can find the session powerpoint here.

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 11:28 AM 0 comments  
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
 
SloppyKissCards.com
In a simplistic view of the world, there are dog people, and there are cat people. I'm a dog person :)

Identifying a niche target market and providing a viral product offering which further expands your audience is a great business model.

A great business model and execution on it is what I expected when Ryan & Nicole decided to leave the borg and start their own business back home in Vancouver.

And thus the creation of SloppyKissCards.com - animated cards for dog lovers.

Great job! (It was mostly Nicole, it looks WAY to nice for Ryan's work)

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 12:18 AM 0 comments  
Monday, June 05, 2006
 
Email To: line etiquette
A developer and I recently had lunch where I recanted a recent encounter with a co-worker.

Earlier in the day, I had sent an email out to a group of co-worked on a project I'm participating in. One of the recipients replied directly to me and questioned the way in which I had ordered the To: line recipients in the email. In a tone which clearly indicated their irritation, they wanted to know why they were third instead of first on the list. So, for example, why I chose to do: To: a@foo.com; b@foo.com; c@foo.com instead of c, a, b.

On a day to day basis, it rarely occurs to me to think about the order in which I address my To: line recipients. With the exception of emails sent to senior levels of the company, I don't spend the effort carefully measuring an arbitrary metric as to who should go first, middle and last in my emails.

Back to the developer at lunch, he was genuinely shocked that I wasn't practicing good To: recipient email etiquette. In fact, he told me that he would be insulted if I had made this blunder with him.

I asked then, "what is the correct email To: line recipient etiquette?" To which he recited no less than 3 different algorithms.

Here is one: Stack rank the recipients in the descending order by role. So, General Managers first, then Product Unit Managers, then Discipline Managers, then leads, then individual contributors.

You can easily extrapolate a variety of other algorithms. Each of which might or might not be known to the recipients.... clearly making this an exercise in futility.

I'm going to be a bit harsh, but personally, I think this is a specialized form of a pissing contest. Did you get the email? Great.

However, to those who I might have been insulted in the past, I apologize. You can feel free to put me last, first, in the middle of your To: line, I really don't care. But I'm not going to spend any cycles on "correctly" sorting email aliases.

To mitigate, I created a distribution group (which sorts alphabetically) and no longer run the danger of stepping on any toes.

- posted by # posted by Dennis Pilarinos : 11:48 PM 2 comments