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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Wow, what a long day.
It started like this:
7:30 am
Drive to the Belmont AT&T store to meet a co-worker (Andy). Waited in line for 5 minutes and aborted.
8:10 am
Arrived at Stanford Shopping Center, witnessed the 500 or so person line and aborted.
8:30 am
Arrived in the parking lot of the Mountain View AT&T store, did a U-turn an went to work.
9 am - 5 pm
Was ridiculed by co-workers who were looking for my shiny new iPhone. One co-worker (who shall remain nameless) convinced his 12 year old son to wait in line for close to 4 hours and got an iPhone! Then he called me in a meeting from his new 3G iPhone to taunt me.
6:00 pm
Arrived back at the Stanford Shopping Center. Got in line and it was moving really well. after 1 hour I had moved half way up. Then it turns out that a bunch of Apple employees went off shift so the progress in the line slowed. It took me 2 more hours to move the same distance I did in 1 hour.
Anyway, while in line I was instructed to call 611 on my phone and remove my 15% corporate discount or I would not be walking out of the store with a phone. I was told I'd have to do that or else my transaction would fail. I was also told I could call back on Monday and add it back??? WTF. Weird.
Anyway, when I got in the store I answered a bunch of questions.... yes, yes, yes, yes, 16GB Black. They only had a few yet, and had not sold out of anything yet.
A few minutes later I was $550 poorer (no worries, my iPhone fund has exactly $550 in it) because I did not qualify for a subsidy... half the price my ass.
What is interesting is that they did not unbrick or activate my phone. I just walked out with a shrink wrapped box. The minute I walked out my BlackJack II stopped working. I guess they nuked my SIM. Anyway, 10 minutes later I was home, accepted the 500th Apple EULA of the year, and have a working 3G iPhone with my corporate email and a bunch of cool apps like SmugShot.
I'll post more info when I've played around with this thing.
I feel like I did back in 6th grade when I got my first Mac! (A Mac II cx with an Apple 13inch RGB monitor).