Sunday, September 21, 2008
I wish people would pay more attention
A classic "Your system is low on virtual memory"
and the old favourite "The system has recovered from a serious error"
These errors are for a reason - to let you know something needs attention. Deal with them.
and the old favourite "The system has recovered from a serious error"
These errors are for a reason - to let you know something needs attention. Deal with them.
Labels: Microsoft, Stockholm, Sweden
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
PSS fun day out
Every now and then Microsoft puts the boat out and organises a team building exercise. The morale budget is a reasonable pot to spend so the events can be good fun (although I'm in technical support, not sales, so everything really needs to be kept in perspective).
To keep the department going, one half went yeesterday and the other today. As the rain started to fall, the coach rolled out of Microsoft campus and on to Chalfont Heights Scout camp. I managed a little snooze on the coach as we sat on the M4 waiting for the Reading-to-London traffic to move.
The schedule for the day was participating in 7 outdoor activities, competing for prizes at the end of the day.
· Chariot building
· Rifle Shooting
· Rage Buggies
· Diffuse (sic) the bomb
· Archery
· Hovercraft Racing
· Grand Finale : Human Table Football
The chariot building was standard team event stuff - get the team from A to B using 2 planks and 3 beer crates, build and pull the chariot, return from B to A. This went flawlessly although slowly - some teams were light on members and fitting five people on one plank, especially women, looked pretty easy. Our team of six blokes managed reasonably well but I have no idea how a particular group of my colleagues managed yesterday with eight including one woman several months pregnant!
I find it mildly surprising that scout camps have rifle ranges, admittedly only firing 0.22" lead pellets. Decent rifles, though, with telescopic sights which seemed reasonably unnecessary con sidering the relatively short distance to the target.
As the rain had been falling yesterday too, the ground was a bit muddy, especially for the Rage buggies. To keep the speed down, the track was small and winding which tests your skill but doesn't pump the adrenalin through the system. We did manage a pretty good pit crew routine, piling one new driver in the left as we yanked the old one out the right side.
Defusing the bomb was a mixture of general knowledge, memory and mental arithmetic with some props (walky-talkies, camou netting, explosive charge) to give it some character. Despite being a bright bunch of individuals, the general knowledge required some help from the organisers - do people still watch Big Brother?
I enjoy archery although, like the air rifles, the targets weren't too far away which means it wasn't too hard to get a reasonable score. I was impressed how far the arrows went through the straw targets - easy to imagine the penetration through a squishy human body.
I had been looking forward to the hovercraft but was a little let down to realise that one of the pair was being fixed when we arrived which means half the time as both teams share the same craft. Just like with the buggies, the course was a slalam to keep the speed down and these engines were not limited so 50 mph would have been possible (before or after hitting the trees, though, we didn't know). Steering was not too hard - 30% using the crossbar and 70% leaning to left or right - but you had to remember to keep pressure on the throttle to avoid gently settling on the grass.
Lastly, we all gathered round the inflatable human table football and watched our teams slip and slide in the mud while walloping foam tootballs around.
My team didn't win anything but the day was fun and, for some reason, tiring although the amount of time being active wasn't too much.
As we got back on the coach, the rain finally cleared away.
To keep the department going, one half went yeesterday and the other today. As the rain started to fall, the coach rolled out of Microsoft campus and on to Chalfont Heights Scout camp. I managed a little snooze on the coach as we sat on the M4 waiting for the Reading-to-London traffic to move.
The schedule for the day was participating in 7 outdoor activities, competing for prizes at the end of the day.
· Chariot building
· Rifle Shooting
· Rage Buggies
· Diffuse (sic) the bomb
· Archery
· Hovercraft Racing
· Grand Finale : Human Table Football
The chariot building was standard team event stuff - get the team from A to B using 2 planks and 3 beer crates, build and pull the chariot, return from B to A. This went flawlessly although slowly - some teams were light on members and fitting five people on one plank, especially women, looked pretty easy. Our team of six blokes managed reasonably well but I have no idea how a particular group of my colleagues managed yesterday with eight including one woman several months pregnant!
I find it mildly surprising that scout camps have rifle ranges, admittedly only firing 0.22" lead pellets. Decent rifles, though, with telescopic sights which seemed reasonably unnecessary con sidering the relatively short distance to the target.
As the rain had been falling yesterday too, the ground was a bit muddy, especially for the Rage buggies. To keep the speed down, the track was small and winding which tests your skill but doesn't pump the adrenalin through the system. We did manage a pretty good pit crew routine, piling one new driver in the left as we yanked the old one out the right side.
Defusing the bomb was a mixture of general knowledge, memory and mental arithmetic with some props (walky-talkies, camou netting, explosive charge) to give it some character. Despite being a bright bunch of individuals, the general knowledge required some help from the organisers - do people still watch Big Brother?
I enjoy archery although, like the air rifles, the targets weren't too far away which means it wasn't too hard to get a reasonable score. I was impressed how far the arrows went through the straw targets - easy to imagine the penetration through a squishy human body.
