Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Well, Sarah is finally sleeping. It's been exactly one week since her birth and it's gone by way to quick. Soon I'll be going back to work and that's just sad. I plan to take close to 2 months of paternity leave starting in January and I'm looking forward to that. I'd like to point out that Microsoft is amazing in this regard. Dad's get 3 months of parental leave, 1 of which is paid. The remaining 2 months are taken unpaid, or you can apply any vacation balance to that portion. Since Lora and I won't be vacationing for a few months, I'm going to cash it in and spend time at home watching my daughter grow. Anyway, I think it's fantastic that Microsoft is so amazing about this. I also signed Sarah up for benefits which means she gets the same amazing health benefits that I get... which as far as I know are simply unmatched by any other company (no copay for visits, prescriptions etc).
Thanksgiving dinner was great. I spent all day cooking our 17lb bird yesterday. My family, Lora's family and my sister/husband are here visiting. My dad made a most excellent Souffle for desert and it was great. Coupled with two bottles of 1997 Clos du Val Cab's, dinner was a big success.
Sarah is also doing great. The last two days have been tough since she has been extremely fussy not letting most of us sleep very much. My poor wife is exhausted (and on strict orders to nap right now).
Anyway, I'm starting to dig out from the past week... We have a lot to be thankful of this year, and most of all the wonderful emails, cards, and messages everyone has left us! THANK YOU all for sending them. We really appreciate it.
BTW - I've been using a new Sigma 30mm Lens to take pictures of Sarah. This lens is amazing. You can shoot at 1600 ISO in dim light w/o using the flash and the pics come out amazing. Mike lent me his the past few days while I was waiting for Amazon to ship mine... (thanks Mike!). Anyway, if you want to make those indoor pics look great and hate the flash get this lens. They make it for a number of digital SLRs.