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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I’ve been blogging for close to 7 years now. I think the amount of writing I did peaked around 2004 or 2005. When I had my daughter 2 years ago, I slowly started to crank down the blogging. This was really hard for me because I’ve always enjoyed writing on this blog (and I hope you enjoyed my random stuff!). At the same time I pretty significantly cut down the amount of time I spend on a lot of my side projects (like dasBlog) and even playing with every piece of productivity software I could get my hands on. Mostly I spend my time doing work, and when not doing that, hanging with the family.
In 2006 I started to play around with Twitter. In the past 2 years Twitter has really hit critical mass for me and I’ve found that my ability to get short little burst of stuff out there really alleviated much of the guilt I felt for not blogging. In fact, I first really used Twitter at ETech in 2006 but never really found much use for it after that till they added Facebook syndication.
Last year I also started to really spend more of my time using FriendFeed (although not that much because there are no good FriendFeed clients nor is there a decent iPhone experience) as a way to aggregate all the stuff that I do on the web (share items in Google Reader, upload photos to SmugMug, and comment on stuff). I kind of view FriendFeed as my “public” Facebook since my public internet activity is all visible there.
So where does this leave blogging? Twitter has sort of become the anti-blog in my mind. The more I use it the less urgency I feel to blog. Further my twitter updates are syndicated to Facebook meaning that people I am friends with in real life see my updates as well as the folks I don’t really know but I do enjoy interacting with, similar to my blog + comments.
Mike Torres recently wrote a similar post that got me thinking that I really need to put something up on my blog and let people know, if they didn’t already, that even though it’s been quiet here you can still see what I’m up to on Twitter and FriendFeed.
@patlee will do. I also like Rosenblum about 22 hours ago
I think it's amusing that Google thinks updating a service like Hotmail is more trivial than updating a browser like Chrome to be compatible about 22 hours ago
I was finally accepted to be on the Turley Wine Cellars mailing list. Took 2 years. wohoo! B.E.S.T Zinfandels ever. 1 day ago
I do plan to continue writing here, especially on topics that will take longer than 140 characters, but the subjects and frequently I write about will differ from my posts in the past.