I had been looking forward to the hovercraft but was a little let down to realise that one of the pair was being fixed when we arrived which means half the time as both teams share the same craft. Just like with the buggies, the course was a slalam to keep the speed down and these engines were not limited so 50 mph would have been possible (before or after hitting the trees, though, we didn't know). Steering was not too hard - 30% using the crossbar and 70% leaning to left or right - but you had to remember to keep pressure on the throttle to avoid gently settling on the grass.
Lastly, we all gathered round the inflatable human table football and watched our teams slip and slide in the mud while walloping foam tootballs around.
My team didn't win anything but the day was fun and, for some reason, tiring although the amount of time being active wasn't too much.
As we got back on the coach, the rain finally cleared away.
Labels: Microsoft
Monday, March 10, 2008
пасспорт?
Opportunities in my job for visiting customers have been pretty thin on the ground - only two in 2007 and one of those was in-house. So you can imagine how happy I was to hear about a request coming in to deliver a workshop.
"Novosibirsk? I'm sorry, where exactly is that? Oh, really? I see..."
"Novosibirsk? I'm sorry, where exactly is that? Oh, really? I see..."
Labels: Microsoft
Monday, December 10, 2007
When UPS say "tomorrow" they mean "next working day"...
Anyway, I waiting in all day today and eventually:
Status: Delivered
Delivered On: 10/12/2007 16:50
So a quick test reveals ... {fanfare} ... the external wireless network adapter doesn't power up...
Status: Delivered
Delivered On: 10/12/2007 16:50
So a quick test reveals ... {fanfare} ... the external wireless network adapter doesn't power up...
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Another year, another MCP
Today in darkest Wokingham, I clicked and dragged my way through the "Managing & Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment" exam which means only a couple more before I reach the big five-oh.
Each year I commit to passing at least one although I have been leaving it a bit close recently - this year and last were December exams. There are a bunch of Windows 2000 exams being retired in March 2008 so maybe its time to pick those low-hanging fruit before the tree is chopped down.
Each year I commit to passing at least one although I have been leaving it a bit close recently - this year and last were December exams. There are a bunch of Windows 2000 exams being retired in March 2008 so maybe its time to pick those low-hanging fruit before the tree is chopped down.
Labels: Microsoft
Thursday, November 08, 2007
TechEd day 4
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
TechEd day 3
Today definitely benefitted from a good night's sleep - I even managed breakfast.
[[Add stuff that I did]]
Justin wanted to take in the Champions League match but there was no way we would get any tickets so we settled on finding a pub with a TV after grabbing some food.
As I was walking along Carrer de Jaume I on the way to meet Justin, around 7pm, I entered a very noisy Plaça de Sant Jaume. There seemed to be dozens on young women with flags and whistles singing and, I assume, protesting about something outside the Oficina de Turisme. Any ideas what they are doing would be much appreciated.
This part of town is great for little side roads (like Carrera de la Boqueria) with shops and people but I was in a hurry so didn't have much time to browse. Soon I was on La Rambla and meeting up with my colleague. Food was a little hard to find as some places didn't open up their kitchens until 8pm but Justin soon found an Indian Restaurant for us. I was a bit wary as the menu outside had a nice, large UK flag on it to attract British tourists but we went in anyway - how different could it be?
On the whole, not too much - they sold Kingfisher and Cobra just like back home. And popadoms too but these arrived as crispy tubes rather than flat disks with only one bowl of spicy raita? Where's the right orange stuff or the mango chutney, chopped onions and lethal lime pickle? After mixed pakora starters, we had a main. I'd asked for mushroom rice to go with the fish dish and that got a surprised look but the waiter quickly put something together for me. On the whole a safe experience, especially as there were no proper tourists in there to embarrass me.
Next was a hunt for a sports pub and Justin, who seemed to have a knack for this, pulled us into a Paddy Pub jam-packed with 'Gers fans - or at least it seemed full as they were all clustered in the doorway leaving a lot of space at the back. I say "a lot" with reservations - the pub was quite small but still sported three large flat-screen TVs (two for the downstairs audience and one for the small balcony which also hosted cublicle with the token urinal). Quite a cosmopolitan affair - Justin and the owner of the bar were from the US, the fans were Scottish and Italian, and I was English, all in an supposedly Irish pub. Drinking Bulmers from large cardboard cups.
Justin did ask me to teach him some football songs but I didn't really know what the Rangers fans were singing (apart from "Rule Brittania" and the National Anthem). Had to explain unionist/protestant demographic of the club as a fan draped in a Northern Ireland flag staggered past us.
The Barca-Rangers match wasn't too exciting. The Scots didn't really have much chance - I'm sure that if they had scored it would have just irritated their hosts into putting even more past Allan McGregor.
I decided to hang around while Justin went back to his hotel so I could soak up some of the atmosphere. In this case "atmosphere" started off as the unwanted attention of prostitutes and guys selling loose cans of beer but it improved as more Scottish fans arrived from the ground. A couple of beers and it was off back to the hotel, trusty AutoRoute map in hand...
