Europe update 1

Ugh, this post got overwritten. If anyone has a cached version somewhere, please let me know.

Bon Voyage

As some of you may know, I'm headed off to Europe for the next two weeks. I'm still hoping to continue posting here, but I'm not sure how reliable my ability to get an internet connection will be. So if you don't see anything added here for the next two weeks, you'll know why. Tschuss!

Splat

Oh man, coming home tonight my friend was back in the exact same place. He's got to stop hanging out in the middle of the walk right below the stairs to my apartment or he's gonna get stepped on. If it's not by me, then it'll be by someone else.

The Big Kahuna

Yesterday afternoon was the Microsoft Intern/New Grad tech fair out on one of the soccer fields on campus. Basically, they gave us a free tshirt, put out some food and had an intra-Microsoft job fair. The main event, though, was a keynote speech and Q & A session with Steve Ballmer. I have to say, I was impressed. I guess you don't get to be CEO of the largest software company in the world for being a dummy. He gave a rather informal talk on the company for about 15 minutes and then opened the floor for questions. Mr. Ballmer ... *ahem* ... Steve insisted that we call him "Steve." Anyone who referred to him as "Mr. Ballmer" or "sir" got an earful. He said it made him feel even older. After the first 3 or 4 questions, people caught on and started using his first name. He got questions from across the board, a number relating to the new "Zune" release, some about Mac compatibility, some about Google in various respects, and some cheesey "What advice do you have for us as ____" and such. He answered all of them well and with a clear grasp on the bigger picture of the company as a whole, the insdustry, and all stakeholders. I guess it's only natural that the guy in charge of all this stuff would have that kind of scope on things, but you don't really think about it when you spend all your time down here in the trenches. Anyway, I walked away from the talk thinking "OK, Bill can go give his money away, I can work for this guy."

Squish

Coming home tonight I almost stepped on this guy. Luckily, I saw him just in time. So I took some pictures of him instead. It's hard to tell, but he was about as big as my index finger.

On a rather unrelated note, today was the 4th day in a row with the high temperature here hitting well over 90. And I do not have A/C. Luckily, Microsoft does.

Company Picnic

This weekend was the annual Microsoft Company Picnic. Of course, the company is so huge that employees are asked to sign up for one of the two weekend days to attend. I went on Saturday with Anna.

There was a whole lot of stuff there, including pony rides, massages with lines that were way too long, carnival games, a volleyball tournament, R/C car racing, fortune tellers, a fake tattoo booth, magicians, musical performers, a puzzle hunt, and of course a lot of food. One of the tents there had a bunch of cool birds, including a live Bald Eagle. We spent the majority of our time doing the puzzle hunt, since many of the activities were either kid-centered, not very good for our attire, or just kinda gross (think lots of sweaty people getting massages outside in 90 degree weather.) The hunt was fun though. And we enjoyed our share of the food as well.

Among the musical performers they had there that day was an all male a cappella group called the Baudboys made up entirely of Microsoft employees. We watched them for a while. They sang a few songs I'd heard before, including Title of the Song, which they seemed to imply was an original by them (I guess maybe you have to play it up like that to pull that song off.) They did a few others I hadn't heard too. I made sure to go chat it up with them at the end and exchange business cards.

Many of the drinks they were serving were made available in a small mountain in these huge wagons. They were a little heavier than our wagon at home. Check out kid staring at me like I'm crazy in the picture below. Nice.

Apartment Exterior

Pictures of the outside of my apartment are now available here. It seems I'm hitting the limits of what flickr will do for me for free. Anyone got any suggestions for other photo sharing sites to try?

Hiking Trip

Bear with me while I catch up on the last couple weeks of activity out here, but I have to tell you about the hiking/camping/sailing trip we went on about 2 weeks ago now. I went straight from work that Friday and met up with Anna, Emerson, and Ryan (who works with Anna) over at Ryan's place in Seattle. From there we drove to a point on the sound where we could take a ferry across the water to the Olympic peninsula.

On the other side, we drove to a cheap car-camping site where we got a spot roughly 10 feet from the fairly major road that got us there. We were also in plain view of about 8 other campsites from our site. Ah the great outdoors. While we were camping, Emerson cooked some SPAM from the Spam Museum that Anna visited on her way to Washington. I tried some of it. That was enough for me.

