I drove down from Vancouver to Seattle early this week with the bags leftover after the movers took my other stuff. I am put up in Seattle downtown temporarily until I find myself an apartment. Seattle downtown is fun, much better than my previous stay in Bellevue downtown though not as good as Vancouver city. The best part to being back though is the face to face meetings with people I work with. And that I can walk into people's offices instead of typing a formal email, making a call or using IM. Just the pleasure of being able to get an issue addressed right then is awesome.

I am thinking of making frequent visits to Bloomington in the next year. Something along the lines of spend  a few days every month and work from Bloomington. It will be interesting to make real world use of all the technology we build for remote scenarios.

We use Office Communicator internally at Microsoft for all our internal IM converstaions, audio/video calls/conferences, file transfer etc. In the past when I worked in IDC, Hyderabad, we used email and VTC for communication with the Redmond team. The last 3 months I have been working remotely from Vancouver with the Redmond team. Things would have been definitely tough without communicator. And I am not saying that just because I work in the Communicator team. The round table is pretty awesome too.