[[Add stuff that I did]]
Justin wanted to take in the Champions League match but there was no way we would get any tickets so we settled on finding a pub with a TV after grabbing some food.
As I was walking along Carrer de Jaume I on the way to meet Justin, around 7pm, I entered a very noisy Plaça de Sant Jaume. There seemed to be dozens on young women with flags and whistles singing and, I assume, protesting about something outside the Oficina de Turisme. Any ideas what they are doing would be much appreciated.
This part of town is great for little side roads (like Carrera de la Boqueria) with shops and people but I was in a hurry so didn't have much time to browse. Soon I was on La Rambla and meeting up with my colleague. Food was a little hard to find as some places didn't open up their kitchens until 8pm but Justin soon found an Indian Restaurant for us. I was a bit wary as the menu outside had a nice, large UK flag on it to attract British tourists but we went in anyway - how different could it be?
On the whole, not too much - they sold Kingfisher and Cobra just like back home. And popadoms too but these arrived as crispy tubes rather than flat disks with only one bowl of spicy raita? Where's the right orange stuff or the mango chutney, chopped onions and lethal lime pickle? After mixed pakora starters, we had a main. I'd asked for mushroom rice to go with the fish dish and that got a surprised look but the waiter quickly put something together for me. On the whole a safe experience, especially as there were no proper tourists in there to embarrass me.
Next was a hunt for a sports pub and Justin, who seemed to have a knack for this, pulled us into a Paddy Pub jam-packed with 'Gers fans - or at least it seemed full as they were all clustered in the doorway leaving a lot of space at the back. I say "a lot" with reservations - the pub was quite small but still sported three large flat-screen TVs (two for the downstairs audience and one for the small balcony which also hosted cublicle with the token urinal). Quite a cosmopolitan affair - Justin and the owner of the bar were from the US, the fans were Scottish and Italian, and I was English, all in an supposedly Irish pub. Drinking Bulmers from large cardboard cups.
Justin did ask me to teach him some football songs but I didn't really know what the Rangers fans were singing (apart from "Rule Brittania" and the National Anthem). Had to explain unionist/protestant demographic of the club as a fan draped in a Northern Ireland flag staggered past us.
The Barca-Rangers match wasn't too exciting. The Scots didn't really have much chance - I'm sure that if they had scored it would have just irritated their hosts into putting even more past Allan McGregor.
I decided to hang around while Justin went back to his hotel so I could soak up some of the atmosphere. In this case "atmosphere" started off as the unwanted attention of prostitutes and guys selling loose cans of beer but it improved as more Scottish fans arrived from the ground. A couple of beers and it was off back to the hotel, trusty AutoRoute map in hand...
Labels: Microsoft, Spain, TechEd
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
TechEd day 2
Before the conference I noted that my faithful day-in-and-day-out M&S trainers had finally fallen apart. The soles had already worn out of tread but now the side had split so they went into recycling. Pretty impressive longevity - over 15 months.
This meant I had to fall back on my "pretty" blue Adidas trainers - they're OK to wear (or seemed to be anyway) but the laces have little grip and keep coming loose over time. After walking miles in airports, between the hotel and the conference, around the conference, and then carousing in Barcelona last night, I find a nice set of blisters. Walking to the conference this morning was not as fun as it could have been...
On top of this the three bottles of beer at the opening of the Ask The Experts area, the rioja, the booze at the Marley bar and the minibar cans meant that I didn't feel great in the morning. For some reason, I didn't think of taking the aspirins I packed for this precise eventuality until I was at the conference (and they were not). Additionally there is a chemist on my route which didn't sink in either. So from 8am to 8pm (when I got back to my room and spent 10 minutes searching for them) I felt not 100%. Yes, I did skip breakfast.
One thing I had forgotten is that it is not always wise to drink a lot of water in the morning to rehydrate yourself. What this seems to do is awaken whatever you drank but your body hasn't processed yet so the stomach starts to decide it isn't too happy at the moment. Just how far are the toilets from the Ask The Experts area? It didn't seem that far yesterday ....
The helpdesk stuff is going OK.
1 They ask me an ITPro-style question (Dev questions get tefloned to someone else)
2 I exhaust my knowledge on the subject (varies from seconds to tens of seconds)
3 I ask them for their email address
4 I research question
5 I email them the answer/response
After lunch I scanned the schedule for the useful or the interesting.
1:30pm
"WIN201 - Next Generation Networking in Windows Vista"
This was a good overview from a Polish expert by the name of Rafal Lukawiecki who's working in the UK. The focus was on IPv6 which we need to implement world-wide in the next 3 years before all the existing IP addresses run out, 70% of which are allocated to US companies and as a result most of them don't see what the problem is. China, on the other hand, have a different opinion.
The 2:45pm slot didn't have anything that appealed so I tried one of the WCF hands-on labs. The combination of my groggy head and the dry qualty of the lab led to me giving up after a while but with a little more practice under my belt. Another 40 hours should do... :-)
5:00pm
"MED204 - Microsoft Robotics Studio"
Although something that felt like a meeting of model aircraft enthusists, there's a lot of serious work going on with robotics (e.g. NASA space exploration).
