I’m back online after a couple of months in the dark. This blog was originally hosted on an old Linux box from my attic in Newcastle. That box is currently somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic making its way, along with the rest of our possessions, to our new home in Seattle. It’s taken me a while to get around to it but I’ve now moved the blog, together with the old postings, over to the Typepad hosted service so connectivity should be a bit more consistent from now on.
What’s been happening? Well, after leaving Newcastle I first spent a week at the South By Southwest music festival in Austin, TX (I’ll post a separate entry on this later) before heading up to Seattle to properly begin my new job at Microsoft. I’ve just finished my third week here and things are going pretty well so far. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and talking to folks here to try and start to understand the Microsoft technology stack and the plans we have for the next releases. I’m working as a Program Manager in the Connected Systems Division, specifically on enterprise messaging and business process management - in Microsoft terms that means Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and BizTalk.
I’m currently living in a nice apartment in The Olympus complex in the Belltown area of downtown Seattle. I’m up on the tenth floor with a great view over the Puget Sound. Getting from here to work in Redmond is a reasonably long commute which involves crossing Washington Lake on the 520 bridge, which gets very clogged at peak times. I’ve experimented with early starts, late starts and the bus to try and work out the best option. Late starts seem to fit best with my natural biorhythms ;-) I’m currently driving a Ford Taurus rental car which is the US equivalent of a Mondeo. I only have this for one more week so I need to find a car pretty quickly - US car salesmen are pretty much exactly how you’d expect them to be. I also need to pass my Washington state driving test; there are 3 parts to this: eye test, knowledge test and practical test. I’m taking the knowledge test next week, wish me luck.
I’m also starting to get my head around the practicalities of living over here. Tea has been a bit of a problem to date. They have plenty of varieties over here (you know the sort of thing, bags of fruit, herbs and sawdust that have never been anywhere near a tea plant) but finding proper English builders tea has been a challenge. Until yesterday that is, when I found the British Pantry, a little emporium of all things Blighty. You can get all the jams, breakfast cereals, and Jaffa Cakes that you could possibly wish for. The only problem is the price; I spent $16.09 for 160 Tetley tea bags and $11.59 for a jar of Marmite! They also have a restaurant selling traditional English fare. I’ll be back there for bangers and mash sometime soon.
Oh and the TV here is very poor in comparison to the BBC and UK TV in general. Now you probably knew that already but it’s not until you live here that you realise just how bad it is. I’ve given up. Instead I’m listening to FiveLive over the Internet and watching DVDs of The Sweeney that Helen kindly sent over in an emergency parcel!
More updates soon...
