I’m catching up on some blogs and came across a great piece on the new (still beta) version of Windows Live Messenger. You can read all about it over at Download Squad.
It’s so awesome to actually be involved with something that millions of people use every day! 
If you haven’t tried it yet, you can get the new version by visiting http://download.live.com/messenger.
Just had a really funny thing happen. I was typing in Office Communicator the name of one of my colleagues to see if she was online yet this morning. I typed in “teri h” and the app searched through both the company address list and my personal contacts in Outlook. The irony is that it looks like while Teri Hoffman isn’t online this morning, the local teriyaki restaurant we go to by our house isn’t online today either!
The real reason this appeared is that I have a number of restaurants in my contacts so it’s easy to place takeout orders while we’re driving home. Microsoft has integrated our Office Communicator platform with the phone system, so if I wanted I could click on the phone icon next to the restaurant’s listing and call them.
Still, it got a good laugh out of me that a restaurant would show up in my IM client!
I had the distinct pleasure of attending my first Microsoft Company Meeting yesterday at Safeco Field. I can assure you, you’ve never been to a business meeting like this before! Does your office gathering have Rainn Wilson as MC? A pitching mound? Beach balls and pyrotechnics? A drum line? 20,229 paper airplanes (and hundreds more unofficial flying paper objects)? Gigantic display screens? 4 seating levels? 20,000+ people (more than a Mariners game these days…)? A traffic jam?
Jaw-dropping demos of technology that your company (maybe even YOU) helped put together? Steve Balmer running around the room chest bumping people, screaming his head off, and inadvertently knocking defenseless women over? (seriously – that was funny as hell!)
I can’t wait to get using the next versions of Windows, Windows Mobile, Office, and a bunch of the other stuff I saw. I can honestly say that coming from the outside (of MS) recently, that while you may think the Microsoft has lost “the touch” I can tell you you’re wrong. Just wait for this stuff to get out.
Speaking of – check out the new beta version (public) of Windows Live Messenger (and the other WLx products). Head over to http://download.live.com. Messenger is WAY cleaned up from the UI of old, you can leave it logged in on multiple computers (chats appear on both and when you close a window on one it closes on the other – great for folks like me with multiple PC’s), and you can see “What’s New” with all the people in your address book. My extended team runs Messenger, the address book platform, as well as the stuff that makes “what’s new” work.
Lastly, I’m so happy to see Microsoft finally get off it’s ass and compete in the marketing space. Far too long, IMHO, have we countered Apple’s Mac v. PC ads with either nothing or the kind of over-detailed over-engineered non-passionate advertising Microsoft is known for. It’s time to stick up for ourselves and the fallacy that cool people use, and cool things happen, only on a Mac. Great things happen on the PC platform every day, and I’ve heard lots of stories about just as many issues on Macs as Windows boxes.
I’m a PC … and I help tens of millions of people every day connect to their friends, family, and community … one IM at a time.
For the last couple weeks we’ve been glued to the TV watching various events from the Olympics. It’s been great to watch all the swimming, and track events, and see some of the stuff that you never really get to watch but for every 4 years (rowing, whitewater, etc.). [What's the deal with trampoline as an Olympic sport? That's just nuts!] We even watched a bunch of events while we were on vacation the first week of the games. Kaitlyn tells us she wants to be a 10M platform diver. We’ll see.
Tonight we watched the closing ceremonies on NBC in HD – the fireworks and other bits of eye candy look so much better in HD. That being said, for the past 2 weeks we’ve been pretty firmly planted “north of the border” watching the Games on CBC. That’s right, Comcast carries Vancouver, BC, Canada’s CBC channel here in the states. AND THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT!
We’d watch an event one evening live, and then notice that the same stuff was getting replayed 18 hours later on NBC. Especially crappy was when NBC did decided to show something live they only did so for for the east coast of the US. They tape-delayed EVERYTHING for the west coast, but still kept the “LIVE” banner on the screen. Can’t the FCC get them for false advertising? And don’t get me started on the inappropriate and moronic comments that Bob Costas feels like filling airtime with. Spare me.
Next time, especially with Vancouver hosting the Winter games in February 2010 we’ll be watching a LOT of CBC. I only hope Comcast starts carrying their HD feed here in the states by then.
I read a story this evening on Engadget HD that at least gives me hope … ESPN is thinking of bidding for the 2014 and 2016 games and promises to never tape delay anything. NICE! I can’t wait to watch Olympic dodgeball on ESPN 8 … The Ocho!
For those frustrated by NBC’s arrogant mishandling of its broadcast rights, there exists one slim ray of hope (other than living somewhere lucky enough to get Canadian television so you can actually see the events before reading about them in the paper or on NBC’s own website), ESPN. That’s right, with Brett Favre finally on an NFL roster, the sports giant has apparently found enough free time to consider taking a run at broadcast rights for the 2014 Winter Games and 2016 Summer Games.
It’s been a long day. 2 days. 3 days … week. We’re doing A LOT of work this week and, unfortunately, we’ve got some dependencies on new circuits being delivered for new/enhanced services to our Baltimore office. Nothing seems to go well on this trip, and we’ve been running into issues at every turn.
But a few minutes ago I was able to go to my “happy place” because of an email I got … announcing I could check in for my flight home tomorrow evening.
From here on out, no matter what happens, I’ve got my ticket outta here – literally. 
It’s my last day on the job today; I start at Microsoft on Monday. The atypical part of the story is, though, that I’m traveling this week and look to be putting in about 80 hours on the clock. Usually folks check out at the end of their stay … I guess I’m still emotionally invested in making this place successful.
I’m super-tired today, having pulled a couple of 18 hour days and a 12 hour travel day since Tuesday. Today looks like more of the same (guessing 15+ hours).
