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Wrapped up and on the way

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Well,
I’m in route to LA. A day early, but
I’m going to squeeze in a quick visit to my parents. = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Saturday
morning appears to be the travel time of choice for people with kids, on the way to
Disneyland
. To think that I’m going to have more
fun than they are! I’m flying on United,
and I thought the legroom was fine until the person in front of me reclined his chair
– my legs are still fine, but I can’t get the screen of my laptop vertical. This
is one situation where the big screen on my Toshiba M2 makes it difficult, but I still
wouldn’t trade it. I’ve got my iPod, so I’m rocking out to Matchbox Twenty, trying
to remember to not sing along. (I think
I’ve only slipped once so far ;-) I had
intended to catch up on my email (it’s been overwhelming this week), but with the
screen tipped forward, and the laptop so cramped up against me, it’s more of a pain
than I have patience for. Luckily I can
type without seeing the screen – it’s actually easier for me to compose without looking
at the screen/keyboard. (

Kent

/>tells
me it’s the same for him.)

Yesterday
we wrapped up the majority of our projects for PDC; all that’s left is some last minute
verification, and then a list of things to prop out on Monday, once the beans have
been spilled. I’ve been the gatekeeper
(and cheerleader) of all things PDC for MSDN, so I imagine folks are sick of getting
mail from me. The afternoon was almost
anticlimactic – we had a little celebration, and if I were more together I could post
a few pictures, but I just haven’t got the whole coordination of getting my pics online
down. I imagine I’ll have plenty of opportunities
to practices this week. I’m so proud
of well everything has gone – I know I keep saying this, but the MSDN team is really
high quality. Sure we’ve had bumps in
the road, but everything has been handled professionally, calmly and creatively. Even
the firedrills have seemed almost mellow. I
want to name everyone, I’ve just been so impressed with their work, but I must not
because I’d be sure to forget someone, and besides, I would want to attribute their
projects to them, and that part would have to wait anyway.

At
the end of the day I walked around and handed out Kinder Surprise eggs. If
you’ve never run across Kinder Surprises, they contain a toy, almost always disassembled,
in a small plastic two piece container, which is inside an egg of chocolate. They
don’t see them in the
US
, I think because of the choking hazard, but they are very popular in Europe and

Canada

. When I handed one to Tim,
before he would take it he wanted to know “Is it a cool toy?” “Yes,
absolutely,” I said, hoping he wasn’t going to get a dorky puzzle. When I walked back
down the hall after passing out more, Tim was all excited that his even came with
stickers! It was fun to walk around and
see everyone hunched over their prize, putting it together. When
I pointed out to Tommy that it did come with
assembly instructions, of sorts, he said “I know but…” Those
engineering sorts, they love to see if they can figure it out without the instructions.

I’m
anxious to know how the verification is going back in

Redmond

; I have a hard time letting go. I couldn’t
connect to the wayport access at the airport for some reason, so now I’m going to
be stuck sending a bunch of mail that I responded to but couldn’t send over the modem
at my parents house. No matter what I say, they think DSL would be way to complicated
– they know how to get connected with their current system, and don’t want to have
to learn something new. One of these
days I’m just going to order it for them and just show up on their doorstep the same
day the install is scheduled for. (Hmmmmm,
maybe for Christmas.) Every visit to
my parents means that I’ll spend some time “tuning up” their computer (as they call
it.) I’m sure most people who are reading
this have a very similar experience when they visit relatives. Go
to windows update and download any updates. Look
for ad ware that they’ve inadvertently downloaded, uninstall anything that they don’t
need or want any more, clean up the desktop, make sure the virus software in still
running, all that stuff. Then we’ll probably
sit in the back yard by the pool, visiting and soaking up the sun.

Update:
Now I’m here, and it’s icky! I hate breathing
air you can SEE. Part of it’s because of fires around here, but it’s smoggggggggy. It’s
great to see my parents, but I’m antsy to get to the real deal.

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