Hello everyone,
Everything is going well here. I am crazy busy at work these days but it should calm down in about 2 weeks. We are just in the final days of testing before releasing. Unfortunately, we are finding a lot of last minute bugs in the software and may need to delay the release a few days until we can get the important bugs fixed. I worked on Saturday yesterday and so did most of the mac team. We have been working a few late nights as well. Microsoft has been pretty good about buying us free dinners and ordering taxis to take us home.
All of this chaos at work will end for me on September 6th when Julie & I go to Germany! I really need a vacation and I'm super excited for this trip. I've been slowly but surely learning German with Rosetta stone but I still have a long way to go.
Microsoft is giving every single full time employee the new Windows 7 mobile phone. I played around with it a few days ago at work and it's amazing. I think it's better than both the iPhone & the Android phones. It releases in October here in Europe, so I imagine we will all get the phones then. I think Microsoft is giving us these so that we can evangelize them to our friends & family. The iPhone is very popular and I think Microsoft is embarrassed at how many of its own employees are using the iPhone rather than something made by Microsoft. Anyhow, I can say for certain the the windows 7 phone is the real deal! I will probably end up giving my current awesome android phone to Julie.
I sometimes think it's funny how technologically rich I am. I remember 15 years ago I only had access to about 25 mhz of processing power and 8 megabytes of RAM. Now, my phone alone has 20 times more power and 36 times more RAM. However, if you add up all of my computers, I'm nearly 2,000 times richer (in processing power) than I was 15 years ago! Imagine if my bank account was 3,000 times richer!
Julie is still in celebration mode from finishing her dissertation. Right now she is spending 5 days in Amsterdam and seems to be having a great time. I haven't been there yet, but she is already insisting that we both go back.
It looks like there is a good chance that Microsoft will be sending me to Beijing, China in October. This will be for me to train some contractors to write automation scripts for Mac Office like I have been doing for the past 2 years. I really hope this goes through mostly because I just want to go to China! I think it would be fun. I was hoping Tom could whip over from Taiwan, but then I looked at a map and Beijing is pretty far away from Taiwan. Also, Tom said the flights would be really expensive. Anyhow, maybe it will work out that I can meet up with Tom, otherwise I will see him when we go on our big vacation to Asia in February.
I've been really enjoying listening to podcasts on my train ride to work every morning. There are so many interesting lectures that you can download and listen to. Here's something interesting I just learned: "we live in such a specialized society, that even something as simple as a pencil can't be made by any 1 single person".
If you think about it, to make the above pencil, you need
- A lumberjack to cut down the trees
- A mill worker to mill the tree down into small enough pieces of wood
- Someone to make the long charcoal center
- Someone to get the rubber from nature
- Someone to refine and mold the rubber into a small cylinder
- A printer to print the letters on the outside
- Someone to mine materials for steel
- Someone to make the small steel band to keep the eraser attached to the pencil.
- etc, etc, etc
Crazy eh? no one knows how to do every single one of those professions. It does make me feel better about how specialized my knowledge is. If you ever feel like you know nothing relative to everyone else, just remember that no one knows how to even make a pencil.
I think that's all for now.
Cya
