Wow, lots of posts materializing today.

This is just a short one. Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, I now can receive mail at Microsoft from the marklio alias! So, put marklio together with microsoft dot com, and I'll get it!  No need to attempt to remember my other weird alias that I discussed earlier.

Basically, I just created a global distribution list called marklio and put myself in it.  Simple, eh?

This is somewhat old news to some of you, but due to the nature of the process, I delayed making an announcement in this public place.  But, now that all the ducks are in a row, we're marching toward closing within the next 3 weeks on a house here in the Seattle area.

Becky and I are super-excited about it.  We were really worried we would have to settle for something that we didn't really like due to the crazy housing market here, as well as the deadlines surrounding our relocation benefits.  But, we were able to jump on what we feel is a fantastic place for us to be.  I've chosen several of the exterior shots to make public in the set, since most of the interior shots contain the previous owner's things.  And, since I like them so much, most of the shots are panoramas.

I just got "direct to Flickr" functionality working on my phone through a small utility that runs on Windows Mobile 5.  Now, when I take a picture, it immediately and transparently sends it to Flickr.  The camera on my phone is now actually useful without jumping through alot of hoops. Yeah.  Here's a picture of the drink I am currently drinking.

I've got lots of other posts in the works, but this one's a quickie.  I finally got ahold of the camera for the 360.  In just seconds, I had a video chat going with my brother.  For families that are far apart, buying a 360 just might be worth it just because it's so dang easy to set up video chat.

What was more surprising is that I plugged it into my PC, and just as quickly, it was set up as a webcam.  That was lucky for me because my fairly new logitech webcam seems to be having some driver issues with the latest build of Windows Vista.

One drawback is that there is no built-in mic, which gets a little annoying if you trying to show someone that Jenna can say "apple", "meow-meow", "ma-ma", and "da-da" on command.

Another drawback is that there is no fullscreen, or even large screen option.  Hopefully that will be rememdied with a software release.  Or perhaps I can write a video chat program with XNA express.  Oooh, that's a good idea.  I hope the APIs support that.

I haven't been to a Baylor football game since I graduated about 7 years ago (before that having gone to almost every single one), but something about them playing within 10 minutes of me now that I'm almost 2000 miles away made me want to go.  That, and our good friends Jeff and Bethany were going to be there.

In a bizarre kind of coincidence, Baylor played Washington State University today, something that hadn't happened since the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio in 1994 (or so Jeff tells me. I could have sworn it was the University of Houston...also Cougars).  Oddly enough, Jeff, Becky and I were at that game as well.  In another twist, they were playing at Qwest Field rather than at their home stadium in Pullman, WA.  So, we just couldn't pass it up.

We had procured the tickets several weeks ago and so we all just met at the stadium.  Jeff's twin brother Joel and his wife were on vacation visiting with Jeff and Bethany, and so they joined us as well.

Unfortunately, the Bears lost, but by an astonishly-small margin of 15-17.  In fact, they led for a large portion of the game due to a first quarter safety.  Anyway, I'm not huge into sports at all, much less football, so we had a good time reminiscing about college life and making fun of the bizarre traditions of WSU, all the while thinking about our own bizarre traditions and how they must be viewed.  We got a big kick out of making fun of their band.

Here's a panorama of the view from our seats.  As the sun set, it was blazing in our face (I have the sunburn to prove it), and as Jenna got cranky, Becky and I decided to leave early, in the tradition of Baylor fans through the ages.

I got my internal blog set up yesterday. At my old job, I found having an internal blog was very useful for lots of reasons. Here, due to the size of the company and confidentiality concerns, it may not end up being as useful, and I may have to leverage other resources like Sharepoint to accomplish similar things. For now, other "softies" can catch me at http://blogs/markmil. If you're not on the Microsoft network, don't expect that link to take you anywhere.

For some reason, it really bothers me when I see this pattern in code (using no particular language):

This can, of course, simply be specified as:

Now, I understand that as code is refactored, this pattern can appear due to simplifications...but still...come on. It's even worse when someVar is used only as the condition of another if block.

UPDATE: This seems to occur most often in code whose ownership has changed hands several times. New owners seem to fall into either trying to edit the code while maintaining the structure as closely as possible, or by heavily refactoring. Many times, the former choice is made, especially if the original owner is still around somewhere. Usually my first instinct when I inherit code is to massively refactor. I'll post a more in-depth view on this later.

We took advantage of the day off and drove up to Bellingham to see Jeff and Bethany.  We started with a delicious lunch.  Jeff grilled some burgers and corn, while I let Jenna crawl around on the lawn, which she seemed to enjoy quite a bit.  The burgers were great, and the corn was so good it didn't need butter.

 While we ate our dessert of ice cream and cookies, we talked about our options for the day and finally decided to head toward Mt. Baker on the Mt. Baker highway.  Due to the distance and our time constraints, we knew we probably wouldn't make it all the way there, but they knew of some cool spots on the way that were a bit closer.

One the way, we decided on our actual destination, some falls near the mountain that they had visited before.  It was spectacular.  The whole area was amazing.  The scale of everything was staggering.  We hiked down some trails to get a better view of the falls.  Becky and I traded off carrying Jenna and the camera so I could carry Jenna down the steep parts, then trade off so I could get some shots.  Some of them turned out really well and really look like postcards.  I got a huge panorama of the waterfall itself (right).  For some reason, I like to leave the jagged edges on there.  I might make a cleaned-up version though since it turned out so well.  I'm pretty sure most of you will want to move here after seeing some of these pictures.

I really wanted to just run wild through the forest and become a feral human.  I found a huge stone in the woods that was turned upright and covered with moss.  I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the plot of Halo 3.  I'm also pretty sure that there were many sasquatches watching us from the woods.  I'm fairly certain that they are hidden in a few of my pictures.

I also experimented with a technique called wiggling which uses 2 shots with different perspectives to provide a semi-3d effect to give you some depth that I don't think is conveyed through the photos.  I think my 2 perspectives are too exaggerated.  It kind of gives me a headache.

On the way out, we visited the ranger station where there was the usual ranger station information and a really big cross-section of an extremely old tree. I don't remember how old it was, but it was old.

So, visit my Labor Day 2006 photoset to see all the pictures. (be sure and click through the various links above as well to see some cool new features of Flickr that allow you to see where pictures were taken. (as well as some other neat links))

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.