Afterwards I hung around until 8pm reading email and generally taking it easy. Back at the hotel, once the aspirin kicked in, I had a bath and then some more Halo 1 on the PC. Boy, do I suck at Halo on the laptop (and I'm playing campaign, not online) but it passes the time.
This meant I had to fall back on my "pretty" blue Adidas trainers - they're OK to wear (or seemed to be anyway) but the laces have little grip and keep coming loose over time. After walking miles in airports, between the hotel and the conference, around the conference, and then carousing in Barcelona last night, I find a nice set of blisters. Walking to the conference this morning was not as fun as it could have been...
On top of this the three bottles of beer at the opening of the Ask The Experts area, the rioja, the booze at the Marley bar and the minibar cans meant that I didn't feel great in the morning. For some reason, I didn't think of taking the aspirins I packed for this precise eventuality until I was at the conference (and they were not). Additionally there is a chemist on my route which didn't sink in either. So from 8am to 8pm (when I got back to my room and spent 10 minutes searching for them) I felt not 100%. Yes, I did skip breakfast.
One thing I had forgotten is that it is not always wise to drink a lot of water in the morning to rehydrate yourself. What this seems to do is awaken whatever you drank but your body hasn't processed yet so the stomach starts to decide it isn't too happy at the moment. Just how far are the toilets from the Ask The Experts area? It didn't seem that far yesterday ....
The helpdesk stuff is going OK.
1 They ask me an ITPro-style question (Dev questions get tefloned to someone else)
2 I exhaust my knowledge on the subject (varies from seconds to tens of seconds)
3 I ask them for their email address
4 I research question
5 I email them the answer/response
After lunch I scanned the schedule for the useful or the interesting.
1:30pm
"WIN201 - Next Generation Networking in Windows Vista"
This was a good overview from a Polish expert by the name of Rafal Lukawiecki who's working in the UK. The focus was on IPv6 which we need to implement world-wide in the next 3 years before all the existing IP addresses run out, 70% of which are allocated to US companies and as a result most of them don't see what the problem is. China, on the other hand, have a different opinion.
The 2:45pm slot didn't have anything that appealed so I tried one of the WCF hands-on labs. The combination of my groggy head and the dry qualty of the lab led to me giving up after a while but with a little more practice under my belt. Another 40 hours should do... :-)
5:00pm
"MED204 - Microsoft Robotics Studio"
Although something that felt like a meeting of model aircraft enthusists, there's a lot of serious work going on with robotics (e.g. NASA space exploration).
Afterwards I hung around until 8pm reading email and generally taking it easy. Back at the hotel, once the aspirin kicked in, I had a bath and then some more Halo 1 on the PC. Boy, do I suck at Halo on the laptop (and I'm playing campaign, not online) but it passes the time.
Labels: Microsoft, Spain, TechEd
Monday, November 05, 2007
TechEd day 1
Well, not as exciting as I had hoped it would be. Never mind.
The conference starts later today so after a good breakfast I'm walking down the palm-tree lined beach road to the centre wishing I still had a pair of sunglasses [[must find a shop]]. The air is warm enough that I leave my fleece in the rucksack.
I have no idea what the internal theme was for this restaurant as it seemed to be closed down (not just shut) and it was difficult to look through the windows. What a pity.
This part of Barcelona is full of building sites although most of the huge tower blocks seem fully built if not nearly finished. Looking out of my hotel window, I managed to count TWENTYONE huge cranes in a 180 degree view of the city.
and this building looks familiar...
Here is my home for the rest of the week (well, 9 hours of it anyway).
First thing I receive is a pair of fetching green Ask The Experts T-shirts because after four-five days just one top tends to get a bit whiffy. The workload back home seems to be looking after itself so I watch the 4pm "Think Big - Vista Media Centre" session, just in case it comes in handy to answer customer questions.
After the break I take in the 5:45pm "Introductory Walkthrough of Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) and Visual Studio 2008" as this is an area I really need to get into. My developer skills are amazingly poor considering I work in the developer unit in PSS but I'm starting to understand what WCF is doing.
What a great cloakroom ticket to have at a tecky conference. Well, I found it funny...
The Ask The Experts area doesn't open until 7pm and I'm not scheduled to work but I turn up anyway to meet Justin from the MSMQ group in the US. It is supposed to be a developer-oriented conference but all the questions are about usage and troubleshooting (which would be better handled next week when the IT Pros have their event).
At 8pm, Justin and I slope off across the road to talk shop over tapas and rioja. Very civilised. And much later, ten fortyfive maybe, we get on the tube to find a bar in town. Not surprisingly, at this time of night on a Monday, there doesn't seem much going on but we do find a Bob Marley pub where I introduce Justin to Magner's cider'n'ice. There's only time after that for a brazilian sugary cocktail before leaving Justin to find his hotel while I catch the last tube back to find mine.
