Sun, Social Media, Random Thoughts... Skrocki's Blog

My new "every-one-is-unique" messenger bag made of recycled billboard material, with a wickedly cool seat belt strap, is getting a lot of ogling eyes here at the mother ship (props to Will for hooking me up!).

...by my incredibly sweet and creative 7 year old niece.

It's always good to lift one's head up from the trenches, take a look back and soak in the glory of progress. That's what I did today on behalf of the amazing engineering team I get to work with and here's what I saw:

Over the last two quarters, between 4 Application Engineers, 1 Development Manager, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Program Manager (me!) & one part-time Search Program Manager, working on 6 applications, the team drove the following to fruition:

• 30 application upgrades
• 225 change requests
• supported 6 of Sun's applications that saw ~60 million page views and 21.4 million search results

All while infusing respect and humor into our day-to-day activities. I consider myself lucky to be on a team with these guys. Congrats Allen, Igor, Matthew, Rama, Ramsci, Rob, Shawn and our leader who enables our pace and delivery, Will!

To see the goodness for yourself, check out Sun Forums, Wikis, Mediacast, Planets, Search and of course this very site Sun Blogs.

Who's up for a tweet-up in Palo Alto on Weds, October 1st? @DiTucci, @tehduh, @smaragdis, @chrisbl99 and I will be in the hood & it would be fun to sync up with our twitter friends in the bay area.

Interested? Any suggested locations? Does 5:30-ish work for everyone?

Update: The confirmed location is Blue Chalk in Palo Alto. Hope to see you there.

In case you missed it, BusinessWeek ran a story on 18 CEO's who use twitter. Sun's CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, was among the 18 -- in addition to a couple of my favorite twitter users, Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com CEO, and Loic Lemur, Seesmic CEO.

Jonathan's response to how Twitter helps him run Sun:

"Communication is a key part of leadership—as CEO, I need to engage the market, inside and outside Sun, with whatever technology affords me the greatest possible reach. Through blogs, online news, social networking sites, or Twitter, the Internet has fundamentally changed how we communicate with one another. Today, we have thousands of employees participating, engaging customers and developers across the world, 24 hours a day. And whether it's via a half-hour streaming video or a 140-character Tweet, we need to reach everyone in the forum and format they choose—not what we choose."

There's obviously a style difference between how the the 18 CEO's profiled leverage Twitter -- some use it to emote, others use it to inform, and yet others use it as a combination of the two+. Jeremiah Owyang asks:

"@SunCEOBlog twitter account is so unpersonal, for a company that preaches being so open, this isn't living the brand, agree or disagree?"

Jerimiah is one of the most interesting and informational Twitter users that I follow, but I had to disagree with him on this one:

"@jowyang -1 on this one. @SunCEOBlog (not @SunCEO) simply tweets his new blog posts. His blog is his general communications channel."

I think it would be odd and unnecessary to expect all/any fortune 500 CEOs to maintain multiple social media profiles while effectively driving the success of their companies. It's also not necessary if they have at least one channel where they can hold open conversations and syndicate those conversations for ease of engagement -- as is done by Jonathan using his blog for widely distributed conversations then having posts syndicated via Twitter.

Similar to Lee LeFever, thanks to Twitter, I use it as a combination of a chat, micro-blogging, and feed reading tool. The few feeds that are most important to me are fortunately syndicated on Twitter. So, I rarely check my full feed reader anymore.

Setting up a feed for syndication on Twitter, is super simple. Check out Twitterfeed for the details.

There's this discussion on Twitter this week about the evilness of plastic shopping bags that was kicked off by this tweet:

Naturally, everyone says they want to be ecologically friendly and refuse plastic bags. For the most part, the conversation confirmed that most retailers support the "no plastic bags" stance -- some, mostly grocery stores, encourage it by offering a small credit to folks to use cloth bags, or recycle plastic bags. That's good.

Tho', there are some retailers who are totally missing the boat. I'm talking about the clothing shops that cater to Gen Yers and Gen Zers/tweens -- the shops that use their bags as walking advertisements. Bags as ads is a great idea, but why not do what the grocery stores do and sell inexpensive branded cloth bags to consumers and reward them with a small discount each time they reuse it? My 13 year old & her friends use these bags instead of backpacks and they are all too happy to be a walking billboard for these shops.

The brand wins.
The consumers win.
The environment wins.

