I don't think that people really care what the story is when a blogger goes away for a while and suddenly comes back.  So I won't bore you with one here.  Suffice it to say, I've neglected my blog for far too long, and if anyone is left that might still check it then I thank you.  I do hope to post at a frequency that is more worthy of your attention. 

This week in the EEC is a bit nuts.  I am lucky somewhat in that I'm not 'in the trenches' this week, but most of the rest of the team is.  We're preparing to host an all-facility event for the MOM (Microsoft Operations Manager) team next week, with a total of 22 customers (companies) confirmed to attend.  We're breaking it into two groups of 11, each group attending for two days (with a day of rest between).  We occasionally do these kinds of events (we call them 'airlifts', an oft-used term at MS I'm sure), where instead of hosting a single company that tests several MS products (a "depth/1:1" engagement), we host one product team and 15-30 of their biggest customers (or TAP/early-adopter customers, anyway).  Airlifts are easier for us in some ways - like the test environment specs are the same for each company, as they'll all be going through similar tests exercises going by a list of scenarios & tasks generated by the MOM team.  What makes this harder than building a big ol' customized environment for a single customer, is that even though the airlift environments are smaller (11 servers plus 5 clients in this case), the EEC is building it out 11 times (and rebuilding them all in a day, before the second group arrives!).  In the EEC's nearly-4 years in existence, we actually have gotten pretty good at standing up a lot of configured equipment at a fast pace.  But I've learned this week (rather, was reminded of my long-possessed knowledge) that there are always devils in the details that prevent it from being as straightforward as the planning docs make it seem. (Like how to put 11 identical-but-separate test environments on the same network as a common fileserver, without having IP conflicts/replication errors/other similar nastiness. Or something like that. Something bad, like crossing the streams.)  I'm nowhere near being an network engineer, but from what I've heard, the buildout team has had to dance around some stream-crossing trickiness like that in this final stretch before the event begins.  At any rate, my hat is as always off to my teammates, the ones who actually install hardware in the boxes, stand them up with OSs and apps, network them together, and generlaly make it all hum and blink prettily in the data center.  In particular I salute Stan who is driving this whole event as point-man, and is rocking the house (tho he may not realize it in his sleep-deprived state).  Please go visit his blog and give him a hug in the comments.

My role in the whole deal next week is actually as a videographer.  That's not my 'regular' job or at least not my primary role; though I've always run video cameras for our engagement kickoff meetings.  That's where the customer visiting us presents their visit goals, current MS pain points at home, future plans, company profile, and any feedback at all about MS that they want us to hear.  MS product team folks typically attend, but I videotape the presentations for later viewing by those who couldn't make it.  Frequently a customer will have a choice quote in their presentation that warrants 'clipping' it out and sending around MS for folks to see.  A quote to the effect of "I won't deploy product X unless it does Y," or, "if product X still has these problems at RTM we're going with competitor Z," tend to get a lot of MS-internal attention and can result in product changes that ultimately do benefit the customer(s).  So I end up feeling pretty good about getting to play with video gear all day.  (muahahaha...)

Lately, I've been doing more & more video work, now starting to include short 'films' that take more editing skill than I've employed before.  These 'films' are generally humorous in nature and are almost always intended to be a morale-lightening nugget to show in a group meeting, or a funny internal-marketing tool.   In addition to recording multiple presenations and customer feedback sessions for the upcoming MOM event, I'm also now doing their 'morale video'.  On top of this I'm doing another, similar project for a former boss (still at MSFT, different group), and as the scheduling is working out all the principal photography for both projects has to happen next week.   Add on the video capturing, editing, and rendering, and I'm in for some long nights myself in the coming weeks.  Given that I don't charge for my video services, and that there's a whole MS department that specializes in making multimedia content that does charge, I might expect a surge of project requests;  however, given my decidedly amateurish output, I don't expect any such surge to be sustained for long.  MS Studios might break my kneecaps before too long, anyway.

I imagine that as time goes on and I need stuff to post about, I'll turn to A/V topics as there's always something to rant/rave or ask about there.   I wish I could post some of my 'work' here, alas it's all MSFT-internal/confidential & such.  (You're not missing much;  my best piece is about a coupla geeks arguing over MSN/Google.  You can guess how that ended.)

If you've read this far, thanks again.  I'll be back soon.  (Soon = ~weeks, not ~months...)