Been pretty hectic here the past two weeks. After the crazyness that was IRS, I was hoping for a few days to relax and recover. I haven’t found them yet.
For our abbreviated Reading Week(end) I returned home to Winnipeg – my first time back since August. It was semi-relaxing. I had a chance to hang out with Erinn (collide_a_scope) and her roommates (Miah, Seb, and Joel) and drink cocktails and play boardgames (Blokus, Ticket to Ride, and Apples to Apples), which made it the perfect evening in my mind.

The main goal of the weekend was a belated Christmas with the family. Unfortunately, Kelsey is off working at a ski hill in Lake Louise, but Kerry and Jen came over for an amazing Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinner cooked up by mom. Mom food is good on its own, but Ukrainian Mom food is amazing – perogies, borscht, and kutya. MMMMmmm. Afterwards we exchanged gifts, played more board games (Ticket to Ride) and sat around and talked. It was a good evening. I was happy to share some London stories and give them some of the gifts I bought there. The highlight for me though was replenishing my wardrobe. New socks and underwear and some really cool shirts. I also got some really weird food items from Mexico – what exactly do I eat peanut butter salso with? I know I said I love eating anything with peanut butter, and I love salsa, but together…

The weekend at home should have been more relaxing, but I had a lot of homework to catch up on. It didn’t help that I discovered that my laptop is either afraid of flying or afraid of Winnipeg. While I was sitting in the lobby in Pearson coding away before my flight, my laptop died on me. Blue screened and then wouldn’t restart. When I got home I spent a whole day trying to diagnose the problem. I even took the whole thing apart screw by screw looking for a loose wire. No luck. I eventually set up my old desktop and used to that to work on. Then when I got arrived back in Rez, I put the laptop back on my desk, and in one last desperate attempt tried to restart it. No problems, just booted straight up. I’m not sure what the problem is, but my laptop is not moving from this spot until I’m ready to give it up to the repair shop for a few weeks (probably after exams).

After Reading Week(end) I had a few big assignments that consumed most of my time, and then on Thursday night I flew down to Seattle to interview with Microsoft. By a strange twist of fate, erin_noelle had her MSFT interview that weekend too, so we were booked to fly on the same flights. It was nice having some one to talk to on the plane rides and during the downtime before and after interviews. I had 6 interviews split between 2 teams. Both of the teams are new and only one is starting to release products, so I can talk about it – they’re moving into the Business Intelligence area and going head to head with Business Objects, who I have an offer from right now (too funny).

It was a long day, but I didn’t feel drained at the end of it. I think I really like interviewing, I get a real adrenaline high from it. At the end of the day I was really pumped. I think the interviews went pretty well, but I don’t want to jump to any conclussions before I find out later on this week. I wasn’t that excited about the Business Intelligence team, but if I get the other team, I’ll have a real tough time deciding between it and Business Objects.

The best part of the trip was everything was taken care of by Microsoft aheaed of time. I didn’t spend a single cent while I was there. No need to send in receipts for reimbursement. It was great, all my meals, my flight, car rental, and hotel all covered. On Saturday night, a Microsoft SDET from Outloook took me out for dinner. It wasn’t part of the interview, just a chance to relax after a long day and get some insight into working at Microsoft. We went to a Mexican place and had a blast. A lot of the concerns and questions I had about Microsoft in general – living in Seattle or Redmond, promotions, what it’s like as a new employee, social activities, moving between positions and groups – were all answered. And I had an amazing fajita and una cervesa grande.