Barnaby Jeans - Talking About Stuff

We’re Hiring…Come join the team

Barnaby Jeans — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:41:38 +0000

As you saw in my previous post, I have taken on a new role and in doing so have left a vacancy in our marketing team. If you are a passionate customer advocate with a strong marketing background then the role below might be a good fit for you.

Some of the programs that you may have heard of, TechDays, EnergizeIT, and AlignIT are just some of the programs produced and executed by my team, and are all directed and led by the audience managers.

If you are interested in being part of a great team that has outreach to technical professionals across Canada to create lasting relationships, then keep reading.

Senior Technical Audience Manager – Microsoft Canada

Are you driven by the need to make things bigger and better? Does making others great make you feel great too?

Audience Marketing Managers (AMMs) drive the local engagement strategy, plan and execution framework for how Microsoft builds sustainable and meaningful breadth and depth relationships with our technical audience. AMMs focus on the following audiences: Developers, IT Pros, Designers, Architects and Students worldwide.

The goal for an Sr. AMM is to help find Technical Professionals better ways to use technology to greater benefit. We do all we can to earn the hearts and minds of those Technical Professionals, by focusing on their needs and by helping them to be successful in their jobs and in their careers. Our goal is industry-leading satisfaction and favorability because highly satisfied/ loyal customers buy more of our products and will recommend them to others.

Success of the Sr. AMM role is determined by the individuals’ ability to work collaboratively across the subsidiary/area playing a key orchestration role with internal partners and stakeholders including Developer & Platform Evangelists, Product Marketing, Customer & Partner Experience and Business & Marketing Organization resources including the Corporate Marketing Group and segment marketing leads.
Sr. AMM’s ensure one Microsoft voice is heard and the interests and needs of the audience are considered and integrated across all campaigns and activities.

Key Requirements for the role Include:

Serves as the recognized “go to” custodian, advocate, and respected authority for audiences across the subsidiary. Maintains and supports product managers and other internal stakeholders with audience intelligence and guidance

Serves as a local resource for audience intelligence use to drive, shape and influence key strategic messages, content, and programs across local marketing efforts (i.e., customer campaigns, events, purchase process and deployment). Synthesizes audience and market information to derive key audience insights and affect strategic direction and planning process.

Consistently tracks programs to measure business impact including engagement, adoption, advocacy and scale

Assesses market and audience standing to develop or refine marketing strategies that are responsive to market trends, audience perception, competitive pressure, product adoption and net new engagement opportunities

Aligns with global audience strategy, programs and approach with execution based on local market and audience intelligence. Effectively assesses viability and value of existing, new and emergent channels/programs for improving audience outreach/scalability.

Understands and leverages through effective project management, connection points across media and channels (both online and offline), to drive audience objectives.

Reviews all programs and activities against metrics and goals to prioritize and make informed business decisions.

People who are successful in this role and in this team have a passion for the customer. They are consummate cross-company collaborators, and they are driven by the challenges of change. They balance the excitement of continuous innovation with the need to deliver consistent, predictable, reliable, and repeatable experiences for our customers. They are builders, motivators, and team players extraordinaire!

Join us if you are inspired by driving change!

An introduction to me and my new role

Barnaby Jeans — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:35:54 +0000

I am part of one of the coolest teams at Microsoft. In my new role as Senior Solution Advisor I get to hang out with some really great people both here in Toronto as well as across the country. My role is to connect with decision makers in development teams all across Canada to understand their challenges and to share their successes and stories of solutions built on the Microsoft platform. My focus is everything from traditional client development, through mobile, web, and onto the cloud.

If you manage a development team in Canada and want to get more connected to Microsoft please connect with me (download my vcard) as I’m excited to hear what you are building, how you are deploying, and the challenges you face. My Calendar is pretty up-to-date and is posted at http://barnabyjeans.ca/calendar/ (download ics file).

More broadly, as part of the Microsoft Canada team, my team and I are responsible for connecting with the Canadian Developer and IT Pro communities through blogs, webcasts, community engagement and events. My team and I produce the TechDays events that travel across Canada.

Before coming to Microsoft, I most recently worked as a Sales Engineer for Red Hat and helped to establish their Canadian sales force, and before that, I worked as a technical Sales Consultant at Oracle focusing on enterprise architecture. I have been working with customers of all sizes across Canada and the US for over 12 years.

