Like I promised, I have finally uploaded pictures of my office. It is really nice as you see :)

Well my trainee showed up this Tuesday. He graduated from the University of Arizona. He reminds me a lot of me three months ago. Also a little cautious, wondering if there is something more he should be doing, and always thinking he broke something. Yep, just like me :) Hopefully I can help ease his transition into my next project, with the last week.

Wow, just saying that I only have one week left blows my mind. My time has gone by so fast. I can't wait to be back here next year for my next internship. And after my latest rounds of scholastic planning, who knows maybe I will go for a hat trick of internships :)

Other than the new employee not much is new here. Things are winding down at work. I don't have much new work, mainly just assuring that everything is running smoothly. I have a presentation for my team of about 40 people this Thursday on my project. Hopefully everything will go smoothly with that.

Well, this is probably the last time I will write from Seattle, but I do plan to continue the habit of writing in this blog for the future. That way at least my parents can know what is happening in my life.

Winding Down

It is crazy to think that I only have two more weeks at work. Time has gone by so fast. It is too bad that I don't already have my PhD, or I would start working at MS immediately. I have really enjoyed the work here. I had my final code review this week. Everyone thinks that my coding style is really well done. I now just have to come up with a mock interface for it before my demo. Unfortunately I will not be able to finish the real interface, so what I come up with will just have to do. I hope that my replacement will be able to finish that. I get to start training my replacement next week, so I am excited to meet him when he comes on Monday.

So, as you can all tell work is going really great. This has to be the best job that I have ever had, hands down. I really love all aspects of working for Microsoft. Besides just work Microsoft has a lot of great events. This week we had a puzzle day competition. What it is, was that for the entire day on Saturday, me and a team of 9 others got together and solved themed puzzles all day. The solutions to these puzzles led to the solution of two main puzzles, and based on how you did, you got different places. Though my team only took 11th place it was still really fun. Next year I am sure we will do better. I will know how it works, and can focus on winning.

Overall I can say, I can't wait to come back here next summer. I hope my manager can work it out so that I will be on the same team. If not, I am sure I will love wherever I am placed.

Happy Fourth of July!!!

Happy Fourth of July!!! I hope everyone went out and saw some fireworks. Me and my roommates went to see them. They were really nice. It was funny, traffic and parking were great to get there, but getting out of the parking garage was epic! We spent over an hour inside of the parking garage. The funny think was that traffic on the street was pretty empty. It was just bizarre to be stuck in the car for so long.

Other than that work keeps going on. It is crazy for me to remember that I only have three weeks left. I am doing well in my projects, and I have made a good impression on my team. My team leader has already begun to talk with the budgeting team to make sure that they can get me back next year as a full-time hire. I admit, this is the first time in my life, I have had a valid alternative to graduate school. We will just have to see what happens with that. Luckily I don't need to decide till next year.

Well that is all from me. Sorry that nothing much happened this week for me to report about. I do hope you all have amazing stories to tell me when I get home.

Party in Tacoma

Another week has gone by and I am still alive. It was touch and go for a little bit, but I survived. SharePoint server has consistently dominated me. I still don’t have it up and running. I am just about ready to give up. Hopefully I can finish solving it this week. Luckily I have been finished with my commitments since week 5, so technically I don’t have to finish anything else to have a successful internship, but that wouldn’t be any fun J

Work is really exciting overall. It is about the only thing that could compete with graduate school for my interest. I am glad that decision is still about two years away. I just wish there was some way I could do both. I will just have to excel this year and next year at my internships and pray that I do so well they can’t resist giving me such an offer. It is very unlikely, but there is an outside chance I can convince them to do it.

This weekend we had the Washington YSA conference. It has been just a blast. I have enjoyed this time greatly. On Friday there was a bunch of games and then we saw some YSA produced shorts. It was a lot of fun. Kirby and Corben (LDS movie people) came and played for us as well. It was good fun.

On Saturday we had some good time listening to several talks, as well as doing a little West Coast Swing dancing. I really enjoyed myself. In the evening we did some boating and ate a really good fish and chips restaurant.

Lastly, an event which I just got back from, we went and listen to Lavelle Edwards speak. It was a nice fireside. He talked about the importance of really knowing ourselves. I just wished he had talked a little more about football ;) Oh well.

I hope all of you are having a blast this summer just like me!

New Office!

Well MS Move did a good job moving me to my new office. I must say I love having my own office. It is really nice and spacious. I will take pictures this next week and then show them to everyone. I really like it though. I have two white boards all to my self, I think this must be what heaven is like :)

The week was also really productive. I am finally caught back up to where I was after I started rewriting my code. It was an interesting process but it is done. Now I am stuck at trying to install new software. Installing software is really a pain in the butt.

