Brandon Live!

I’m pleased to announce that the second tool to join the BrandonTools.com collection is now available!  It’s a new Sidebar Gadget for those who want to see what the indexer is up to and to easily control its behavior.

Click here for details.

Note that the screenshot depicts the gadget running on WS4.  The "index now" button is not available on versions prior to Windows Search 4.

A couple weekends ago some friends and I took a trip up to Whistler in Canada for a few days of winter fun.  It was my first time up there and I finally see why it has such a great reputation.

The skiing on both the Whistler and Blackcomb mountains was fantastic, and the weather was decent enough.  On our last day there, I stopped for lunch at the Longhorn saloon, the origin of Windows Vista’s codename (chosen because it sits between the Whistler and Blackcomb lifts).

 Update 2/23:  Apparently the infamous Fake Steve Jobs has linked to this two-week-old post because of the little anecdote at the end, with an interpretation I didn’t quite expect.  After all, the main purpose of “the wall” is to remind us how awesome the work we’re doing is by comparison.  As always, Fake Steve is good for a laugh, although it’s a bit less enjoyable when you’re the one being picked on!  ”Microtards?”  Ouch.  Of course, I think it should hardly be surprising that people in any business compare themselves to their competition.  Can you imagine any place where that doesn’t happen?

Like the Japanese car in the Dearborn auto plant parking lot, Macs and iPhones must create problems for switchers working at Apple competitors as well as companies with a PC-or-die IT policy.

He then goes on to link to this very blog!

However, Microsoft appears to be okay with at least one of its employees running Vista on a MacBook in the office. Blogger Chris Pirillo pointed to Brandon Paddock, a self-described geek who works on search technology at Microsoft (but not in the Microsoft Mac Business Unit, where it’s okay to show up with Mac hardware and software, or at least it is at the “SVC,” the Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, Calif.).

It’s true, I’m a Microsoft developer (on Windows no less) with a Macbook.  And an iPhone!  I’m also rather fond of both of them.

I’m not the only one, either.  I see as many iPhones as Blackjacks these days, maybe more.  It’s really an awesome device and it doesn’t surprise me at all that geekier folk would pick one up.

I also wasn’t the first on the shell team with a Macbook.  My friend David used to be an SDET on the team, but is now a PM.  His primary machine is a first-gen black Macbook.  I’m pretty sure I’ve seen at least one Macbook Pro in a nearby office, and my boss has an iMac at home.

Many of them are like me, and run Vista pretty much exclusively on them.  I know some didn’t even keep the OS X partition around when they installed it.  It’s neat to play with once in a while (and the VMware Fusion and Parallels stuff is getting really impressive), but not terribly useful for practical purposes, especially if your life revolves around building a competing OS.

If you do run OS X, you can even get it on our network, although some things like getting on the WiFi take a fair bit of extra work.  Luckily there’s an IT help page that walks you through it.

But as I said, in my case it’s pretty much a PC.  A stylish, well-put-together PC.  I even recently put a Vista orb sticker on top covering the backlit Apple logo (which likes to shine through while it’s running, creating an eerie, ghostly effect).  Not because anyone ever cared that I carried a Mac around, but because I’m very proud of the team I work on and what we do there.  And it fits perfectly =)

If I haven’t mentioned it before, I love working at Microsoft.  I love that I can carry a Macbook around to every meeting and have others think nothing of it.  I love that others on the team are willing to look at, use, and sometimes even live with our main competitor’s product.  I think it’s important to know what “the other side” is doing, and to understand what users are talking about when they make comparisons.  I think it’s also important that we respect the great things they’re doing down there, and strive to do better if we see some area where they’ve got an edge on us.

Little tidbit on that note:  One day a friend of mine on the team printed off a couple dozen screenshots of Leopard, showing off various tasks the user can do in OS X, and hung them on one of our hallways.  Across from it are pictures of the same tasks in that incredibly well-kept secret of a project that we’re working on.  There are post-it notes and markers next to each wall where passersby leave comments / questions.

I wonder if any hallways in Cupertino have something like that?

In case you were wondering.

• It takes 10-15 seconds for a (standard def) video from Xbox Live to be ready to play.
• I frequently download files at about 2 MB/sec from good servers.
• Orb is amazing with 15mbps upload
• Same goes for Remote Desktop
• Bit Torrents aren’t choked by stupid Comcrap throttling software
• My connection doesn’t drop momentarily every few minutes like it did with Comcrap, kicking Trillian off of AIM and causing lag in Halo.
• Sure, it’s not even been a week, but the service has been operational 100% of that time.  No middle of the night service interruptions so far.

I just received an e-mail from Karen Anderson, the assistant organizer for the Seattle Weblogger Meetups, delivering the news that Anita Rowland (who organized those meet-ups) died of cancer today.

