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Bio Added, Some Updates on the New Job

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This is just a quick entry to say that I've filled in the About section of this blog with some biographical information.

I’ll take advantage of this opportunity to add a few more notes about what my life has been like since I moved up here to Redmond. The Microsoft campus is a vast maze, so there is a game-like quality to getting settled in here. There is, for instance, the 35 bullet point "New Employee Task List" which needs be clicked through. Each click is a little bit like rolling the dice. Sometimes you end up signing up for some benefit program that is so lavish that I'm way too embarrassed to describe it here. So that's a bit like landing on the right square in a board game. Other tasks, like setting up my smart card or my parking permit, seem to be like some kind of bizarre bureaucratic exercise from a movie like Alphaville or Brazil.

Then there is the housing game. We have to sell the house in Santa Cruz, where the market is soft and buyer oriented, and we have to buy a house up here, where the market is hot and seller based. Worst of all, we’ve had to split up the all important domestic portion of the house, with my wife Margie down in Santa Cruz selling the house and finishing her job, while I’m up here battling the Seattle traffic.

Speaking of the traffic, recently I’ve been learning the importance of the Seattle web cams. Back in the day, web cams were a totally cool technology that we used to check in on our favorite places in the world, such as the Santa Cruz coast line, or Paradise on Mount Rainier. In the 21st Century, web cams are just another tool we use to navigate traffic. Here for instance, is the web cam of the 520 bridge across Lake Washington. Check it out during rush hour on the Pacific Coast. If you catch the cam at the right time, you’ll soon understand why you don’t want a job as a recruiter here at Microsoft.

Well, enough of this rambling. I need to get back to work. Besides writing blogs, I also have some new tasks that I have to master. Again, there is a hit and miss aspect to this part of my life. Some of the tasks involve routine grunt jobs such as monitoring bug traffic, while others involve some cool projects like getting source out on to CodePlex so the community can share it with us. And perhaps most importantly, I have to fight my way through the blizzard of “out of office” emails I get every time I try to pin someone down who will give us more control over “our” web site. So it’s back to work I go.

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