3 posts tagged “moving”
Boy 2008 is going by quickly - it's already getting to the middle of February. Today of course is Chinese New Year, and one of my Chinese colleagues brought a treat to the office for the occasion - Water Chestnut Cake. It was amazing. I need to get the recipe from her, but here is one I found online. All this time I've been putting water chestnut into curries and stir fries when I could have been putting it into cakes :)
I have to admit I am a sucker for Asian desserts - almond jelly, custard balls, egg tarts, chiffon cake... - just to name a few. Oh and there is a great Chinese bakery, Regent, down the road from Microsoft which does a mean mango mousse cake and fruit tarts. What I love about Asian desserts versus Western-style ones is that they are not as sweet and not as heavy. Ok I shouldn't be thinking about dessert this early in the day.
In other news, I moved into my new place in Capitol Hill a couple of weeks ago. It's closer to my friends, much quieter and greener than living smack bang in the middle of downtown, and I have my own place again. It's been great so far. I can see the sun rise over the mountains in the mornings (admittedly it's rare that the sun actually gets a look-in in winter, but summer's going to be fab). And the kitchen is huge and wonderful and I've been cooking up a storm. Ach there I go, inevitably back to the topic of food again. Let me end this before I start eating my keyboard.
Over the last week or so I've been packing up my apartment and, with the much-appreciated help of friends, gradually started moving my things over to my new shared place in Seattle - my lease here expires at the end of March.
Although I'm now learning the hard way why people complain about how stressful and annoying moving is, it's also been interesting to just see how much stuff I've managed to accumulate in just a single year of living here. Since I lived with my parents in Sydney, the only things I brought with me were clothes, books, music, and my bike (and that was still a small truckful of stuff, mind you). Now I find that in addition to what I brought to Seattle, I'm packing up (or selling) furniture, indoor plants, kitchen appliances, pots and pans, manchester, cleaning supplies, ski gear, musical instruments (and their attendant accessories), electronic gadgets (and their attendant manuals), camping equipment, plus the additional clothes, books and music I've bought over the year - it's insane! I can't believe I now own this much stuff, and how little of it I actually need or use often.
I guess that's one of the things I find really cool about going backcountry camping - the feeling of having all your essentials in a rucksack on your back, and leaving all the extraneous stuff behind. You suffer every extra kilo of luxury you decided to indulge yourself with (I can never resist taking my big camera, or my thermarest), but you also appreciate every measly little granola bar, every sip of water, every layer of clothing you brought with you. And you look out across a cavernous, tree-filled valley, or an impossibly blue lake, or lie on the ground and gaze at thousands of stars, and wonder why we decided to bother with TVs and iPods and vacuum cleaners in the first place.
That said, although I have been living in a state of limbo this past
week, with half my stuff here and half there, I know I will no longer
be able to stay here once the following items have left the building:
- Wireless internet
- Stereo
- Guitar
- Tea set
- A book
- My favourite papasan chair
Today is a momentous day.
The apple juice can sculpture on my desk at work has finally reached perfect 6x6x6 pyramidal form. 56 cans, the ancient Egyptians would be proud. It's all about setting noble goals in life, folks. Stay tuned for the 7x7x7 edition (may take a few months - I don't drink *that* much juice.)
On a less frivolous note, a lot has actually been happening at work. Our team just started on the next major release of our product, Subscription and Commerce Service (SCS) 7.0. I don't talk about work much here, so here's a quick summary. My team, the Subscription and Commerce Group (SCG), is responsible for Microsoft's online monetisation platform. In plain English that means that we provide e-commerce services like credit card processing, subscription management, and so on, that other groups in Windows Live (formerly MSN), as well as our external partners, can plug into to sell things online.
Anyway, after spending a year working on a very obscure backend feature called Payment Gateway (namely the interface between our system and various banks), I'm happy to report that for our next release I'm going to be working on possibly the most visible feature our team owns - Microsoft Points. Ok, so it isn't by any means as instantly recognisable as Office or Windows, but most people who are active Xbox gamers, or own a Zune, or run their small business websites over Office Live, regularly interact with my feature. Basically Points are a digital currency you can use to buy things like songs for your Zune, premium content for your Xbox like extra levels, weapons, and so on.
It's really motivating to work on something which my friends are interacting with (albeit unknowingly) on a daily basis. My neighbour Thejas, who is addicted to his Xbox and whose TV speakers regularly shake our common wall with the rumblings and explosions of Gears of War, was pumped when I told him that I now work on Points. The guy probably spends half his salary on Points, god bless him.
It's also pretty cool to think about all the possibilities of combining our features with the other interesting stuff that's going on in MSFT. For example, late last year another group in Microsoft shipped XNA, a toolkit that anyone can use to develop games for Windows or the Xbox. Combining this with the Points world, could we see a whole new marketplace emerge for Xbox enthusiasts to upload and sell content they've created themselves to other users? Exciting stuff :)
I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to talk about in regards to what we're working on, but there are some interesting things in the works, and with all the MSFT head honchos pushing the "software as a service" doctrine these days, it looks like our team's work is only going to become more important to Microsoft as a whole. Even the Economist is talking about it.
Anyway, enough about work. In other news, I have to find a new place to live. My lease runs out soon, and I've been trawling online classifieds for apartments to rent downtown. Since I seem to spend so much of my spare time in Seattle or wishing I was in Seattle, it makes sense to move there. In an interesting twist of fate, Astha's roommate is taking off to India, possibly for good, and therefore has to move out of their apartment, and Astha asked if I would consider taking her place.
The arrangement does have the potential to be awesome - Astha is a champion and we get on great, so it could be a lot of fun. Her apartment is also gorgeous, in a ridiculously convenient location, and will save me a hell of a lot of money compared to living alone. There is of course the question of whether the fun will continue when we have to be in each other's faces 7 days a week, and how the hell all my stuff, which currently takes up a whole apartment, is going to get consolidated to a single room. A lot of stuff will obviously have to go into storage, but the main issue is, I have gotten used to having my own space, and it will take a bit of adjusting to. I do think it's worth a try though, and the fact that it's a month-by-month arrangement is good - if it really doesn't work out, we're not stuck in a lease.
Some other tidbits:
- My new skis are really doing wonders for me. They are so light and manoeuvrable, I am charging down runs I used to be scared of. I hope we get some good powder in the mountains this week, I want to hit up a black diamond. (Best case scenario: I won't die.)
- Nando's has landed in Seattle. Hallelujah. Hot on its heels - Baker's Delight.
- This is hilarious.
