Respite From The Last Mile

I have been neglectful of this blog recently, as my team is hard on the last mile to both the production go-live of v1.0 of our product and the drop to test of the first release of our localization Service Pack next week. I've pulled several late nights, but I've learned a ton and our product is awesome. Full localization in sixteen languages (and half a dozen character sets) of a highly performant, globally deployed customer support application is a pretty amazing accomplishment.

Anyway, that's my excuse for not posting here for over a month.

The Baseball Challenge was an awesome experience. Former Mariner pitchers Brian Kreuger and Brian Holman each managed a team of volunteers in a surprisingly competitive game played in a wonderfully laid-back atmosphere -- my two sons were able to sit in the dugout, as well as on the field, during the game. Over $15,000 has been raised to date for Cocoon House and Ronald McDonald House.

By the way, the Cocoon House team won, 12-8, despite the fact that I went 0 for 4.

The Microsoft Giving Campaign starts on October 3rd. I hope those of you reading who are MSFTe's will consider helping these two fine organizations. I'm in the process of planning a Giving Campaign event for Cocoon House and will post the details here when they're fully baked -- my next meeting on the topic is scheduled for Tuesday, 20 September so I'll hopefully know more then.

After I post those plans, the next post will be technical in nature. Promise.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for your patience.

    -wp