Medicast.sun.com has gotten a lot of love in the form of new hardware, a database upgrade, and today it will receive a new look and new highly demanded features -- my favorite is the embed code feature that enables users to easily copy code for embedding mediacast-hosted media into their blogs, websites, etc. Full release notes are posted on the wiki, but here's a before (top) and after (bottom) glimpse:

Via @brianherman, Mark Bristow claimed the gold and a new world record time of one minute 8.873 seconds in the LC1 1km event this week in the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games. More details here and here.

Congrats Mark!!!

Oooooo...Rama just posted a job opening for some lucky soul who is passionate/knowledgeable about the community/social networking space and is a stellar engineer who will get to work on Sun sites like this, this, this, this and/or this. The job description is somehow missing the super cool benefit of having me as your program manager, but I'm sure that was just caused by some formatting fluke.

Interested? If you, or someone you know, meet the qualifications, but may not have the listed 12 years of experience, you/they are still encouraged to apply.

TITLE: STAFF ENG, SW

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS
Exciting opportunity for a talented Java Developer to join Sun's experienced, high-energy Web Engineering Team. We value great design, speed, passion for Web applications, critical thinking, flexibility, and effective communication. Primary Responsibilities:

• Design, develop and implement enhancements to Web applications including, but not limited to blogs, wikis, forums, and other "community" driven applications
• Test, troubleshoot and debug software issues
• Define concrete project proposals and solutions
• Fluent in emerging technologies
• Exhibit strong leadership skills Secondary Responsibilities
• Document all new development output
• Work with PM to effectively scope deliverables and timelines

REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE:

• Java/Java Servlet/JSP
• Web technologies (XML, HTML, JavaScript, CSS)
• Experience working with relational databases (MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL)
• Strong familiarity with UNIX
• Good understanding of high-performance, high-availability, scalable servers and systems
• Exceptional problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to deliver under pressure

PREFERRED KNOWLEDGE:

• Experience in Webservices development
• Familiarity with Web 2.0 and emerging technologies
• Solaris System Administration
• Ability to write comprehensive, clear system documentation

MINIMUM LEVEL OF EDUCATION: BS

We recently purchased and installed ourselves what I call the sexiest washer and dryer on the market:

Our install was not flawless and led to a few days of frustration until the nice LG repairman paid a visit. I figured the following might save someone some hassle if they run into the same issues:

Tip #1: It's worth it to have it installed by the pros for two reasons: 1. This isn't your typical take it home and plug it in set. 2. The washer drum is crazy heavy.

Tip #2: If you do the install yourself, be extra careful when connecting the power cord wires to the dryer. The screws that connect the electrical wires to the dryer can be easily stripped. If this happens, the wire connection will be loose and may lead to an electrical smell followed by your breaker being tripped or worse...cause component(s) in your dryer to burn out.

Tip #3: If you purchased platforms (one drawer bases that the washer/dryers sit on), don't forget to install the four mounting plates that connect the machine to the base. I highly recommend purchasing the bases even though they are a bit pricey because the doors on both the washer and dryer will sit rather low to floor without them -- causes an awkward back bending/twisting motion when shuffling the laundry in/out. Plus, the drums are deep so, it's a stretch to reach into them -- worse if not elevated via the platforms.

Tip #4: If your washer bounces around the room on the spin cycle, ensure the four shipping bolts on the back of the machine have been removed. Ensure the mounting plates (see tip #2) have been installed. Use the leveling wrench that comes with your appliance to adjust the feet -- this step may take several tries. It's best to apply the adjustments during the spin cycle, otherwise, you're just taking a shot in the dark. Using a carpenters level to ensure the top of the machine is level won't do the trick since your floor may have some give that plays a factor during the spin cycle.

Tip #5: I've read about some washers acquiring a mildew smell because the front-loaders may allow for the drum to not drain entirely and because the door has an air-tight seal. The LG repair man suggests leaving the door open in between use and using HALF of the detergent that is suggested on the detergent instructions.

Tip #6:: Per the repair man, dilute your bleach as well (half water: half bleach) to prevent bleach build up in the hose. I'm not sure I buy this one since the bleach reservoir seems to hold very little, but I'm still getting use to the fact that the washer uses significantly less water than the old school top-loaders.

