Projects, parties, precipitation

So much for the latest attempt at keeping a regularly-updated blog. I’ll try to get back on the wagon.

Things have been busy at work and extremely dull otherwise. Since my last real post, we’ve started and finished a little Silverlight thing for MSN. We got some very silly content, very little direction, and very little time, and made something pretty cool out of it. It’s a pretty good example of how the team comes together. Should launch before Christmas.

Now I’m ramping up on a much larger and less silly Silverlight thing, as well as some other Surface experiments.

Last week I attended the “Silverlight Partner Summit” in Redmond, which was fun because I ran into some friends and colleagues, and also because we got a bunch of details on Silverlight 3, which is looking to be pretty exciting. I started using Silverlight because I was being paid to, and that’s changed some with v2, but I think v3 will be the one that really gets me to prefer it over Flash for most projects. I think I won’t be the only one.

After that I went straight to the airport to head to the SF office for the Stimulant holiday party. Nathan took some pictures, but I kept my camera in my pocket as usual. My job was to set up Surface to be party friendly — removing most of the SDK apps and adding our stuff to the launcher, including ToneGrid, Xray (demo video to come, someday), and the photo booth app that Darren made just for the party. Surface was a big hit, as were the Stimulant-green cocktails served throughout the night.

Now I’m back in Seattle, where everyone’s panicking about cold weather and snow, and I’m trying to get my head around the wacky math required to do anything interesting with Deep Zoom.