Category: Amazon

For the last year and a half I’ve relied on my Treo 650 for mobile phone service, web browsing, corporate and personal email, ad hoc photography, and the occasional game. It’s served me well in the US, India, and Europe; I’ve even used it to blog.
But it looks as if I’m going to be switching. Amazon.com‘s collaboration infrastructure is based on MS Exchange, and VPN access is rigidly controlled. An IMAP client (even with SSL) doesn’t cut it. But they do support Blackberry‘s enterprise services, and so I think I’ll be getting a Blackberry – specifically, a Blackberry 8700c. It looks like a nice device: it’s a bit lighter and slimmer than the Treo, with a better keyboard. I have no idea how the web browser and email client compare with those on the Treo, nor how well they’re integrated with the phone client. Can I easily dial a phone number in a web page or email message? Is it possible to access both my corporate email and my personal IMAP server? I’ll find out.
The two obvious gaps are (1) fewer applications, and (2) no camera. The first probably doesn’t matter (quality is more important that quantity), but the second…? I seem to remember talk of BlueTooth-enabled digital cameras, but a quick web search suggests that only two came to market, and both have disappeared. Oh, well. So much for convergence.

We just announced the beta for EC2, the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud. 10 cents per clock hour per executable image, Xen based, nicely integrated with the S3 storage service.
(I guess this means that I’m now in competition with my former employer.)

As I come to the end of my second week at Amazon, I realize that I haven’t blogged much about the experience. In part, this is because of the sheer volume of material I’ve been absorbing (“open mouth, insert fire-hose, drink”). It’s been taking place at all levels, from short-term planning meetings for one small engineering team to VP-level breakfast discussions, and everything in between. Architecture, operations, monitoring, infrastructure, computer science, engineering practices… the list goes on. And (of course) the details are all confidential.

But I can talk about one thing I’m doing: interviewing! The Distributed Systems Engineering group is hiring; we have some really interesting opportunities, and we’re getting some very promising candidates. The bar is set really high (in fact there’s an official, HR-blessed role called “Bar Raiser”), and the interviewing process is pretty rigorous. I’m finding it time-consuming, but a lot of fun.

And of course, [shameless advertising] if you’re interested, drop me an email or contact DSE!

I’ve been trying to find out who at Amazon blogs. It turns out that Jeff Barr (creator of the excellent Amazon Web Services Blog) maintains a personal blog page with a quite a few links (including to yours truly). Perhaps the next step should be an aggregator….

My first blog post from inside Amazon, on my corporate laptop (HP/WinXP/Firefox). Curiously the WordPress UI looks quite different on FireFox; I imagine there are some features which don’t work correctly on Safari. Oh, well.

The most important things that I learned yesterday:

• 90.3 KEXP
• FX for beer
• Lots of faces from the Distributed Systems Engineering all-hands, to which I now have to attach names
• Remedy (internal tool) is the answer to 90% of questions. The other 10% are the really important ones.

Must-read links:

• Alec on Welsh road signs
• globalful
• Akihabara News

So, finally, my first day at Amazon. Four hours of orientation this morning, then being shown my office (no bookshelves! must fix that), then lunch with my manager, then wrestling my computers (WinTel laptop and Linux desktop) into submission, then diving out for an hour to sign the lease on my apartment and open a new bank account, then back to the office to see if the Exchange server has decided to behave itself, then provisioning my VPN device… all of this interspersed with greetings and introductions from dozens of people, most of whom I will come to know really well in the next few weeks, but right now my caches are spilling data as fast as it comes in, so I’m damned if I can remember any names, and suddenly it’s 6 o’clock, and I have to head across the street to get a shuttle bus back to the PacMed building where I parked my car.
Whew!
I knew I was in terminal overload when I returned to my desk after I’d signed the lease and opened a bank account, and suddenly realized that I didn’t have the apartment paperwork. It was still at the bank. Panic. Rush back to retrieve it. Resume breathing.
Speaking of banks, my account back in Massachusetts is with Bank of America. (Used to be BayBank, than BankBoston, then Fleet….) And my new account in Seattle is also with BofA. But in MA your ATM card can have a 5 digit pin, while here in WA the pin can only be 4 digits long. Go figure….
And to all my friends and family who asked about the employee discount at Amazon.com…. There is one. But it’s modest, and I can’t share it. Sorry. (Mind you, as a new WA resident I’ll have to pay sales tax on my Amazon.com purchases. So the discount will come in handy.)
But, you ask (well, some of you), what’s it like? What’s the gestalt of the place? Obviously it’s too soon to say, but one thing is very familiar after years at Sun. The people here are smart. Very smart. And they seem to be predisposed to action, which feels different from some parts of Sun recently.
This is going to be fun. More anon.

