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Wow. It has been a long time since my last post. I've never gone an entire month without blogging since I started a few years ago, so this "getting back into the swing of things" thing is new to me. But, in my defense, I had a pretty good excuse--I've been on paternity leave with my new daughter. It's been a mind-blowing experience and I've had more fun blogging about that than blogging about tech stuff

. Now, I am back and my job has evolved a little bit. I am now working across all of the Microsoft.com on-line community technologies. The team that I work with runs everything from on-line forums (which has gotten rave reviews from Soma, the VP of DevDiv) to web chats to the Federated Community Search that runs from within the Visual Studio 2005 and accesses relevant content from our Codezone partners. We teamed with Josh's team in Visual Studio to make a lot of that Community menu item in VS a reality. And yes, I am still part of the GDN world and we are continuing to determine how to evolve GDN. We're still trying to knock out a few glitches here and there, but the performance has been awesome (viva Whidbey! viva killer hardware!). I still hate that we were down, but Betsy still rocks and I am optimistic that we'll never go through that again (regarding her comment about coughing up her lungs, I just want to point out that she got that cough somewhere else--GDN is not hazardous to your health). The lessons learned when we did the migration are really important--I'm hoping the team writes a paper or something to make great use of the experience. I think customers can really benefit from those rough weeks in November.

Well, given the extensive scope of our team (I've only told you about that stuff I can reveal--trust me when I say we many things on tap that I can't even tell you about :-) ), it goes without saying that we have openings! It's the opportunity to work with people like Jim Newkirk, Betsy Aoki, Korby Parnell, Doug Seven, and George Bullock. We have openings for developers, testers, and program managers. Follow the appropriate links on Doug Seven's blog for more details (thanks Doug!).