35 posts tagged “microsoft”

Oh-oh I'm behind already in my blog updates... more Las Vegas/Grand Canyon photos to come but not this time...

Just came back from skiing with Hugo and Atul, leaving behind Tommer, Beau, Kieran and Wu to enjoy more of their snowboarding up at Snoqualmie. We stuck to Central (there's also West, East and Alpental), which has quite a few beginner and intermediate runs (which suits me just fine). Lesson for me: stick to greens and easy blues for now! I bet my legs will be sore in the morning but it was good to get out there for probably the last time this season before...

I start work with my new team in Windows Mobile on Monday. I can't really say what I'm working on (I've always wanted to say that), but I think it's going to be exciting coming almost full circle from when I first got out of uni working for Ericsson in Melbourne, to finally being able to work with the mobile devices I always dreamt about. The best part is that the office will be moving to a new building in South Lake Union in May, which will cut down my commute dramatically!

Okay time to go, I'm about to head out to a Missy Higgins gig at the Tractor Tavern... It's funny, I've probably seen more Aussie acts here in Seattle than I ever did back home (at least pro rata); off the top of my head: Ben Lee, Bernard Fanning, Cat Empire, Tim Finn, JBT... Now Missy Higgins, and probably The Waifs soon too!

Haven't posted in awhile now, guess I've been busy at work and after hours, not to mention just a little bit lazy.

I think I may have just listened to a speech from the next President of the United States.

One nice thing about Microsoft's corporate clout is its ability to attract influential speakers to come speak on campus. Today, the Microsoft Political Action Committee, a bipartisan group that lobbies on Microsoft's behalf on issues relevant to our industry, invited Hillary Clinton to come speak with us. I only got told by a friend this morning when I arrived at work, although I got forewarning of sorts via an e-mail yesterday about "heightened security" in the area around my building (her talk was held in Building 33, where Microsoft receives all of its important guests).

I rocked up just after 9.30am, and the room was 90% full already! When Hillary finally came on to speak, she was greeted with thunderous applause (with a little extra from a small group of Wellesley alums). Then she spoke off-the-cuff (well, at least without notes) for a good 45 minutes on a wide variety of topics. She may have been labelled as a wooden speaker by some, but surely it's in large part because of the inevitable comparisons with her husband. I found her to be engaging and well-versed on many issues. I also couldn't help but compare her performance to those of Howard and Rudd in Sunday's debate. She was more polished, very deftly mixing putting forth her policy positions with some personal anecdotes and a few backhanders at the current administration.

Hillary's critics might accuse her of wanting to be something to everyone; she would respond by saying she wants to govern for everyone, something that she has done in New York state, approaching all voters even those who normally would not vote Democrat, on what she could do to help. Should she win the nomination, it will be interesting if she can turn around some of the swing states this way, and deflect or neutralize the personal attacks that are inevitably going to come her way. Whatever you might think of her or her policies, my lasting impression is that she's a very, very capable candidate and it would not surprise me at all if she becomes the next President of the United States.

Last night I had the pleasure of sampling PF Chang's, the American Chinese restaurant chain, with some of my work friends... you know, for the heck of it... since I knew it was gonna be faux Chinese, but at least it never pretended to be anything but. The decor was rather nice and upscale-looking, kinda like a Cheesecake Factory with a Chinese motif (complete with a replica Terracotta Warrior standing guard next to the staircase that joined the split-level dining area).

I ordered the Mu Shu Pork, just so that I could be fluent in American sitcom-cliche Chinese take-out -- it was either that or Kung Pao-something, which I also was able to sample thanks to a colleague. The Mu Shu Pork wasn't bad; for those not familiar with it, it's basically ground pork, onion and mushroom in a hoisin sauce, wrapped and folded in a pancake parcel Peking Duck-style. I got a huge portion, of which I could finish only half, so you can't complain too much about serving sizes. My main complaint was that the dish was super-salty, and so was the Kung Pao Shrimp I nibbled on from my colleague's plate... Someone hand me another glass of water!

At least my curiosity is now satisfied. It still doesn't change my opinion that a "real" Chinese restaurant that uses fresh ingredients and more traditional recipes would easily beat the pants off PF Chang's, but I suppose it depends a lot on the tastebuds you grew up with, and PF Chang's does a good job of catering to American palates and expectations.

