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!