My visit to Redmond - Synopsis

Words will become limited if i had to write down all the feelings i went through.... so i am writing down all the synopsis which hapened in this blog :)

Day Zero:
Day checked in the hotel, had a nap and woke up @ 11 pm and found
that every dinner restaurant is closed down. so went to wendy's and had a
nice veggie ham burger and the jetlag had affected me i went out for a
stroll to find the place where the meeting was held so that the next day i
need not worry and found that there are 12 microsoft buildings within a
reach of 1 mile :). Came back to hotel and slept !! .....


Day one:

I went a little early and was found to be greeted by a beautiful
receptionist "Stephanie". She introduced me to Chris boar the guy who was
running the show.
We had a pre-meet discussion since i went a little ! early and found that i
was the only guy who was attending both the day sessions and felt thrilled
about it.

The session was on .NET Security (i hope the topic name is not in NDA)
on C# . We did not speak much (nothing) about C# and i could sigh a relief
when i found couple of indians (vishal and another guy from Sanjay). Though
we all know vishal, i was pretty comfortable when i met him. After the
session was complete, Sanjay (sanjay works for TCS and his client is
Boeing) took me out for a see thro trip in bellvue and redmond. Ok, The
info what i got from sanjay was that boeing in itself has a .NET Usergroup
and he is a member of this group.

Sanjay introduced me to couple of his friends Gaurav and Rohit. Both work
for microsoft redmond. Gavrav is in the messenger project and rohit i dont
remember which project he is in. We all went to a microsoft building
(buliding no 109) and were playing Xbox games. We played until 10.30. and
so! when we came out it was very late for dinner (all the restaurants get
closed by 10). So we had two option goto denny's or go to Rohit's place. we
did the later part of it.

Rohit cooked his maggie and provided us a stumpous meal and gaurav dropped
me back @ my hotel. Twas the end of day 1.

Second day:

The second day was with a different group of people. It consisted of
few people who are in the industry for more than a decade except one of
them.
I was the only Indian chap in the crowd. This discussion was with the
contiunation of the first day and we were expanding the horizons of the
first day outcome.
It went on fine. Until the evening , before the end of this session Miracle
Davis , the product manager came to me and said if i am staying in town for
one more day she would be giving me a person who can take me to the entire
Redmond campus and i had fixed up the timing from 1- 4 pm.

Later in the evening Gaurav, rohit a! nd me were playing xbox until 9pm went
for a good Indian Dinner. And later we went home the jet lag took over me.

Day Three:

The third day was full of networking and showing up the UG stats.
Vishal had given me the compiled version of the stats and i had to
photocopy it 7 times ;).

I gave one to all of the following :)

Miracle Davis (Product manager of MS Learning)
Matt Carter (Project Manager of MS Press and MS Learning)
Steve Cellini (Senior Technical Evangelist) Platform Startegy Group
Robert Scoble (Technical Evangelist)
Harold Hagstorm (Content development mgr of MS Learning)
Chris Howd (Content Dev mgr)

All were praising the work done by the UGs in India and i had a 45 mt
meeting with Matt carter who was telling me what MS Press (now ms Learning)
could do to the UG's and he said he would interact with the local (India)
group and let me know the updates of it . Also, he was hinting @ giving
away books for! the UG's.

Matt said that if we MVP's would be interested to write books, MS press
shall publish the same for us. He has asked me to take down your opinion
and based on the interests i wud be taking forward with matt on this.

Robert Scoble, Matt Carter & I went for lunch. All of them were praising
the entire UG and esp Anand's involvement (he said Anand is in his Team
99). Congrats Dude!!

Post lunch i had a Microsoft Redmond Campus visit , chris howd (the content
mgr) took me in his car around the entire Remdond and alsmost all the
buildings.
He took me to the building where Bill sits but he said it is accessible
only by the Executives. Anyway, i shall send you guys across the VCD of the
entire goround when i am back to India.

Eve i met Kunal and had a coffee with him :) and as usual he was pretty
busy and we could mange only 15 mts of the time.

post microsoft visit, sanjay the TCS chap took me out for a visit to
seattle downtown and had a nice view on the space needle (seattle famous)
and were roaming in the streets of seattle.

Thats all happened in the Microsoft Redmond trip....Comments are welcomed.

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