Who is this Russ Slaten guy anyway?

I was looking back over some of my older posts and realized that everything I've blogged about was technical and read more like a KB article than a blog. This is my humble attempt at adding a personal touch to this blog.

I was born and raised just outside of Dallas in Mesquite, Texas. My real name is Rusty Slaten but most everyone calls me Russ. I am single and currently reside in Carrollton, Texas. I have two Labrador Retrievers and enjoy the outdoors, basketball, golf, fishing, poker, and video games (although I don't play them anymore because I don't have time). I enjoy all sports but am especially a fan of the Dallas Mavericks. I am currently reading several programming books: Assembly Language for Intel Based Computers 5e by Kip R. Irvine, Introduction to 80x86 Assembly Language and Computer Architecture by Richard C. Detmer, and Advanced Windows 3e by Jeffrey Richter.

I graduated from Poteet High School in 1995 and started working at Microsoft (Las Colinas) in 1997 as a contractor providing front line technical support for Exchange Server. Unfortunately I slowly stopped going to college and am only now going back to get a business degree and eventually an MBA (currently have about 80 hours). In 1998 I moved from Exchange support to SMS support. The current product at the time was SMS 1.2 SP3. In January of 1999 I became a Microsoft employee with the title of Support Engineer just in time to provide support for the upcoming release of SMS 2.0. In June of 2000 I became a Technical Lead which simply means that I assisted a team of Support Engineers from a technical perspective. In December of 2000 I changed roles and became a Rapid Response Engineer (RRE) which is now known as a Premier Field Engineer (PFE). In this role I was responsible for providing short-term onsite assistance to customers. I primarily provided onsite training, consulting, troubleshooting, critical problem resolution, and development for SMS and MOM 2000. In the 3 years I was an RRE I visited close to 170 different companies throughout the world. In October of 2003 I moved from a field role back to an office based role and became an Escalation Engineer (EE) on the Critical Problem Resolution (CPR) team supporting "Management" products. There is a jobcast on this role on the jobsblog which is very good (One of my peers, Jeff Dailey, did a great job on the jobcast), but if I wanted to summarize my role I would say that I solve critical and complex problems using code.

Here is a list of the products that I am (or soon will be) responsible for supporting (some are not released yet):
SMS 2.0
SMS 2003
SMS 2003 R2
All SMS and MOM Solution Accelerators
All SMS Feature Packs (OSD, DMFP, etc...)
BDD 2007
MOM 2000
MOM 2005
MOM 2005 Workgroup Edition
All MOM Management Packs
Softgrid
SCCM 2007
SCOM 2007
All SCOM 2007 Management Packs
Service Desk
SCE
WSUS
SCRM
AssetMetrix
System Center Online
SCCP
WDS

If there is anything else you'd like to know please comment!