we are approaching sun rise here in Seattle. I have been awake for over 24 hours... and still in "hurry up and wait" mode. With a little bit of luck we will get things up and running before too long.
It is the deployment of the new Zune client and maketplace backend. For those people who did not update to the newest client everything is working just fine... as far as the new client goes, things are still on hold. I guess we can hope those people in the Atlantic and Eastern time zones aren't trying to use the new client. (which is already available for download.)
I can only wonder how Jaani feels right now. It is very unusual for me to come home for a few hours and then leave again, but he got a nice long walk and two trips outside before I went back to work... I guess I should recap exactly how my Monday morning has gone. (it has been a little out of the ordinary.)
I woke up this morning (Monday 5/5/08) earlier than usual (at 6am). I caught an earlier bus than usual, and the bus was packed! I had to stand all the way until the bus got to Bellevue (20 minutes or so)... after that I got to sit for the remaining 10 minutes to Redmond and finished one of the books I got from the Library (Titled Google and the mission to map meaning and make money). It is a good book; it tells the story of a student from the University of Maryland (Sergey Brin) and another student from the University of Michigan (Larry Page) who came together at Stanford to create a system of rating pages. After years of development (and an attempt to download the internet onto a computer in a day or two) the system now known as PageRank revolutionized the field of searching indexies of the Internet, and developed the first brand (and word for that matter) to become a universally recognized verb that means "to search" in every language on the planet. (well at least over 100 of the spoken languages on the planet.) As a result the face of Internet search was changed forever, and few could imagine a world without Google. In the background Sergey and Larry became billionaires in a record time span, and things are looking to only go up.
So, once I got to work, we had a press release most of the day. The bloggers were here for all the major news agencies. (For those of you who don't know yet, nearly all news stories start as blog postings these days; On average, and with the exception of current events, a RSS news feed will give you the news a full day before it is published in a news paper or on broadcast news.) They were walking around the building all day trying to get us to spill the beans on some hot juicy exploit or bug... crazy news people. I actually gave a short speech about my areas (Cart and Meld.) I am concidered the expert on both areas because that's what I focus on all day long. So I told them first what the areas are (only without the technical jargon) then I started to explain why these items are so cool! I have to admit it was harder than I thought because I wanted to say too much! I managed not to give any of the future release info up, which makes me happy because I didn't violate my NDA!
After work, I went home a little early, and spent a few hours with Jaani. We went for a walk, watched Charlie Wilson's War, then I took him outside again and left to go back to work. I have been sitting here ever sense.
So, that brings me to here... it's 6:30AM PST... I have reached the point of being tired... then went to work... became exhausted... forgot that I was tired... remembered... and am left in a state of limbo where I can't really remember if I actually went to sleep or if I am still awake... I actually stopped trying to figure it out because it was too distracting form the task at hand. So, I better say goodbye so I can continue to hurry up and wait!
anyway, just remember... I am not crazy... I merely have a healthy disregard for the impossible.
Later,
SteveO
