peter and i attended a dinner tonight hosted by the filipino's working at microsoft. it was held in a function room at the microsoft campus and there were around 20+ attendees. filipino dishes were served, including filipino desserts (peter devoured them all!), there was a gift exchange with a twist (you could "grab" (steal heh) a gift that someone else got hehe) and later in the night some games of filipino mahjong were even played. although we hadn't met any of them before tonight, everyone was so friendly and welcoming and it didn't take long for us to fit right in.

we were asked many questions tonight, about sydney, our experiences and our opinions on life in seattle. we found ourselves laughing and joking around with them most of the night (their humour reminded us so much of my dad's haha). they seemed to be so amused by peter and how many filipino phrases and terms he knew - they joked that he was probably more filipino than some of the guys there ... and cheeky peter kept saying it was because he was from palawan haha! we promised we'd be at the next filipino event to see everyone again, and there was a couple (our age) there that we especially "clicked" with who we look forward to getting to know better. so yeah, it was a fun night, we met some great people, and they even made us take home a lot of the left overs :-).

it had somehow come up in conversation with my co-workers yesterday that i had never had a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. going by their reactions, i may as well have told them i'd never seen the sun. so i arrive at work this morning to find this neatly wrapped up "pb&j" (as they call it) on my desk - labelled "cris' first pb&j" and all hehehe ... my co-workers are a funny bunch. it was tasty though :-).

I kid you not, it felt as though it was my baby's first day at pre-school today. I was nervous but also excited for lana, as we drove her to redmond's marymoor dog park - a 40 acre(!) off-leash dog area. the entire (10 minute) drive there, i kept rambling on to peter like a nervous mother - "so all the dogs there will be off leash? even the big dogs? what if they come near lana? will she freak out? oh my gosh. don't take lana off her leash today okay? it's her first time there - she might run away! do you think the place will be muddy? i'll have to bathe her afterwards huh? how do you think she'll be with the other dogs? she's not used to other dogs. do you think we should still go?? ... haha. :-P ... and my cool and collected hubby simply replies, "babe, she'll have fun."

so we arrive at the park and of course at this point lana is still on her leash. already we can sense her excitement as she tugs a little harder at her leash wanting to explore her new surroundings. we make our way towards the off leash dog area and wow - peter and i are impressed. the place is huuuuge and we see what looked like to be (easily) several hundred dogs running around off-leash. my heart skips a beat but peter walks confidently on with lana, and almost immediately some dogs (big and small) run over to lana and start sniffing her. she stands frozen with a "who are they and why are they near me?" look on her face haha - but surprisingly she remained calm and let them sniff her and then she starts sniffing them (and from watching episodes of the dog whisperer, peter and i know this is a good sign haha). as we walk lana along, we get many of the dog owners asking about lana and commenting on how cute she is, and we tell them it's her first time here and thats why she's still on a leash hehe. we were told for her first time there, she was handling it all really well (yeah, it was her mother that was the problem :-P). we were so happy to see that lana was socializing so well with the other dogs and not fearful or anxious at all, even when dog's 4 times her size would approach her.

so after about 15 minutes of all this, peter looks at me with this grin and says "babe, i'm taking her leash off". i'm like "what? noooooo ... " but the smile on my face seems to make peter think i don't mean it and he takes her leash off. oh. my gosh. inside, i'm freaking out right about now, envisioning lana running far far away and us never seeing her again! but what i see is peter starting to run around the park and lana chasing him. they get a fair distance away from me, and so i call out lana's name .... and to my delight she turns her head around and starts bolting towards me sooooo fast, and with her eyes fixed on mine - like you know those slow motion scenes with two lovers running towards each other? that's what it looked like! :-P when she got to me, and i patted and hugged her, almost immediately my nerves disappeared! i thought, "we can do this!". so i put her back down and lana spent the rest of our time there off-leash, walking/running along side us, playing with the other dogs, but also running back to us whenever we called her :-D. to see her voluntarily stay close by us the whole time, even with so much going on around her was so touching :-P. all three of us had such a great time and we can't wait to go back! i'll bring our camera next time so we'll have some pics to show you guys :-).

here's a map of the park for now...

With Vista out the door, the emphasis is now on Longhorn server. Due to an unusual arrangement and resource shifting, I found myself working in three separate projects within Longhorn server. All the other developers I know only work in one project. Over the past few weeks, several projects I was working on had the same deadline. I suddenly found myself inundated with issues from multiple teams requiring immediate attention. I found that switching constantly between the three was rapidly reducing my productivity.

Working on multiple projects concurrently is not foreign to me since that was part of my role while I was at CorVu. The big difference was that I already knew the codebase intimately so switching was mostly effortless. Here, one of the projects was completely new and another I’d only spent a short time with. I would spend a few days looking at some code, build up enough understanding to resolve some issues then I’d have to jump to the other projects. When I return to the code a week later, I have to spend time trying to work out where I was when I left. It got to a point where I was having to work on weekends to compensate for time lost switching between projects. I talked to my manager about the situation and he recognized my situation wasn’t an ideal one for both myself or the team. Some reshuffling was done that allowed me to concentrate on each project long enough to retain knowledge for each.

So in the past few weeks, I learned a great lesson working in a large corporate environment. You have to know when you are in an undesirable situation then you have to actively voice your concerns to ensure the situation is improved.

Vista Released

When Vista and Office were released two weeks ago, there was a fair bit of buzz as retailers started an advertising campaign to get consumers excited about Vista. Even Apple joined in on the Vista fanfare by releasing two of their own Vista related ads in the PC vs Mac series. Unlike Apple, Microsoft released a fairly conservative ad:

Video: Windows Vista "Wow" ad

There’s been a lot of internal debate among employees about the ad campaign. Many of the more senior employees were pretty happy with the class and style of the ad but the younger employees seemed to prefer something more “cool” – something like a public rebuttal of Apple’s campaign. But according to Ballmer, Microsoft would rather be popular than cool (hinting at the market share between Windows and Mac OSX).