see a puffin eat a fish

Having an ingrained mistrust of black box systems, i’ve avoided learning anything about .net for over five years. I can be incredibly stubborn, nose in spite of my face and all that. Being at Microsoft for the summer, it’d be foolish not to take advantage of the resources available to me and use this opportunity get my feet wet with the .net framework 2.0. So far i’ve worked on three internal projects using .net and Visual Studio 2005 and i’m hoping to build a few more complex systems before my time here is up.

So what’s the verdict? Well it’s nice having a proper IDE and an integrated debugger, beats response.writes in asp classic, but overall building apps in this environment is no better or worse than anything else I have used. There are nice time savers that you have to hack up/work around when you want to customize their functionality. If someone needs me to use .net I will but otherwise I probably wouldn’t use it for any client projects. There’s free stuff out there that’s as good or better.

Though young Bill Gates does look like me from my resident alien immigration card. I’ll have to put that online.

Anna is making her inevitable impact on the Seattle garment industry, making a place for herself at impulse, a boutique clothing store in Fremont. If you’re in Seattle, drop by next week! You’re bound to walk out with something that looks amazing on you. p.s. you have to be lady. No mens clothes.

Since I am already messing around with Google’s My Maps, I decided to put together a quick and dirty map of our trip across the country. It could use a lot more content, possibly a connection to my Flickr photos. Since I can generate a KML file from this I can make much more interesting visualizations using Google Earth or a similar program. Click on this link or the image above to see the interactive map. Then just select the locations on the left and you’ll see them on the map. I think this is a great stuff. Very fun.

As you may have guessed by the title, today was my first day at Microsoft. This is my first time ever doing work for a big company so I will be extra cautious about what I disclose. I will say that seeing a large company from the inside is much more layered and complex than considering it from the outside.

Due to a scheduling coincidence, I also got a chance to go to Bill Gates’ house and see Bill on my first day on the job. No cell phones (nor WayMarkrs) or cameras were allowed so I don’t have any pictures but Gates lives on a sprawling, Japanese inspired house on the shores of Lake Washington. It was very cool to see him in person. Though i’ve drifted to the mac the past couple of years as a kid I had my first introduction to computers through PCs, DOS and eventually Windows. This was the guy who had helped make all of the software that got me interested in computers.

I did make a little map of the loction of my house and Bill’s. Click on the image above for a larger view.