She is the second blogger I remember from geek dinners at Crossroads Mall to pass away in less than a week.  Robert Scoble even linked to a rather saddening photo from one of those dinners with both Marc and Anita in it.

You didn’t have to even meet Anita to know her name and that she was a pillar of the Seattle blogging community.  I only wish I’d taken better advantage of her monthly meet-ups. 

My thoughts and sympathies are with her husband Jack, Riley, and the rest of her family.

It was with great shock and sadness this evening that I read of Marc Orchant’s death.  I didn’t know Marc well, or even that he was being hospitalized because of a heart attack.  I first met him at the “MSN Search Champs V2” event back in 2005.  Over those few days he made a great and lasting impression.  I fondly remember geeking out with him at one of Scoble’s “geek dinner” events at the Crossroads Mall in Bellevue, talking about nifty uses for Tablet PCs.  I looked forward to the next time our paths would cross, and am deeply saddened that they never will again.

Even though I only met Marc a few times, I didn’t need more than that to know he was a good man.  My deepest condolences to Marc’s family.  He will be missed.

I meant to post something here before I left… oops!  Anyway, we all made it here safe and sound and so far things are going great.  Uganda is beautiful, the people are amazing, and the team I’m with is just great.  I was a little nervous about being the only non-religious team member, but it hasn’t been a problem at all and I don’t think it will be.  Anyway, that’s a topic for another time… I just wanted to post something here to refer you over to the team blog:

http://trip.WeHaveHope.org

We’re trying to have someone update it every day (we were thwarted last night by a database problem, but BlueHost took care of it quickly).  If you want to track our experiences, or learn more about the trip, go read up there! 

I’ll be home on September 7th.  Until then…

Less than three weeks remain until I depart for Uganda!  I finally got our team’s official blog set up a couple nights ago, and you should see posts from the whole team popping up very soon.  I’ll be making more posts there (and here) about the trip as it gets closer, and while we’re there you’ll be able to track our progress and experiences via the official blog (hopefully I’ll make it into the town with internet access every few days). 

Where I’ll be:  Our team will be based in the village of Mafubira, a few miles from the town of Jinja, in Southeastern Uganda, on the shores of Lake Victoria and the Nile River.

What I’ll be doing:  Of the three teams we’re splitting into, mine will be focused on researching sustainable income projects for STAO and the village.  I will also be undertaking an effort to provide technology assistance for STAO and the school (which will be especially interesting since my understanding is that there isn’t yet a real “school” in the traditional sense, ie. with a building or even a classroom to speak of).

How can you help?  

1. Donate money.  Donating to our project budget will greatly help most all of our efforts, including HIV testing for the kids, immunizations, construction of additional orphanage housing, school supplies, and more.  Please donate through this link so that your contribution is allocated appropriately to the trip budget.  All donations go to Tusubira (a registered 501(c)3) and are tax deductible.  Some employers, like Microsoft, will even match your donation!
2. Donate supplies.  We are limited by the airline in what we can carry with us, but believe me that we are going to squeeze as much into our bags/boxes as we can!  Specifically, my efforts could really make use of any working laptop computers (they don’t have to be particularly modern to be useful) that we can use for the lab I’m going to set up.  I also will need some local networking equipment (switches, cabling, etc), USB flash memory devices, and laptop locks for securing them to tables/desks/etc.
3. Subscribe to our blog
4. Tell others about our cause.
5. Keep our team in your thoughts and prayers during our journey.

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.

I spent the last week vacationing with family in Pensacola, Florida.  Why Pensacola?  Well, a lot of my family lives there, in no small part because of the naval base.  My grandfather was an Admiral, with the distinction of having been one of few to achieve such rank out of ROTC (via Cornell).  Back in the early nineties, my uncle commanded the Blue Angels, flying the #1 F/A-18 Hornet that led the elite air squad after his tour in Desert Storm.  It had been about two years since I’d visited Pensacola, but in my mind it’s hard to believe it had been so long.

What is difficult to believe was the weather.  I boarded the plane bound for Houston (my only stop en route) in 70 degree whether, carrying my jacket on my arm and enjoying the Spring sunshine.  When I finally arrived in Florida, I found myself shivering in the ~45 degree rainy climate, hoping the cold grey would soon turn to bright warmth.  It finally did, the day I left.

Still, it was a relaxing respite from the craziness of work and all of my side projects (Start++, Uganda, some semblance of an active social life, my new MMO addiction, and more).  Of course, now that I’m home I need to catch up on e-mail all the happenings I missed… making for a not entirely costless respite.

There were many things I wanted to blog about while on vacation, but I resisted the temptation to spend too much time glued to my Vista-powered Macbook.  I’ll try to catch up on some of those this weekend, as I strive to aptly prioritize my catch-up efforts.  Speaking of which, if you sent me an e-mail or posted a comment and I haven’t responded - it’s entirely possible that I wasn’t ignoring you, but rather just haven’t gotten to it yet.