Archive for February, 2007
February 26, 2007 at 6:26 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
In the past weeks I didn’t had much time to complete my learning courses because I was so busy with the projects I had to work on. Today was learning day, and I completed about a dozen online courses to get back on track. I still have quite a few to go, but if I keep up this pace, I’ll be done by the end of the week, and if all goes well by then I’ll be the lucky owner of a pack of Office Ultimate disks to install on the Vaio laptops so I can make the sysprep and install the ten laptops to have them shipped to the selected influential bloggers across Europe.
Courses of today:
How To Use The Roadmap / I had to refresh this to get the most of it. :) Didn’t take too long fortunately.
Getting Set Up / My basic set up tasks as a new Microsoft employee. Pretty important to know. Printed out the checklist to fall back on later.
Understanding Microsoft / Did the training before, but forgot to archive it and add it to the roleguide… So had to do it again. Nothing changed. It’s a course where you get to see and hear from Microsoft top executives; you have to complete this online training to understand how your job is affected by Microsoft’s mission, vision, history, organization, competitive pressures, and product life cycles, among other things. For every of the 7 business units you get to see who the competitors are, which is good to know. I only knew a few, the major players. Now I know them all. :) This course came with a really wicked video I just had to upload. It’s a great example of how you’re being pushed to deliver the best you’ve got. This video is the answer to my ‘Why Microsoft’ question. It doesn’t contain secret info, it’s just a great moral booster. I loved it.
Welcome to DPE / DPE, Developer Platform Evangelism, is where I fit in as an Enthusiast Evangelist. I’m not a technical guy, and I’m not a developer, but I love to learn how things work and I love to talk with the people who make it work. My job is to tell the world a little bit more about the products that are being released or have been released, to talk to the people behind the screens and to bridge the gap between the product and the consumer with an experience, an event or useful information. This course featured a video by Jon Beighle, Director of D&PE. It helped me discover the mission, value, and goals of the Enterprise Partner Group.
EveryDay Productivity / A course to preview my role within the organization. To help me find out where I fit in and to review my job description, commitments, deliverables and tasks. I still have to get my commitments lined up. I’ll have to get to that this week. Let’s say, before Thursday. That would be cool.
Finding Information At Microsoft / A short guide that provides you the tools and process for finding all kinds of information on the Microsoft intranet. There’s a gazillion http://project links on the intranet. Every product, every team, every single activity has its own place. You just have to figure out where and how. I printed the list, it’s 3 A4 pages long. All URLs and its not even close to complete, it’s just to ‘get you started’. I’ll be old and grey by the time I’ve checked all these locations. The coolest ones are obviously the ones where you can find demos and presentations. I think I’ll spend my lunchtime checking out a few every day and then when I like the content, I’ll subscribe to the team alias so I get notified of new thingies as soon as they’re out.
Your Security At Microsoft / Already did this back in December, but didn’t add it to the roleguide, so I had to do it again as well, just for the record. It’s an important course where Corporate IT and Physical Security have partnered to develop this general security awareness e-learning class. It goes over basic Physical Security best practices and IT Security policies to protect you, your property and company assets. It covers all areas from preventing tailgaters that follow you inside the secured areas of the building to tips for travelling and password creation. I learned quite some handy rules to create solid 10-digit passwords, but besides the cool travel tips, it’s mostly common sense.
The last one I did today was Peer Mentor Overview / this Peer Mentor training offers practical tools to help new employees (as well as their Peer Mentors) to communicate effectively, to transfer knowledge efficiently, to set learning goals, to understand learning styles, and manage their Peer Mentoring partnerships. My mentor is David Boschmans. We get along pretty good. It’s great to have someone to turn to when you have some small questions or issues to deal with, especially when there’s so much to learn and remember. I guess this is a course that doesn’t really end.
Tomorrow I’ll do another load of courses. It’ll be fun :)
February 25, 2007 at 6:25 pm ·
Filed under PR, Video, Community
Live Earth will use the global reach of music to engage people on a mass scale to combat our climate crisis. It will bring together more than 150 of the world’s top musicians for 24-hours of music from 7 concerts across all 7 continents. Live Earth will bring together an audience of more than 2 billion at the concerts and through television, radio, film, and the Internet. That audience, and the proceeds from the event, will create the foundation for a new, multi-year global effort to combat the climate crisis led by Vice President Al Gore. Kevin Wall, Worldwide Executive Producer of Live 8, is producing Live Earth.
The Save Our Selves is designed to trigger a mass-scale movement to combat our climate crisis. Our climate crisis affects everyone, everywhere. That’s who SOS is aimed at. The magnitude of the climate crisis makes it so that only a global response can begin to address it.
