Work Play Work Play

Whooosh. Another 15 hour work day flies by.

After the quick jaunt to Chicago, I continued making up for not having taken any vacation over the holidays this year by flying down to Los Angeles for a weekend to see my family and catch up with my friend Jeff (formerly of mates fame) who flew in as well for the weekend from Michigan. The weekend trip was followed by 5 nights in beautiful Whistler, British Columbia -- by far the most amazing skiing in North America.

Along the way, I picked up a free HTC Excalibur aka T-Mobile Dash [review]. Free, you say? Why yes! Free as in beer! I had called up T-Mobile from LAX to exchange my T-Mobile SDA with an underperforming joystick for an identical model, and they kindly offered me the Dash instead - with free shipping no less! The Dash runs the Messaging and Security Feature Pack, which is much improved over the SDA's OS, and T-Mobile will be offering a free upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 shortly for it as well. XOXO @ T-Mobile!

It's going to be a challenge to get work done at work this week. My team has a couple dozen partners in town for a round of tech talks and demos, it's TechFest (one of the coolest annual Microsoft events), we're celebrating one of our products that's about to ship (OpsMgr 2007) at an off-site event, and there's an all-paid-for team ski day on Wednesday. Sadly, after taking quite a bit of vacation recently, I'll probably need to duck out of most of it (even the skiing). Time to work hard -- go big or go home.

Isn't it funny I can write a 3 paragraph blog post all about me me me, and yet it winds up plugging 5 Microsoft-related sites? Hrmph.