CurtBlog

I did find an apartment a couple weekends ago and should be starting to move in around the first of May.  haven't had much time to think about it, but i'm jazzed about the place.  it has pretty much everything I was looking for: location, decent kitchen, balcony big enough to grill on.  it's a gut rehab just completely redone a couple years ago, so everything is almost new.  and central heat and air, which is unusual to find in the city to some degree.  should be fun.

wow, what a week.  i think i may have pulled the first all-nighter of my life last night.  worked about 30 hours straight.  but the site did go live in time for the big Microsoft launch day.  what site you ask?  oh yeah, this one:

http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/vsrapideval/

what i've been deep in since 2 Mondays ago.  what day is it again?  anyway, it came together nicely at the end.  there is still some cleanup to do and some bug fixes, but it's generally there.  and mentioned on the Visual Studio .NET 2003 homepage 4 links down, so that's cool.

anyway, tomorrow should be a bit of a breather and hopefully we'll get to party a little with a couple of our new Microsoft friends tomorrow night.  meanwhile, i'm going to catch up on some much needed ....ZZZZZZ

got back last night from the first week in Redmond.  it was rather interesting to finally see the Microsoft campus and meet a few people.  most of the week we were either working at the hotel or at Microsoft.  I will say if you are going out to work at Microsoft, plan on getting a hotel with highspeed access as it is next to impossible to get any level of access other than port 80 at Microsoft.  You would think they would have a visitor lan or something that opened up most of the common ports to the outside, but no.  So that was a bit of a pain.

Seattle is a beautiful city.  My first time on the west coast. The furthest west I had been before was Colorado.  I've been in almost every state east of the Mississippi and quite a few on the other side.  So I've done quite a bit of travel, but never out there.  I felt a bit like I was on the set of Twin Peaks with the amazing trees, lakes and mountains.  I'm hoping at the end of next week I have a bit of free time to enjoy it a bit more.

One highlight was I got to meet Scott Guthrie briefly.  Our deadlines are very tight on this project, so we didn't have much time to talk.  I'm hoping to meet some of the rest of the ASP.NET team and maybe see some of the new things they are working on.

well, my first week of work is already over.  it went great.  i'm really enjoying it and my coworkers are a lot of fun.  getting ready to go out on this cold day to look for apartments.  this is prime apartment time in the near north area of Chicago.  for some reason a lot of leases run from either May 1 or Oct 1.  No one has explained why to me yet,  but that is the case.  anyway, there are a ton of apartments available right now and with the economy being bad, rents are a bit lower than they have been and there are even move-in incentives, which is very unusual for these desirable neighborhoods.  so i guess i'm hitting it at a good time.  if anything, there are so many I'm a bit overwhelmed on where to start.