Ellie's profileEllie's WorldPhotosBlogListsMore  |  Tools Help |
|
May 05 How to get help with your Hotmail problems I get many messages from people who are looking for help with Windows Live Hotmail. I want to be sure all of you out there know about a new resource, the Hotmail Online Solutions Center. If you are having a problem with your Hotmail account, or have a question about how to make Hotmail work better for you, the Hotmail Online Solutions Center is a good place to start. Remember not to post your personal information, and good luck! As a personal note, I'm not able to help directly with Hotmail issues anymore is because I moved out of the country several months ago to fulfill my dream of working and living abroad. Coincidently, the company where I now work, VirtuOz, makes virtual customer support agents. It's been very interesting to look at customer support issues from a different perspective, and I'm grateful for my previous experience of talking to Hotmail users and trying to make Hotmail better for them. May 07 Mary Ann Powers worked on the ENIACMy great aunt, Mary Ann (Berry) Powers, passed away in April. In addition to being a nice person, she also had a cool and unusual career. As a young woman, she studied mathematics and went on to work on the ENIAC. She had some good stories that she told about her work many years ago. She didn't know that computers were going to end up where they did, but was always neat to hear about what the industry used to be like.
It seems that many comments here are about Windows Live Hotmail. If you'd like to give feedback to the team, please leave those comments on the team's blog at http://mailcall.spaces.live.com. December 15 I'm in "Google Gets Ready to Rumble with Microsoft"The New York Times recently published an article about Google taking on Microsoft with a variety of different products.
I'm on page 5 of the article. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/technology/16goog.html
It says:
Ellie Powers-Boyle, 25, a graduate of M.I.T., works on Microsoft’s Web e-mail products. In the last three years, she says, there have been a dozen significant upgrades of the Web e-mail product, and she has worked on three or four new features each time. “We iterate quickly,” she says. “For someone of my generation, the whole idea of waiting years to see if you made the right product makes no sense.” July 30 I'm on Channel 9 talking about scrumI still can't ever find the stomach to watch myself in videos, but I did get interviewed by Grace Francisco, my co-chair of Women@Microsoft SVC about scrum and how the Windows Live Hotmail team has been using it.
May 07 Windows Live Hotmail is out of beta!I joined the Windows Live Hotmail team in August 2004, and have been working on Windows Live Hotmail (a.k.a. Kahuna) ever since. Today we finally got out of beta! We'd done some earlier pilots in certain markets and things went relatively smoothly, so today we are taking the plunge! When users sign up for new Hotmail accounts, they'll get Windows Live Hotmail. January 25 A sad day for May Zhou's family, friends, and women in technologyUpdated 1/26/2007
This story has gone from bad to worse. They found her body in the trunk of her car, all the way out in Santa Rosa in the parking lot of the junior college. Police say some evidence points to suicide, but they are still investigating. May was in my class at MIT. She is one of the truly brilliant people in electrical engineering, and very hard-working and thoughtful. I really want to know what happened.
---------------
May Zhou is a graduate student at Stanford. She has been missing since Saturday. She went to MIT with me. I hope they have some good news soon....
January 08 Favorites so far from CES 2007, Day 1Favorites from CES 2007 day 1:
Pictures coming soon. Drop by the Windows Live Mail booth to say hi. October 30 Collecting customer feedbackIt seems like a lot of people are using my blog for submitting problems with Hotmail or Windows Live Mail. It's great to be able to interact with customers. If you're having problems, you probably want to go to the Mail team blog or the Mail support blog.
Here are some answers to some common questions:
June 23 BarCamp San Francisco - this weekendI'll be at BarCamp San Francisco this weekend to see what's up and talk more with people about Windows Live and the future of email in the Web 2.0 world. April 26 Windows Live Mail: getting fewer adsFor those of you who have been asking for fewer ads on Windows Live Mail, we've heard you. Microsoft has decided to remove one of the big ads from Windows Live Mail. This is a very expensive decision, and we hope it will make users happier by having more space to read their mail.
The product team has wanted to do this for a long time, so we're really glad everyone at Microsoft is committed to it so we can make it happen.
I hope you're all excited about this! (The change will be in a coming release, not immediate.)
February 28 Talking about M5 is alive!Note: These new features will be released soon, but they are not out yet!
The feature list for M5 was just announced. There was more great work by the team in Shanghai on the Hotmail Classic View -- that's the view of Windows Live Mail that works for browsers other than Internet Explorer 6.0+. We're continuing to monitor user and business needs in terms of browser support.
If you want to try Windows Live Mail Beta, go to http://ideas.live.com. Posting to my blog is not a good way to get an invitation!
