I started at Microsoft Canada yesterday. The team has been exceptionally supportive even as I stumble through my adjustment to the new environment, the new job and the new people. John, Barnaby, Mark, Qixing, Mark Z, Daniel and the rest of the team been great at helping me get adjusted. This is the first time I’ve worked at a large company since 2005, and there is a little bit of an adjustment.
I’ve got the MacBook Pro connected to the network. I spent the day configuring BootCamp with Vista Ultimate. I am trying to run Vista, but I keep wanting to switch back to Mac OS X (I think I’ve complained about it once an hour for 2 days). Familiarity is key in determining acceptance, and I’ve been using OS X daily since the Developer Preview 3 in 2000 on my old PowerBook Pismo. It’s great to have the MacBook Pro configured and running on the corporate network, now it’s time to try to run Vista in either BootCamp or Parallels for a few weeks (it’s really fast in BootCamp, I had only run it in Parallels previously), though there are a few hoops to jump through. It helps if you read the instructions ;-)! There are a whole bunch of little things that I miss including:
- TextMate
- Quicksilver
- Quartz anti-aliased text rendering
- iPhoto
There’s a whole bunch of things that are just plain different. And I don’t like them. I am going to actually use Vista and the software tools provided. I’ve already installed Vim and Notepad++ as my text editors. I have also installed Firefox which I seem to be using for external sufing, I’m using IE7 for internal surfing.
I also get to try out a couple of new things that have me excited.
The best part is I have the opportunity to find the stories of people doing awesome, inspiring things in Canada. The stories are about technology, about design, about entrepreneurship, about things that are happening in Canada. What jumps to mind are things like GiveMeaning, ConceptShare, JobLoft, Idee StandoutJobs.com and others. I’m going to DemoCampGuelph1 tomorrow night, I’m looking forward to seeing the cool shit going on in Guelph.
- Mark Roseman CourseForum
- Chris Iwanowski, “speaker’s corner” kiosk application we just developed for Guelph Museums.
- Simon Clark
- Holden Karau
- Kevin Thomason, aideRSS, Filtering/managing your RSS feeds – basically, taming the RSS beast
- Colin Smith, Adobe
I’m looking forward to figuring out what this role is all about. I’m looking forward to figuring out how I can continue to help connect community members. I’m looking forward to being inspired by the wild, crazy stuff things I know that are going on in Canada.