Brandon Live!

Last week, Dane Glasgow announced that he was leaving Microsoft.  Recently, Dane has been the General Manager for the Live Search team.  I first met Dane at the Search Champs “v2″ event back in April of 2005, around the time that Desktop Search was first released at Microsoft.  We were treated to a dinner hosted by MSN, and Dane was one of three that evening to suggest that I send in a resume.  A few shorts months later, and I joined the WDS team, which fell under Dane’s pervue at the time.  Having worked (indirectly) for Dane for over a year, I can say with great confidence that Microsoft is losing one of its finest.

Dane’s “official” farewell party was on Thursday, and included the presentation of a custom-embroidered T-shirt that dozens who’d had the pleasure to work with Dane signed beforehand.   Of course, a few stragglers had a bit more of a challenge scribbling their autographs…

It was great working with you Dane.  Best of luck “out there.”

I’ve been a bit of a slacker blogger lately, but not without good reason.  One of several things taking up my time is Tusubira - the non-profit organization that I’ve been working with for a while now, and the related trip to Uganda that I’ll be taking at the end of this summer.

Why do I bring this up?  Well, fellow MS blogger Sanaz Ahari made a post earlier this month linking to a video I’d not seen before, with some incredibly interesting data about the distribution of wealth, health, and technology over the last 30 or so years between and within countries from all around the world.  It’s not the shortest video ever, and if you’re used to watching 30 second news blurbs you might not get much out of this as it’s a bit longer than your average NBC world news segment.  But the data presented is so compelling, and the presentation so engaging, that I had to share it.