Tanya, my cohort on the Architecture Strategy Marketing team, has finally – after much promising and subsequent delays – starter her blog. So far, just she’s just written a hello world post where she explains why she named her blog “Wabi-Sabi”.

Of course, long time readers are probably wondering: “Did he just say ‘Marketing team’?”

Yes. Yes I did.

About two weeks ago, I was re-orged to be reporting to Norman. While you might expect me to be displeased about this, I’m really ok with it. First off, I was acting as the marketing director for about six months, so the fact that we now have three people doing marketing instead of just me is a huge bonus. Secondly, while I was acting as the marketing director (badly I might add) I was in total firefighting mode – no opportunity to do advance planning whatsoever. Now, I have the opportunity to focus on doing a great job on a few things well (like the TechEd Architecture track) rather than doing just enough to keep a ton of things from completely falling apart. It’s taken a while to shift gears, but now I spend more time doing and less time running around like a chicken with my head cut off.

Finally, my move to the marketing team is inherently temporary. Yeah, it’s fun while it lasts and I’m learning a ton, but don’t think this is a long term career change. Before it even happened, Adam (head of Architecture Strategy) explained that he expects me to be over on the architecture side of the house “soon”. Norman and I have already started planning that transition.

So get your “marketing slime” digs in while you can! (Apparently, we marketing slime prefer the term “marketing flacks”.)

One of the reasons blogging has been a little light around here recently is because I was prepping for the TechEd Session Triage. Basically, all the track owners figure out what sessions they want on their own then come together for an entire afternoon to present their sessions to each other. Turns out there is often overlap with other sessions in other tracks that need to be worked out, suggesting changes to titles and abstracts and other wise cutting up. For example. I’m sitting next to Becky who owns the Connected Systems Infrastructure track. We had several sessions in both the CSI and ARC tracks that have caused changes and cuts. We actually got the ARC, CSI and DEV tracks got together earlier this week for a “pre-iage” which means today went pretty smooth for the ARC track. Not that it felt like things were going to go smooth running around this morning. Typically, the last 24 hours before triage are a flurry of emails with last minute suggestions. This year – no exception. But now, at least it’s done.

Jochen just posted a list of known issues for the Dec 04 CTP release of the DSL Toolkit. I have not had enough time to play with this. Anyone know where I can get 3-4 more hours a day? 😄

If you’re using the MSN Deskbar, you might want to pick up Gibson Research’s Wizmo. Wizmo is a command line tool that provides a grab-bag of tools. Personally, I use it for the shutdown commands. I’ve mapped several of them to Deskbar shortcut, particularly “shutdown” and “shutdown!”. The exclamation point invokes the “damit” variation that overrides applications and/or device drivers that refuse to shutdown. I know a repave is in the near future when I’m find myself using shutdown! on a regular basis.

I’m surprised Wizmo didn’t make Scott’s Ultimate Power Tools list.

I just read Dare’s awesome article on C-Omega. If I had any time at all, I’d experiment with it to rewrite dasBlog (well, at least the back end parts of dasBlog anyway). Of course, I don’t have any time at all, so it’s not going to happen (well, at least I won’t make it happen)