It’s been 6 months since I jumped on a plane and moved 8,000 miles / 12,000 km across the ocean to Seattle.
Have I mentioned that I love this place? Seattle, Microsoft, etc. Forget the 8.5h of daylight that we’re getting at the moment and the fact that sunset is at 4.20 PM. Forget that it snowed on the weekend and almost every road in the state is frozen.
The thing that is really doing it for me over here is technology. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m at Microsoft, because I’m in America or because it’s just a good time in the release cycles – but I’ve had some “moments” lately where I just go “Wow! What a great feature” or “Wow! That was easy”. Here’s a few examples of some moments I’ve had.
Technology at work
Instant Messaging & Search: We’ve been having a few dogfooding problems lately and I thought “I wonder what the Exchange guys do? They’ve been dogfooding for years”. So I did a quick company-wide-intranet search (using Office SharePoint Server) and found the Exchange dogfood site. Within a few minutes I was on IM (using Office Communicator) to the guy who runs dogfooding for exchange. We setup a meeting and I’ve walked away with some great advice from another team who has been doing this for years.
Live meeting: Later on the same day I had a meeting with one of our early-adopter customers back in Australia. I started up Live Meeting and it automatically starts recording the session to the hosted service. Then I dialed-in to the phone conference on my Office Communicator phone. After a few minutes of catching up with William one of our UX guys dials in. To ensure that we get the best value out of our meetings we have an application that we bash notes into while the customer is showing us the product and what they’re trying to do with it. Once we’re ready to go, I hit a button in live meeting and a few minutes later we get an announcement “Anonymous participant has joined the conference”. This is the hosted live meeting service which recording the audio from the conference call along with the video of the customer demoing the product. After the meeting, the notes from all three us get logged and consolidated into the feedback collection system.
Technology out and about
I love being connected. I was at a concert last week and I moblogged a photo which then goes off to my twitter feed. Then I realized that my sister loves The Killers as well – so I started up Windows Live Messenger Mobile and IM’d her with “hey, guess where I am?”. She then jumped onto the Live Webcast and rocked out to the concert as well.
It reminds me of Microsoft’s Digital Lifestyle video (remember the one with the music from Magneta Lane – Girl From Mars?). The technology is here now and I’m loving it.
Your Digital Lifestyle: Girl from Mars
Technology at home
Netflix is a video-on-demand service. With the recent Xbox 360 update, you can now stream movies via the Xbox. All you do is start the Netflix application via the menus and choose a movie from your queue – it’s amazingly simple.
Other news
Emma gets here tomorrow (!!). Her Employment Authorization card came through this week. And we’re off to Leavenworth for a White Christmas. Checkout the time-lapse web cam.
That’s all for now! Happy holidays.
