Since I had the morning off, I spent it wandering around Shinjuku, the part of Tokyo where the MS Japan office is. I was looking for presents for my wife and son, but couldn’t find anything. Experience tells me that I’m a poor judge of clothes for Julie plus with the diet she’s been on and the foreign sizes there’s little chance I’ll pick out something that she likes or that fits. Too bad, as this is like heaven for women’s clothes shopping. I went to four different department stores, and each had floor after floor of ladies wear. For example, the Odakyu department store has 14 floors, of which 6 are dedicated to ladies wear. Other departments get a floor or less. I did find a cute shirt for Patrick, but it was around 8,000 yen, which I was told was $76 US. Seems pretty steep for a shirt he will only wear a few times before he out grows it. 

I did have more shopping luck (for me at least, not for Julie or Patrick) at Yodobashi Camera. Their slogan is “Total Multimedia Life” and let me tell you they are not kidding! If it uses electricity, they have it. From computer equipment to media players to digital and video cameras to pro music gear to home appliances – eight floors of geek paradise to put Fry’s to shame. I picked up a compact USB 2.0 hub and a Wireless 54G card for my laptop – grand total about $50 US. I know I could get these in the states, but the place was so cool I had to get something. And unlike the US, they had racks of hubs to choose from. Literally, they must have had 30 different models of compact USB 2.0 hubs in different shapes and colors. The one thing they didn’t have that I looked for was a tablet PC. Hey Scoble, what’s up with that?

It took forever, but I’m in Tokyo. Ten hours on a plane I expected. I didn’t expect the two hours late departure and I didn’t realize it was an hour and a half train ride to the hotel from the airport. But I’m here now and I had a relatively good night sleep (I never sleep great on the road). I’ve got some time to look for souvenirs this morning, then I have meetings this afternoon and tomorrow morning before flying out to Kuala Lumpur tomorrow.

On the flight out, I ended up next to Jesper Johansson from Microsoft’s Security Business Unit. He writes the Security Management column on Technet and had two of the top ten presentations at TechEd US. He spent most of the plane ride working on his “How to Get Your Network Hacked in 10 Easy Steps” presentation. He showed me his demo, where he hacks a Win2k/SQL2k machine using a SQL injection attack. Anybody still using concatenation to generate SQL commands? I realized that was bad before meeting Jesper, but now I’ve seen just how bad. I’m glad we’re out there showing people how this stuff works, if nothing else in order to make them realize what they can do to identify and mitigate security risks. I want Jesper to write some security infrastructure architecture articles for Architecture Center and/or JOURNAL.

Also ran into Mark Hindsbo, who works down the hall from me. He’s in town, like me, to meet with the Japanese subsidiary, though he’s not going on to TechEd. It was nice having someone around who had been to the MSFT Japan office before (the hotel is in the same building) and to chat with on the train.

It’s been quiet around here as I’m prepping for my next trip abroad. TechEd Malaysia and Bejing are next week and I’m presenting at both, plus I’m stopping over in Tokyo to meet with the local field architects. Should be pretty cool. I did TechEd Malaysia two years ago, but I’ve never been to China before so I’m pretty excited.

A few short takes before I go:

• Three more Architecture Strategy team members are blogging: Josh Less, Norman Guadagno and Drew Gude.
  • Josh is the “FinServGuy”, focusing on the architecture, patterns and standards in the financial services industry. He just started on our team and just started his blog. Go check out his post on the Insurance Value Chain.
  • Norman actually not a team member yet and he’s the blogging vet of these three. When he starts in October, Norman will be our marketing manager, a skill set that we’ve been sorely missing around here. His blog – Atlas Brand View – has no coverage of architecture per se, but interesting marketing tidbits like Eight Reasons Marketing Makes Sense and Whatever Happened To Burger King. Can’t wait to see what he writes about architecture marketing.
  • Drew is a vertical architect like Josh, but focused on automotive and manufacturing. He’s doing some cool work with RFID and is a member of the RosettaNet Architecture Advisory Committee. However, as I write this, Drew has yet to blog anything. I keep hearing how he’s working on something but since I’m going out of town I figured I could put a bit of a squeeze to get him to post. 😄
• I’m stoked about the .NET Languages site. Not much up there yet, but I subscribed. Given my interest in software factories and domain-specific languages, I guess this isn’t a surprise. But my interest in language design goes way back to the early days of my blog. BTW, Compiling for the .NET CLR is a great book.
• I hung out with new-red-pill-taker Peter Provost last weekend. Our families went to Bumbershoot together. With my 18 month old son and Peter’s 30 month old daughter, there was little, if any, debauchery – unless riding the kiddy rollercoaster when you’re not really tall enough counts.  There was, however, lots of geek talk, at least when the wifes were off doing other things.

I’ve got some cool stuff “in the works” which I hope to talk about more when I get back. I have 35 hours on airplanes in the next ten days, so I get a chance to bang out some code.

John Evdemon and I were chatting about making time to “get our hands dirty” on some code. After the last meeting between hockey owners and players, it looks like we’ll both have plenty of time on our hands since there won’t be any hockey to watch.

I agree with this ESPN.com article that there is plenty of blame to go around, but it looks to me that most of it sits with the players on this one. The players 12th-hour proposal apparently included a luxury tax/revenue sharing system and a salary rollback that would come to about $100 million dollars. The problem is the league as a whole is losing around $200-$300 million a year (according to former SEC Commission Chair Arthur Levitt). So great, with the player’s proposal, the league continues to hemorrhage over $100 million a year while the luxury tax system spreads it around so everyone feels the pain.

Maybe these guys have been checked into the boards a few too many times, but the numbers are very simple: According to the league, their revenue is around $2 billion, with around 75% going to player salaries. Furthermore, in the past decade, revenue has grown 173% but player salaries have grown 261%. Mess around with those numbers in Excel and you’ll discover that revenue is growing about 5.6% year while salaries are growing 10% a year. Assuming those numbers stay constant and you have salaries equaling revenue in 2011 – only 7 years away. Now, if you include the 5% salary rollback that the players are proposing, assuming the model doesn’t change much (and it shouldn’t – my understanding of the rest of the player proposal deals with revenue sharing, but I’m using the overall league revenue and salaries in this analysis) then that date pushes back just one entire season before the player salaries equal revenue. I’m not sure how anyone in the player’s union can say the current system is working with a straight face.

It’s going to be a long cold winter if you’re a hockey fan. I’m guessing the players are assuming they owners will cave like they did during the ’94-’95 season. Memo to the players, in 1994, the owners were only paying about half of league revenues to player salaries. In other words, they made more money playing than not playing. This time, with the owners losing less money by not playing, they don’t have much incentive to cave.

I got my Lingo phone set up last night. It was mind-numbingly easy:

1. Ignore included directions which tell you to turn off the computer, router and cable modem. (maybe you unplug the microwave just to be sure)
2. Plug Lingo VoIP box into router
3. Plug Lingo VoIP box into phone
4. Plug Lingo VoIP box into power outlet
5. Wait for VoIP light to come on

We made a few calls, both locally and to our family & friends in Europe. I couldn’t hear any difference in quality from our normal land line. We’re going to run with both in parallel for a while, and then I’m going to cut back the services on the land line. I figure I don’t want to shut it off completely for SLA reasons – it works when the power’s out and in the very rare occasions that the internet connection is down. Otherwise, I figure I’ll be completely switched over in a month or so.

BTW, like other VoIP vendors, Lingo offers incentives to sign up your friends. If you want Lingo and an extra $25 credit, drop me a line.