Category Archives: Event

Dallas Cowboys 28, Detroit Lions 27

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[update: It didn't happen. The Patriots dominated the Steelers and appear to be on the road to a flawless season. Well done.]

How ’bout ‘dem Cowboys?! I thought only one thing could happen today to make NFL week 13 one to remember: Pittsburgh defeating New England thereby putting a major blemish on the otherwise amazing Patriots season. I am still cheering for the Steelers after the refs made their presence known in the Baltimore Ravens’ near-win against the Patriots in week 12.

What I didn’t expect was my favorite team, the Cowboys, to struggle as they did against the Detroit Lions today at Ford Field. Given the Cowboys’ amazing, come-from-behind victory, week 13 will be memorable for me regardless of what happens today in Foxboro. Here is a summary of the scoring drives courtesy of Fox Sports (note the game winning touchdown pass with 0:18 left in the game). Go Cowboys!

NFL 2007 - Week 13 - Dallas Cowboys vs. Detroit Lions

It’s official, I hate Ford Field. Oh, I also hate regional restrictions on televised games. Who cares about the Seahawks playing the Cardinals anyway?

Back from the Land of the Rising Sun

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I am just returning to Seattle from Tokyo where I was the keynote speaker for Remix Japan. About 1500 people attended the event held at the Tokyo International Forum on Wednesday, September 19. In addition to the 80-minute keynote, I also presented a 50-minute general session for all attendees.

The keynote and general session covered various aspects of Microsoft’s Software+Services initiative and our broad Web platform, tools and services portfolio. Following the 3 hours for the back-to-back keynote and general session I spent another 3 hours in the afternoon doing interviews & briefings with members of the Japanese press.

It was my first time visiting Japan and the trip was too short for me to really take Tokyo and its 12+ million residents in. I spent the morning of Sep 18 meeting with my colleagues in the Microsoft Japan building near Shinjuku station (the busiest train station in the world). We then spent the rest of the day in rehearsals with the various partners and Microsoft staffers who were preparing demos for the keynote and general sessions. I left my hotel room at the Park Hyatt—the hotel featured in the movie Lost in Translation…it’s amazing!—at 9 AM and returned just before midnight. I was in the bed by 1 AM and up again at 6 AM to make it to the venue by 8 AM for final keynote preparations. The keynote started at 10 AM.

Tokyo Panorama from Park Hyatt room 4216
Picture of Tokyo from Park Hyatt
Nikon D200, Nikon 18-200 f/3.5 @ 18mm f/16, ISO 400, 1/80
Panorama captured from room 4216 at the Park Hyatt hotel. It consists of 5 individual, landscape photos taken by hand (no tripod) then stitched together as described in my panorama tutorial.

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On Vacation after Attending Annual Sales & Marketing Conference

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Hi everyone. I wanted to let my faithful readers know I am still around and getting some much-needed and much-deserved rest and relaxation over the next couple weeks. Along with catching up on the many projects and chores that have piled up on my things-to-do list, TB and I are also attending a wedding in Philadelphia and visiting my family in Dayton.

I also have quite a few things to blog about to make up for the silence enveloping my blog these last couple months. Three posts in three months is embarrassing so I will endeavor to write several posts before the end of the month. Let’s start right now…

Last week I was in Orlando for Microsoft’s annual sales conference, MGX. MGX is a massive event with over 16,000 employees from all around the world all congregating to review the last fiscal year and prepare for the upcoming fiscal year. We took over most of the world of Disney spanning the Orange County Convention Center (OCCC) to Amway Arena and all the hotels in the vicinity. It was quite an amazing experience witnessing how truly diverse and multi-national the company is, and just how hard sales & marketing folk can party. I attended MGX to present a 75 minute session to our worldwide audience marketing managers about how to increase satisfaction, adoption and revenue of Microsoft’s Web platform & tools.

I stayed at Rosen Centre Hotel which is adjacent to OCCC. The hotel is average but in an excellent location for conferences at OCCC.

Lowlight: The keynotes were definitely blah lasting about 9 hours from start to finish. Exec after exec got on stage and said almost exactly the same things. It was my first time attending this event so I am not sure what, if anything, I can share in this forum. Coincidentally, Microsoft reported 4th quarter and FY07 earnings the same day as the keynotes so a lot of what we heard regarding the state of the business was also reported to financial analysts covering the company that afternoon.

Highlight: I was able to have dinner with one of my first cousins who lives in Orlando and his son. That made the humid, hot & unbearable July weather in Orlando worth the trip.

