A Running Tally of Metaphysical Phenomena

‘Round these parts, we find it’s a lot easier to refer to fractions in terms of parts of a dollar.

K: How far are we from Silverdale?
K: Oh, I don’t know… We’re about a fifth of the way there, maybe.
[silence for a few seconds]
K: What’s that in cents?
K: 20 cents.
K: Oh, OK.

So it was with amazement in our minds that we acknowledged recently Greta’s progress to 25 cents of her first year! If you say 14 weeks (we were late in reporting the amazement), it sounds sort of impressive, but when you say that she just blew past a quarter of year, that really sounds impressive. She’s doing so well, too! She’s much more patient when she gets hungry than she used to be. She hasn’t cried going to sleep for the night in over a month, and she has slept from 11-ish to close to 8 probably about 70 cents of the nights over the last few weeks. She’s drooling like crazy and smiling like crazy and even laughing a little when I tickle her cheeks and ears with her own toes. We’re really starting to feel that stage that parents talk about when you give and give and give and then your little baby finally starts to really show some great feedback. We’ve been able to get a reaction out of her in various ways for a while, but now it seems like she’s really participating in our interactions, and it’s a ton of fun. I laid on the floor with her for close to an hour yesterday and watched her mimic me when I stuck out my tongue. She’d be happy, smily, etc., but no tongue at all, and then I’d wag my tongue around like a big doofus for a minute, and she’d grin and stick hers out. Worked every time for a little while, which was just too much. She’s awesome. Here she is showing us last week what happens when she doesn’t wear a bib and then this week, being a fearsome little white bear and roaring at all of us.

Well, I’m off to do something different. I’ve been over here at Xbox Live for just about a year and a half now, and I’m about to try my hand at a new adventure. After a long, long recruiting process, a 9-hour interview, and some waiting, I’m about to go over to the Windows team starting on Monday. It’s a great move, but not without its difficulties. It’s full time with MS (as opposed to being employed by Siemens but working at Microsoft), which means great insurance, etc., and it’s with a really stable group in a really stable company. So that’s all really great, and I’m very very grateful that this has come up.

At the same time, though, I work with a fantastic group of people that I really enjoy, and I’m going to miss them. I know I’ll make some friends on my new team, and there will be incredible people over there as well, but it doesn’t make it a lot easier to leave the people I work with now. It’s going to be a huge adjustment.

I’ll be writing user assistance stuff for error reporting in the Windows operating system. In English, that means the little boxes that come up and say “Your whatever just broke.” A lot of times, these have a button that says OK and one that says Web Help, so I’ll be writing some of that web help as well. What I like about this is that it feels a lot more natural for me to write about things that may be very technically complex and what have you, but for an audience of “normal” computer users doing their thing rather than highly technical people running systems analysis and monitoring and whatnot. The technical people here are awesome, and it’s been a heck of a lot more fun than a lot of people’s jobs, honestly. It just feels like a better fit for me personally to write for people a little more like me. I’m really looking forward to this.

Also, like they were telling me when I interviewed, you may not get your name on this stuff, but an audience of about a billion people is pretty cool. A few years from now, when I get a book out, the About the Author page is definitely going to say “Kent’s works have been read by over 900 million people and have been translated into over 100 languages.” It’s going to be sweet.

At the moment, I’m backing up all of my personal stuff from my work computer (music files and whatnot) onto the corporate network so that when I turn my computer in to Siemens and go get a new one from the Windows team, I’ll still be able to listen to the things I enjoy and set my wallpaper to pretty pictures of Greta. It all starts Monday. I’ll let you know how it’s going once it’s, you know, going.

Also, I’m a couple of weeks behind, but here are the 11 and 12 week pictures. Enjoy! See you next time.

Kent

Greta and I were hanging out today on the floor, and she was just talking and talking and talking. Right up until I turned the camera on. Then she clammed right up every time. I eventually was able to sneak the camera onto the floor where she didn’t see it, and this was just 41 seconds of the many minutes we spent talking to each other today:

Talking Even More – 11 weeks