shahine.com/omar/

Well tomorrow is moving day. I really hate moving. This time around I hired movers to pack everything up. Well not everything, but almost everything.

To make matters worse, Lora is doing her last rotation as a Resident Physician at UCSF and it’s Oncology, which is the worst rotation of all. She works 6-7 days a week from 6 am to 7pm and most of the patients are really very sick. So it’s just myself and the cat packing things up.

Anyway, I thought I would be in San Francisco for at least 7 years, but 4 will do. I’ve really enjoyed living in San Francisco, but I’m not going to miss the weather this summer. I will miss the amazing views we have from our apartment, the south beach neighborhood, and of course all our friends. But we are really looking forward to the burbs and I’m looking forward to a 15 minute commute to the office.

The last 4 weeks have quite possibly been the most stressful in my life. Buying a new home before you’ve sold your current home, and then dealing with open houses, and selling the new home don’t do wonders for your nerves. Especially as you watch your short term funds dry up as you try to manage all the temporary debt you take on . I’m looking forward to this summer when I can look back on all this as a piece of my history.

I've hopelessley wated forever for Motorola to release the Q, and now it appears Verizon will prevent the phone from going GSM for at least 6 months. Even more pathetic is the fact that the Q is not shipping with the MSFP. How lamo is that since MSFP was RTM'ed back in December and 5 months later, you get the older OS with the brand new much delayed phone. Ridiculous.

Anyow, the new hotness is the Fujitsu Q.

I've been really quite on this for some time. I've watched and read mini-msft since the first post. Last week Lisa Brummel announced some sweeping changes to the review model and compensation system for high performers. While many people have pointed to mini as possibly being a catalyst for this change, I know otherwise. There have been a lot of other people that have spent countless hours meeting, writing, and lobbying our execs to change the system. One of those folks is Bubba. I'd like to think that our many lunches, discussions etc have also helped a great deal, but Bubba deserves a lot of credit for really doing something about the situation and finding a bunch of like minded individuals within Microsoft to help him with the process.

I've never felt good about the fact that mini's blog results in a lot of our dirty laundry being aired in public. But I don't feel as bad knowing that there is a positive force within Microsoft that resulted in what I feel are fantastic changes for employees.

At the same time I am personally very disappointed at our leadership team for the lack of messaging, PR, marketing or whatever you want to call it that you do with the street that resulted in a 5 dollar slide in the stock price. I'm not impressed with our new CFO.

If you can read this post, then Word 2007 can successfully post to dasBlog. Why do I love this? Cause I hate the spell checker in every other applications (including BlogJet). Office has hands down the best proofing tools out there (and we use them in Windows Live Mail as well).

BTW – I’m currently on vacation. Right now I’m on Fripp Island in South Carolina attending a wedding. Earlier this week Lora and I spent time in Charleston, SC and Washington, DC.

update: looks like Word is passing in the dateTime in this format:

<member><name>dateCreated</name><value><dateTime.iso8601>2006-05-13T14:59:40Z</dateTime.iso8601></value></member>

Which dasBlog doesn't like. The format should be:

20060513T14:59:40

Stephen Colbert roasting Bush.

Bush roasting Bush.

All at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

Very very soon, our M6 release of Windows Live Mail will have support for Firefox 1.5 on par with our IE 6, and IE 7 support (minus a feature or two we haven’t gotten working yet).

We agree with Scoble here. Firefox support is important and we’re glad we finally have it.

What happens when you take two different brands, and combine them together? MSN Live. Nice I didn’t even see that one coming. Not even CNet gets our branding strategy.

I’m just going to start calling our service Windows Live Hotmail to clear things up.

Last night Lora and I ate at Gary Danko’s with some friends. I’ve always wanted to eat there, but could never manage to get reservations. Anyway, this was a phenomenal culinary experience. Gary Danko has a menu where you pay by the number of courses you want. I decided to have 4 courses: 1) appetizer, 2) main course, 3) cheese and 4) desert. Everyone else had 5 courses, and of course I sampled most everything. The bad news is at step 3 I was full. Luckily we were there for so long that I was able to digest a bit and eat some more.

We also got lots of little “gifts” from the Chef along the way, which filled us up even more. Everything was amazing, including the service.

Oh, and the wine prices there are obnoxiously expensive.