Tip #7: Wash similar weight fabrics together. This will help balance the load and decrease the washer vibration during the spin cycle.

Once we had the repairman out to fix our install issues, both of them work like a charm.

I was just chatting with ThinGuy about the following video. Truth be told, I'm turned off by many technology videos because I find them boring, but you have to watch this one. Scott McNealy (Sun Chairman) and Terry Matthews (Mitel Chairman) are such compelling communicators, they could be talking about dirt and the conversation would be worth a listen. But, that's not all. Following their intro, is an incredibly cool demo of the Sun Ray and Mitel telephony system solution -- I WANT ONE!

Which reminds me (apologies for the side note) of a conversation I had with another colleague today about how Sun and non Sun social networks have triggered me to have a deeper awareness of Sun initiatives (like this one) that are not directly related to the focus of my role. I got to know ThinGuy through his blog which triggered an opportunity to meet him and his lovely wife for dinner. Though we live in different states, my husband and I have become great friends with them...and I know more about Sun Rays than I ever expected.

I guess, for the most part, it fits...well, wait, it might fit at times, but I definitely have my moments where I'm not exactly laid back and optimistic.

Your Theme Song is Soak Up The Sun by Sheryl Crow

"I've got no one to blame For every time I feel lame I'm looking up" You're laid back, optimistic, and very together Like the sun, people feel warm and comfortable around you

Via @jowyang, this is a really cool community site: AirBed&Breakfast.

"What is AirBed & Breakfast?

AirBed & Breakfast is an online marketplace for peer-to-peer traveling.

We enable people to earn money by renting out extra space, and offer travelers a viable alternative to hotels."

With tens of thousands of people converging in Denver, CO next week for the Democratic National Convention, it appears that many residents are more than happy to open up their homes and earn a few bucks in the process.

As for me, it's a little outside of my comfort zone, but Elaine C.'s "Museum" quality cleanliness does sound appealing.

Some of you may have read my post on Operation Frog Egg Relocation. Please meet Beijing Skrocki!

I'd like to say that Beijing is a symbol of the relocation program being a success, but as it turns out, Beijing was one of the few (if not only) eggs left in the koi pond that escaped the menu of Big Tuna (my big, sweet, hungry koi) and my OCD pond vacuuming. So, our little 8/8/08 froggie is indeed lucky!

As for the relocated eggs, they are still doing well as tadpoles, but their road to becoming frogs is much slower than Beijing's. In fact, I'm beginning to worry about their slow progress -- winter will be here soon enough.

Every now and then I catch a lucky shot with my rookie Canon PowerShot SD750 (a crowd-sourced recommendation that I totally appreciate!). This welcomed beauty was just visiting my pond -- s/he gets bonus points for having an appetite for mosquitoes.

There was a really cool success story about Sun Wikis published on our intranet that is totally worth sharing here. The following isn't the complete story, but does include the keypoints.

"July 22, 2008 - Last fall, when faced with the problem of how to increase collaboration with its customers, the Sun Java Communications Suite team responded by going "all out" with its product documentation on wikis.sun.com. Communications Suite (Comms Suite) provides the email, calendar, and instant messaging services used by employees as well as hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The Comms Suite Documentation Wiki went live in January of this year, just in time for the Comms Suite 6 Beta Program. Already, in just a few short months, the wiki has been embraced by the Comms Suite community.

"Using wikis.sun.com as the platform for the Comms Suite documentation has been nothing short of a revolution for us," said Jim Parkinson, VP, Tools and Services. "We are getting real-time feedback from customers in the form of wiki comments and direct contributions which have an immediate impact on the shape, direction and content of the documentation. Customers are a part of the ecosystem and are actively engaging with Sun employees and each other. We believe this effects a higher level of customer engagement and satisfaction.""

Kudos to the Sun Java Communications Suite team for a fantastic use of Sun Wikis!

One would think that with all the Twittering, Facebooking, FriendFeeding, etc., the Sun blogging growth would have slowed, or at least plateaued. I'm happy to report that it hasn't for Sun.



























The steady growth, in my opinion, is primarily due to Sun's culture of openness and transparency. Our team of 5,139 self-appointed bloggers is also a source of inspired growth as they help internally evangelize the value of open conversations in the market place -- specifically, via the use of blogs, wikis, forums, etc.

