Talking at the Sunnyvale Senior Center

On Friday, my coworker went to the Sunnyvale Senior Center to do a community service project to help people spring clean their computers (e.g. install all the service packs, anti-virus, etc). She asked me to come along since they’d probably ask questions about Hotmail and the like and so I went. Turned out to be very rewarding. After she did her thing about her spring cleaning project, I joined her in the front of to field questions about MSN and Hotmail. It’s really interesting to see the different perspectives others have on our products. We fielded questions such as: “is Hotmail free” or “where do I go to get Hotmail” or “can I use Hotmail with Outlook”. It was great to hear what people had to think and to get to talk about our product with people (far) outside the industry.

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Flea Market at Ami’s School

About three weeks ago the taqueria across the street from Ami’s elementry school was held up at gun point and a few of the patrons were shot by the theifs. Check out this email that was sent to the school’s faculty:

I wanted to announce that this Saturday (April 9)  we are having a flea market at the Garfield CDC site. It is a fund raiser for a family in our classroom that is in need of  some tender loving care right now. On March 25, a parent in our classroom was shot while working during an armed robbery in the taqueria by the school. He was shot twice in the neck and is spending the month in intensive care trying to recover.  Meanwhile, his family is left trying to cope.  There are two small children at home, and they are in need of the basics: money, food, pull-ups, etc……….. We are accepting donations of any kind in order to sell them at the flea market on Saturday.  If you would like to bring stuff by, drop it off in Room 4 at the Garfield site by Friday afternoon.  Also, please feel free to come by on Saturday to do some shopping!  We are also accepting food and pull-up (2-3 year old) donations in the classroom as well.

Incomprehensible, isn’t it? The school is located at 3600 Middlefield Road in Menlo Park if you wish to help.

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Vacation Plans Finalized in the Nick of Time

I spent at least 2 hours this morning dealing with people across Europe, doing all sorts of stuff like booking hotels, cancelling hotels, and making and refunding plane arrangments and the like. For all the effort, the trip if finally finalized and squared away after yesterday’s little bomb. This is probably a record in last minute vacation planning for me, but here it is:

  • Wednesday, April 13 – Fly to Paris, stay at my sister’s place
  • Saturday, April 16 – Afternoon/evening train to Amsterdam
  • Sunday, April 17 – Fly over to Budapest
  • Wednesday, April 20 – Fly back to Amsterdam
  • Saturday, April 23 – Head back to San Francisco

As usual, I’ll be taking pictures like a madman, but I’m not bringing my laptop so I won’t be posting them online but I’ll hopefully be blogging while I’m on the trip.

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Cancelled Flights

In all my traveling, I think this is the first time this has happened to me: my flight from Amsterdam to Krakow and return have been cancelled. I’m left wondering if it has anything to do with the Pope’s death (he’s from Krakow). Unlikely, I’m sure. Instead of Krakow, I’m going to head to Budapest (on the same airline — we’ll see how that goes). The lame part is that cancelling my hotel reservation in Krakow is going to cost me $25 since I booked an Expedia “Special Fare.”

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