On Saturday we went hiking in the Olympic National Park. The actual hike we did took us up to a nice little lake area with a view of all the peaks around us. It was a pretty steep incline the whole way and Anna got some pretty nasty blisters from her new hiking boots. There was a chipmunk-like animal there who seemed really tame and playful. He was running around near us as we sat there. Later (after I saw him eating some peanuts) we discovered that while we weren't looking he had chewed through a plastic bag and helped himself to Emerson's trail snack. We ate lunch there and then hiked back down to the car so we could drive up to the visitor's center at Hurricane Ridge where there is quite a view of the Olympics. More pics of the hiking trip can be seen here.
We drove back to our campsite and stayed there for the night, and then got up the next day and drove to Port Townsend where Adventuress, the ship that Anna worked on last summer, was docked. We went out for a day sail that they were doing and cruised around the sound for a few hours. It got a little chilly out there, but it was a really cool experience. After we got back in to land, we all loaded back in to the car and drove back to the ferry that took us back over to the Seattle side of the water and headed home.

On a related note, I discovered Blogger will host pictures and allow you to put them in your blog posts!

Ask A Ninja

Today's featured website is askaninja.com because it's hilarious. Check it out. As a starter, I recommend episode 17.

"Priceless"

New Bike Helmet - $38
Finding your bike has flat tires the next morning - grr
New Bike Pump that evening- $20
REI Membership because at this point it's worth it - $15
[EDIT:] Going back and returning the leaky pump and getting a better one - $15
Not driving your car to work every day: ... wait, I thought this was supposed to save me money.

I owned the wrong car

Apparently when I bought my car the dealer wrote down the wrong VIN on all the paperwork. So technically, the car I've been driving around for like 3 weeks wasn't really mine. The one I actually owned has been sitting at the dealership. It's exactly the same as the one I've had, except it has leather seats. Apparently, just swapping cars isn't the remedy the dealership wanted, so I went in today and signed a whole lot of papers to legally own the right car. And they took the license plates that I just got Monday because those plates belong on the other car. So now I'm back to temp plates. I guess I'll have to reregister my car for parking at work too. You know, I really would have been ok with it if they had just wanted to swap out my car for the other one. Really, it would not have been a problem.

Spammed

I was wondering how long it would take, and today I got my answer. Less than 24 hours after I created the blog, it was comment spammed. Either that or some very nice anonymous person really did think that this blog was a great new idea for a site and "truly unique." At least the spam was complimentary I guess. So, with apologies to all you humans out there, commenters will now have to type in the text they see in some garbled image.

The meat of the matter

Ok, time to put at least a little substance in to this thing before I start sending out the link to everybody. It's a quickie, but I've been saving this one since my first day of work.

You know I was going to refrain from mentioning my place of employment in this blog, but I think it might not be as effective that way, so I'm going to have to go ahead and say that I'm working for Microsoft. Post number 3. Guess that policy didn't last very long. So I'm at my first day at Microsoft, attending the new employee orientation that all new employees attend to get oriented. Apt name, huh? There are like 170ish other people there (and they do this every week) because MS is huge and they are growing pretty darn fast. According to HR, as of sometime last year roughly 19% of the company had been hired within the past year. Crazy. Anyway, they let us out for our first break. I headed to the restrooms since we'd been sitting for a while. Strangely enough, a number of other people had the same idea I did and by the time I got there a line had formed that ran out of the bathroom door and down the hallway a bit. So I got in line to wait. I couldn't help but notice though, that when I looked over to the left at the women's room there was no line at all. A few women were walking in and out of the door.

Oh the software business.

Man this thing is powerful

I'd never used blogger before, but I have to say I'm pretty impressed after playing around with it for a little while. The power this service gives you to really get in and do stuff with the blog is impressive. I'm sure I could waste loads of time doing all kinds of useless things with this. Surely, that's just what I need...

Online at last!

So I've finally moved in to my new apartment and got my internet hooked up this morning. I'm considering using this blog to keep everyone up to date on what's going on with me. This way I can tell everybody all the good info at once. Since I know you are all dying to hear about the exciting and bold adventures of my life out here. We'll see how long this lasts. For those interested in seeing where I live, send me an email or something. I don't want to post it out in the open. Pics of my new car, however, can be seen here.