Well MSN Search launched yesterday, so everyone in my team is pretty excited. Microsoft is starting a huge advertising campaign to convince people to try MSN Search and forsake Google. We’ll see how successful they are. They’re certainly throwing a lot of money into marketing.

As part of the marketing campaign, all the buildings on campus were plastered with search bars. I volunteered to help and spent my Monday night wandering through buildings and placing window clings on people’s office windows, elevator doors, elevator roofs, bathroom mirrors, drink fridge doors, and about anywhere else they would stick.

It was fun exploring what should have been empty buildings – most of them still had a fair number of developers working late. I think I work in one of the nicest buildings here at Microsoft, but we don’t have quite the goodies that some of the other teams have. All we have is a Foosball table that we can’t play before 5 pm because it’s next to someone’s office. The VB.Net team had 3 or 4 arcade games on every floor in their building – all free to play course. So I had a quick game of Dr. Mario during a graffiti break.

As part of the launch festivities, they had different gimmicky things all over campus. They had a MSN Race car at one building and just outside my building they had 6 alpacas. I’m still not sure why they were there, but it was kind of cool. They were a little nervous around strangers and they made the weirdest noises, like whiny kids. Too odd. At lunch, they had two very cute girls dressed up in skin-tight butterfly suits handing out t-shirts and window clings. Can’t wait to get that picture developed.

Oh, and as promised, as part of a press release or blog post they released the picture of our team with Bill. I had the original somewhere, but I found this photo-shopped one today, and it’s much more amusing (I’ve circled and labeled the important parts).
(larger…)

Editor’s Note: this picture has been lost to time sadly, but I did find the press release.

Last night we had an intern bowling event. Although it was even more slanted than usual with 20 guys and 1 girl (not including the two ladies who organized it), I still had a good time. Probably because the phone food was good, I kept winning, and I met my Mexican friend – Fernando. If you don’t remember Fernando, you’ll have to refer back to my first post, the one that started it all. Fernando is quite the bowler, I’m happy to report. Until the last game, he was the only one to beat my score (a modest 148) and by only 7 pins.