Mike Ball

I realize that I haven’t been keeping up my end of this blogging deal, but I have an excuse. This moving stuff is distracting, especially when combined with a new job where I’m trying to learn what’s going on. I’m supposed to initiate a new area using an established framework, so I have to learn the framework. Talk about drinking from a firehose!

Anyway, I keep running around trying to get stuff set up in this apartment, while running back on weekends to sort stuff. It’s kept me busy.

Last night was the first time I did a workout at the apartment complex, and though the CV room was fine (it’s hard to screw up a bicycle) the weigh room had real problems. For example, there was no machine that let you do curls! They didn’t even have free weights. I’ll have to do something about that, either get some weights or find another place.

I went out looking for a Club One, which is the club that MS Pays for. I had an old address for it, and got thoroughly lost in the process. After I sorted that out, I found a Target where I bought a floor lamp so I had light in my bedroom. The store was being remodeled, and it looked like a hurricane had been through it. What I noticed was that people took it with good humor, and there was even a sense of camaraderie from the shared adversity. It was a lot different from the way I remember Palo Alto. People were friendly!

I think we’ll like it here better than in Palo Alto. It sort of makes it worth the trouble.

Well, I’m back on line in the Bay Area. I just got cable internet access installed in my apartment. It will probably take me a little while to get caught up on the various details. For example, I don’t have a printer, and I’m still in the process of setting up remote access to MicroSoft. I supposedly have the hardware, but knowing how to use it is something else.

I have a neat picture from my Seattle trip, but the software to put it on the blog isn’t set up yet.

Daily life is a work in progress.

Today I flew up to Redmond to meet with my peers at MicroSoft. The boarding pass, when I printed it out, said to be sure to arrive two hours early. Sooo… At great expense in terms of sleep, I got to the airport at 4:30 for my 6:30 flight. So did a lot of other people, all of whom were waiting for the check-in counter to open at 5:00. Once they finally opened, checking in and getting through the inspection took all of 15 minutes. Nobody was carrying on much, so the inspection was very fast.

There may be some times when getting to the airport two hours early is a good idea, but the first flight in the morning is certainly not it.

Once we got in the air, the flight was smooth and fast. I had a window seat, and got to admire the Cascade mountains on the way up. Seattle was warm and lovely. I’m sorry that I forgot my camera in the rush of outfitting my replacement briefcase.

My brother Charlie and his wife Donna came out to visit us in San Diego last week. It started out well, with the usual trips around the coast and mountains. We were trying to get a glimpse of the recent burn, but never did. Then, while Charlie and Donna took in Balboa Park and the zoo, I went and got the small moving truck I’d rented, and got ready to move some bare necessities up to the apartment. The trip was pleasant. We went through the mojave desert, over the Tehachapis, and then up the San Joaquin valley. Charlie saw stuff he’d never seen before, and all was good. We unloaded the truck, and I decided that an old man shouldn’t move stuff himself, even with the aid of his not quite so old brother, but we did get it unpacked and things are ready for me to move up next week. Thanks, Charlie.

Then we decided to go visit San Francisco, and the fun started. We were parked near fisherman’s wharf, and when we got back to the car after doing the tourist routine, the car was open, and somebody had stolen Donna’s purse and my briefcase. Donna and Charlie lost both their passports, both of their phones, all id, and the usual sort of purse stuff. I lost my brand new laptop, my Microsoft badge, my ipod, and some junk. We went to the police station to report it, which took a while, but was evidently enough to let Donna talk her way through airport checkin. I toted up what I had lost and it came out to about $20 more than my insurance deductible.

Important lesson: Your trunk is not secure. According to the police there is a device available that will unlock essentially any remote-control car locks with no skill required.

I’m now officially a MicroSoft employee, having gone through their new employee orientation course. Interestingly, it took a little over two hours to do in Silicon Valley. Had I been in Redmond, I understand that it would have taken a day and a half. In my estimation it had about 15 minutes of useful content, which I could have gotten myself from written or online material. Oh well, at least they fed us lunch.

I’m excited. I had trouble sleeping Monday night, and went to bed early after I got home on Tuesday. Since then I’ve been studying pretty much non-stop. In my spare time, I want to get all of the information I collected when I was working on HPCS transferred to my professional page online. This means carefully filtering out the stuff that is proprietary or confidential, which takes a while. I’m glad that I have an industrial-strength shredder for the paper copies.