Betsy Aoki's WebLog

I can feel a long blog post coming on....this one has a lot of interconnected parts. Last night my pals Ari and Laura took me to see Huun Huur Tu, which is a group of 4 Tuvan guys who play two musical instruments apiece, sometimes 3, and do that anomalous...

I've got two thoughts - like plates spinning on sticks - about community right now, and forgive me if I let either of them fly off like frisbees as I cogitate on this. I was recently asked to give input on community - not in my usual “Yee-haw...

Well. No one on the GDN team complained. Except about other things. ;-) So I put the FAQ up, plain as it is. Even in the left navigation. I'm hoping this stems the tide for the poor folks who write me day after day about things that don't work as well...

I liked this. The extensive audio geek stuff is unnerving but he says it is actually cheap.

Note: All photos this page Randy Stewart, blog.stewtopia.com I am grateful to Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media for nudging me into giving my first Ignite talk at Gnomedex 2009, in the same way I'm grateful for previous circumstances nudging me to bungee...

I've been on the run since the wee hours of the morning (7am MVP summit meeting) but I felt the need to blog about the MVP Summit . First of all, the summit's more intimate than PDC was. It's partly occurring on the Microsoft Redmond campus and also...

I was sitting in the Microsoft cafeteria I think of fondly as an expanded Starbucks (there's a latte stand on one end, but the entire color scheme might as well be in a Starbucks cafe) with Chris Sells . I was asking his advice about outreach to the Gotdotnet...

Hi y'all, The Got Issues Gotdotnet FAQ will be out by the end of the week; I'm just having the team review it before I make it public. I'm also hoping to get a widget on GDN that will let me do what Duncan Mackenzie does on his developer center which...

So 2007 is a year where I want to focus on inspiration. Last year, I set out to thank as many of my mentors (and they are legion) as I could. I probably missed a couple hundred. This year, I have a loftier goal: to thank the folks who presented...

So last night my plan was simple - I was going to bring together Jas Sandhu, who works with the developer evangelism team, together with Justin Grant, our MSDN marketing mogul, and Sean Kollenkark, who is an MSDN pm that firmly believed I should talk...

So it's been a mad rush since we went to Whidbey RTM bits and I know it scarred some of you, for which I have to apologize. There are some server rodeo rides in that deployment that I don't care to describe in too much detail. For all you guys trying...

Well, the Channel 9 Guy pestered me enough after seeing my last post that now I have to indulge his whims.He's been a constant travel companion - quiet, amiable, sinister, and spongy. Because beginnings are always important times, you see here the Channel...

Since I last blogged about Agile I've been doing a lot of thinking about how some ad hoc project teams can come together swiftly and with great effect, and yet others will arrive ponderously to the scrum, Agile books in hand, and very little gets done...

Smuggling a load of 9 Guys overseas for the podcasting talk in Australia Regional Director and podcasting whiz Chris Auld speeds away at TechEd NZ Channel 9 Guy adventures in NZ Top of the SkyTower with the Channel 9 Guy in Auckland...

Heh! My officemate has her 15 minutes of fame on Channel 9 today! What I love about this whole video actually is how they capture things that you would not see, like our admin, a MSDN Directs meeting (the folks who report to our Product Unit Manager)...

I went to Anita Rowland's Blog Meetup Wednesday. Saw Robert Scoble. Saw a bunch of Microsoft bloggers actually who followed Scoble to this strange and kitschy bowling alley known as Leilani Lanes . (You must click on the Leilani link if only to see the...

I just said those immortal six words to my long suffering officemate, who runs the .NET Framework, ASP.Net, and Longhorn Developer Centers on MSDN . I don't actually place blogging before good food - if I did, you'd see a lot more posts from me ( Kent...

You might say this is tempting fate. You might say, Betsy, on a regular basis you spit into the wind, scratch your armpits at the mighty, laugh and try to drink Diet Coke at the same time.You walk the razor edge of sanity on regular basis. Why the heck...

Ok, so I made these two New Year's resolutions: that I'd reduce the size of my butt and I'd increase the strength of my brain by learning more about asp.net and Longhorn. Mostly because I hate also sitting around (on my butt) feeling stupid in the presence...

So you know how in the blogging world, especially in the tech blogging world where time is money, money is gear, gear is nirvana and nirvana means 1st person shooter quality time - as I was saying, how tech folks don't want you to waste their time? And...

Ok, so I will be a Lounge Lizard or a Booth Babe, however you want to describe it, at TechEd Orlando next week. I will essentially be at the Microsoft.com Community Lounge June 6 - noon to 7 p.m. June 7 10 a.m. - 7 p.m. June 8 9 a.m.- 5pm...

In previous posts you've seen me walk you through and discuss the XNA 2D Collision detection sample . I've been taunting you with screen shots of the goofy little 2D Windows game I made called "When Cods Collide" based on that sample...now, I need to...

I stole the name of this post from Raymond Chen's post of a similar name. What makes it great is that Raymond writes about 1,001 posts to my one. So by the time I reference his post with mine, it's buried on his blog, like I discovered ancient Mayan ruins...

So I have been remiss in posting some key TechEd Orlando photos. One was a situation I really wish I had seen - but can share thanks to Jason McCullough of the CCT team (his camera) and Brandon Blazer, whose name is the coolest and who actually took...

Well, the other day I was minding my business, being a Program Manager, when I realized I had not chatted with Chris Sells in a while. I used to see him more often when he worked in MSDN, but now he has some ridiculously important job in a product team...