I'll be there. Getting in very late Wednesday night, and leaving Tuesday afternoon. I'm working on the video crew again this year.

tigerknight flew in on Friday night to visit a bit, and left on a cruise with his parents today from Vancouver. I volunteered to take him up, since going into Canada in the morning is the easier direction, and I could break in my new NEXUS card on the way back, thus saving his parents from having to get up before dawn and cross the border two more times to pick him up here. So we nipped up real quick, I dropped him off, grabbed a quick bite, and came home.

( But while looking for lunch downtown, on Robson Street I caught an unusual sight I had to share. )

From an insideHPC blog post mentioning the group I now report up to inside the company, quoting a blog post made by our new CVP:

Here is a small item that may be of possible interest, creation of the Extreme Computing Group (XCG) at Microsoft. XCG was formed in June 2009 with the goal of developing radical new approaches to ultrascale and high-performance computing hardware and software. The group’s research activities include work in computer security, cryptography, operating system design, parallel programming models, cloud software, data center architectures, specialty hardware accelerators and quantum computing.

About half of those items (computer security, cryptography, operating system design, and quantum computing) are in my group. The remaining ones are from the group we're combining with.

I added an animation loop to the eXtreme Computing picture toob made for me, adding my own smartass slant to it.

In related news, we ended up horning in on their lab today and installing some hardware. Now that we've been sucked into the walled garden, we're just moving our stuff in, crashing on the couch, and eating their food. It's like we're the departmental equivalent of furries.

Thoughts on the icon?

Current Mood: mischievous

And now, thanks to toob, I have an icon appropriate for my new group at work.

Current Mood: silly

As of today, my group has been moved inside Microsoft Research, underneath a newly minted corporate vice president who runs a group called.. and I love this name.. the "eXtreme Computing Group," or XCG for short. To my mind, this name summons images of hackers (with festively-colored mohawks and living on cans of Mountain Dew) working on computers in cheesy movies, where they're navigating filesystems and defeating firewalls through the use of graphical tools that have one literally flying around the system, with thumping techno songs blaring in the background.

It's still complicated to explain to people what I do for a job, but "eXtreme Computing Group, Microsoft Research" will look way better on a business card.

EDIT: This is the group we're merging into, that's going to be renamed XCG.

Current Location: Unimatrix 01, Submatrix 112, Alcove 4323, Redmond, WA
Current Mood: optimistic

Today is the sixth anniversary of the day I officially became owned by Her Royal Tonnage, The Princess DK.

And to celebrate, I had the foresight to get a fever and aches, which obligated me to stay home today. It's been awhile since I've been any kind of sick; this is the first sick day I've had to take since starting this job. Usually I end up being over these things pretty quickly, and hopefully that'll still be the case.

It's been a bit tense at work. I don't have all the info yet, but it started ominously: At 12:45pm on Monday, a meeting request came from my manager through for 2pm that same day to our whole group. A meeting request that said, "This is a mandatory meeting -- decline any other meetings at this time and plan to attend." And of course he wouldn't say anything until then. Fun, eh? I hope to have some better info tomorrow, assuming I can drag my carcass in. I'm not sure yet what to make of what we were told. Stay tuned.

I'm looking for pretty low-capacity hosting for a modest mail server for a domain, some web space, and maybe an IRC server. I may use this as an excuse to finally scuttle the IRC server, though. Either way, I think it's finally time to retire my old, loud, heat-generating and power-consuming UltraSPARC server that operates over my cable modem, particularly as my ISP keeps changing my IP address. Anyone got a hosting provider they'd care to recommend with a general notion of cost? Having my own host with a shell prompt would be nice, but I could go for something more stripped down for just email and web space, especially since I don't really need a whole host.

On an email I received internally at The Empire today, someone humourously suggested "Bing" stands for "Bing Is Not Google." Ha! Reminds me (and the grizzled net.veterans in the audience) of "Pine Is Not Elm."

By the way, am I the only one who was reminded of "The Bing," which was the name of the topless bar in "The Sopranos?"

Current Mood: thoughtful

I used a quote from "Spaceballs" during a presentation at work to people from the NSA.

I was booting up a virtual machine that was protected with a PIN, and the entry screen came up. And I asked the room, "What's our favorite PIN?"

And without delay they responded, "1234!"

After I entered it in I said, "That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!"

(Yes, I know, in the movie it was 12345.)