In my free time, I enjoy digital photography and technology in general and I’m currently exploring the possibilities of both IPv6 and VOIP/SIP.

Following the unexpected death of my mother-in-law in February 2009, this summer I will be riding 200km from Toronto to Niagara Falls with the Ride to Conquer Cancer to raise money for cancer research. I have committed to raise at least $2500 so if you are interested in supporting, please visit http://conquercancer.ca/goto/Barnaby to donate.

Support my Ride to Conquer Cancer

Barnaby Jeans — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:27:31 +0000

If you are reading this blog post then chances are we have met at some point in the past. You’re either a friend, family member, colleague, classmate, business acquaintance, or someone I have met as I have travelled across Canada and around the world.

As you may or may not know, my wife (Michelle) and I have been involved with fundraising events for cancer research since 2003 when Michelle’s aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer and the weekend to end cancer walk first came to Toronto.

Since that time we have either walked or crewed in 7 more events in Toronto, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and London (UK).

We have been away from these events for the past few years while raising our family, however, in January 2009 Michelle’s mom was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of lung cancer, and within 3 weeks of the diagnosis, had passed away. You can read the full story at http://snipr.com/bernice_white. The speed and aggressiveness of cancer made us realize we needed to get back into fundraising to fight cancer and in June 2010, I’ll be on the bike to ride the 200km from Toronto to Niagara Falls. It will be a challenge in a number of ways, but with my bike, my helmet, and your generosity, I know we can make an impact.

Please contribute to this history-making event with a donation. Funds raised in The Ride to Conquer Cancer will support breakthrough research, exemplary teaching, and compassionate care at The Princess Margaret, one of the top 5 cancer research centres in the world.

To give you a sense of perspective, according to the National Cancer Institute of Canada, over 153,100 new cases of cancer and 70,400 deaths from cancer were estimated to occur in 2006. Men outnumber women for new cases by 5% and mortality by 11%. That's why I'm riding. To do something BIG about cancer. I hope that you'll share this incredible adventure with me by supporting me in my fundraising efforts.

To donate, please visit http://www.conquercancer.ca/goto/Barnaby

Thank you in advance for your support.

Barnaby

Flickr Tags: RideToConquer

Twitter Tags: #RideToConquer

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

barnabyjeans.ca goes IPv6

Barnaby Jeans — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:32:00 +0000

UPDATE: As I have changed hosting providers, the following information no longer applies, however, is left as a reference for others who may be trying to get IPv6 up and running.

A couple of months ago I got IPv6 up and running at home, now that I have that working, the next logical step was to setup a server that I could connect to using IPv6. Over the last few weeks I have been working on getting http://barnabyjeans.ca to not only speak IPv4 but also be accessible over IPv6. The good news is that this is now working and you can access this site over IPv6. If you are experimenting with IPv6, you should automatically connect over IPv6 as there are both A and AAAA records setup for that server. However, if you have IPv6 setup but name resolution isn’t working you may want to try accessing the site via the following http://[2001:470:1f04:39a::2] (depending on your operating system, this may or may not work). You should notice down at the bottom of the page (under the community server logo) is the IP address you are connecting from. If you are hitting the server over IPv6, you should see your IPv6 address down there, if not, you will see your traditional IPv4 address.

Now that I have that out of the way, how did I go about getting the server to talk IPv6? I’ll try to outline the steps below, but as with anything, you will probably want to try this out in a controlled environment before rolling this out more broadly.

Decide how you are going to get your IPv6 address. For this server, I decided to try Hurricane Electric’s free tunnel broker which you can find at http://tunnelbroker.net.
Once you have registered and signed into the tunnelbroker.net site, you will need to request a new tunnel and provide the current IPv4 address of your endpoint (server). As we are setting this up on an Internet facing server, you will likely have a public IP so this step should be pretty straight forward. If your server sits behind a firewall they you will need to use the firewall IP address and, very importantly, make sure that your firewall passes protocol-41 traffic.
After you have requested your tunnel, you will be provided with some important pieces of information, specifically:

Server IPv4 address:72.52.104.74 — note this isn’t your server IP address – this is the tunnel server endpoint

Server IPv6 address:2001:470:????:???::?/64

Client IPv4 address: aa.bb.cc.dd — this should be the public IP address of your server

