I love Lucidio Mayer Kuhn Filho’s post about his daily bike commute. Lucidio is a Dev on the Microsoft Dynamics team, and judging by this picture, he is also one tough mofo who pedals 22 miles a day round trip.
My favorite part of his little FAQ is this section:
Don’t you get all sweaty?
Of course yes, but here’s one of the advantages of working at Microsoft: at-work showers. The building where I work has locker rooms with showers plus a towel service. So as soon as I get in my office, I can take a hot shower. Also, because I have my own office, I can place my bicycle in my office, or leave it in the garage, where there’s a bicycle rack.
Now, where else could I use my bicycle to work, have showers and towels waiting for me, and colleagues that think it’s perfectly normal for someone to stroll with bicycle clothes plus the bicycle itself at the corridors?
Read the rest of Lucidio’s post.
Microsoft Live Labs is a catalyst for the convergence of two critical facets of technology development. The aim is to inspire new thinking and new approaches to product innovation.
By Julie Evans
Live Labs founder Gary Flake says the biggest challenge facing his group is to transfer its technology to product teams effectively.
Microsoft Live Labs is going to a place where few have gone before: the intersection of basic research and pure engineering. Its mission: to drive state-of-the-art Internet technologies.
Live Labs was founded by Gary Flake, technical fellow at Microsoft, who saw the need to form a trench in the middle between the long-term nature of researchers and the near-term focus of engineers.
“… there’s an intersecting point somewhere in the middle where there’s this convergence of research and engineering where a lot of interesting things happen,” Flake said. “The notion of being a little bit in the middle is one that’s a little bit awkward for Microsoft. We wanted Live Labs to be a place that was really having a home in the middle between these extremes. We apply this pattern not just on the continuum between engineering and research, but we also think about it in terms of tactics versus strategy, long-term versus short-term, horizontal platforms versus vertical engineering. In every case, we are aspiring to try to make the market connect the dots between the two extremes.”
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A Microsoft tester spills his guts about testing tools for devs, chugging the kool-aid, and dancing zombies
The geek in question
Justin Wilcox
The job title
Test Lead, MSMQ
MSMQ, huh? Nice Microsoft acronym. Break it down for me.
MSMQ stands for Microsoft Message Queuing, which ships as part of Windows. We’re a messaging platform that developers use if you’ve got an application on Computer A that wants to send information to Computer B, you use us to guarantee that information gets there, even if there’s a failure (e.g. machines burst into flames, someone trips over the Ethernet cable, asteroids, etc.) after you sent the information.
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From Valleywag: Michael Wallent, a general manager at Microsoft, will return to work in January as Megan Wallent.
While this news is interesting in a “huh, that doesn’t happen every day” sort of way, the blog post touches on broader issues about gender and Microsoft: This is a company that as of late last year counted only 100 women among its top 900 executives — those Wallent’s rank and higher. In becoming Megan, he’ll only improve that ratio by 0.1 percent.
Read the full article.
Looks like Jeff Sandquist (of Channel 9 fame) is working on a new project:
A couple of nights ago Larry Larsen, Max Zuckerman and I got together to film some new content at my home for Channel 10. This will used for a new series where we go to the homes of fellow Microsoft employees and show the technology they use.
Think about it….
Channel 9 brought you inside the halls of Microsoft, now Channel 10 will take you to their homes. 
Yes, I know you’re probably thinking that this will be some sort of lame MTV Cribs like rip-off series.
Not the tone we’re looking for. Instead we’re honing in on the actual technology people use in their homes. [Read the rest]
I love seeing the way geeks hack their homes, so I’m totally looking forward to this. I can’t wait to see the wifi-enabled blenders and database networked bathroom fans.
Microsoft Studios offers advanced audio and video services that match any facility this side of Hollywood. An anniversary celebration is a chance for employees to see how it can fulfill their presentation needs.
By Laurie Rowell
Daniel Orme-Doutre, consulting engineer for MS Studios, works in the facility’s technical hub where encoding and distribution tasks are performed.
In its 10 years as the headquarters for Microsoft Studios, Building 127 on the Redmond campus has hosted historic events such as Bill Gates retirement announcement, and a talk-show host known for his suspenders and his one-on-one interviewing format.
Back during the Y2K scare, “Larry King wanted to talk to Bill Gates on January 1,” explained Bob Palmer, group manager of Studios. “Larry does his show out of Chicago, so when he gave Bill the dates, Bill said, ‘No, we can’t do that.’” Instead, Bill proposed an alternative that unnerved the King contingent: that they do the show from Redmond. When the show’s producers came out from Chicago to see the setup in Building 127, however, they quickly arranged to broadcast the program from Microsoft Studios.
“At the end of the show, their staffers asked, ‘Can we just do the show here all the time? It goes smoother and we don’t have any issues, and it’s a lot nicer than what we’re used to back in Chicago,’” Palmer said.
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This isn’t MSFT-specific, but I couldn’t help but link it.
Regular swearing at work can help boost team spirit among staff, allowing them to express better their feelings as well as develop social relationships, according to a study by researchers.
[Read full article]
I am on the hunt for this gold helmet-wearing Segway rider. He’s been spotted all over campus (that’s my building in the background of this photo!) and I must speak with him. I want to know more about tooling around Redmond on a Segway — and why the gold helmet?
The venerable JPEG format for multimedia images has been an industry standard for some 20 years. Now, the search is on for sharper, more versatile image-coding technology, and Microsoft thinks it has developed it.
By Laurie Rowell
It took Robert Rossi’s team about five years to develop JPEG XR. Now, Rossi is attempting to persuade industry groups to adopt the technology.
How does Microsoft, a company eyed warily by competitors and open-source advocates alike, deliver a new information technology standard to the industry free of charge and without any strings attached? Especially when that standard promises to change how we see the world, via the Internet and other multimedia sources, for years to come?
Robert Rossi, principal program manager lead for Microsoft’s Core Media Processing Group, took a crafty approach to this challenge. He stood in front of the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), the group that set the JPEG standard, at an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) meeting in February, and said, in essence, “Here is your JPEG1 successor.”
The new format, originally called HD-Photo and renamed JPEG XR (extended range) was developed at Microsoft entirely. “Internally, a lot of people would question why Microsoft gave the technology away free of charge.” Rossi said. “The truth is that an image-coding technology doesn’t survive if it has a cost associated with it, because it needs diffusion.”
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