Change of scene

I'm just packing up after a three week stint working in Redmond instead of my usual base in Cambridge.  Firstly I should say thank you to all the many folks who took me out, fed me and generally made me welcome, especially Jochen and George.

It's been quite intense at times as we're pushing hard for our next release (real soon now folks) but I feel I've got a lot done.

A few observations:

You can do a trip like this and lose almost no productivity - use remote desktop the first day while you set up a temporary machine at your new location and then it's all good.

When you're working remotely for a long period, you can learn to kid yourself that a face to face conversation isn't better. It is.

Windows Live Messenger Beta with reasonably recent web-cams is absolutely fantastic. Keeping in touch with my better half on such a long trip has been both easy and fun.  Even the cats like it. (I have a few invites left BTW if anyone needs one).  Time to start using this seriously for work.  Roll-on some future when we'll have many-many services and bandwidth that are this good in this space.

Hotels suck by the 3rd week but having a pool 15 feet from your bedroom door is a fine, fine thing.

Everything in Overlake closes way too early :-(