Becky, Jenna and I made an impromptu trip to Mt. Rainier yesterday.  We figured we might as well see it up close since today we're driving up to Bellingham to hang out with Jeff and Bethany and swinging out to Mt. Baker.

Simply put, Mt. Rainier is the biggest thing I've ever seen on planet earth.  It is enormous.  It's over 14,000 feet.  Think about that for a minute, that's taller than Pike's Peak, and Seattle is more or less at sea level.

The picture on the left (courtesy wikipedia) is the view of Rainier from the Space Needle in Seattle.  I think it's over 60 miles away from there. It's unbelievably huge.  When it's visible, it dwarfs everything else you can see.

Anyway, since the trip was unplanned, we basically entered in Mt. Rainier into the GPS and followed the directions.  The roads in the National Park were categorized by Becky as "pants-wettingly scary".  Driving next to a sheer cliff with no guardrail is indeed "white knuckle driving".

Despite that, it was wonderful fun.  We got some pretty good pictures, but with me driving, and Becky tending to Jenna, we didn't get as many as I'd like.  I'm sure we'll be back there with friends and family many times, so I wasn't that worried about it.

This is my best picture of the mountain.  It was a pretty hazy day (it wasn't visible at all from Bellevue), so even at close range (still about 10 miles away) I had to do some post-processing to bring out the details.  On the way out of the park, the sun was hitting it and it was even better, but we were in a hurry to get home.  It's interesting that my close-up picture does do it's size justice (the space needle picture above conveys the scale much better), but in person the size really makes you dizzy.  We came around a corner to this view, and Becky and I both just about had a heart attack.

We're about to head up to Bellingham.  I'll try to get some better pictures of Mt. Baker.

Oh yeah... and today is Labor Day, so enjoy this Homestarrunner classic.

Today was quite an exciting day.  First, I got my "alias" changed.  At MS, your alias is more or less your identity.  It's your email address, it's your login, etc.  I wanted to try to get marklio, but, by strict company policy, it's a combination of your first and last name.  Unfortunately, as I've mentioned before [1, 2], Mark Miller is a fairly common name, and there are already a handful employed at MS.  In addition, there are Mark's with other last names that start with M or even Mi.  And Millers with first names starting with M, Ma, and even Mar.  So the valid, un-lame, available combinations are all gone.  I was assigned marmill, but was able to get it changed to markmil, which was the least lame of the available aliases, and I'm reasonably pleased with it, despite the things that get thrown out of whack when it changes.

I also attended some meetings where there were some exciting things announced.  Unfortunately, I can't talk about them. Sorry.

Additionally, everyone is getting excited about Vista.  The latest build is pretty good, and it's cool that our team has a deliverable in there.  There was a party on the athletic fields this afternoon celebrating a big milestone.  It was pretty fun. They were giving away some cool frisbees, but I neglected to get in line for one early, and they were out by the time I went looking for one.  The food was pretty good, but their idea of BBQ chicken was fairly blasphemous.

Finally, I actually did some real work.  Due to vacation, illness, and higher priority focus on my team, there was a backlog of bug fixes under our ownership that needed verification, so I stepped in and ran the "repros" to verify the fixes.  It was cool to see the process and how in-depth it is.  Open Source advocates often use the argument that they have "more eyes" on the code, and therefore more bugs can be found/fixed, resulting in higher quality code.  After being part of both worlds, it is my opinion that it is highly unlikely that there is any sizeable open source project with consistently more "eyes per line of code" across the whole codebase than what is coming out of the CLR right now (and probably many other MS products that I can't speak to with experience).  Quality is an extremely important goal here, and from the metrics I've seen, that goal is being reached.

Oh, I also met some members on the team that I have strange and bizarre connections to.  One guy, upon learning I grew up in central Texas asked if I knew where Belton was.  Turns out, I went to high school with his brother-in-law, and his wife went to high school with my brother Andrew, and was actually good friends with him since they both played tennis.  After some further conversations, it turns out he actually met Andrew a couple of times!  Turns out, there are quite a few Texans on the CLR team.

Needless to say, I'm very excited to be here.