I'm really happy to report that my good friend, Sun fellow & neighbor, Shereen Fink, is our newest blogger and check out who was first to post a comment on her blog (hint: it wasn't me, but someone you probably know.).

Mile High Race Track has closed and there is a fantastic group of greyhounds now up for adoption via Recyled Racers and Colorado Greyhound Adoption. Some of the dogs will be on site at the Sun Broomfield Campus today from 11AM to 1PM for an employee meet and greet.

If you are in the market for a dog, please consider a greyhound. They have such a calm, sweet demeanor (tho' every one has it's own personality, of course). Lola (our greyhound pictured on the left), was very easy to train when we introduced her to our home. She's super sweet with our cats and any kids that may visit. Her doggie manners were excellent when we introduced her to our other dog, Ellie (pictured on the right).

For those worried about not having space for a big dog, greyhounds are very graceful and super relaxed. Lola spends most of her time napping in my office and is a total indoor dog for the most part, but there's nothing more heart-warming than to see her running on her own terms in her own yard -- you can hear the thump of her feet. It's beautiful

I'm going to drop by the event today -- just to visit. I'm already two pets over the legal limit, but keep that on the down low.

P.S. If you're not in Colorado, but are interested in adopting a greyhound, search for your local greyhound rescue here: http://bgrd.co.uk/

He's still the king of the one liners...

I love this article about my friend, neighbor, Sun colleague and philanthropist, Shereen Fink. We live in an agricultural community with a large population of Spanish speakers, so the volunteer work that Shereen does to teach English is incredibly valuable to her students and our community.

Congrats on the well-deserved recognition, Shereen!

My new all time favorite painting and a treasure for which I will be forever thankful, compliments of the incredibly talented and beautiful @MrsThinGuy.

This is a great year for Sun blogging milestones. In March the site reached it's 100,000th comment, in April it turned four and reached it's 100,000th blog post, and today, we welcome our 5,000th blogger. That's ~15% of our employees/interns blogging directly on this site with many more blogging on their own non-Sun sites -- if they'd like, we syndicate their blogs too in the "Recent Posts" section of the main Sun Blogs page.

Please welcome to our 5,000th blogger, Alexey Ilyin, blogging from Russia at the Sun x64 - High Availability blog. Alexey tells me that the blog will have content in both Russian and English.

Congratulations to the 4,999 of you who led us to this milestone by initiating such rich conversation!

Tara Hunt, AKA @missrogue on twitter, created an excellent presentation, "Happiness as Your Business Model", on how to leverage the following "pillars of happiness" to make your websites, products, and services successful:

"1. autonomy
2. competence
3. relatedness
4. self-esteem"

She offers specific case studies of how companies like Zappos.com, Moleskin, Twitter, Ma.gnolia, & Wordpress have become "agents of happiness" by infusing the pillars of happiness in their business models to make their customers/users happy.

My favorite implementation examples of the pillars are as follows (slides 124 and 134):

"5 ways to create feelings of autonomy:
1. give people tools to personalize their experiences
2. build tools that democratize previous inaccessible industries
3. offer clear and attractive choices
4. be open and transparent
5. don't lock people in

5 ways to increase relatedness:
1. build multiple ways for customers to interact
2. have many collaborative experiences
3. create simple ways for customers to share with a friend
4. design for generosity
5. create online/offline meeting experiences"

Good stuff. Check it out.

Get Smart, starring Anne Hathaway and Steve Carell, released in US theaters today and Sun has it's very own star cameo. Be sure to look for the Sun Storage Tek SL8500 Modular Library System in the scene below.

We've seen you lingering around here for a while -- reading blogs, commenting on blogs, dreaming about being one of the cool kids on the "Popular Blogs" list, thinking about starting a blog, but never pulled the trigger.

Granted, blogging isn't for everyone, but if you have a desire to engage in conversation about your work, hobbies, thermometer collection, etc., why not click the Register link and be on your way already? It's not only good for Sun, but it can also be good for your career and a great contribution to your digital footprint -- the thing that some say is the new resume.

Here's the express route:

1. Register/Login
2. One the Main Menu click "Create new weblog"
3. Click on "New Entry"
4. Compose your first post
5. Click the "Post to Weblog" button and you're in the club!

P.S. My not-so-hidden agenda is to get just 3 more Sun employees/interns to start blogging so we reach our 5,000th blogger milestone. If you are our 5,000th blogger, I'll write a post about it and send some link love your way! I know, it's not the fanciest prize, but that's all I got.

