This weekend I finished the Autobiography of Malcom X, as told to Alex Haley. This is one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read and without a doubt the most powerful biography/autobiography I’ve read. It is amazing story written with passion and conviction of Malcom X’s years of growing up eating weeds to stay alive in Michigan to his personal growth after his pilgramage to Mecca, showing the progress one man can make and highlighting the struggle of the Afro-American in the 1960s. I’m not particuarly good at writing book reviews, so I won’t try to. Suffice to say, this is a must, must read work, a defining piece of literature for America society.
April 2004
Update on my Job
Seven months in one job, now on to the next. I’ve moved in to a new job at Hotmail. I had previously been working in the “Feature” team at Hotmail doing all sorts of work such as running our content system, managing our customer service accountability and as well some of the more techical features. I’ve now changed rolls in to a new “Infrastructure” team, where I’ll be working on building the future platform for the Hotmail front end, doing a lot more techie type of work. I’m not sure who I’ll be working for (although I have a running theory…) but I know the job will be a transition. I quite enjoyed working on user facing parts of Hotmail (that’s why I joined in the first place) so this is a change away from that. Let’s see how it goes, I’m excited to see change.
Work has been keeping my busy as well. I’ve got assigned to run one of our releases from the PM world, basically meaning there’s lots of coordination between all the parties (e.g. our dev team, ops teams, release engineering and QA teams). It’s become quite stressful since it involves being the go between and the arbitrator between all those folks. I’ve been working 10-14 hours days and I don’t see it letting up much soon.
Great SD Weekend to Unwind
I spent this past weekend in San Diego. Great weekend. Friday night went out and partied with the guys while trying to convice Dan to move to the Bay Area (and apply at Microsoft). Saturday was a BBQ at Cather, then Ami took me to the Cirque du Soleil‘s Varekai. It was my first Cirque show and I thought it was great. The acts were amazing and breathtaking. After the show, Ami took me dinner at Tapenade in La Jolla where we had an excellent dinner (at an Italian/French resturant, no less!). Quite a nice day. Sunday continued the fun with laying out at beach (La Jolla Shores) with Shane and Justin and reading Shane’s text book from his String Theory class (amazingly interesting stuff). After the beach, all of us (ex-)roommates went to Barona to do a little gambling, where I lost some $40 on a weird roulette machine.