As I was walking out to our rental car from the hotel this morning I turned to my good friend and boss Brian and said, “dead man walking.” Oh how true on at least a couple different levels.
Looking forward to starting my new adventure next week at the same time. A couple days of official orientation, and then some settling in, etc. I’m really jumping off a cliff with this change in my career, and that’s both exciting and scary at the same time. Here’s hoping I remembered the parachute!
I mentioned the other day that I couldn’t say anything… and at the time I couldn’t. But that’s since changed. The first couple days of the week I got to help with a couple ISA Server exam refreshes, so there’s part of the mystery. And here’s the other part…
I’ll be in the New Employee Orientation session at Microsoft’s Redmond campus on Monday, July 28th. I’m joining the Global Foundation Services group to help run the infrastructure behind behind a little program you may have heard of called Live Messenger (it does instant messaging, or “IM” as they say – evidently all the kids are doing it these days).
I’m truly honored and humbled to have even been considered, much less offered a position on the team and with Microsoft. I’ve always had a goal to work for Microsoft, going all the way back to college (I even interviewed with MS my senior year). I thought I’d gotten as close to that as I was going to when I spent 2.5 years working at Cascade Investment (I received annual “head-nods acknowledging my existence from Bill Gates during my tenure).
About 6 weeks ago I read a blog post by Dare Obasanjo talking about the availability problems of Twitter of late, and how the architecture decisions they made in the beginning lead to some of their issues today (and limit what they can do to easily resolve them). At the end of his post he throws in something that really grabbed my attention: “If this problem space sounds interesting to you, we’re hiring. I’m specifically looking for good operations folks.”
That got my mind running … designing and implementing systems at huge scale has always been an area of interest for me, but I’ve never found myself in a spot to actually be doing it. After a day or so of mulling things over in my mind I bit the bullet and sent an email to a friend who’s been on the Live Operations team (now GFS) for a couple years to get his take on things. His reply was a shocker: “I work directly with Dare on a current project I would love to have you onboard.”
I don’t know if that was a sign or not, but things sure did go quickly after that. All told I had about 9 hours of phone calls, lunches, and onsite interview sessions. These were perhaps the most grueling interviews in my life (I really haven’t interviewed cold for a new job since January 2000), but at the same time it was a lot of fun!
There’s something to be said for asking someone a demanding question they have no way of knowing the answer to (or maybe there is no answer) and evaluating their thought process, analytical skills, and ability to ask good questions. The next time I have to interview someone I definitely have to work some of this technique into the mix.
I’ve always heard and known that Microsoft’s interview process is a gauntlet that is exceptionally difficult to pass. I never thought I’d have what it takes to make it through, especially interviewing for a position that runs such a large-scale system when my background is clearly in the SMB range (small/medium business). A couple of the folks I spoke with, though, said that if they went looking for people with experience in the scale of systems GFS deals with they wouldn’t be able to find anyone; find a smart person who fits the team and they can learn the details.
So that’s the challenge for me in the coming months … get up to speed on a completely new system, scale, architecture, paradigm. It’s going to be tough, and it’s going to take a lot of hard work. But I’m excited for the challenge; to be outside of the comfort zone that I’ve built up over the last 10 years.
I can’t wait to get this next chapter act in my career started! Wish me luck!
PS – a special thanks to Alicea, Barton, Brian, and Bryce for sticking by me through all this. Your insights and simply just being there to listen have been invaluable. YOU ROCK!
I spent the first couple days of this week at Microsoft’s campus working with a small group of folks doing a refresh of the certification exams for ISA Server 2004 and 2006 (70-350 and 351). ISA stands for Internet Security and Acceleration – basically it’s Microsoft’s network firewall product that runs on top of a Windows server. It’s a great too for publishing apps in a secure manner to the Internet, speed up web browsing for your users (by keeping a copy of commonly-accessed web content on the ISA server), and providing remote access to a network (VPN)
I’m under NDA so I can’t tell you a lot of details on what we did and discussed, but I can tell you that it was a really cool experience. If you’ve ever taken a test and thought “these questions are stupid” I had a chance to avenge your experience (as long as your complaints were with either the 70-350 and 70-351 exams).
It was a blast to hang out with some wicked smart people and get into technical debates about best practices and firewall techniques. Kudos to the whole group for, in my opinion, making some great progress on these exams!
The one part that bummed me out … well pissed me off really … was having 5 people who’ve been using the ISA product since it was called Proxy Server 8+ years ago all look at a test question, debate it, all arrive at an answer, find out we’re all wrong, and then learn that the people who have taken the exam in the last few months have gotten that question right about 90% of the time. What the f…
Folks – don’t cheat. Brain dumps are illegal (people go in to take an exam and steal the content and then post it online), and you’re not doing yourselves any favors. The more people who pass exams by cheating the more diluted the pool of certified engineers becomes, and then you get to a point where having a certification doesn’t matter. Effectively you’re screwing yourself over by making your certification useless, plus you’re lying to your employer (and yourself) in saying that you’re competent in a product or technology when you really aren’t.
STOP IT.
Or, maybe you should just keep on doing it. I know a PhD Psychometrician who’s an expert in Wii Boxing that’s gonna get ya!
There’s SO much stuff going on in my life I just can’t talk about publicly right now … and it’s eating me up! There’s the whole big [redacted] that I can’t talk about. Plus there’s another possible [redacted] that I can’t tell you about either. And then for the next two days I’m going to be [redacted] which I think is completely cool and am really looking forward to … plus it pays really well!
Whew … okay, thanks for letting me spill the beans about all that.
I hope to be able to share my thoughts more about all this before the week is out. I don’t know if I could go another weekend without having [redacted] finalized and put to bed.
Speaking of bed … it’s 11:30p! Yikes!