In my spare time, I'm a novice koi pond hobbyist. Which as it turns out, involves a whole lot more education than what I had originally expected when you factor in managing levels of acidity/alkalinity, ammonia, salt, nitrates, chlorine, etc. Bundle that with the required armchair koi vet degree and quarantine environment that you'll need to respond to infections and injury (on top of knowing the types of koi by their proper names, pond filtration equipment, predator control, the types of plants that will be compatible with the pond ecosystem, etc.) and it gets...complicated, but still fun.

This week's lesson-in-progress is how uninvited guests in the form of amorous amphibians one day, can turn into thousands of frog eggs the next day. At first glance the rope of eggs looked much like a cluster of plant roots, but after closer examination, it's clear that they are frog eggs. The koi managed to eat the majority of them before I had time to relocate them to a small water feature we have in the yard (pictured in this post). Now, we wait and see if tad poles will develop -- I understand that it takes a week or more.

I opted to intervene with a relocation because they are native to the area and offer value in the form of insect and slug control -- which our garden and mini fruit orchard will appreciate. Tho' some argue that frogs can introduce adverse conditions to a koi pond in the form of unfriendly bacteria or parasites. My pond has a UV filter that helps to manage bacteria, but it won't kill parasites. I've yet to experience a parasitic infestation, so I know little about responding to and managing one.

My frog-loving 6 year old nephew will be visiting for a couple weeks in about 10 days, so I'm hoping the timing will be right for him to observe the emergence of tadpoles...assuming a higher-ranking creature doesn't discover their hide-out.

Update (June 21): Tadpoles emerged today: http://flickr.com/photos/lskrocki/2597620655/

http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2008/06/ecotechnology_great_debates_at.php

The guy on the far left (the sharpest dressed panelist) is ThinGuy.

In these days of "syndicate and widgit-ize everything", one might find Angad's cool & comprehensive demo interesting. How to leverage dapper.NET to create a feed (by scraping content off a page), widget and alert:

Check it out: http://blogs.sun.com/angad/entry/getting_automatic_updates_of_the

See also: Demo on the dapper.net page

A friend of ours, Roger, has been mentioning how boring this blog has become. "Have you gone pro?", he asks. To which, I laugh...a lot. As a side note, even tho' he's not in the tech sector he's a great example of how personal blog content on a corporate site can lead to driving awareness of a company with people who normally could care less about certain topics related to it. Our conversations about a personal topics often would lead to a work related topic he read about on my blog. Cool.

Anyway, getting back to the cause of the boringness. Sadly, he's not the the only one to notice that this blog seems to have lost that personal content ingredient. This isn't by design or some master plan to abandon my goofiness and strive for some higher level of rigid professionalism. Much of it has to do with my turning 40 in March and as a result I got serious about getting fit -- this started around late last year.

I now spend more time running and cycling. Now that summer is here, I spend an insane amount of time gardening (we have a 2 acre yard). This calendar year, I've also taken on a few task forces at Sun AND one of my projects, Forums, reached a point where it needed and deserved far more attention (lots of good traction there that I'll try to blog more about).

So, that's the word. I'll try to bring back some entertaining posts, but in the meantime, visit me on Twitter for some goofy microblogging, if you'd like.

Good "clear the air" interview between Scoble and Twitter today about the Twitter stability issues and how they are in small part related to power users who follow and are followed by a lot of users.

In addition to making it clear that there is a big difference between power use vs illegitimate use of the site and the sum of the impact of both, I appreciate Twitter's transparency about the site's stability issues. Basically, they have a lot of power advisers and the solution isn't necessarily something that throwing money at any one thing will solve -- it sounds like the primary wellness necessity is time and effort to work on laying the new foundation concurrent to maintaining the site and applying stop gaps in the meantime.

The overall user frustration is the duration of the stability issues. All I can say is, having been on projects where stability issues seem to linger on and on, there's almost always a small team of committed, exhausted people working their you-know-what's off who are far more disturbed by the issues than anyone else. Tho', I can't speak to the level of actual commitment going on behind the scenes at Twitter, of course, but let's hope that it's maximized. Time is their worst enemy at this point.

I still would rather work on a project in the hot seat than to work on something nobody cares about. Sending Twitter some get well soon vibes...