When I started at Microsoft, Windows was the golden goose – it made lots of money and was extremely relevant. We even got labeled a monopoly by the DOJ (yay?) There was always lots of work to do that felt very important. By 2015, however, Apple and Linux had become very prominent, and we started charging less and less for Windows. Microsoft’s shift towards a…
Up to this point in my career, I had no major failures – every major project eventually worked as expected. Hardware based content protection broke my winning streak. The only good thing I can say about this experience was that I was able to work with some great engineers, such as Lucia Darsa and Hany Farag. DRM and content protection is almost a religious battle,…
DirectFlip was a great feature, but it only worked in limited scenarios (which never occurred on a Windows Phone, where the savings was the most important). Hardware that supported multiplane overlays, on the other hand, was usually capable of skipping the DWM composition step most of the time. For example, when watching a video with some controls on the screen like this: The video gets…
12/12/20 was our final day in Africa and we decided to do something slightly controversial. I’ve been working with the homeless in Seattle, and I wanted to better understand how things worked in Kenya. As it happens, Nairobi contains the 3rd largest “slum” in the world, which is called Kibera. As it turns out, there are a number of Kibera residents that offer tours. After…
12/19/2024 was the last day with the safari group. We had a flight from Malindi to Nairobi in the late afternoon, and everybody else took a connecting flight from there back home. But we decided to stay one extra day in Nairobi. We had to check out of our room at 11am, but they allowed us to hang out on the grounds until our shuttle…
I woke up early again on 12/18/2024 to attempt to take a great sunrise picture. It was cloudy again, and this was the best I could do shortly after sunrise: Thirty minutes later, I was able to capture this: The plan for the day was to visit the very small village of Oda, which is where Karen’s husband (Patterson) was born and raised (and he…
12/17/2024 was entirely a free day – there were no group activities scheduled at all (although we did sit with others in the group if we happened to run into them when we ate meals). I made it a goal to take a great sunrise picture, so I woke early only to find that the clouds were too dense to see the sun at all….
12/16/2024 was a bitter-sweet day. It started with a visit to the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust Elephant and Rhino Orphanage, which is within Nairobi National Park. Elephants only eat their mother’s milk for the first two years. If for some reason the elephant becomes orphaned during this time, it cannot survive. Since 1977, the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust has been providing a haven for these elephants (and…
12/15/2024 was probably the least exciting day of the trip. We left Maasai Mara and drove back to Nairobi. We got to four wheel the same river and pay the same kid to move his stick to let us pass. The drive was boring and uneventful (except for when I overpaid for a bag plums and never heard the end of it). We did take…
Riding in hot air balloon was never on my bucket list, but when offered the opportunity to do a sunrise hot air balloon ride over the Serengeti, how can you turn it down? That is why 12/14/20204 started VERY early for Amie, myself, and several other members of our safari group. We entered the basket while it was on its side, then they tipped it…