I’ve arrived in Seattle.
Everything worked pretty much the way it was supposed to, with a few glitches that turned out to be unimportant. The car to the airport was late… but I still got there in time. The BOS-ORD flight was 35 minutes late, but it was OK, because it turned out that the ORD-SEA flight was on the same aircraft, from the same gate! At SEA, Avis couldn’t find me a car, and so they had to give me an SUV. Ugh…. but I guess it may prove useful. And then I had no trouble getting to the office to pick up my keys, and driving across town to the Centennial Towers where I’m staying.
The view from the balcony of my (temporary) apartment is… well, judge for yourself. (Sorry about the image quality.)

I’ve unpacked, walked downtown to a Starbucks to get WiFi and caffeine, and in a few minutes I’ll grab some dinner. Tomorrow I need to find a supermarket, sort out the high-speed internet service that I ordered for the apartment, and explore the neighbourhood (with my camera). In the evening it’s Real Madrid vs. DC United. And then on Thursday my boxes should arrive…..

Not much blogging recently, in part because things have been very busy. With some help from Chris last week, I’ve been doing several household projects, ranging from replacing kitchen cabinet hardware, to installing new blinds in all of the basement and second floor windows, to upgrading bathroom fittings. I’ve also been sorting out what I’m taking to Seattle, what I’m leaving here, and what should be chucked out. (The third category is usually the largest.) Rather than using a moving company, I’m just packing up in boxes from the local UPS store.
We’ve also arranged numerous meetings with our financial advisor, accountant, and people from the bank, as we sort out the implications of my becoming a Washington resident. For those of you outside the US, every state is fiercely independent when it comes to taxation. Most (including Massachusetts) have a state income tax, but Washington is one of those that doesn’t. With me in Washington and Merry in Massachusetts, our tax returns are going to be complicated. (The challenge is to make sure that they don’t become “interesting”!)
So the countdown looks like this:

• Thursday: Pick up Tommy for another overnight visit. (Kate and Mark are going to see the Red Sox.) Continue packing.
• Friday: Finish packing. Take Tommy home, then meet friends for farewell drinks. [5pm, “Naked Fish” in Bedford]
• Saturday: A Fellowship day. Haul the boxes over to the UPS store and ship them for delivery in Seattle next Thursday. Lunch, then a movie. (Film not yet chosen – “Scanner Darkly” or “Prairie Home Companion”, perhaps.)
• Sunday: Cleaning up after the packing. Dinner with friends.
• Monday: Meet with accountant. Last-minute stuff.
• Tuesday: Fly to Seattle.
• Monday 14th: Start at Amazon!

Whew!

Where do Seattle residents go to buy electronics? I don’t mean TVs and GPS’s; I’m thinking of power supplies, DRAM, heatsinks, and so forth. (Yes, I know I’m joining Amazon – but some things require browsing. I’m never going to buy a mouse or a keyboard without getting my hands on a physical example.)
When I’m in Silicon Valley, I tend to visit Fry’s, Microcenter, and the Apple store. I see that there’s a Fry’s in Renton, and an Apple store up in University Village….
Anyway, where do the local geeks shop?

This isn’t really a “relocation” question, but it relates to my move.
After years of “creative diversity” at Sun (Sun Write/Paint/Draw, Applix, FrameMaker, StarOffice) I’m going to be entering a relatively conventional (MS Office, Outlook Exchange) IT environment at Amazon.com, and I’m going to have to get myself a new computer (or select one of the standard offerings from Amazon.com IT). Recently I’ve run various Macintoshes (iBook, PB12, PB15), as well as an Acer Ferrari 3400 for Solaris x64.
I like to use my laptop as my engineering notebook. It goes everywhere with me, and needs to be instantly available as soon as I open the lid. So it has to be light and small. On the other hand, when I’m at my desk I expect to be able to use a decent display at full resolution. Performance? Of course, but my experience is that disk speed is more critical than highly artificial CPU numbers. (And to get decent battery life the OS is going to be dialling back the CPU anyway.)
The problem is, my ideal system doesn’t seem to exist. Here are the key features I’m looking for, in priority order:

1. Weighs less than 4 lbs
2. 6-8 hours battery life
3. 100GB 7200rpm hard disk
4. Able to drive an external 20″ LCD via DVI
5. WiFi, Bluetooth, USB 2.0 and FireWire
6. DVD burner (detachable OK)
7. Decent 3-D (Vista-compatible) graphics; not this shared-memory nonsense

Any suggestions?