Today concluded the new employee orientation, and I got my badge/smartcard/mealcard/buspass/etc, so I'm free to enter any building, although I look like an idiot in my picture (as usual, some would say).  I also got my office, machines, email, parking permits, etc set up. I'm still looking at blogging policies and so forth, so I'm not going to say much more about that for now.

It's very cool to wander around the halls and see the names of other CLR bloggers like Joe Duffy, Krzysztof Cwalina, the guys that post to the BCLTeam blog, etc. So far, I've really only talked with my manager, some people on my team, and some other random people, but I hope to get a chance to meet and talk with more of them.

For those who are wondering, I'm an SDET on the Execution Engine team in the CLR group.  My ownership area at first will be what they call the "shim".  This is more or less mscoree, which I'll discuss more in later posts, but it basically does the job of loading up a relevant version of the CLR and getting everything going.

I'm still trying to decide how to handle the transition of this blog.  I believe I have a few options:

• Create an msdn blog and use it for MS-related and/or technical content and use this blog for personal stuff.
• Create an msdn blog and cross-post technical stuff to it, while still using this blog for everything.
• Continue using only this blog.

I've had alot of non-technical content lately due to the move, and posting stuff for my friends and family, but I expect the technical content to ramp back up after a few weeks.  I'm interested in the opinion of my readers on what direction I should take.

BTW, For those of you that keep asking me to send you some of our rain, it's raining this evening for the first time since we've been here (almost 2 weeks).  It's also quite chilly out.  The forecast indicates it'll be sunny again by Thursday and stay that way for at least a week.  They say the "rainy season" won't start until the end of Sept.

A number of years ago, my buddy Dave and I made a silly video about our cats.  We wondered what it might be like for cats to compete with each other in an olympic-style competition.  The competition itself proved to be too big of a project to bite off, so we merely made a video about them preparing for such an event.

We basically just filmed our cats (our cat, The Professor, and Dave and Jen's cat, Mambo) doing the things they normally did.  I wanted to make it all NFL-film documentary style, so I found some appropriate music, and put it all together, with me doing a strained althetic announcer voice (yes, that's me).

I just recently heard of Stage6, and decided to give it a shot using this video as a test.  It's a YouTube-like site that allows you to have much higher quality video (at the cost of having to install the Divx player).  So, I give you "The Road to Catathalon 1987".  I'd like some feedback as to how well this works in the various other platforms and browsers.

Oddly enough, after viewing this, many people ask me who won, or when this event occurred.  I'd like to take this time to pre-emptively remind people that the Catathalon is a fictional event.

Not to diminish the previous post so immediately, but today is Becky's birthday!  As luck would have it, Becky's brother Andy is moving to Vancouver, BC, which is only a couple of hours away.  And, even more luckily, Becky's dad and Andy are driving through Seattle today on their way to move him in. So, due to several remarkable coincidences colliding with perfect timing (more likely God doing what he does best), for the first time in about 8 years Becky gets to be with some of her family on her birthday, and in Seattle of all places.

So, they are to arrive just after lunch today, and we'll have a pleasant afternoon of visiting and touring and some yummy dinner somewhere.

Here she is trying on a new scarf.  It's a little big.

Happy Birthday Becky!

We made the beautiful drive from Bellevue to Bellingham to visit the Flints yesterday.  The drive was very scenic, although the traffic was pretty bad in several locations due to construction.  We arrived and got the tour of their house, and then preparations for dinner commenced.  Jeff flexed his cooking muscle (see image right) and prepared chicken fried steak, which was absolutely delicious.  I like to think it had something to do with me filling the pan with the perfect amount of oil.  Bethany prepared some yummy vegetables.

During the preparation of dinner, Becky's french horn arrived, which we had shipped to them to get it here as soon as possible.  That worked out perfectly.

Due to the beautiful weather (sunny, about 70 degrees), we were forced to eat outside in their great yard, where blackberries grew in abundance (yes, that is an actual picture of the blackberries we saw, not a stock photo of blackberries.  Great picture, Becky).  If we had known, we probably wouldn't have bought blackberries at the market the other day.