This is where I find Spanish road signs suck. I managed to get home tonight by luck and the fact I had Autoroute on my laptop. Coming out of the tube statiom, I looked around for road signs and, finding none, looked at the roadmap next to the station. Taking the big red blob as a hint, I calculated my route home and set off.
In fact I was 90 degrees off.
The road did look decidedly long as it seemed to stretch off to infinity (where I was expecting the sea) and while phoning home I decided that now was a good time to bring out the laptop. The area was very quiet - one person every 5 minutes, sort of thing - so I didn't feel too worried bringing out a thousand Euros worth of kit that could be ripped out of my hand.
And I soon worked out that I was walking parallel to the beach and actually at the crossroads with the road that had my hotel on it. Infallible male sense of direction came through in the end.
Now some quality time to raid the minibar and put in a couple of hours of Halo on the laptop...
The conference starts later today so after a good breakfast I'm walking down the palm-tree lined beach road to the centre wishing I still had a pair of sunglasses [[must find a shop]]. The air is warm enough that I leave my fleece in the rucksack.
I have no idea what the internal theme was for this restaurant as it seemed to be closed down (not just shut) and it was difficult to look through the windows. What a pity.
This part of Barcelona is full of building sites although most of the huge tower blocks seem fully built if not nearly finished. Looking out of my hotel window, I managed to count TWENTYONE huge cranes in a 180 degree view of the city.
and this building looks familiar...
Here is my home for the rest of the week (well, 9 hours of it anyway).
First thing I receive is a pair of fetching green Ask The Experts T-shirts because after four-five days just one top tends to get a bit whiffy. The workload back home seems to be looking after itself so I watch the 4pm "Think Big - Vista Media Centre" session, just in case it comes in handy to answer customer questions.
After the break I take in the 5:45pm "Introductory Walkthrough of Windows Communications Foundation (WCF) and Visual Studio 2008" as this is an area I really need to get into. My developer skills are amazingly poor considering I work in the developer unit in PSS but I'm starting to understand what WCF is doing.
What a great cloakroom ticket to have at a tecky conference. Well, I found it funny...
The Ask The Experts area doesn't open until 7pm and I'm not scheduled to work but I turn up anyway to meet Justin from the MSMQ group in the US. It is supposed to be a developer-oriented conference but all the questions are about usage and troubleshooting (which would be better handled next week when the IT Pros have their event).
At 8pm, Justin and I slope off across the road to talk shop over tapas and rioja. Very civilised. And much later, ten fortyfive maybe, we get on the tube to find a bar in town. Not surprisingly, at this time of night on a Monday, there doesn't seem much going on but we do find a Bob Marley pub where I introduce Justin to Magner's cider'n'ice. There's only time after that for a brazilian sugary cocktail before leaving Justin to find his hotel while I catch the last tube back to find mine.
This is where I find Spanish road signs suck. I managed to get home tonight by luck and the fact I had Autoroute on my laptop. Coming out of the tube statiom, I looked around for road signs and, finding none, looked at the roadmap next to the station. Taking the big red blob as a hint, I calculated my route home and set off.
In fact I was 90 degrees off.
The road did look decidedly long as it seemed to stretch off to infinity (where I was expecting the sea) and while phoning home I decided that now was a good time to bring out the laptop. The area was very quiet - one person every 5 minutes, sort of thing - so I didn't feel too worried bringing out a thousand Euros worth of kit that could be ripped out of my hand.
And I soon worked out that I was walking parallel to the beach and actually at the crossroads with the road that had my hotel on it. Infallible male sense of direction came through in the end.
Now some quality time to raid the minibar and put in a couple of hours of Halo on the laptop...
Labels: Microsoft, Spain, TechEd
Sunday, November 04, 2007
TechEd Day 0 - flying out to Barcelona
So I'm off to Barcelona for TechEd for Developers in Barcelona. Back in August I hadn't even though of going but one of my colleagues in the US who's big in MSMQ said it would be good to meet up at TechEd. I thought he meant TechEd in the US and suggested that this would be unlikely. After being corrected, I started looking for a back door in as Microsoft wouldn't pay the 2,000 Euros to send me as a delegate - they would pay for my travel and hotel, though, so I volunteered to help out as a BizTalk "expert" in the Ask The Expert area. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on if you were planning to ask a BizTalk question or not, I've moved to the Vista desk as they couldn't get any volunteers there. For me this is a slight improvement as my BizTalk knowledge is probably less than that for Vista so from Monday I'll be here with a bunch of other non-Vista people handling questions.
The trip was pretty uneventful. The RailAir bus left on time with my tearful family waving me off. Sat in front of a pair of well-off old biddies who were trading stories from their lives and travels. I was amused by the fact that one of the ladies had to regularly phone her local pub to pay up because her husband and friends would frequently enjoy themselves so much that they would forget the bill and go home. The pub didn't seem at all annoyed as they knew she would phone eventually.
