Wow, what a week it's been.  It's funny, I remember when Keith moved upstairs to marketing, I watched him blog, and I watched the number of posts he made slowly taper off to where he posts a once a month or so.  I said to myself, I wasn't going to let that happen to me ever.  I'd always find the time to blog.  Well, I can safely say, that isn't as easy as I'd thought!  I'm way behind in my blogging these days, which irks me.  Blogging about work stuff is a fun way for me to share, and help make Microsoft a more open, and transparent company.  If you know what is coming, and can have some say in the way it comes, you will hopefully trust it more, and have a bit of ownership in it.  Or at least, you'll understand why we fixed one bug over another. 

Last week we launched, which was awesome.  I went down to San Francisco to meet with a bunch of pretty influential bloggers, and it was a very neat crowd.  I learned a lot of interesting stuff, heard lots of feedback, and generally met some cool people.  It was a little weird to me to see some bloggers writing down my comments for future writings, which freaked me out a little bit at first, but then when I thought about it, that's my job.  I speak about IE, and I listen to comments about IE.  Most of the people there were developers, and all had gripes, but many said thanks, you've taken a step to make my life a bit easier.  Oh, and when is coming out? 

Everyone wants to hear us say, and I think we need to keep saying, we are committed to this.  IE has come back, the "vacation" is over, we're taking feedback for today.  There isn't a formal loop for feedback yet, but we're working on it.  At this point in the process, our big steps are not creating major feature scenarios, or anything like that, but to look at the simple feature requests, and start prioritizing those.  What do people want IE to do?  What do they want us to do better.  We know there is a lot, and you've certainly told us there is a lot.  Start thinking about a top 10 list of the 10 things you want to see happen in for the developer. 

After getting home from San Francisco, I had two nights in my own bed before I took off to Boston for The Ajax Experience.  I came out an extra day early so I could make sure all our packages arrived, set up our booth and so forth.  Needless to say, it was a good thing I did.  They lost my luggage on the flight, but thankfully I got that back at 7:30am this morning.  Then, of the 8 or so boxes we had shipped here, we found the first four easily.  Then I had to call down an enquire about the other 4.  They managed to find 2 more, but couldn't find the last two.  CRAP!  These last two are the major part of our display for the booth we've got.  It took me until almost mid-day today to find the last two, it seems like they mis-labeled them, and put them in the wrong place.  We're staying at the Westin Boston Waterfront, and it's a brand new hotel, and it is showing a few signs of that, for example, when I got to my room, some how, the bathroom had been used before I got there!  There was a towel on the floor, the sink was dirty, and the there was a used soap bar in the sink!  Eek!  The internet connection has also been WAY spottier than it should be.

Our booth will be pretty sweet.  We've got an XBOX 360 lounge set up, and at the end of the event, we're doing a drawing for the XBOX (so I don't have to carry it home).  So if you're at The Ajax Experience, there should be ballot in your bag, be sure to fill it in and drop it by our booth.  On Wednesday we'll be making a draw to see who gets to take the XBOX and toys home.  Speaking of cool give away's at the Ajax Experience, as part of the registration, everyone gets an Ajax Experience branded 512mb iPod Shuffle!  How's that for cool?  For future events when we give away XBOX's or anything like that, I really want to get them event branded, that's kind of cool! 

What else, OH YAH!  I got my first blog post on the IE Blog!  It's pretty cool, but I got to announce the AddOn contest for IE.  check out the post, but the short answer is if you submit an AddOn to the IE AddOns website between November 1st 2006 and February 9th 2007, we'll pick a few of the best ones and send one winner to Mix07 and give them $2500.  We've got some other cool prizes, including $2000, $1000, $500 and a couple of Zunes.  Check out the announcement!

Anyways, I should get to bed, I need to set up the XBOX lounge around 7:30am tomorrow.