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Weekend Update
Apr. 27th, 2009 09:02 amFriday was our office move from the Millennium campus on the outskirts of Redmond back to the new Studios West buildings across from main campus around the swank new Microsoft Commons. I started my career at Microsoft working on main campus, and I don't share the belief that having "Home & Entertainment Devices" sequestered away was a 'good thing' all these years. Perhaps it was important during Xbox v1 to break away, but it's long since time the organization got a little closer to the rest of the family. Apparently MGS is not moving to the new campus, so I'm not sure what's happening with them as I was under the impression they were emptying Millennium which I believe is rental space rather than company owned. My workgroup had an offsite meeting all day since movers were pillaging our offices Friday, which was at a minimum good team time.
Anyhow, today will be the first day in the new space. Our offices are smaller than standard and have enough glass that they are all fishbowls or maybe zoo cages, but at least we are no longer hidden behind the cafeteria. Many of the teams are making use of 'villas' with cubes, so it was a bit of a stretch to get our whole team offices since we all deal with confidential 3rd party information. Our prior space put us half a building away from the restroom, a kitchen, a working printer, and our own lab space. In fact, the one major problem with the new space is that our lab (more specifically the lab I built, designed, and maintained for 4+ years now) is still in Millennium for a few more months and then is being moved to a building across the quad from our offices. At least it's good exercise, I just hope it gets enough use.
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cuddlyeconomist and I had a full and productive weekend. We finished unpacking the last of her things (mostly collections of knickknacks), and the house has come together nicely. Saturday evening we had jeliza over for movies and dinner, and she put up with our experimenting with Margo's pizza stone and AB's finicky pizza dough--note to self, he likes his pizza thick and small unlike us. Did some erranding including a trip to a restaurant supply store for a number of fun little items. We were going to try for a hike at Point Defiance Park, but we were running short on time and settled for a jaunt around the neighborhood instead.
I also rebuilt her laptop with a retail Windows Vista install, mostly to get rid of those pesky Dell software 'value-adds' that screw up the machine but also to get the Windows Home Server backup solution working--for some reason, something on her system was crashing the shadow backup service constantly which WHS requires to do its thing. The Windows Easy Transfer program lived up to its name, and manually copying my fully patched image of Lord of the Rings Online over a fresh install of the original disk avoided the countless hours of 11 Gigabytes worth of new game content and patches being downloaded. The most frustrating thing about the whole experience was as always getting all the various Windows and Office updates installed, and damn is Visual Studio 2008 slow to install from scratch even when it's just the Standard edition.
The landscapers are starting in earnest this week and in fact I should head outside to greet them. They did some of the auxiliary French drain work last week, but they should be doing major earthworks in the next few days.
Anyhow, today will be the first day in the new space. Our offices are smaller than standard and have enough glass that they are all fishbowls or maybe zoo cages, but at least we are no longer hidden behind the cafeteria. Many of the teams are making use of 'villas' with cubes, so it was a bit of a stretch to get our whole team offices since we all deal with confidential 3rd party information. Our prior space put us half a building away from the restroom, a kitchen, a working printer, and our own lab space. In fact, the one major problem with the new space is that our lab (more specifically the lab I built, designed, and maintained for 4+ years now) is still in Millennium for a few more months and then is being moved to a building across the quad from our offices. At least it's good exercise, I just hope it gets enough use.
cuddlyeconomist and I had a full and productive weekend. We finished unpacking the last of her things (mostly collections of knickknacks), and the house has come together nicely. Saturday evening we had jeliza over for movies and dinner, and she put up with our experimenting with Margo's pizza stone and AB's finicky pizza dough--note to self, he likes his pizza thick and small unlike us. Did some erranding including a trip to a restaurant supply store for a number of fun little items. We were going to try for a hike at Point Defiance Park, but we were running short on time and settled for a jaunt around the neighborhood instead.I also rebuilt her laptop with a retail Windows Vista install, mostly to get rid of those pesky Dell software 'value-adds' that screw up the machine but also to get the Windows Home Server backup solution working--for some reason, something on her system was crashing the shadow backup service constantly which WHS requires to do its thing. The Windows Easy Transfer program lived up to its name, and manually copying my fully patched image of Lord of the Rings Online over a fresh install of the original disk avoided the countless hours of 11 Gigabytes worth of new game content and patches being downloaded. The most frustrating thing about the whole experience was as always getting all the various Windows and Office updates installed, and damn is Visual Studio 2008 slow to install from scratch even when it's just the Standard edition.
The landscapers are starting in earnest this week and in fact I should head outside to greet them. They did some of the auxiliary French drain work last week, but they should be doing major earthworks in the next few days.