The funniest thing was the e-mail circulating around to organize our outing, where one of my colleagues (who's from mainland China) said: "Why are we going here? This restaurant is not well-known in Chinese community." And if there's any nationality that's universally picky about their food, it's the Chinese :).

Check out the Wikipedia entry for PF Chang's, especially the references to PF Chang's in popular culture -- funny :).

Some catchup now on non-nerdy things. Last week was the final week of Ramadan, when Muslims fast for a month in a gesture of solidarity with the poor. They eat breakfast before sunrise, and don't eat or drink again until sunset. To come together as a community and raise cultural awareness, the Muslims at Microsoft DAC (I can't remember exactly what DAC stands for, I think Diversity Action Committee?) put on a Ramadan dinner in Cafe 34 (which conveniently is in my building).

We watched a video about Ramadan (I swear the same as last year's), then tucked in for a feast from nations representing a broad spectrum of the Muslim world. You break the fast with something light (in our case, dates, hommus with crackers and little samosas), say some prayers, and then follow up with the real meal. We were treated with a delicious array of dishes -- various meat curries (halal of course), biryani, stir fries, spring rolls, not to mention desserts like Gulab Jamun and baklava (the latter of which apparently found not just in Greece, but also Iran even if the pronunciation differs slightly). Tasty stuff, now if only the cafeteria would serve such food every day instead of the generic inoffensive but unappetizing fare they currently serve up...

Speaking of food (as I often do), last Friday a bunch of us from work (Nima, Leila, Zen and I to be precise) ventured to Kozue on 45th, a Japanese restaurant in Wallingford that had been recommended to me as good value. I don't get the opportunity to visit Japanese restaurants much anymore (if sushi train places don't count, that is). I miss the broad spectrum of price and quality at my disposal in Melbourne -- whether it was cheap chicken teriyaki at Don Don's, to the it's-Friday-I-couldn't-be-bothered-cooking reliability of Japonica, to the consistently high quality of Hanabishi on King Street, where I was first introduced to the concept of beef tataki. I still remember going there with Claudine in 2001, and marvelling at the wafer-thin slices of beef that I initially couldn't distinguish from the surface of the plate on which it was served...

So I was determined to devour as much raw fish as I possibly could at Kozue... and certainly the portions were generous. I don't think I've ordered a sashimi plate that had as many pieces of fish as it did for the money... they were sliced thick, and most just melted in my mouth (which is exactly what I like my raw fish to do). The one thing I had trouble with: a raw prawn. The head was still on, but the de-shelled back part (thankfully de-veined) was just sitting there an opaque mass of white/pinkish raw prawn meat, daring me to overcome my skittishness at eating raw crustacean -- something you know is just Not Quite Right. Zen had a prawn head tempura-type thing, so we did a double-dare (I think I got the raw end of the deal, haha) and decided to just go for it. It actually wasn't bad, the flavour was a milder version of cooked prawn, with just a hint of prawn head juice :). And no food poisoning afterwards either, so all those undercooked shellfish warnings are just bollocks -- you heard it here first!

Well here I am sitting at my lunch break, with nought better to do than tell you about my latest geek toy: a HP s3120n slimline PC running Vista Home Premium, a relative bargain purchased from Fry's, which for the Aussies is yet another example of the American penchant for warehouse-style retail. Think Harvey Norman superstore on steroids.

I have been amazingly satisfied with it so far. It replaces the home theatre PC I had previously sitting under my TV, a Shuttle PC that I put together myself a couple of years ago and which used to be my desktop PC until I bought the MacBook. As a media PC, it was adequate -- I could play pretty much anything on it, but the user experience was just not there. The UI presumed I was using a keyboard and mouse set, which is not the best assumption when operating from the comfort of my couch. Also, it suffered from one of my pet peeves: it was noisy. In spite of Shuttle's engineering wizardry that managed to pack a bunch of full-size PC components into a shell not much bigger than a shoebox, it did mean that the fan required to push out the hot air had to spin fairly fast, hence producing an annoying constant whine.

I'm happy to say the new HP solves all of these problems. It is super-quiet while still somehow fitting into a case that on the whole is, I think, even smaller than the Shuttle's. It comes with a remote control so that I can operate the media functions sans keyboard. It has a digital/analog TV tuner, DVD drive, a gigantic hard disk, media card readers and digital audio output -- all the ingredients you need for a decent home theatre PC setup. It even comes with a wireless LAN card, although for my purposes it's moot since my router is so close I just hook it up over 100Mbps Ethernet.