Quote M5 is alive! February 14 Mail Invitations for Valentine's DayHappy Valentine's Day! I'll be giving out 14 invitations to Windows Live Mail Beta to the first 14 people who email elizabethireland (at sign) hotmail (period) com from their Hotmail or MSN address. Be sure you go to http://spaces.msn.com/mailcall to make sure Windows Live Mail is available in your area. Leaving a comment on my blog will not get you an invitation! February 09 Where in the world is the Windows Live Mail team?I'm glad to report that a lot of people have been able to get into the beta successfully. We're still working on our next batch of new features. I think you'll be really pleased at the big things we're adding, and no, I can't tell you what or when we'll be releasing. Thanks to everybody out there testing Windows Live Mail, especially our loyal beta testers who have been with us since last year. January 16 Good times in Vegas at CESIn my second time in Las Vegas, I spent the days showing the new Windows Live Mail beta and getting customer feedback. I even saw some of our long-time MVPs who have been testing Windows Live Mail for months. January 04 Going to CESI'll be at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in the Windows Live Mail booth. There should be some exciting announcements, and it'll be good to meet some more current or future Mail beta users. December 22 MIT grad wins "Apprentice"Wow, looks like education pays off. This MIT grad has won the latest season of The Apprentice. December 12 Accepted the invite but no Kahuna yet?Here's an issue that has affected a good number of people who have accepted invites to Windows Live Mail but are still seeing the old Hotmail interface: Why is this happening? Some of your accounts need to go through an extra migration step to be able to use Kahuna. Other accounts can be migrated immediately. If I don't see the Kahuna UI immediately, what do I do? Wait two weeks, then email me: elizabethireland ("at" sign) hotmail ("period" symbol) com. When you accepted the invitation, your account was automatically put in the queue for migration, which can take up to two weeks. Sorry that the messaging didn't make this clear, and thanks for your patience! December 07 Go Shanghai team! I can use basic Kahuna from my Mac!I've spent the past months on the phone and the computer late at night working with the fabulous new team in Shanghai. I'm really proud of all of the work we've done, especially with a new team and so much to do in a very short time. They are very smart and have learned fast. If any of you on IE 6+ want to try out the basic Kahuna UI, here is what you can do:
You'll know you're on basic Kahuna not main Kahuna when you see a special Today page and a message in the toolbar. You can read my full post on the mailcall blog. If you are having a problem with your account, you can contact me by emailing: elizabethireland ("at" sign) hotmail (the symbol for "period") com. November 22 TokyoI’ll start this off by saying that my Japanese is pretty bad, so don’t go thinking that I’m any sort of expert. I did well in six years of Japanese classes in high school and middle school, but it was not like taking the easy way out with Spanish. At my peak, I spoke like a four-year-old Japanese kid with a bad accent. And I haven’t taken a Japanese class in about 5 ½ years.
With that said, I’ll say a big thank-you right now to my Japanese teachers, Hiroko sensei and Mogami sensei. I always wished I actually got good at Japanese, but after being in China for a week, I learned am grateful for my skills, as minimal as they are. There is an enormous difference between being a very foreign foreigner who speaks the language at the level of a two-year-old, and a very foreign foreigner who can only say “thank you.”
In China, all I could say was “thank you.” I could also point at things, read a few characters I learned in Japanese class, and copy characters out of tour books for taxi drivers to read. I got around surprisingly well, but it’s not really a good way to interact with a culture. I really want to learn Chinese!
In Japan, I was able to use my six years of study to communicate the following concepts using actual words (Japanese only!) and not just my ridiculous miming skills:
I felt like an actual person, able to communicate with other people using actual words – and neither the lady with the phone or the taxi driver spoke any English. J
A big shout-out goes to the kind people of Tokyo for their late-night hospitality. Boo on the Tokyo International Youth Hostel for closing before 11:30 PM. Also, boo to the high cab fares in Tokyo: ~$18 for a 10-minute short taxi ride – it cost about as much as a one-hour ride from Shanghai to Pudong airport!
To do now: learn Chinese -- the tones are really hard! November 09 BeijingI took the overnight train from Shanghai to Beijing -- it was some of the best sleep I got during that week! I traveled there myself, speaking only one word of Mandarin: "Xiexie" (thank you). The Lonely Planet guidebook was a huge help, and I made it through without getting lost or getting sent to jail!
I only had two days and one night in Beijing, so I spent my time running around to see as much as possible. Beijing has more historical attractions and has had less western influence.
There were far fewer foreigners (like me) so I stuck out a lot. Admittedly, I'm not a very normal-looking person (5'10" with red hair and pale skin) so more people were staring at me than in Shanghai, which I expected. When I was in Japan about nine years ago, sometimes people would come up to me because they wanted to practice their English conversation, but in Beijing and slightly less in Shanghai, people would often approach me to sell me stuff.
At the Great Wall and Tieneman Square, somewhere between six and twelve different people approached me to ask to have their photo taken with me. Sometimes even the grandmothers would want to get in the photo. The first time, I thought they wanted me to take their photo with Mao's portrait... but why would they ask the foreigner? Oh, they wanted to be in the picture with me and Mao. It was kind of a strange experience, but it was kind of funny and I went along with it as part of the price of being the foreigner. So if you see some Chinese blogs with photos of what looks like The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, well, now you know the photos are the genuine, not photoshopped. |
|
|
