With Great Power comes Great Response.write("Ability") : Personal

Astoria Ski Day V2

PhaniRajuYN — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:56:56 GMT

I buckled under peer pressure .Here are the pics from the 2nd Annual Astoria Ski Day .

Explanations will come soon .

If you have a facebook account , here are the same pictures ,tagged.

The halls are empty

PhaniRajuYN — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:33:43 GMT

I probably brought this onto myself by taking all my vacation time in November to go back home for a month long visit.

Now that its December , almost 80% of the team is on vacation and I am in office. Its not just my team , most of my floor
in building 35 is on vacation. I hardly see anyone in the hallways nowadays , the silence feels unusual.
Most of the people with whom I used to discuss any new ideas are on vacation , and not having anyone around
to bounce my ideas off of feels weird . Although , the silence lets me get a lot done though , no distractions.

Thanks to the unusual ( in Redmond terms) snow, the campus shuttles are shut down for these snowed-in days .
That means my walk to work for a distance of mere 3 mile feels like 10 miles as I have to walk real slow
to prevent slipping on the ice and falling . And not to mention that it gets dark by 4 PM in the evening .

So I go to work in the dark and go home in the dark, but only have an eight hour day.
Guess I can check off one of the items in the list of You Might be from the Pacific Northwest if You….

This is how evenings look when I step out in the evenings to go home .

Pretty awesome , isn’t it !

Oh and before I forget , Happy Holidays Readers !!

Happy Birthday to Me , Again!!!

PhaniRajuYN — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 10:08:00 GMT

Its that time of the year again !
I grow a year older ,every year , on the year.
This happened to me last year too and I have a strong suspicion it will happen next year too .

Stuff I did over the last year .

14th Jan 2008   , Joined the Astoria team.
14th Jan 2008   , Saw snowfall for the first time.
23rd Jan 2008   , Went Snowboarding for the first time.
23rd Jan 2008   , Ran into a tree while snowboarding for the first time.
28th April 2008 , Went Sky-diving at Snohomish and didn’t jump off the plane ( got scared and canceled jump ).
15th May 2008 , Went hang-gliding at Tiger Hill , Issaquah ( yes , first time ).
5th July 2008    , Went River rafting for the first time in Wenatchee valley.
5th July 2008   , Jumped head-first into a rapid just to see if I could , ( I could , don’t think I will ever do it again)

I don’t know if I have become more adventurous or just suicidal.

From a work perspective ,
Joined the only team I wanted to work for , the Astoria team.
Worked with the team on Astoria Beta1 and RTM ,
And the adventurous interim release of Silverlight Client library for RTM.
I still can’t believe that I work for this team .

Here’s to 27 years of living and loving !

REsT In Peace

PhaniRajuYN — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 01:46:32 GMT

So , I finally made a move from my job in PSS to the product I enjoyed playing with most , ASTORIA ( ADO.NET Data Sources ).

Of course, this means that I have moved from half-way across the world to join the team in Redmond, WA.

About a week after I joined , we went Skiing . Me , being a novice , hurt myself snowboarding and wear a band-aid on my forehead as proudly as one would wear a war wound with pride.

I realized that I had all the attitude to be a snowboarder and none of the skill :-).

See how a high-performance team beats the deadline for fun over here : RESTing on the slopes