On the software side, I have to say I'm very impressed with Vista Home Premium and Windows Media Center -- it's certainly come a long way since I first used it in the 2005 edition, in terms of both stability and usability. A few highlights:

• The Live TV with time-shifting and scheduled recordings has made my TV watching so  much more convenient -- no more worrying about missing my favourite shows. The last thing I like to do of a weeknight is watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report; now if I defer this by half an hour or so and watch the episode I've instructed Media Center to record on a regular basis, I can skip the ads via the fast forward button.
• The Electronic Program Guide is fantastic; not revolutionary but certainly a big advance to someone used to having to go to the Comcast website to look up what's on tonight...
• The Media Center Extender integration works extremely well; it automatically detected my Xbox 360 and allowed it to connect to the media stored on my PC. So now, I can experience that media through the Xbox, including live TV with time-shifting!
• There are some interesting extras in Media Center too that I wasn't aware of or expecting -- e.g. there's now a feature called "Internet TV" (beta), i.e. IPTV. Last night I watched part of a John Mayer concert in NYC, as well as Crowded House playing live in Chicago, all streaming on-demand via the Internet. There are also TV shows, movie trailers, that kind of thing. The selection isn't exhaustive, but impressive nevertheless.

So how does it compare to Apple FrontRow? Well, I have to admit that Media Center for my money wins out -- it's rock-solid, usable and functional, and the out-of-the-box experience was pretty much flawless. FrontRow has a great UI, but the feature set is lacking, and I doubt the one-button Apple Remote will scale up. AppleTV, meanwhile, also suffers from a paucity of features and dollar-for-dollar is a pretty hard sell. While Vista has copped its share of flack (and admittedly I'm not using Vista in a desktop-like scenario here), the Media Center component is a definite silver lining.

Quick update: I have finally gotten round to posting photos from my hiking trip to Tolmie Peak, and my long weekend trip to New York City.

As usual, I've been using Picasa, although Microsoft (we?) have released a beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery which looks pretty neat, in particular the panoramic photo-stitching feature (which would come in handy on some of my Tolmie Peak photos). I think I'll give Photo Gallery a whirl even though it's in beta (what Web 2.0-gen software these days isn't) -- software + services is one of our big bets, so I'm eager to get a taste of one of the first products of that vision. The only dubious piece of strategy here (although personally I have no objection to it): Windows Live Photo Gallery is available for XP as well as Vista, which kinda removes yet another reason to upgrade to Windows Vista, that is to get access to the (much improved) Windows Photo Gallery (notice the missing "Live" part in the naming).

Micro-speak is popping up all over the place now (well internally anyways). Perhaps it's because there has been a recent influx of new Microsofties in my team that this lingo has become all-pervasive in everyday communiques. But I'm starting to see a lot more 'ping'-ing going on, a lot more people declaring how 'superexcited' they are, not to mention a lot more turning of 'ask' from a verb into a noun, e.g. "I don't think this ask is unrealistic".

My current favourite remains: "I'm blocked" -- which is effectively shifting the blame to someone else for not being able to get your work done :).

Actually I'm not sure if the Microsoft Company Picnic was in the shadow of Mt Si but it sure sounds poetic doesn't it? I started at Microsoft a bit late to attend last year's event, so this year was my first time. Microsoft must have grown since this year's was spread over 3 days (you pick a day to attend). The weather was a bit overcast, but at least temperatures were bearable. Apparently 2006 attendees sweltered in high 30's heat.

I caught up with numerous friends and colleagues, pigged out on all manner of food, enjoyed some quaffage and generally had a good time, with some stunning scenery to boot. Mind you, I think if you had a family and kids it would have been even better since there was no shortage of family-oriented activities. For some reason Vox won't let me upload my photos, so check out some pics on Picasaweb.

I got a Ship It plaque yesterday delivered to my office. A nice surprise but at least I got one... A squarish silvery thing that says: "...Thanks for the lasting contribution you have made to Microsoft history", signed by Steve and Bill. Aaah I can feel the love already... But seriously, little gestures like that do make a difference, it shows that the company (at least in the large) appreciates your efforts.