Client IPv6 address:2001:????:????:????::?/64 — this will become the IPv6 address for your server
you will also notice some instructions on how to configure various operating systems to use the information above. In our case we’ll select Vista/2008 (this seems counter-intuitive as we are using Server 2003, however, this option provides you with the “netsh” commands that you will need to get this working.
Enable IPv6 on the server. In this case Windows Server 2003 so the following command should do the trick

netsh interface ipv6 install
once you have ipv6 installed on the server, you can make use of the commands as mentioned in #4 above. They will likely look like the following (I’ve replaced the actual values with $ClientIP, etc):

netsh interface ipv6 add v6v4tunnel IP6Tunnel $ClientIP $ServerIP
netsh interface ipv6 add address IP6Tunnel $ClientIPv6
netsh interface ipv6 add route ::/0 IP6Tunnel $ServerIPv6
once you have completed these steps, you may want to try the following commands to see if you are connecting via IPv6:

ping -6 www.kame.net and ping -6 www.sixxs.net. unless you have a firewall that is blocking ICMPv6, these commands should be successful
lastly, if you have any websites currently running, you will need restart IIS to have it listen over IPv6. The following article discusses IIS and IPv6 specifically: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/6ad3cff7-10f7-4499-8673-e866795607d1.mspx?mfr=true

There is a great page on Technet site that covers a lot of the background on IPv6 and is worth a read – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/network/bb530961.aspx

Life, Death, and Technology

Barnaby Jeans — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:56:31 +0000

The past few weeks have been a roller coaster of emotion as my Mother-in-law (Bernice) was flown home from her winter RV’ing in the US southwest and in Mexico only to find out that the health problem she was having was lung cancer and she only had months to live. Unfortunately the timing wasn’t nearly correct and she passed away early last week. The full write up and timeline is posted on my in-laws’ blog at http://www.whitesrvjournal.com/archives/2009/02/one_final_journ.html. Once you have read that, continue on with this post as I want to share the role technology has played over the past few months.

As I mentioned, my in-laws spend their winters RV’ing somewhere much warmer than Southern Ontario, so they spend a significant amount of time away from us. One of the main ways that we stayed in contact, and maintained a connection was to webcam with them. The tool of choice – Windows Live Messenger – quick, easy to use, and great video quality.

Now skip forward to early January, after flying home and being admitted to hospital, Bernice was transferred from Cambridge Memorial Hospital to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton. One of the first things we did was get her setup with a phone in her room, however, with her being in Hamilton and us being in Cambridge, she was going to have to pay long distance for every call to us. Fortunately we use Vonage for our home phone service and in a matter of minutes I was able to get on the Vonage.ca website and add a virtual number to our account to provide a local Hamilton number for her to call. As you can imagine, sitting in a hospital room in Hamilton with the family living in Cambridge, having a convenient, and free (for her), way to get in touch was crucial.

Unfortunately Bernice’s battle with cancer was short-lived and she passed away on February 2nd, 2009. While there is lots of grieving to be done, there were also the details of the memorial service and celebration of life to take care of as well as sharing the news of her passing to friends and acquaintances. As you have already read the blog post, you know that they blogged about all their travels, so this was the easiest place to share the news broadly. In the past it had been Bernice who wrote the blog posts, so we needed a quick way to put together the announcement. As I use Windows Live Writer to author my blog, it was a simple matter to point it to whitesrvjournal.com and get setup to post over there. With the blog posted it was time to focus on the memorial service.

After meeting with the minister, one of the things my father-in-law was looking for was a version of Amazing Grace on the bagpipes. As I didn’t have it in my CD collection the quickest way to (legally) get a copy was to purchase one from iTunes, and after a quick search I was able to provide him with a version by Ian McGregor & Scottish Pipe Band.

One of the other things that we needed was a good photo of Bernice that we could position at the front of the chapel as well as use in the blog post. Trying to find photos of specific people can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, however, I had just finished tagging my most recent photos with Windows Live Photo Gallery. In doing so, I could quickly find all the photos that had Bernice in them. The photo that we finally selected is actually a crop from a much larger photo. In order to print it at the size we wanted, it was going to need to be resized. The tool of choice – Genuine Fractals. I was able to take a crop that was about 1000 pixels wide and blow it up to print a beautiful 10×14” print. Thanks to the folks at Print Three in Cambridge getting the printing done last minute after my Canon S9000 stopped working.