Having already checked in, it took about 15 minutes to clear through to departures. Had to resist laughing when the woman in front of me in the Bag Drop queue told her travelling companion that she had left her passport at home. [[I was mean enough to sneak a picture though I did later accidentally delete it while trying to free up space on the phone for email.]]
She was having an interesting chat with the Bag Drop man although he seemed to be shaking his head a lot which couldn't have been good :-)
Security wasn't too long a wait so I had an hour to kill in The Tin Goose before the gates were open for my flight. As I was off for Spain, a couple of pints of San Miguel seemed in order.
The plane was only a little late taking off because a member of the flight crew decided to go off sick at the last minute and a replacement had to be brought over from some storage area that they keep them in.
In-flight entertainment was playing X-Men 3 on my laptop. The playback isn't great for DVDs - a bit juddery at times and the sound sometimes gets ahead of the action but I managed. Hopefully my next laptop - which is designed for Vista unlike the faithful machine I'm currently using - will do a better job.
Once in Barcelona Airport (which I remembered from my trip with Samantha to Andorra) we had to walk the entire length of the airport to get from baggage area A (where we exited the plane) to baggage B (where our luggage went). I think this is just a ploy to make you walk past every opportunity to spend money at the concessions.
The conference had laid on a shuttle so I decided to take that to the CCIB instead of queuing outside and dealing with a taxi driver when I had no money and precious little useful Spanish left in my head. Very lazy, although it did mean a 1500m walk from the conference centre to my hotel on the beach.
I had checked out Google Earth for the location of my hotel and saw there was a building site next to hotel. I had hoped the image was not up to date but when I opened the hotel window I found I was wrong.
Reading the book that comes with your room, I was pleased to see that there was a wireless network. But there wasn't, unless you count the access point running on someone else's machine. So I talked to reception and they gave me a network cable. I now had an IP address! But still no Internet. Time to leave it until tomorrow.
Caught some Spanish news as I was browsing the channels. "Hmmm, that looks like Gibraltar" and so it was - the raising of sunken treasure from a British warship is big news in Spain and Gibraltar (Spain's version of Las Malvinas) was used to fly out the loot. Although I couldn't really understand what they were saying, they definitely didn't have happy faces.
Spent a long, slow hour in the hotel's restaurant watching some local youths drawing on a seat in the park outside the window. Must pop by tomorrow and see what they were up to - I've found the graffiti in Barcelona to be top notch :-)
Note to self - if the restaurant shuts at 11pm, don't expect great service at 10:20pm.
The trip was pretty uneventful. The RailAir bus left on time with my tearful family waving me off. Sat in front of a pair of well-off old biddies who were trading stories from their lives and travels. I was amused by the fact that one of the ladies had to regularly phone her local pub to pay up because her husband and friends would frequently enjoy themselves so much that they would forget the bill and go home. The pub didn't seem at all annoyed as they knew she would phone eventually.
Having already checked in, it took about 15 minutes to clear through to departures. Had to resist laughing when the woman in front of me in the Bag Drop queue told her travelling companion that she had left her passport at home. [[I was mean enough to sneak a picture though I did later accidentally delete it while trying to free up space on the phone for email.]]
She was having an interesting chat with the Bag Drop man although he seemed to be shaking his head a lot which couldn't have been good :-)
Security wasn't too long a wait so I had an hour to kill in The Tin Goose before the gates were open for my flight. As I was off for Spain, a couple of pints of San Miguel seemed in order.
The plane was only a little late taking off because a member of the flight crew decided to go off sick at the last minute and a replacement had to be brought over from some storage area that they keep them in.
In-flight entertainment was playing X-Men 3 on my laptop. The playback isn't great for DVDs - a bit juddery at times and the sound sometimes gets ahead of the action but I managed. Hopefully my next laptop - which is designed for Vista unlike the faithful machine I'm currently using - will do a better job.
Once in Barcelona Airport (which I remembered from my trip with Samantha to Andorra) we had to walk the entire length of the airport to get from baggage area A (where we exited the plane) to baggage B (where our luggage went). I think this is just a ploy to make you walk past every opportunity to spend money at the concessions.
The conference had laid on a shuttle so I decided to take that to the CCIB instead of queuing outside and dealing with a taxi driver when I had no money and precious little useful Spanish left in my head. Very lazy, although it did mean a 1500m walk from the conference centre to my hotel on the beach.
I had checked out Google Earth for the location of my hotel and saw there was a building site next to hotel. I had hoped the image was not up to date but when I opened the hotel window I found I was wrong.
Reading the book that comes with your room, I was pleased to see that there was a wireless network. But there wasn't, unless you count the access point running on someone else's machine. So I talked to reception and they gave me a network cable. I now had an IP address! But still no Internet. Time to leave it until tomorrow.
Caught some Spanish news as I was browsing the channels. "Hmmm, that looks like Gibraltar" and so it was - the raising of sunken treasure from a British warship is big news in Spain and Gibraltar (Spain's version of Las Malvinas) was used to fly out the loot. Although I couldn't really understand what they were saying, they definitely didn't have happy faces.
