64 Advantage Program

The reason I'm in Mountain View is to attend the 64 Advantage program, hosted by Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft wants to sell 64 bit OS'es, Intel wants to sell 64 bit CPU's, and both need applications that run on them... so I'm here on behalf of my company, which hopes to sell 64 bit apps. A three-way symbiotic relationship. ;)

Last week when I returned from my Seattle trip, my boss sent mail that said "hey, sign up for this". I was too late for the Boston session, which would have been nice since I have never been, but I did squeeze into the Silicon Valley session. This is fine since I've got a few friends in this area also.

I went through the registration process, which didn't ask for much beyond my name, work phone number and email address, but it did require a password. So I created a throwaway password which I forgot about 15 minutes later. I received an email and a phone call from a lady at Microsoft confirming my registration.

Forgetting my throwaway password came back to haunt me, because the website has zero useful information "in front of" logging in. Check it out, tell me if you can find out where the program is held (something more specific than "Silicon Valley"). Well you can't, and I tried the "forgot password" link but nothing came back after a few hours. So I emailed the nice lady at Microsoft who was in charge of this and essentially asked "where is the program held? And what time does it start?" She was understanding and mentioned she wasn't sure why all the useful info was hidden.

It turns out the program is held at the Microsoft Silicon Valley campus, right off Highway 101. Today's agenda was 2/3rd presentations and 1/3rd lab work. Overall, the presentation were really good, all kinds of stuff about mixing 64 bit and 32 bit code, which is a large chunk of my job!

In the evening I met up with my friend Jimmy. We were coworkers back at Compaq in Houston... 10 years ago now. Wow. I caught him up on my big news of this year (IMCdA and moving to Florida) and in return I found out Jimmy is getting married next year!