Personal
A long time ago, my family took a trip to Expo ‘86 in Vancouver, with stop offs in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In LA, we went on the Universal studio tour, something which I basically have no memory of. I did get a memento, though—a poster entitled “Murphy’s Computer Law” with a bunch of humorous computing “laws” on it. This poster went up in my room, accompanied me to college and has been in most of my offices at Microsoft. However, a few years ago, a corner ripped off in a move. Then while it was sitting around waiting...
Since I’m joining the T-SQL community, I thought I’d try my hand at a “T-SQL Tuesday” that I could actually have an opinion about. This week’s question (hosted by Robert Davis, a.k.a. @SQLSoldier on Twitter) is “How do you learn? How do you teach? What are you learning or teaching?” and is very relevant for me because, of course, I just joined the T-SQL team a short while ago and am doing a whole lot of learning at the moment. How I learn I was going to say “by doing,” but I don’t think...
..and they are: Programmers who want to write an operating system Programmers who want to write a compiler Programmers who want to write a database It’s not that every programmer ever actually works on one of these, just that every programmer seems to dream of doing one of these things. It’s the primary reason why things like Linux exist. Yes, open source, blah, blah, blah, OS choices, blah, blah, blah, evil Microsoft, blah, blah, blah. But I would bet my bottom dollar that 9 out...
For reasons that are too deathly boring to go into here, I’ve changed my name on Twitter. Because I ended up creating a new profile instead of changing the name (again, for reasons not worth talking about), you’ll need to re-follow if you’re interested in what I might have to say there. New location: http://twitter.com/panopticoncntrl. Hope to see you there!
As difficult as it is to say, I wanted to let my loyal readers know that after a decade spent working on Visual Basic, I’ve made the decision to change jobs at Microsoft. It's somewhat hard for even me to imagine just how long I've worked on Visual Basic. I joined the Developer Division (VB's home) over 11.5 years ago to work on OLE Automation. A year and a half after that, I moved over to the VB team proper to work on the compiler's code generator just as we started the move to what would become .NET. In...
No, not really, just going through another dry spell on the blog. But I have been playing with Twitter, so you can try me there as well: http://twitter.com/paulvick. No promises that I'll keep it up, but...
Just a quick note for those who might care--I haven't given up blogging just yet, even though January was the first time in the history of this blog that I went without saying anything for a month. My wife, kids and I went on a big vacation to the Dominican Republic in January, with a swing by the East Coast for a baptism for good measure, and that took up most of the month! Then, just as I was starting to dig myself out of the hole from that trip, I was off for another week. So needless to say,...
In a context completely unrelated to computers or my work, someone gave me a copy of one of those "word a day" calendar entries for the word "mortmain". You can see the fuller definition here, but one definition is: The oppressive influence of past events or decisions. Only after I tacked it up in my office did people start pointing out to me the irony.
It's hard to believe it, but 6/21/2007 marks the 15th anniversary of my permanent arrival in Seattle. I'd spent the summer before in Redmond interning, but in June of 1992, I graduated from college, bought a car, packed up my stuff, and headed out to Seattle. When people would ask me how long I expected to work at Microsoft, I said, "I don't know... I guess I'll stay three to five years and then figure out what I'm going to do with the rest of my life." Tomorrow, of course, marks the 15th anniversary of starting work at Microsoft. On...
Of course, some of the hardest parts of being a parent is giving up, giving in and admitting that you're no longer the freewheeling couple that you once were. Bit by bit, kids chip away at any pretensions you might have of remaining young and/or cool. Thankfully, in my case that isn't really giving up all that much--I mean, I was never really cool, so it's not that much of a loss for me. My wife, on the other hand, was quite a bit cooler than me, and so she's taking it a bit harder. Case in point--after much resistance, my...
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