Other than a new office this week has been pretty standard. I had my mid-point evaluation, but that was all good, so, nothing much to report in that area. This weekend I did go to a BYU intern event. We all went to the arcade. I guess I am starting to grow up, because the arcade wasn't that interesting to me :( Oh, the good old days of being eight, how I miss them. Hopefully I will have something a little more interesting next week. I will be going to the regional YSA event next weekend.

Until then, I hope you are all having a wonderful summer.

Well this was certainly a good week. I made really good progress on my project. I went from being 5 weeks a head of schedule to being two weeks behind schedule :) Oh well, maybe in the future I won't decide to throw away what I had done and start from scratch. Either way my boss has been happy with my work. He wanted to offer me a job starting next summer, but because of my time in China it will just be another internship. I still have to check with the flagship program if it something that I can do, but I hope that I will be able to.

I got a 3 and a half day vacation this week because of office moves. Come Monday I will have a huge office all to myself. I am really excited about this. It was also nice to have the additional time off. That Friday morning I went with my friends to breakfast to celebrate their birthdays and was introduced to how wonderful the Microsoft prime card was. We were able to get 2 for 1 on our food, essentially cutting the price of the dishes in half. It made what would have otherwise been an expensive meal a very well priced meal. It is really an awesome perk for working at MS.

Saturday we had a wonderful opportunity to go as a ward family and serve the grandparents of one of the ward members. We did all of the yard work for her, and then we helped her plant a garden. It was so much fun, and it was wonderful to be able to help someone that needed it. I really should spend more time doing stuff like this in the future. So Ryan, if you ever want help getting service projects together you have got my full support.

This Sunday I was also given a calling. I am... ummhh... how to put this... the acting Sunday school president. Yea, kinda weird. The deal is the ward already has a Sunday school president, but he is gone from the ward. The ward doesn't want to release him because then they would have to re-call him once I left. Officially I will be getting called as the first councilor, but I will have the responsibilities of the president. Hopefully I can make a good impact on the ward in the six weeks I have left. Pray for me!

Life goes on.

Well, not much happened this week. I did play tennis everyday of the week which was a lot fun. I really need to practice a lot more, or Chris will kill me when he gets home :)

Work is going really well. My project got an upgrade from prototype to feature in office 15 (i.e. Office 2012/2013). So it will be a long ways off before anyone gets to use what I am doing, but it will be a feature that is eventually shipped. I gave my first presentation on it at the developer all-hands meeting for my team. It got very good responses. I am really happy with the progress it is making.

And of course, since it was doing so well, I decided to re-write it from scratch =p. As all of you that know my coding style understand, re-writing is my favorite approach :) Hopefully this time I will get it right so I can pass it off. I already know who my replacement is. He will be starting work in 4 weeks. I will be responsible for training him and getting him up to speed.

Well, other than work and tennis nothing really happened. I hope you are all enjoying great weather like I am. Best of wishes.

-Scott

The Amazing Race

Well, life is going great in Seattle. The weather has been absolutely wonderful this last week, nearly no rain and just gorgeous sun. The only sad things is that I have not been able to get out and play tennis as much as I would want.

I am fully adjusted to working at Microsoft. All the meetings were hard to get used to at first, but now I am understanding what is being talked about. I really enjoy it here. All that talk about Microsoft burn and church doesn't seem to be true. I work about 7.5 - 8 hours a day, an hour of which is taken up with lunch, and my boss doesn't mind at all. My projects are also going well. I am ahead of schedule by about 5 weeks ahead of schedule. Hopefully that will give me the breathing room I needed to make sure that the last part of my project is executed already.

One cool thing for me has been the interest my project gets. I have already had two different feature teams express interest in seeing a demo. I am working with one of them to help them incorporate what I have done into their work. It is great.

As for fun stuff, this week was the Seattle YSA's Amazing Race. Basically for those that haven't seen the show, we go to several locations and have tasks to complete. It was a lot of fun. My team didn't have anybody local so we were really slow getting to the different locations. We came in dead last in our group, and ahead of only three of the other fifteen teams. Oh well, at least it was a blast. I got to see quite a few different locations around Seattle and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Driving is crazy in Washington, so luckily it wasn't me that was driving.

Well, I hope everything is going great for everyone. I wish the best summer to all of you.

-Scott

Life as Normal

Well life has pretty much settle down to normal. I am out of the first few weeks jitters. No more crazy movie parties for the entire office either :( Though my Admin did bring in a popcorn machine one day and we all stopped work to eat some popcorn and converse.