MSN was the first sponsor to sign on and support SOS in its efforts to combat our climate crisis, and looks forward to extending SOS’ efforts to mass audiences. As one of the world’s most popular Internet destinations, MSN will help SOS meet its goal of reaching more than two billion people. MSN aims to inspire the more than 465 million people around the world who visit MSN each month through the power of video, community, interactivity and meaningful content.
Links:
On a remotely related matter, on March 24th it’s international Shutdown Day. It’s not related to the Live Earth event, but it’s also an initiative with a ‘community’ background. Basically it’s to see what would happen if as many people as possible would turn off their computers for just one day. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate.
Here’s a funny clip to support this project, which highlights alternative uses for laptops. Do not try this with your corporate equipment.
Links:
February 25, 2007 at 5:16 pm ·
Filed under PR, Buzz
I know it’s been around, but I still think it’s pretty cool and since I’ve just received a ton of images of the event, I thought I’d link them up here. You’ve probably read it on the TechEblog already, or on dozens of other blogs, but in case you didn’t see it yet, here’s what the Vista launch team in Toronto pulled for their launch event:
And here’s a selection of the load of pictures I’ve received: Read the rest of this entry »
February 21, 2007 at 6:10 pm ·
Filed under Buzz, MicroLife, Projects
Sunny greetings from Switzerland. I’ve just finished interviewing Urs Muller, Matthias Rambold and Kalle Vänskä for a nice report for either Channel 9 or Channel 10, or wherever it fits in. The first interview was about the MWPSK, -my web pages starter kit - an ASP.NET Starter Kit application to build and manage websites online with all common pages types, forms, user management, rich text editor, html editor, events, news, downloads, guestbook and a ton of other features. I sat down with Urs Muller and Matthias Rambold and we discussed this fully functional Content Management System. Agreed, there are hundreds of CMS platforms out there already, but this one is a little bit special. As soon as the editing is done, I’ll publish the video here.
It doesn’t use a database, comes with a 1-2-3 easy setup, it’s open source AND it comes with 16 starter design templates out of the box. Reason enough to go have a little chat with the creators of this experiment.
Codeplex Link for the MWPSK
The other interview was with Urs Muller and Kalle Vänskä about UniveRSS, the three dimensional RSS reader that has been built as a showcase for WPF. UniveRSS leverages the Windows Presentation Foundation and provides a stunning way of visualizing RSS feeds and their content. It introduces a full-screen 3D universe where galaxies represent the folders of your RSS feed directory, and the stars are represented by the spinning cubes that hold the feed information. Size and position of the feed cubes indicate how many unread items they contain.
This cool thingy just got upgraded and now plays Flash movies that are embedded in blog posts, so for instance when you subscribe to a blog that posts DailyMotion or YouTube clips, you can play the content right away without leaving the application. In the demo (also online soon, when the editing is done) there’s also a part where Kalle shows the real-time integration by means of an earthquake tracker. The RSS lists all recent posts, and when you click on a post a small application is loaded inside UniveRSS which shows a globe with a pinpointer where the event took place. Clicking that pinpointer will load Virtual Earth in the application so you can easily see the map of the region. A click on an icon opens up an browser window where you can see more Virtual Earth details and use the navigation better.
Link to UniveRSS
After the video interviews I went to the Microsoft headquarters in Zurich to meet up with Christian Frei, and we talked a little about a future project of which I can’t say much but it’s going to be really cool to help set it up. It’s not really my project, but I’m very excited about it and I’ll help out wherever I can.
Then I went back to the hotel. I managed to reschedule my flight to tonight so I don’t have to leave tomorrow at noon, because I really have to finish the laptop project I’m working on. Damn, I love this job.
February 15, 2007 at 11:50 pm ·
Filed under Uncategorized
test - yeeeey back online !!!
February 13, 2007 at 12:51 pm ·
Filed under Video, XBox 360
Check out this cool compilation I found of the XBox 360 marketing campaign, the gadgets that have been launched, the add-ons and the pwnage over the PS3 page. The power of advertising… Funny and so true :)
Video link
February 12, 2007 at 11:38 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
Here’s some random thoughts about my visit to The States.
- American people are really friendly, they always come up to you and wish you a good day. They’re very talkative.
- The food comes in massive massive portions. It never happened that I could finish my plate. In some restaurants, single person portions can be compared to a meal for an entire family back in Belgium.
- There’s a lot of war veterans in the streets who are homeless. That’s too bad. They went out to fight for their country because they had to (or wanted too, let’s leave that in the middle) and they end up with a cardboard sign asking for money. That’s just not right. (Although a local guy said a lot of the homeless people sport those signs just to get some money, so I’m kind of confused here)
- I still don’t get the difference between black cabs, yellow cabs and orange cabs - apart from the difference in color of the cars.
