Betsy Aoki's WebLog

So, I finally have enough bios live on the QnA Team Blog that I can at least start talking about the crazy posse I work with. At least beyond horrible cat emergency stories and ill fated drives in the snow....to eerie resonances. Also, I figure I've...

Well, I was nosing around the blogs of my old team for auld lang syne's sake and ended up reading Doug Seven, the dev lead who frankly should have a role next to Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. I can totally see it, and he wants to hit me with...

So, the brain is bending and buzzing and there's been too much caffeine in every single drink I've had today. That's my caveat. Thanks to the inestimable Liz Lawley , I was fortunate enough to attend the Social Computing Symposium sponsored by Microsoft...

Well, I got snagged for an impromptu community drinking thing with some other Microsoft folks and 3 guys (not from Rolla) from the Live Side : Kip Knusken, Harrison Hoffman and Chris Overd. I suspect there may have been more LiveSide folks there but we...

You could wonder why they picked May day (mayday!?!) to air my video on Channel 9 but since stuff goes on the home page all the time, if you don't find it there, here's the permalink . People have asked me what it's like to be interviewed by Channel...

Well, it's different. First, the parking garage I park in looks EXACTLY like the parking garages in the old Duke Nukem. Remember that gray cement and Big Freakin' Fans? And stairwells? I'm hunting for the closet where they keep the digital rocket launchers...

Check it out ladies and gents! Permalink: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=183335 --Betsy

I blogged about it on the MSN Search blog briefly, but as part of the new Betsy world I will be assisting that team with their blog. There are about a bazillion pms in there working on all sorts of stuff and we need to talk more about it. This is a...

There are a couple of blogging discussions I see going on that have their own merits and are completely unrelated, yet rattling in my brain this week. 1) the Rory / Dare / Eric discussion I'll roughly call "Your passion underwhelms me/enthusiasthma...

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...

Well, this story has awaited some time to be told. Mostly because I spent a lot of time cackling over it as the events progressed and being rather smug, saying I told you so, and so forth. Now I REALLY get to go to town. :) Remember how I screwed my...

Some of this will likely take folks as a surprise (although the hallways have been buzzing around here as the internal mails have flown around), but today I am stepping down from my position as queen of Microsoft employee blog sites and principal program...

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...

EDIT: Had to update this to reflect 5pm start of downtime. Sorry about that; there's a chance it may go shorter than 10pm but we want to be safe in warning you all. ----------- Yep, sucks. We are hauling servers over to another location. As...

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...

I have received multiple requests for pimpage and I feel that Dave has had his moment. Now, I must spread the love. First, even though they did not ask for pimpage, I say: thank you to the Gotdotnet community members who waited for us as we achieved...

Finally, the master has revealed himself. My imminently suave co-worker, nicknamed by our director Sandy Khaund "Dayslick" at last year's TechEd, wearer of a tie to Microsoft just last week - Dave Morehouse is blogging. Followers of my blog have...

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...

This weekend was all about books. The big bash on Saturday was with Robert Scoble and Shel Israel celebrating their new book, Naked Conversations. I learned that not only can I make Mom proud by the fact I'm actually mentioned in their book, I got...

Everyone probably saw this over the holidays, but I only did this evening and I laughed til I cried. Mostly because Scoble is the least likely person I know of to pull a banana on someone... http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=Fa8PB9P9KOM No, I don...

Over the weekend I was chatting with a developer friend of mine who told me about an algorithm he examined in one of his Computer Science classes at college. To quote the link he later sent me from Wikipedia: Given n men and n women, where each person...

Well, not precisely. I ran into Duncan in the cafeteria today and he noted his last day was coming up at MSDN. Duncan I first met when I first came to MSDN a few years ago. Did I know he was an author or a guru? No, I just knew that he had some swag...

Well, I've had 2 weeks off from work, one week of that spent seeing relatives, and the last week being sick, so you could argue I've been in an altered state....perhaps the perfect environment to look at the past year and the coming year, make pithy comments...

I heard these guys got a lot of flak on Slashdot, which frankly they don't deserve; the debuggers worked on Gotdotnet when we struggled with live site issues this spring and they assisted us in the Whidbey conversion this fall (Jeff Stucky this spring...

Essentially, do you want to change the world with Gotdotnet? Do you want to work only on the latest .NET Framework? On 64-bit servers? Innovate with a small team? It's not for the timid, trust me: http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details...