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.

Well, in about 15 minutes, we're out the door headed to the airport, at which point our new residence will be Washington state.  We'll let you know when we get there.

Well, almost.  By the time you read this I probably will be.  The truck arrived on schedule this morning, but the moving company forgot to send out the loaders (which was odd because the packers were here yesterday).  That was fine because the driver had a chance to go around and tag all the furniture.

Anyway, things are eerie around here.  Nothing but lots of little pieces of garbage everywhere.

I'll get some pics up on Flickr later.  I'm working with relatively limited internet access through my phone.

I've got a hotel room lined up for us tonight, then it's off to the airport late in the morning!  Crazy

The packers came early this morning and packed all our stuff.  I was completely amazed at how many boxes it took to pack up the kitchen.  It pretty much took 1 person dedicated to the kitchen, while 3 others did the rest of the house.  From what they said, it's typical.  The kitchen has to be packed with more padding, so it takes up more room and takes longer.

Anyway, the loaders come tomorrow and load up everything.  That will be even crazier.  The house will pretty much be empty.  Then, we fly out on Thursday about noonish.

I simply don't have room to take my camera on the plane, so it's packed.  I'll try to snap some pictures with one of the lesser cameras though.

I'm getting ready to shut down my PC for the last time here in Austin.  The packers are coming tomorrow morning.  I hope they're not really mad at how unprepared we are.  Anyway, things are getting pretty stressful here at the end.  There's still so much to do and only a couple of days left to do it.  We said goodbye to my brother and his wife this evening, which was pretty sad.  I've never lived more than about an hour from my family my whole life.  Things will be very different with them being that far away.

We did finally find out where we will be living for the next couple of months while we look for a permanent place. Here's a bird's eye view.

We've got a ton of possible houses to look at when we get there.

My buddy Dan just posted a skit we did back in college for a marching band event.  He just kind of threw it out there, so I thought I might provide some background.  I'm sure others may remember this differently.  Feel free to correct me in the comments.

The event was Band Follies, an annual event celebrating the marching season, which gave the band a chance to hang out in a purely social situation.  Each year, band follies is themed, and this year was a toga party.  Another tradition is that whoever wants to can come up with a skit to perform toward the end.  Kappa Kapa Psi and Tau Beta Sigma, the band's service fraternity and sorority (respectively) also each do a skit, primarily, to show the freshmen how "cool" we are so they'll want to join.

I remember the meeting where we (KKPSi) came up with the idea for our skit.  I had only 1 criteria in mind:

• As gory and bloody as possible

We decided to go with a well-known historical event, and simply give our rendition of it.  Since it was a toga party, we thought we'd play on that and do the death of Ceasar.  Jeff Flint, our benevolent drum major, played Ceasar, and Victor Villalobos played the part of Brutus, although his name was Victor in the skit for some reason.  I led the public rebellion against Ceasar. (I'm the one in the red cap)

One of the problems with the skits in the past is that we were too lazy to rehearse or come up with a real script.  So, to combat this, we wrote the beginning and end, then broke up into smaller groups that would each come up with a "fight scene" during the middle of the skit.  Again, the only criteria was to be as gory as possible.

Dave and I were a team, and our gimic was to be a spectacular exploding head.  He would attempt to defeat me, and I would attempt to evade his attacks with ninja-like skills, then, after being horribly wounded in the stomach, I would turn behind him and crush his head with a mighty blow.  Kool-Aid would splatter everywhere, and the audience would have no other choice but to vomit uncontrollably.  Despite Dave's best efforts, the Kool-Aid leaked and made his paper mache head soggy.  In addition, my Kool-Aid er.. "blood" pack was too strong, and I had to burst it myself, which looked more like a horrible bowel hemmorage than anything else.

Anyway, the other guys all had very hilarious fight scenes, which involved everything from fake arms (a la Monty Python) to real cow livers.  The real payoff was Victor's last Scooby-doo inspired line:

...and I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you pesky Romans!

It was really meant for a live audience, but watch it anyway.  Hopefully with this background it might actually be funny to a random person.

Oh yeah, Mark Bauman and Dan Obregon played medics, who would attend to the wounded as an excuse to get them out of the way for the next fight.  They actually had some of the funniest lines in the whole skit.  Too bad the sound wasn't good enough to catch them.  Do either one of you guys have your original script?

I was watching Jenna this afternoon, and she was crawling around and generally having fun.  She crawled over to a little book (Goodnight Gorilla, to be exact), openned it up, and began making noises.  This was nothing new.  She does this often, and we think she is pretending to read it.  What I was most amazed by was that she began making sounds like E-I-E-I.  This of course is familiar.  So, I grabbed her Old MacDonald book, which was nearby, and began reading it.  Lo and behold, Everytime I read, "Old MacDonald had a farm...", she would respond with E-I-E-I-E-I.  I was completely amazed.

I took me a while to realize that I ought to be videoing it.  By the time I started rolling, she was less interested, but I did get it a few times. If I get a chance this evening, I'll get it encoded and get a clip up here.

Today is the birthday of my good friend Dave Barnes.  Dave and I played trombone together at Baylor.  He and his wife Jen moved here to Austin a few years after we did.  Them being here made our decision to move a difficult one.  I'll certainly miss Dave, but thanks to XBox Live, we can still play.

Here he is leaping over the creek on the frisbee golf course near my house.  He made it...this time.

Well, today I am officially unemployed.  I just made my last commute home from Freescale Semiconductor.  I'll really miss my old team and the fun times we've had.

Now that I'm unemployed, Becky and I are free to follow our dream of moving to Washington state in hopes of finding the elusive sasquatch or "wood ape".  That's right, I'm not going to work for Microsoft after all.

My plan is to drive through the forest roads at high speed, hoping to catch the beast unawares and hit it with my huge, 80's style station wagon.  Thinking it dead, I'll strap it to the roof and drive home, only to have it wake up and scare us.  In my panic, I'll brake abruptly, sending the hairy bigfoot flying through the air.

After some misadventures, my family and I will grow to love the gentle giant, and seek to return him to his home, lest he be poached by his arch-nemesis, Jacques LaFleur.  In doing so, we'll realize that if we lived more like these gentle sasquatches, in harmony with nature, that we'd all be better off.