The new year has been pretty good so far. It started with a new laptop. The old Macbook Pro has been replaced by a new, slightly faster, and much sexier Macbook Pro. It’s taken a bit to settle in, as Vista under Boot Camp on the new MBPs is much less straightforward to get working than it was on the previous generation, but all is well now.

Last week I went down to work in Simulant’s San Francisco office for a couple of days, mainly to meet about ongoing projects, and also to recap 2008 and discuss plans for 2009. Last year was a great first year for the company, and we ended up with money in the bank and a long list of completed projects. Here’s hoping that 2009 turns out even better.

Now I’m back in the Seattle office and working through a giant Silverlight project for MS. This one involves some very high-up folks within the company, a legacy system with a stranglehold on all the data, and lots of account management. Some days I’m really glad to be just the developer and be spared on most of the meetings.

Aside from that we’ve been talking about our “labs” projects and where those should go in the new year. It’s tough to say for certain, but I get the feeling I’m going to be getting very familiar with the iPhone SDK.

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.

I’m slacking on the updates. Here’s what’s up. Last week I spent Thu and Fri in the new Stimulant offices in San Francisco. Everyone had just moved in the previous weekend, but it was looking pretty great already. The main reason I was there was for two video shoots.

The first was for the Surface blog (similar to this one featuring my friend Joel), and was a pretty casual thing where we showed our upcoming music app and the balance board demo, and discussed Stimulant and Surface design/development. That video will probably be posted next week.

The second was a more marketing-ish video for the Expression team that was more about how we use those tools in our project work. This was a much larger video crew with much brighter lights and an actual director. I’m not really sure when that will come out or where it will live.

I’m not much of a slick talker, but hopefully I managed to sound fairly coherent on both shoots. In any case it was lots of fun to actually work with my company in person for a couple of days. I hope to do that more often.

The music app is almost done and will be shown to the public for the first time at the IxDA SF meeting on Wed. I’m excited that it’ll start getting out there, and hope to continue to be able to make fun non-paying Surface stuff in the future.

The physics renderer has taken a back seat to all this but I’ll be putting more time in this week and next.