Carl Hutzler’s Blog

No, this is not my thoughts on the great director Spike Lee. This is about life at AOL.

I got an email yesterday from a fellow employee who read my blog entry “What a week!” Basically there was something in this person’s craw which had been there for a while. When they read my blog entry, it made them boil over a bit and send a very well thought out professional email to me, essentially about “why we are putting more ads/footers in mail our members send”.

(I have my own viewpoint which I fight vigorously on this seemingly none-sensical feature for our email system, as do our members who have started a petition. But this is not the point of this post.)

I think the most important point is that this person decided to take some action and do something about it. My message to everyone left at our great company is to follow this example and “Do the right thing”. Don’t just sit back and accept what is going on. Fight for what you think is best. Fight for your idea. Fight for another way of doing something.

You might find that a lot of people agree with you and that we just needed a leader to stand-up and lead.

Perhaps folks have seen this, as it was a commencement speach he gave at Stanford in 2005. I came across it  today from a friend of mine (a fellow photographer, website designer, and apple lover). Anyway, I thought it was fun to see how a great leader innovated and invented and some of the fairly major setbacks he encountered along the way. Take a look at Steve’s commencement speech.

In my quest to run my first marathon (Marine Corp), I made it to 14 miles (in about 2 hr 45 min) today. It was hot and my last long run was only 10 miles, so this was a big jump (and bigger than the experts recommend).

It kicked my ass. Between the heat, big jump in miles, and fairly quick pace (for my level), I was dead when I got home. I managed to go to the pool and hang out with some friends for a few hours. I ate two lunches back-to-back which helped. But I needed a nap after all that :-)

This week I am going to get more serious about the smaller daily runs I should be doing much more regularly. Hoping that will help for next week when I try for 16 miles.

But overall, I did a half marathon today. Not bad!

Went down to Great Falls on the Potomac River on Thursday, June 29th, which is about 20 miles West of downtown DC. We had over 11 inches of rain in the Washington DC metro area over the last 5 days or so and the water guages (and this one which looks a bit broken) predicted a peak flow at Little Falls (just upstream) sometime on Thursday. It was not as full as I experienced about 10 years ago, but it was impressive, complete with shaking ground, roaring noise, and mesmorizing motion. If we could only harness that power :-)

Videos are fairly small (shot with a cell phone), but you get the idea:
Movie1, Movie2

Still photographs show the power a wee bit better IMO:
Photos

The last week has been the most trying for me in terms of my 9+ year career at AOL. Even compared to November 2003 when spam complaints went from 4 million a day to 21 million, the last week was far more challenging.

What was so challenging?

Well it was certainly a combination of many things, but for me the single most important issue was the continued uphill struggle to try and get things accomplished became even more difficult (something I could not even believe was possible).

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I just realized that I have not posted much lately. Not good! So what have I been up to?

Well, I ran the Grand Canyon (run and walk actually). After our yearly “man hike” that I travel to Salt Lake city for, we drove another 4 hours south to the park. At 4am the adventure began from the Bright Angel Trailhead on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Down our team of five went with headlamps blazing.

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Our mail development team is part of a new organization called AOL Services Infrastructure. My boss, Sree Kotay, is really trying to get the leads from each of his new teams to get to know each other on a personal level. In our second onsite in the last couple of months, we really did get to know each other.

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As my boss mentioned on his blog the other day, AOL is opening up APIs to our applications in the spirit of Web 2.0 (whatever that means ;-). I came across an interesting article which examines whether this phenomenon is good for developers or maybe whether it is just good for the providers.

A year ago my wife, Rylan, got me to start exercising. She basically plunked down $500 for a dozen sessions with a personal trainer at our local YMCA. Since the money was spent, I figured I had to go.

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Yup. Its true. I tried it myself when I first saw the press release from the DearAOL group. AOL was not allowing the dearaol.com URL to be sent or received in any part of our system for a brief time yesterday. I could not even send it to myself which is how I tested it.

Thankfully the fix was straightforward and corrected immediately by our AntiSpam Operations team. The last thing AOL wants to do is live up to the picture the dearaol coalition has painted for us. We are not evil and would never block an organization for their views even if they are not flattering to dear AOL. We have strict policies on blocking URLs; anything else would be suicide. That said, mistakes do happen :-(

Its interesting to see all the conspiracy thoerists go wild with this one. I guess people really don’t trust AOL on this goodmail thing. But in my mind, this experience should serve as a positive for the dearaol group. I mean look how fast we corrected the mistake. This should give most everyone comfort that AOL can not run wild with goodmail and ‘block people who don’t pay’. Heck, if we did, not only would our members get frustrated and jump ship, but we certainly would not get away with it as proven today.