Spent a long, slow hour in the hotel's restaurant watching some local youths drawing on a seat in the park outside the window. Must pop by tomorrow and see what they were up to - I've found the graffiti in Barcelona to be top notch :-)
Note to self - if the restaurant shuts at 11pm, don't expect great service at 10:20pm.
Labels: Microsoft, Spain, TechEd
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
TVP 5 is online
Microsoft's fifth building at Reading's Thames Valley Park has now been officially opened. They haven't yet worked out who is going to work there - Microsoft has a transient organisational structure (except product support) so this isn't too surprising.
Mmmm... cake....
Mmmm... cake....
Labels: Microsoft
Friday, April 27, 2007
All change...
Today I've applied for a new role within Microsoft, something I haven't done for nearly 11 years. Way back in the summer of '96 I was interested in becoming a web editor in the Africa/India/Middle East division although I did eventually withdraw my application for a mixture of frivolous and serious reasons. Since then I've moved between teams but always staying in technical support so effectively I've always had the same job at Microsoft.
This time I'm after a technical writer position in the BizTalk group so still technical but no longer customer-facing. Anyone at Microsoft who knows me will see the obvious irony in this as I always insisted that I wouldn't touch BizTalk with a barge-pole (although, admittedly, this was mainly a bluff to see how much money they would eventually offer me to support the product).
I can't say that being a technical writer was something I was aspiring to - for the last decade I've been trying to work out what I DID aspire to. I definitely didn't want to be still doing support at 50 - not because you can't do the job at that age but it's a grunt role. The idea of being in a grunt role for 27 years (which I would have done to reach 50 years old) just seemed a waste, a blatant display of lack of ambition. So I'd been waiting for something to turn up, a process that usually works although sometimes it takes a lot longer than you expect.
In the meantime I slowly tweaked my job role - contributing on internal DLs, reviewing KB articles, jumping into technical Newsgroups and posting on my own MSDN blog. In the career textbooks that would be in the "how to raise your profile" chapter but for me it was more a reaction to crushing ennui.
In good old "if you build it, they will come" fashion, interest arose in the US. Anyone who says that I will be a "great fit" for a role (and uses an exclamation mark too) is obviously going to pique my interest in a job which I can still do from the UK so 16 hours later my eCV was on its way.
Now I just need to find out what a technical writer does... I hope it's fun.
Labels: Microsoft
Microsoft Building 5
Had a guided tour of Microsoft's soon-to-be finished Building 5 on Thames Valley Park. As you'd expect, it looks very similar to the previous 4 as most of the differences are around hidden things like energy efficiency and health & safety. There are a few innovations, like a couple of suspended meeting rooms which are glass most the way round and attached to the building by the ceiling instead of the floor. I'm sure those rooms will be fully booked for months to come when the building is opened. In the basement will be a gym and dance studio, neither of which I can imagine myself visiting (the gym at home doesn't see much activity so I can't see a public one being overused by me).
I did find the sweet dispenser of blue/red sweets in the builder's canteen amusing - "these are not sweets, they are ear defenders". Yum.
Also, you had to wear full building site kit and you get to keep it ALL! So I now have a hard hat, flourescent jacket, thin gloves (great for snowboarding at Bracknell) and protective glasses. These can be surprisingly useful...
I did find the sweet dispenser of blue/red sweets in the builder's canteen amusing - "these are not sweets, they are ear defenders". Yum.
Also, you had to wear full building site kit and you get to keep it ALL! So I now have a hard hat, flourescent jacket, thin gloves (great for snowboarding at Bracknell) and protective glasses. These can be surprisingly useful...
Labels: Microsoft
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Microsoft has launched a new operating system, Windows Vista
Do you know what the highlight of the celebrations were for us? Eight foot high inflated letters on the grass outside. Yes, wow.
Labels: Microsoft
Monday, December 18, 2006
Microsoft - change the world or go home
Here is a great image from Hugh
MacLeod:
As Hugh says:
The headline works on a lot of different levels:
Microsoft telling its potential customers to change the world or go home.
Microsoft telling its employees to change the world or go home.
Microsoft employees telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
Everybody else telling Microsoft to change the world or go home.
Everyone else telling their colleagues to change the world or go home.
And so forth.
Me, I'll opt for the third one.
Labels: Microsoft
Friday, December 08, 2006
3rd time lucky
Finally, I have my 47th MCP exam under my belt - "Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft® Clustering Services by Using Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Advanced Server" finally fell to me at the 3rd attempt and I maintain my one-a-year record. The exam schedule was full so if I'd failed today then that would have been it for 2006.
Next up will be the 'bleeding edge of technology' exam, "Migrating from Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 to Microsoft Windows 2000" which I failed BADLY (59.5%) way back in September 2005.
Next up will be the 'bleeding edge of technology' exam, "Migrating from Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 to Microsoft Windows 2000" which I failed BADLY (59.5%) way back in September 2005.
Labels: Microsoft
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Bye Bye Tony
And another team member bites the dust. Tony is off to join the small army of rich IT professionals working in the financial sector. Good luck, mate.
