Monday I got a chance to go over to the Zune building and check out the offer space. It's quite different from what I'm used to, smaller offices for a start. I liked the look though, everything was very white with the occasional painted wall to add some colour. The offices definitely need some personalisation. I know I'm going to be moving over there, but when I don't know. I've got a fair bit of vacation coming up before the end of the year (I'm spending Thanksgiving on the Galapagos Islands and Christmas in South East Asia - Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore!). I'm looking forward to the change in scenery and the shorter commute - the building is actually closer to my home and means I won't need to spend ages sitting in traffic on 520.
While over there I got to play with the new Starbucks iCup machines that have slowly been making their way in the buildings on campus. It's pretty cool and better than the drip coffee we used to have. They've made it in to my building now and we've been experimenting on the right mix of coffee an cocoa from the machines to produce a faux-mocha. The conclusion is - we need bigger mugs.
The main purpose of my visit to the Zune building though was to see some design ideas for future Zune software. I was excited about what I saw, but I'm not going to talk about that quite yet...
It's now official, in a couple of weeks I'll be transition from my current role on the Media Center team to a new position in the Zune group. I can't talk about what exactly what I'll be working on, but I'll continue to be working as a Software Design Engineer in Test. I'll be working in a very small group and we'll be invovled in the PC software side of Zune, not the device. Once there's some offical news, I'll post some more about it. I'll still be invovled with Media Center a little bit and I'll continue to run Media Center at home for the forseeable future. I'm very excited about this new opportunity and I'm looking forward to getting a Zune of my own (black please, I'm not hip enough for the brown).
I joined the Media Center team almost three years ago and started working on Media Center 2005 (Symphony), then Media Center 2005 Update Rollup 1 (Emerald) and the current release of Media Center for Windows Vista (Diamond). While I've worked in Media Center I've always worked on Extensibility and the Media Center SDK. It's been a ton of fun, I've learnt a lot and worked with a bunch of great really smart people and if I hadn't been offered this opportunity to work on the Zune team I'd still be working on Media Center.
More info when I can talk about (which might be a while...).