So ...

After the whole Terri Schiavo debacle, I resolved not to get into political screeds online until I could stop acting like a partisan bomb-thrower. That seems to have coincided with the end of my several-times-a-day posting habit.

Sigh.

I still don't want to be a bomb-thrower, but living here in the Eastside of Seattle as a non-Democrat is making it very difficult to keep my non-Democratic political self hidden away. I may have to start actually writing stuff.

And another thing ... what the holy crap is up with all the people here driving at or under the speed limit? People, it is MORALLY WRONG to have the lane empty in front of you during rush hour unless you're doing at least 10 mph over the posted speed limit. Step on the frickin' green pedal already and keep it stepped on until you catch up to the car in front of you. I'm going to have a cardiac back here.

My first bug

Today I submitted my first bug fix in a Windows product. As might be imagined, the effort of fixing the bug was completely dwarfed by the process of accepting the bug, documenting the bug, building fixed binaries, checking in source changes, documenting the source changes, answering emails about documenting the source changes, etc etc.

Given how many people are actively working on Windows at any given time, all of this process is completely necessary, but still ... that's a lot of process.

On the bright side, I've now checked in code to the Windows base. Yay me! I will be signing autographs outside the stage door this afternoon.

And now for something completely different

I'd just like to say that, so far, working for Microsoft is the best job I've ever had. Ever. Ever ever ever. Not only do I get to actually write code for interesting, new, cutting-edge research technologies, but I get paid a reasonable salary plus astonishingly good benefits to do so. And the political maneuvering is not bad at all; I'm still only a software development engineer (SDE), but I'm being fairly successful at inserting myself into good projects and there isn't that much push-back yet. I suppose we'll see how successful a strategy I'm pursuing come semi-annual review time.

So how come, huh?

Yesterday, as we were taking the last few possessions out of the temporary housing, I noticed a car parked next to us with a bumper sticker: "Fox News: We Distort, You Abide". So is it that Fox News is a distorted hack news outlet, but the NYT, CBS News, and CNN are agenda-free apolitical fonts of rigorously fact-checked news? Or is it that we conservatives are held to a higher standard, even by the moonbats?

Apartment living sucks

We're finally getting out of the temporary housing into our new (to us) house. Let me just say that living in an apartment is horrific. It's not so much that Kathy and I are going crazy intrinsically, but the kids don't have space or all their toys, and so they get bored rilly rilly rilly quickly. And then they drive us batsh*t insane.

It's a miracle we haven't killed each other yet.

But we can finally see the end of the torture; the movers will be delivering our boxes of stuff to the new house next Wednesday. We've got a bit of cleaning to do before then, but we'll finally have room plus material goods.

Yay!

Where we at now

Hooray! We are finally all in Washington together. I spent last week back in Georgia getting the whole house packed up and loaded onto the trucks for the big move. We all hopped onto a Delta flight and are now settling into our Microsoft-supplied temporary housing waiting for our new house to be ready and for our stuff to arrive.

Things are much better, now that our family is reunited. Those several weeks where I was here and Kathy and the girls were there were very painful and difficult.

Eventually I'll have something to say about what I'm working on for Microsoft, but not quite yet. It's still all about getting moved and the joys of buying a new house in the Seattle area. Whee!

Latest news

So I've been a bit busy.

I accepted a job with Microsoft, and am now in the process of relocating to Redmond. I've started working, and so far it's been interesting and educational. I'll be happier, though, when we're done with relocating and my whole family is back together again. Spending any real amount of time away from my wife is just painful, and I've had to do way too much of that during this cross-country move.

So anyway, she's been having trouble with the Windows box she uses to play "The Sims 2". As an aside, EA should be ashamed of themselves to act like Sim2 for the Mac is anything other than an abomination; release a damned Universal binary already, you dorks.

The trouble with the Windows box is that the C: filled up and she couldn't find what was the culprit. Trying to debug that process over the phone is just more pain and suffering than one man (me) can bear, and I know it's just as frustrating for her to be trying to do these things and not having it go smoothly. I then remembered reading Joel Spolsky writing about having his interns build v1.0 of a utility to let people remotely drive another PC without all the rigamarole of piercing the firewalls and opening ports and all the other hoo-hah that usually accompanies remoting. So I says to myself, "Self! Give it a try."

Let me say that Fog Creek Copilot (http://www.copilot.com) is exactly the bee's knees. I paid my piddling ten bucks for 24 hours access, asked my sweetie over the phone to type in the secret code into a webpage on her end, and I was able to take over and solve the problem in about ten minutes. She's happy, I'm happy, all God's chilluns is happy now.

So as part of my delight with that service, let me encourage you to go check it out for when your relatives call you up to troubleshoot some other computer problem over the telephone. It was spectacular, and I'll be using it again next time this sort of situation comes up.

I'm not entirely dead

I'm not dead yet. I think I'll go for a walk.