In the Belly of the Beast - Dare Obasanjo's weblog

July 18, 2001

@ 12:58 AM

I really wish I could post to slashdot with my MSFT email but I only got away with it for a days worth of posts before someone noticed and I got told to seperate my posting to slashdot from my employer as much as possible.
Seattle's a decent city. Lots of outdoorsy stuff to do (hiking, mountain biking, etc) and the women seem get along with me which makes for a rather happy Carnage4Life. Besides the fact that it rains all the time, most clubs close at 1:30 AM, liquor stores are few and far between plus they close early, and there's no Macy's nearby. The women make up for all of these failings though. :)
Today was the annual barbeque where the interns get to meet Bill Gates. His house is fantastic and I'll probably have house-envy for the rest of my life. He turned out to be a very good speaker and made some rather amusing and self-deprecating comments which made me think of the MSFTers can't laugh at themselves post and laugh even harder.

He was also a good sport about interns asking him questions, he got the typical bullshit from interns trying to be original "How're the kids" to interns trying to show they've read up on him "I heard you once went tractor racing" to interns trying to heckle him "What's the deal with bashing Linux & Open Source". The latter comment was mine and I half expected to be ignored or fired on the spot (*smile*) but he actually gave me a fairly coherrent answer. Of course it was nothing I hadn't already thought myself but it was kind of cool hearing it from the horses mouth, so to speak.
My midpoint review came and went and I aced it. Looks like I could become a fulltime Microserf if I so intended, I wonder if I can give up Java (and maybe C++) though?
So far I've gotten in language wars with Dale Rogerson, Eric Gunnerson and a bunch of other C# and .NET folks about various issues I've had with .NET and features I miss from Java. I've also had dinner with Dr. GUI which was the direct result of another language war style exchange. The upshoot of the dinner is that I may be doing some articles on C# vs. .NET aimed at the Java crowd. I'm not a 100% that it would get accepted so I may end up submitting it to K5 or Slashdot provided that there are no IP issues.
I've picked up XSD, XSLT & XPath while I've been here and am stunned by how complicated using XML has been made that almost every spec that deals with it is looks like it can only be fully understood by a P.hD and is a few hundred pages when printed. Sheesh.

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