- There are some MASSIVELY big SUVs riding around here. My small European car can easily fit two or three times in one superlarge SUV.
- Bartenders can’t make decent Mojitos. I think they actually count the leaves of mint they put in the drink, and sometimes it looks like the mint is like fish in a small aquarium. 6 to 7 little leaves, floating around.
- Strawberry-banana smoothies are awesome.
- I’ll never order maxi-sized menus in a burger place. Even the kiddie-portions are oversized for me. Despite the fact I didn’t eat that much, I still felt bloated.
- The stores are open until 8 or 10 PM, which is weird if you come from a country where everything is closed at 6 PM.
- Drug stores don’t sell real drugs. It’s a cool name, but it’s mostly an oversized grocery store.
- If you see a movie on tv, it takes 3 times as long to finish seeing it, because of all the commercial breaks. I saw the same woman lose 30 pounds 5 times before the movie ended. At the end of the movie, she was severely underfed.
- If you look at 15 commercials, you’re almost sure you have 7 diseases that were featured in it, and you need the medicins they promote to get better.
- Mexican food isn’t really Mexican if you eat it in a place where regular (white) Americans serve it.
- Sushi might seem super yummy, but I still think fish is meant to be roasted or baked. Eating raw fish feels like participating in some sort of ‘Expedition Robinson’. I think I’ll only do it when I’m deprived of ‘real’ food. I don’t know why.
- Deciding how much you’d tip the waiter is the hardest part of going out for dinner. 10%? 15? 20? Why don’t they just pay those guys a normal wage and make it a little more expensive on the menu? What’s the rule here? And how much are you supposed to tip for a cab? Do you have to tip the bus driver as well then? Or the guy who drives the train?
- If you go to a bakery that has every sign written in French, that’s just an excuse to charge more. ‘Le croissant’ tastes and looks exactly the same as ‘a croissant’, but it almost costs a dollar more for one extra letter.
February 9, 2007 at 10:41 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
It’s been a great week. I got to see Bill Gates and really liked the things he announced and discussed in his keynote. He even talked about Second Life. Hah, imagine that! It’s one of the memorable moments of this TechReady week. After the keynote we went back to the Microsoft campus in Redmond to meet up with some more people and to enjoy the atmosphere there. Video shooting, hanging around, talking… networking. I think I’ve been able to create a solid base for future projects in which I can include a lot of people to scale it, and to me that’s really important.
I liked the TechReady atmosphere, but the sessions I attended (the few of them) were a bit too technical and went way too far into details to be ‘understandable’ to me. I have a very limited tech background, and I do want to know and understand how things work, but seriously, I’m not going to be an overnight wizzkid that all of the sudden will start coding the kernel or some sort of sequel server patch. I’m a people guy, I need practical cases I can demo to my audience. That’s why I felt a bit ‘left out’, together with some of the other EEs. We need more tangible things. That’s exactly why we went to look for them on the campus.
I got a chance to talk with Joe Wilson, the director of DPE, about ‘my commitments’ and how to set them, about the deliverables that come with them and how to measure those. Really interesting. I should get on it as soon as I get home.
Today’s closing keynote by Chris Bangle, BMW’s Chief of Design, was really impressive. He had a great story to tell, with lots of valuable insights that could really be applied to a lot of the things we do at Microsoft. It was absolutely worth the time spent there, and I even got some nice ideas to include similar examples in my future presentations.
All in all I enjoyed my stay here in Seattle. I met a lot of people with whom I’m still actively discussing things over email, because of the lack of time. I met the coolest colleagues a man could wish for. I know now that my choice to go for Microsoft was the right one. Damn, I love to be where I am.
My plane back goes in a few hours. We’re in the hotel lobby right now, chilling a bit to wait for the others to arrive, and then we’ll go for sushi. A cab later we’ll be at the airport waiting for the plane.
February 9, 2007 at 1:59 am ·
Filed under MicroLife
So, we went up to the Zune building to get a tour around the Bear Creek premises, and we were right in time to party-crash a private concert from Young Love, an artist from New York who’s going to sell his music on the Zune Marketplace. The guy’s really good. I like his music. Cesar Menendez showed us around after the mini-concert and I have to say, the Zune people have a really cool and spacy office. Very funky, just like the product they’re marketing.
Then we went to Building 20, where the Channel 9 + 10 crowd is housed. Larry took us to the new studio they’re setting up and Paul and Nic toyed around with the greenkey a bit. I got lost in the building while searching for the kitchen, and I ended up in some wicked place with pizzas the size of a table. America really sees things ‘big’. We had a great talk and some productive conversations as to where we need to take it with the production of video content and I learned quite a few good tips and tricks to have a good time with the editing to come to a cool result. I can’t wait to start shooting videos of my own.