With the memorial service was taken care of, we turned our attention to the celebration of life luncheon that followed. The family wanted to have a slide show to share photos of Bernice’s life. After scanning all of the old photos, putting the slideshow together was quickly accomplished using the Slide Show feature of Windows Live Photo Gallery (specifically the Travel theme). Lastly, we needed to make sure everyone new how to get from the memorial service to the luncheon and a map and directions was quickly created using info from maps.live.com.

While this has been a very difficult time for the family, there have been the little bits of software and the services they connect to that have helped to accomplish what needed to be done quickly and easily and allowed us to focus on mourning the loss of a great woman.

Bernice White

1942 – 2009

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

Sharing information visually

Barnaby Jeans — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:39:43 +0000

I have just found a very cool new application on the Microsoft site called Microsoft Tags (http://www.microsoft.com/tags). Basically what this does is allow you to encode either a vCard, a URL, or a phone number into a 2D image that can then be read and decoded with a camera phone.

If you visit http://gettag.mobi from your mobile phone (including Blackberry and Android) you’ll be able to download the reader that will decode this file and provide you with my vCard. For iPhone users you can visit the App Store and download Tag Reader.

If you want my work contact info, all you need to do is scan. I may just have to include one of these on my next business cards.

Tags: Microsoft

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

Getting Ready for TechDays

Barnaby Jeans — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:01:00 +0000

With two weeks to go until we kick off TechDays in Toronto, the team is doing the final preparations to deliver an amazing experience to everyone who attends.

One of the things that I’ll be taking care of during the events is photography. I’ve already got the Nikon D200 and D300 ready to go, and with any luck I’ll have Nikon D90 in time for the conference as well. The guys at Nikon are absolutely amazing and make sure that my team have access to the latest gear to capture and share the experience at the event for those of you who aren’t able to attend. Of course I’ll be posting the photos to my flickr page as well as to the TechDays group on flickr. I’ll also be tagging everything with TechDays_CA.

One thing I have learned from previous events is that sometimes you need to be in more than one place at once. Normally as a photographer that is hard to do, however, with the help of a little technology life just got easier. I have been using PocketWizard Plus IIs for a while now to trigger remote flashes, but after reading the PocketWizard blog and Vincent LaForet’s blog post on remote cameras at the Olympics, I realized I had only been using my PocketWizards for half of what they could do. A quick search turned up FlashZebra.com and the cables that I was looking for – the ones that allow me to remotely trigger a camera. I have placed my order so I just need to wait for the package to arrive and I’m one step closer to being in two places at once.

If you are attending TechDays and want to chat about cameras, I’ll be the guy with all the Nikon stuff hanging off me. If you haven’t already bought your ticket there is still time to get your ticket before the early bird pricing ends on October 15th – visit http://techdays.ca for all the details.

Tags: TechDays_CA,Pocket Wizard,Nikon,Canada,Microsoft,Photography

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.

Social Media for Government Conference (Ottawa)

Barnaby Jeans — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 14:51:42 +0000

I’ve just arrived in Ottawa to spend a couple of days at the Social Media for Government conference. I will be speaking at this conference on Wednesday afternoon. I spoke at a similar ALI conference earlier this year and blogged about that experience.

While it’s too early in the day to comment on the conference you can follow along on twitter, the posts are being tagged with #ALI.

If you are attending the conference and want to connect you can find me at the following:

Twitter: bjeans
Facebook: Barnaby Jeans
Flickr: Barnaby_Jeans

Finding my photos on the web

Barnaby Jeans — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:02:33 +0000

I’m pretty open about people using the photos I post to flickr as I have them under a Creative Commons license. I always enjoy seeing where they land.

The most recent one is a Paul Tracy photo that I took with my Nikon D200 in Toronto on July 6, 2007. The photo is included in a post about Paul Tracy making his return at the Edmonton Indy this weekend – The 'Thrill From West Hill' Is Back! | Element of Speed

Here is the original photo and link back to the set on Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/barnaby_jeans/sets/72157600689404182/

Technorati Tags: Nikon,Paul Tracy,Edmonton Indy,Creative Commons,Flickr

What’s eating up my disk?

Barnaby Jeans — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 16:02:39 +0000

I’ve just finished catching up on my RSS reader and came across the following post from Sarah on the Channel 10 site.

WPF Disk Space Finder | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

In summary this application gives you a quick and easy way to see what is using the disk space on your machine. What makes this even better is the fact that it is a WPF app and is deployed using ClickOnce deployment.

Direct link to Disk Space Finder: http://www.diskspacefinder.com