Work is progressing well on my project. I would tell you all about it, but I think that would cause you to pass out from boredom. Suffice it to say that I am doing very well, and that my boss is very impressed with my work.

One of the coolest thing that will happen is that in three weeks I will be moving and getting my own office. I was so surprised, but it will be really nice. My new office won't have a window, but it is the same size as the large room in the colony. The best part is I get it all to myself. Two whole whiteboards, I am in heaven :)

About the coolest thing that I did this week was install Windows 7 and Office 2010. Windows 7 RC is really stable, I think you will all love that OS when you get the chance to start using it. It blows vista and XP out of the water. It is so fast and easy to use. Office 2010 is even cooler, but unfortunately I can't tell you anything about it. Let me just say we are going to give google and open office a run for their money. It is a lot of fun working on the office team and getting to use our own products during development, it really gets you excited.

Well that is all from me. I will have some more exciting things to write about this next week. Tomorrow will probably be me moonlighting for CLS, but on Saturday there is a huge YSA activity that should rock. I wish you all of fabulous memorial day. Think of me while you enjoy your BBQ ;)

-Scott

First Post from Redmond

Hi everyone!!!

I know that in the past I have tried to keep everybody up to date with an e-mail, but that just seems so strange to me. I am going to try an update this blog every week or two to keep everyone up to date with what I am doing with my life.

So as you all know, I am in Redmond Washington for an internship with Microsoft. I got here on Friday. I quickly booked it to Costco to get my self stocked up. I got enough food to last me for about a month so I won't need to shop for a while :) Luckily I had a PT Cruiser for my first three days to get all my shopping done.

The house they have set us up with is just wonderful. I will send you pictures next week. I got in first so I was able to secure the master bedroom. It is much too large for me, but i will just have to live with it ;)

Sunday came and we went to a family ward, because we didn't know where the local singles ward was. Last week we found that one too. Singles wards outside of Utah sure are different :) It is going to be an interesting experience.

As for my internship, so far it has been a blast. It seems that they have us playing more often then they have us actually doing any real work. I know that seems strange and it is! I think in my first week they had more fun events then work events. Apparently they really want us to come back and work full time.

Working for Microsoft is also a lot different then any other company then I have worked at. They are so much more organized. Just as an example I give setting up e-mail. As anyone that has used Exchange e-mail knows there are a couple steps to go through to setup your e-mail. At Microsoft you open up Outlook and it auto-configures everything for you. It is pretty cool.

My setup at work is pretty nice. It is weird to be back down to 19" monitors, so I brought my 26" into work. It is the envy of all my co-workers. They all plan to ask the admin for new monitors come next fiscal year (July). Other than the monitors equipment is very plentiful. If we need anything we just have to ask and they get it for us. Very nice.

My team is also great. They are about 70% Chinese. That has been very different, but it has been fun to converse with them in Chinese. For the most part, I just stick with English, but sometimes I will switch over to Chinese. One of my coworkers is becoming my coach in technical Chinese, which is just great.

My project at work is to taken data from Excel worksheets and combine it together. So for example you might have two researchers that enter data on the same subject, but they each enter it in different places and formats. My project will take these different formatted data sources and combine them together so a third researcher could easily compare the data, or aggregate it together. It is a really cool project because it gives me a lot of room to be creative. I don't directly report to anyone besides my manager on this project, so I also have a lot of freedom.

As for Seattle, things are just great. It hasn't been too rainy, and when it is not raining the weather is just beautiful. Too beautiful in fact for there to every be any open Tennis courts. Me and Brandon are going to resort to going at 6:30 in the morning to get our Tennis fix. Daily tennis will hopefully get me good enough that I can give Chris a few good games when he gets back from his mission.

This last Saturday we also headed to Rattlesnake ridge. I have attached some pictures from there (I hope that worked...) It was pretty nice. It was a fun hike. The people I am with are my intern social group at Microsoft. We get together and do stuff on Microsoft's check. They are a great group of people.

And that brings everyone up to where I am now. Today we had Stake Conference which was really good. This afternoon I went through all 4000 pictures from my mission. Yep, 4000. I was amazed to see I had that many. It took a while to go through all of them and touch them up. It was great to relive some of those memories. I really miss the people on my mission, and can't wait until I get to see them again. I hope that I can make a stop in Taiwan on my way to China next year.

Well that is it for this week. If you have any questions please feel free to ask and I will answer them in my next post. Also if you think I should give more/less detail please let me know. I am writing this blog mainly for family and friends that are interested in seeing what I am up to.

See you all in three months!