At least the weather here isn't boring

Sorry it's been so long since my last post, but I've been getting lazy. Also not that much has been happening here, and Rachel's been doing a commendable job at holding down the blog. I'm almost tempted to ask who your favorite blogger is, but I kind of like being married so I think I will avoid that minefield... See Mom, I've learned a lot since I got married! Just in time for having a kid!

The most exciting recent event was the storm we had that left about 1 million people without power. They said there were winds of 80+ MPH, and there were trees down all over the place. Just a block away from us there was a massive tree that fell that blocked the road and took out 2 utility poles, which I think is why some people around here took 4 days to get their power back. It started Thursday night. Our power went out in the middle of the night. I normally work from home on Friday, so since we had no power I was thinking about going in to work. After some shopping for shabbos I was on my way there when I called their security hotline to find out the status of power on campus (earlier the message said it was open and they were running on generators) and it said there was no power. So I got a free day off, sitting in our dark cold house. I probably would have preferred work to that, but whatever. We ended up eating out Friday night by some people that had a gas oven (most people here including us have electric), so we at least had a hot meal, albeit a dark one. Like every other place, the shul was dark and cold. They got these camping lanterns for Friday night so we could daven. We got our power back on late Friday night, so we were only out for about 24 hours, although we did not have internet access until last night. But others were not so lucky. The shul and the people in that area didn't get their power back on until last night - that's almost 4 days without power! Actually there are still some, a couple people I work with among them, who still don't have power yet. One guy brought his cats in to work today because he thought they were too cold at his house.

In more mundane news, our office "holiday" party was today. It was actually supposed to be Friday so I wasn't planning on going, but because of the power outage they rescheduled it for today. Disappointingly, there was no beer (my team did have a "beer bash" a couple weeks ago- This is definitely the first place I've ever worked where they serve beer at meetings). They had this thing similar to secret santa called white elephant. The way it works is that everyone brings in a wrapped gift, all of which go on one table. Everyone picks a number out of a hat which determines the sequence of the turns. On each person's turn they can either pick one of the unopened presents and unwrap it or steal an already opened present from someone who has already gone. The one from whom a present is stolen then has the same choice - he can either steal from someone else or take one from the pile. The only restriction is that any gift can be stolen a maximum of once per turn - that way every turn eventually ends and the same gift can't keep going back and forth on a single turn. Once everyone has gone, the person who went first has a choice to either keep his gift or steal anyone else's, since he had no choice of stealing when he went the first time. Obviously going first is best. If he steals someone's, the one he had goes on the table again and the person without a gift can take it or steal anyone else's, and so on, until someone takes the gift from the table and the game ends.

Extra credit: In a game of white elephant with n participants and n gifts, what is the maximum number of "steals" that can occur in one game?

Anyway, since I hadn't been planning on going to the party, and it was only rescheduled as of yesterday, I didn't have a chance to go out to buy something, so I didn't play. I would have bought either a darth potato head (I can almost hear dovid scrambling for his wallet to order one right now...) or a big tub of play-doh. There were some silly/funny gifts though. The best in my opinion was the mini arcade frogger game. Some of the funnier ones were the book, "The Google Story," a Google pen, some spanish movie DVD, a singing Scooby Doo doll, and a demotivational calendar.

Work is slow overall right now, but I'm beginning to get more responsibility in my team. I'm working on Windows Desktop Search, which is available as an add-on for windows XP, but it is the built-in search engine in Vista. So right now I'm just working on fixing some bugs, errrr, did I say bugs? I mean there are no bugs in Microsoft products! What I meant to say is that I write pristine bug-free code the first time around, just like everyone at Microsoft. And then I ride my unicorn home. His name is Billy.

Sorry, I blacked out there for a second. So like I said, we're all working on stamping out bugs right now, but in another month or so we're going to start working on planning for next major release. But so far I'm learning a ton and I really like it.

So that's about all from here. Before I conclude, I don't want to start a whole onlysimchas-type thing here, but I just wanted to give a shout out to Sheinfeld for having a baby and to Joseph for getting engaged. Good job guys! Keep up the good work!

Ari