After dinner, we toured some of Bellingham.  We went down to a popular park on the water, and drove around downtown and got out and toured Jeff's church.

All in all, it was a delightful evening.  The trip back was long due to lane closures and construction, but it was worth it.  Thanks Jeff and Bethany.  I leave you with this panoramic view of the backyard. Click it to view the whole set.

Becky, Jenna, and I drove into Seattle again this morning.  This time, we went to the world famous Pike Place Market, perhaps most known for the famous Pike Place Fish Market.  You probably remember it from "Sleepless in Seattle".  It's the place where they throw the fish around.

Anyway, we went there.  It was pretty cool.  There were tons of people there, so it was a little stressful navigating with a stroller through the smaller hallways.  We bought some red snapper to eat this evening.  Should be good.  I didn't catch any pictures of fish in the air because my good camera hasn't arrived yet.  We're using our old one and it's too slow to get stuff like that without alot of preparation.  Becky also got some fresh rasberries and blackberries, the likes of which she has never seen before. (Evidently, they were good).  We also got some yummy cinammon rolls for the ride home. I'm sure we'll go back many times, especially when friends and family come to visit, so I'll try to catch some actual pictures of fish in mid-flight.

Here's an autostitched panoramic view from the top of the parking garage near the market.  I think it turned out pretty well.

This is more or less a test to see how this works.  This is not the first time she's laughed, nor the first time we've caught it on video.  It IS pretty funny though.  Enjoy.

I took several groups of pictures during the move that I've stitched together into panoramas with AutoStitch.  Some of them didn't turn out, others turned out great, and still others are fairly good.  Autostitch is nice because it only takes about 5 seconds of human intervention to make one.

Here's one of the loading process.  The truck was really enormous.  It had our stuff along with several other shipments, and the driver had several more stops to make before he headed to Seattle.  It will be cool to see him again when he brings the stuff that's coming to our temporary place.  He said that would be around Thursday.

Several people have asked about our new place.  It's a very nice furnished apartment.  I made a panorama of the view from the balcony (yes, we're on the second floor).  It's a crazily-wide view, so the edges are distorted.  Don't let that fool you. The trees are super-tall.  When sitting inside and looking out the door, you can only see about half-way up.

The living area is very nice.  It's somewhat similar in layout to the old apartment we had in Austin we we first moved there.  The kitchen is pretty small, but it's nice and open, which makes it feel bigger.  The sliding door there on the left goes out to the balcony.  As you can see, I miss my TV.  We do have a DVD player though.

The "master" bedroom is pretty nice.  It has a nice big window and an attached bathroom.  The closet is also pretty huge.

I'm running out of stuff to say, so Ill just post the rest with a short description.

The guest bedroom.  The crib was supplied for us, which was great.  One less thing to worry about.

This is the main bathroom:

 Here's the utility room:

 I've got more photos uploaded, I just need to go through them and make the non-pano source ones public and tag them.

Everything went fairly smoothly considering we were travelling with 2 cats and a baby.  Our flight from Austin to Dallas was delayed enough to make our connection extremely close.  On top of that, there had been a plane change that screwed up our seating.  Our primary seats didn't exist anymore, so they moved us.  The problem was that they didn't move us as a group.  Each of us had separate seats in different parts of the plane, and we didn't have enough under-seat space for the cats.  So, we managed to get a guy to trade seats so we were together in a place where the cats fit.

Once that was straightened out, the rest of the trip was pretty good.  Jenna stayed pretty calm most of the trip.  She only threw a few tantrums.

More precise location of our temporary place

When we finally got to our temporary place, Jeff and Bethany were there to greet us, which was very cool of them.  Jeff and I went to Azteca's, which, surprisingly enough, was a decent mexican food place.  We brought back some fajitas for the four of us and hung out.

Thanks to everyone who has helped make this move possible.  Special thanks to my parents who have been super generous with their time and helped me wrap up lots of unfinished projects at the house before we left, and doing all that with the prospect of us taking their grand-daughter thousands of miles away.  Thanks millions.

Our new temporary place is not exactly where I showed last time.  Here's a more precise location.