Air travel is getting tedious and cumbersome with each trip. Security screening is still woefully inefficient even though passengers and TSA agents should know the drill by now. My flights were all delayed. My connections were all too tight. The combination of the last two resulted in me having to run to catch connecting flights in both the Los Angeles and Denver airports. I made my connections but arrived in my seat smelling a bit ripe, I’m sure.

I did experience a first on one of my flights: I got a shout-out (along with 2 other frequent flyers) from the purser on my United Airlines flight from LAX to MCO (Orlando) on my way to MGX. She said each of our names and thanked us for our continued business and loyalty to United after completing the flight safety review. I felt special at least for a moment and it cost the airline nothing to make that simple gesture. Well done.

I attained United Mileage Plus 1K status this year which means I accumulated at least 100,000 Elite Qualifying Miles (EQMs) in 2006. I just checked and I’m only at ~42,000 EQMs so far in 2007 and it’s almost August! Either I won’t be 1K again come Feb 2008 or I have some serious flying to do in the next 5 months. Talk about a lose-lose. :sad: I guess returning to my regular old Premier Executive status won’t be too bad. :wink:

The Color Purple

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TB and I are in Chicago this weekend visiting family and friends. It is always great catching up with our peeps but this trip would be even more exciting because TB’s mom, Momma B, had purchased tickets for all of us to go see The Color Purple musical. The production has been on Broadway since December 2005 and arrived in Chicago’s Cadillac Palace theater a couple weeks back.The Color Purple

The Color Purple is Momma B’s favorite movie of all time so when she heard the musical was coming to Chicago she was all over it. We attended the 2PM, Saturday show. The score, singing, ambience, set, props, lighting and audience were all terrific. The show is 2 hours and 40 minutes of all the best scenes from the movie (and book) with a bunch of on-stage elements mixed in. There were many black women in the audience who all seemed to have a strong emotional connection to all the characters either from previous readings of the book or having watched the movie for the umpteenth time during their lives. The delight, the scorn, the pain and the hope that weaves throughout the story bounced back and forth between the actors and those of us in the audience.

The acting was superb. The actress portraying Ms. Sophia stole the show. The main actress playing Celie was amazing too, but Sophia had all the spunk and classic one-liners that make the novel and movie classics — Oprah should be proud. LaToya London, of American Idol fame, played Nettie. The only disappointment was Michelle Williams who played Shug Avery. As a member of Destiny’s Child (Are they still a group?) and with a couple successful gospel albums under her belt, I expected more from her vocals than she delivered. Her acting was ok.

I highly recommend this show. It is definitely worth a trip to Chicago or NYC.

What is Really Important

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Microsoft Silverlight

Back in early March, I wrote briefly about all the changes taking place at work at that time. One of the first things I mentioned was I had taken on “a great deal more responsibility” in our organization. During the past 6 weeks, that increase in responsibility has resulted in our broader team working tirelessly toward the launch of a new technology, Microsoft® Silverlight™, culminating with last night’s press release and today’s announcement at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas.

With all the buzz building around the Silverlight announcements in the news and blogosphere today, paired with the strides we are positioned to make in this space, these are truly exciting times in the Server & Tools business at Microsoft. It seems all the hard work and long hours and exhausting attention-to-detail and stress and disgruntled spouses and poor eating habits, etc. were indeed well worth it. In this tiny sliver of time, we are part of something rare and that provides vindication and gives a little meaning to why we do what we do.

That was until that other news story about the shootings at Virginia Tech University hit the wire and quickly reminded all of us what is really important. Thirty-three confirmed deaths and counting. Why? No one will ever know.

Technorati Top 10 - April 16, 2007 So what does Silverlight have to do with the VTU killings? Both, everything and nothing.

Many of us take our work very seriously at Microsoft. Some would argue too seriously. At the same time, we joke about what it is we actually do and don’t do in a typical workday and how that maps to our job descriptions. For example, “Human E-mail Filter,” “Meeting Room Chair Warmer,” and “Keyboard and Mouse Stress Tester” are a few I have heard used. Still, we take the good with the bad because what we do for a living impacts the world.

Today, I woke up anxious to see how Silverlight would fare in the news cycle. The announcement was the most important thing on my mind. Many of those VTU students probably woke up thinking about their classes with final exams as the most important thing on their minds. None of us probably gave a passing thought to the real possibility that we would not live to see tomorrow.

The world has a way of reminding each of us what is really important. It is amazing how something like Silverlight, that seemed so big just last night, pales in comparison to the loss of life at VTU today. Silverlight went from being everything to being nothing.

Thankfully, it appears those of us who spend way too much time on computers got the wake-up call…at least briefly. The image to the left shows the top 10 searches on the Technorati blog search engine today. Virginia Tech is (rightfully) at the top. Silverlight is sandwiched between Don Imus and Paris Hilton. Great! :sarcastic: