Word development party at Rob's
News ·Friday June 4, 2010 @ 00:19 EDT (link)
I went shooting in the morning (WCA, Glock 34, moved up to 30' and shot some good targets). Guys in the next booth had something very loud (maybe just a .45) but they left before I was done.
For Office 15, Word and Publisher (and PTLS—Page, Table, and Line Services) are merging into a new team called PARC (IIRC, it stands for Publishing, Authoring, Reading, and Collaborating, with a nod towards the Xerox PARC laboratory that produced so many innovations). Our new development manager (a Word lead when I started, who then moved to be Publisher's development manager, and originally started as a Word intern), Rob, invited us all to his place for the afternoon. He's not too far from our apartment, actually—a little way up Avondale and east on 116th.
I got to Rob's around 1330 and let myself in (event start at 1300, people actually got there on time), didn't bother ringing the doorbell since I could see people I knew. He's on a very steep road, and I parked at the bottom as suggested in the invite, even though there did happen to be space in the driveway. There was plenty of food and drink—Mexican themed—and then people gravitated to the Xbox and played Roy's Street Fighter IV game. In between, Rob said a few words about people that were leaving the former teams or arriving on the new one, both full-time and interns. I took a turn with the game—Roy's "fight stick" is great—and just used Blanka's shock repeatedly (what can I say, I don't know the game, so I stuck with what worked). Jessica had a good run, and Roy's blindfolded win against Levent was epic.
It was raining when I left—the crowd had thinned considerably and most people were heading out—around 1730, so I raced down the steep street (117th) to my car. Mark's ride had left without him, so I took him back to work and then got to face the usual 520/Avondale traffic. It was a decent party, and Rob says he'll be having more. With a new development manager and a lot of great new code projects to work on, Office 15 looks like it will be a lot of fun (and hard work).
Books finished: The Limits of Power, Universally Preferable Behaviour: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
