Near-pantheon experiences and other stories

I deserted my blog for a loooong time.
The reason is that this summer something flabbergastingly (there is such a word or I've just made it up?)  great happened to me, and I waited to put my hands on evidence before blogging about it. In fact the evidence eventually arrived, but then I had doubt about the liceity of publishing it, then the thought simply disappeared and my blog went in starvation. With this post I'm officially breaking the deadlock, so there.
The flabbergasting event was a dinner in the States with the Microsoft first line, in which I had the pleasure to meet in person people whose usually you only see in the news or in the "urbi et orbi" company mails. And even better, a meeting with our Chief Software Architect!
You see, I guess that, being them PMs, many people in this OPML must meet or have met him actually as part of their job: but for me, that I work on the field on the other side of the globe, it was a unique experience (that made me pretty much a celebrity in my subsidiary, anyway :-)).
The evidence I was talking about above is consituted by some pictures of the event, but in fact I think I should not publish them: collecting all the permissions from my colleagues alone would be long, and I can brag textually as I'm doing anyway...
I won't say anything about the content of the meeting, of course; what I will remember of it, anyway, is my surprise in realizing that the discussion was not limited to the executive summary level: in fact, it took deep dive in technical details (on the most disparate subjects) that I would not have thought achievable when being on the position of having a 360° view of the company activities... after all, we are definitely not talking about an average person :-)

OK. I broke the deadlock, now I can blog again... Vibro.NET Reloaded!