When we got back to Building 18 to wait for a taxi, we accidentally party-crashed a DPE after-hours meet up. Nic took the party-crashing a little too serious, and decided to help Microsoft re-evaluate the construction plan of the building. No children were hurt during the incident. We drank something and met up with some more Microsoft people while we were waiting for our taxi.
Later that evening we went to the DPE dinner/party at ‘The Garage’, a place with a dozen of pool tables and some bowling lanes. I suck at playing pool, but Arlindo, our Belgian IT Pro Evangelist is really good at it. Too bad he wasn’t on my team. Hans tried to make up for my clumsy game, but I screwed up big enough so have us lose the games we played. Then again, I won at bowling and since one bowling game counts for 10 pool games… :-) - Ah well, I had a great time and a lot of good laughs.
Some pictures:
Wouldn’t this neon light thingy look great in your room?
Young Love in concert:
Me taking a pic of Jesse taking pics of Nic who’s filming:
February 6, 2007 at 11:15 pm ·
Filed under MicroLife
The second day of the EE summit, last Sunday, was pretty interesting too. We had demo sessions with Q&A about how to set up things as good as possible when you’re video-interviewing someone, and we also had some more background info about Channel 9 and Channel 10. Then we had discussions about what sort of content we should produce for the Channel 10 website and how the Enthusiast Evangelists should look at their role and the position they take within the company on the one hand, and within communities of influentials on the other.
Later that day, we did a session where each of the EEs could tell what they were doing, what they’ve done and what they were up to, so we could help each other out if something would come up.
Then yesterday, on Monday, it was the opening day of TechReady. The event is massively huge, with 6000+ attendees and they have breakfast and lunch buffet for everyone. I’ve never seen so much food on display ever. Rows and rows and rows of blueberry pancakes, bacon and eggs, fruit and salad… and people from all over the world.
Steve Ballmer’s keynote was everything I expected and more. He’s a bomb of energy and ambition, running up and down the stage with motivational words and bashing comments. I got really boosted up when he was finished. I didn’t take any pictures, but my colleagues did, so tonight at the hotel I try and get my hands on them to post them here.
Unfortunately, the other speakers didn’t bring their content as captive, so I got a little bored. I was also a little tired, so I had a hard time not to fall asleep. It’s soooo difficult to sit in a dark room listening to people who just wrap up numbers and stats. Argh. It’s not that I lack respect or so… it’s just… you know… when you’ve just seen the great Ballmer show, anything that follows is quite a bummer.
We fled the scene and went to the Redmond Campus. Neil Woodgate showed us around at the mobile lab, something that kind of comes close to gadget heaven. The designers that work there are having the time of their life, and the amount of devices that got developed but never made it to the market is quite impressive. We had an iphone years ago. Hah! I still don’t get it why people are so overjoyed about it. That iphone looks cool, don’t get me wrong… but really. Touch screens are a pain in the ass on mobile devices, I’ve experienced it a lot. Some devices aren’t made to be controlled by touch. Phones are one of them. But yeah, the iphone looks cool. And that’s about it. At the mobile lab, rumor has it the countdown for Windows Mobile 6 has begun. As far as I got into the details, I think I’m going to upgrade my phone asap. Some funky new tweaks coming up, and an even better user interface… delicious. In less than a week, it’ll be live. I’ll post details as soon as I can.
Here’s a picture from the ‘ringtone composing equipment’, a music booth in the lab where they test and create ringtones.
So then after that we had a chance to wonder around freely. Jesse took us to the company store so we got to buy some branded goodies, and then we went to the building of Channel 9. I met up with Joshua Allen, who’s working on IE8, and we talked a little about the new things that would be present in the browser. Joshua’s pretty networked too, so Nic from APAC (the EE for Asian/Pacific Region) and Paul from UK joined in on a talk about the benefits of Barcamps and about getting involved with the communities, about Mix07 and loads of other interesting things.
Later that evening I met up with Hans (my boss) and the rest of the team to have a team dinner. We ended up in the hotel lobby for a last beer with Arlindo, David and Philippe, three other Belgian colleagues who just happened to sit there as well.
This morning I grabbed a cab back to Redmond, and I’ve been hanging out with Neil again, who showed me the datacenter of Windows CE, where all the coding is rendered and all the updates and new versions are being produced. Impressive place and cool people. I expected daylight-depraved nerds, but they were all nice and kind people.
Then Neil kicked me out because he actually had to do some work, and I went to Building 8 to have security make a badge for me so I’d have access all areas, and now I’m in the employee restaurant, writing this post and eating pizza. I’m meeting a few other EEs in a few, so I better get on with it.
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