Hanselman: It's interesting.

Chen: So Microsoft Bob - one might say that Windows XP has been the most effective Microsoft Bob delivery system.

Hanselman: Bob is everywhere.

Chen: Bob is everywhere.

Hanselman: It's stories like that that make the book so great - your book, The Old New Thing, that some people are calling the "new old" thing.

Chen: I'm sort of learning to get used to it.

Hanselman: Why is it called The Old New Thing?

Chen: The title of the blog was in fact determined in about 35 seconds. Brad Abrams said, "Raymond, you should start doing this blog thing," and I said, "Wow, you really think so, I'm not sure." And he said, "Yeah, just do it." So I started filling out the paperwork to set up the blog, and one of the questions was, so what's its title? And I said, "I didn't realize it needed a title." I just made up the phrase, "The old new thing" on the principle that I was going to be writing about old stuff, but stuff that at one time was new. "The old new thing" is talking about things that back in the day were the new thing. That's where the name comes from.

Hanselman: It's huge; I know, I was just sitting here and we were looking at your stats and you're becoming more and more popular. People enjoy reading it. The book has new content and you've revised some of the stories. It's very well organized. Even Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software, the pundits are noticing you; you are becoming a power broker in the blogosphere.

Chen: I can always tell whenever Joel makes a reference to one of my stories because all of a sudden they start showing up in all these other data mining stuff. Recently, he retold the story that I shared, it's in the book, and it's on the blog. It's about "blowing the dust out of the connectors," a way to get people to double-check things - as sort of the catch-all description for getting people to check things that they would normally resist checking, on the assumption that it would make them look stupid. You would say, "Is it plugged in?" They're going to say, "Well, of course it's plugged in; I'm not that stupid." They're not going to check. You have a pretty good feeling that it's not plugged in, so you tell them, "Well, sometimes the connector gets kind of dusty. Could you get down there, unplug it, blow into the connector to get the dust out and then plug it back in? Maybe that will clear it up." They'll go down there, notice that it's not plugged in, or if it was plugged into the wrong plug, they'll unplug it, blow into the connector, then they plug it back in. Now they're paying attention; now they're going to plug it into the correct port. They come back, and now it works. They think you're great, and everybody is happy and nobody loses face.

I remember there was another story about a different type of support call; somebody had called in to report a geopolitical error in the maps used in a flight simulator. If you've been following what I've been writing, maps are extremely sensitive data. In general, if you can get away without using a map, that's often the safest bet; however, if you're a flight simulator and the object of the game is to fly around the world, you have to have maps. Somebody had called in to report that there was a border problem on the map. The report went through the normal bug report analysis, and the person got a response saying, "Thank you for reporting the problem. We've taken a look at it and we believe that everything is just fine, that the map is correct."

This person was unsatisfied with this answer, and instead of going through the normal Escalation procedures, sent an e-mail to Bill Gates. Bill reads his e-mail - or at least, enough of it gets to him, that when this issue came up to Bill Gates, he went back to the Flight Sim team and said, "I want to know what's going on here." The Flight Sim team said, "Okay, we thought we had taken care of this, but apparently this person decided to take that case straight to the Supreme Court." They went back and looked at it again and called the guy back and tried to get more information about why he thinks the map is wrong, which map he's using, because we're using this map, and where do you think the border should be? At the end of the day it turned out that this person was basing his map information upon a map of the world on the shower curtain he had in his bathroom. Said shower curtain was a couple of years old and wasn't up-to-date with the latest changes in borders in Eastern Europe.

Hanselman: That's awesome. And Bill was involved.

Chen: This would normally not have been a problem except you bring in Bill and everybody goes on high alert.

Hanselman: He still doesn't answer my e-mails.

Chen: Yeah, well, you need to stop opening them with like, "Hey loser."

Hanselman: Oh, that's my problem.

Chen: Yeah.

Hanselman: Well, listen Raymond, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day. I know that you're busy-busy - you have all sorts of stack dumps and stuff up on your screen here. I know you're busy out there saving lives.

Chen: Yes, I put stacks up just to look impressive.

Hanselman: The book is fantastic and I don't just say that because the author is sitting right here. I really enjoyed it and, I probably shouldn't say this, but it's a great bathroom book because it's got little short stories.

Chen: That was actually kind of the goal; it was not meant to be a book, you sit down and plow through all at one go. It's meant to be a book that you read as time permits.

Hanselman: That's exactly what it's allowing me to do. I'm really enjoying the stories. I think it's great and I really appreciate your time.

Scott Hanselman is chief architect at the Corillian Corporation, an e-finance enabler. Recently, Scott was in the top 5% of audience-rated speakers at Tech-Ed 2003. His thoughts on the Zen of .NET, programming, and Web services can be found at www.computerzen.com.