Here're photos from the the leaving drink at the Walkabout (Reading this time). The 3 amigos here (Martin, Tom and Tony) are all ex-Microsoft. [Vista's build-in red-eye fixer works a treat!]
Great idea at the walkabout is £10 for a bucket of five 375ml VB stubbies in ice and a prize-winning scratch card. Sadly every prize happened to be a stick-on moustache...
Mark...
and me...
Here're photos from the the leaving drink at the Walkabout (Reading this time). The 3 amigos here (Martin, Tom and Tony) are all ex-Microsoft. [Vista's build-in red-eye fixer works a treat!]
Great idea at the walkabout is £10 for a bucket of five 375ml VB stubbies in ice and a prize-winning scratch card. Sadly every prize happened to be a stick-on moustache...
Mark...
and me...
Labels: Microsoft
Friday, November 17, 2006
Vista goodness
I've been at Microsoft for 37.6% of my life now so I've seen a few products go out through the gates (any pun you think you see is not intended). Many years ago I used to get excited about new products - I remember being the only person in my unit running Windows NT while my colleagues stumbled on 16-bit ignorance. Nowadays I get a bit blasé about it - how can you keep getting excited after a dozen versions of Office?
So I have finally succumbed to the internal marketing and installed Windows Vista on my trusty Dell laptop. Setup went well although I was slightly worried by the "this may take a few hours" information - it was an upgrade (rather than the light-speed installation you could do on a freshly-formatted disk) and watching next-gen progress bars can be fun...
Sadly, although the machine has enough power in the disk and CPU departments, it fails on the most important resource - graphics. If you don't have 128MB of video memory then you're not going to get the sweet stuff that the evangelists demonstrate at the shows. Despite that, it does look fancy - but then every new generation of Windows looks fancier than the last. It's amazing what you can do with coloured pixels on a flat 2D screen and you sometimes wonder "why didn't it look THIS good LAST time when the hardware hasn't changed?" So what will the NEXT version of Windows look like? And why can't it look like that now?
And what has made me go "ooh, pretty!" so far? Of course it's the little things, like the Recycle Bin graphic (which looks like a glass of ice cubes when full), or the ability to see Disk I/O in Task Manager and tell which BASTARD process is making the machine grind (yes, that's you, Search Indexer {{BANG}}). There's basically more of everything - more information, better icons, proper zoom in Paint (1/8 to 8x), Media Centre edition is now built in (to Ultimate edition, anyway), and so on.
I received an email from our IT department requesting that I keep my desktop machine running Windows XP as it was "less than an optimal candidate" for upgrading to Windows Vista. Keeping machines like mine back in the stone age would mean they would have a large enough pool of test clients for security patches and the like (we eat our own dogfood). How I laughed - I want SHINY and I want it NOW, even if the machine will be dragged to its knees (I can always use the laptop...).
So, everybody, start saving up! Not for Vista but for the super graphics card and the gigabytes of RAM that will make your eventual purchase of the new Windows something you will really appreciate. Remember, shiny is good.
No, I cannot spell "shiny" properly. This blog has been a major trial for me...
So I have finally succumbed to the internal marketing and installed Windows Vista on my trusty Dell laptop. Setup went well although I was slightly worried by the "this may take a few hours" information - it was an upgrade (rather than the light-speed installation you could do on a freshly-formatted disk) and watching next-gen progress bars can be fun...
Sadly, although the machine has enough power in the disk and CPU departments, it fails on the most important resource - graphics. If you don't have 128MB of video memory then you're not going to get the sweet stuff that the evangelists demonstrate at the shows. Despite that, it does look fancy - but then every new generation of Windows looks fancier than the last. It's amazing what you can do with coloured pixels on a flat 2D screen and you sometimes wonder "why didn't it look THIS good LAST time when the hardware hasn't changed?" So what will the NEXT version of Windows look like? And why can't it look like that now?
And what has made me go "ooh, pretty!" so far? Of course it's the little things, like the Recycle Bin graphic (which looks like a glass of ice cubes when full), or the ability to see Disk I/O in Task Manager and tell which BASTARD process is making the machine grind (yes, that's you, Search Indexer {{BANG}}). There's basically more of everything - more information, better icons, proper zoom in Paint (1/8 to 8x), Media Centre edition is now built in (to Ultimate edition, anyway), and so on.
I received an email from our IT department requesting that I keep my desktop machine running Windows XP as it was "less than an optimal candidate" for upgrading to Windows Vista. Keeping machines like mine back in the stone age would mean they would have a large enough pool of test clients for security patches and the like (we eat our own dogfood). How I laughed - I want SHINY and I want it NOW, even if the machine will be dragged to its knees (I can always use the laptop...).
So, everybody, start saving up! Not for Vista but for the super graphics card and the gigabytes of RAM that will make your eventual purchase of the new Windows something you will really appreciate. Remember, shiny is good.
No, I cannot spell "shiny" properly. This blog has been a major trial for me...
Labels: Microsoft, Shiny, Vista, Windows
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