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Whither the WPF Posts?

A commenter pointed out (not politely, but accurately) that I have not posted any new content about WPF in some time, which reminded me that I never actually wrote about the job transition that I made over two years ago. I apologize for that, in particular to those who had been subscribed to this blog hoping to see new WPF tidbits.

In late 2006 (after .Net Framework 3.0 shipped), I transitioned over to the Exchange Server team, where I’ve been immersed in the humble task of making email more reliable, accessible, and easier to manage for hundreds of millions of users. In the process, I’ve learned a good deal about building large-scale server applications and how to ship software as a service.

But unfortunately for this blog, up until very recently, the details of my work had been confidential. Now that we’ve shipped Beta 1 of Exchange Server 2010 (to much cheering, woohoo!), I’m at liberty to share. However, I expect that if I decide to use blogging as the medium to do so, I’ll start a separate blog for that purpose. This blog started out as a personal blog, made some forays into the work space, and has come full circle back to the personal realm. To avoid any further confusion, I think it’ll stay there. If you’re interested in hearing about my various experiments with cooking, photography, various arts and crafts projects, international travel, happenings around the Seattle area, and my occasional ramblings about local and national political issues, then stay tuned. If you were here for the WPF content, I promise that I won’t be offended if you unsubscribe (assuming you haven’t already).

Of course, many in the WPF community have found the old WPF posts helpful (and from some of the comments that still crop up, I know that many still do), so I absolutely plan to keep them here for posterity. But I don’t expect that I’ll begin posting about WPF again anytime soon (here or elsewhere), as I just haven’t been spending time with that technology. To those of you who are using it – best of luck, and please leverage the current WPF team and the vibrant WPF/Silverlight community! Although I’ve moved on, I still look back on my WPF days fondly and I’m always excited to hear about interesting applications of the technology.

Tourist Spicy

I love spicy food. So does Kenny, and I believe his tolerance for spice has risen since he started hanging out with me. And I think that the couple of Seattle Thai restaurants that we frequent are actually quite good about preparing their food to the requested level of spice – a good 4-star curry from Jamjuree or Thai Tom is really wonderful. We had a difficult time imagining that the Thai food in Thailand could actually be better.

Everyone warned us that the Thai food would be spicier in Thailand, and we were excited to see just what that meant. But so far, we’ve been disappointed – all the food we’ve eaten has been delicious, but it seems that everywhere we go, the spice has been toned down to cater to tourists. We’ve gotten into the habit of ordering anything on the menu that has “spicy” in its title, and pleading with the restaurant staff to add extra chilis, but to no avail. Fortunately we can always ask for extra chili flakes and chili oil to spice up the food ourselves after it arrives, but it’s not the same. And I know that the locals like their food spicy, we just need a way to communicate that we do too!

Obviously the answer is that we need to get off the tourist track a little more. In Phuket and Phi Phi that hasn’t been so easy, as we’ve been staying in the tourist towns near the beach. But now we’re on the lookout for side streets with food stalls where we can hopefully find some non-tourist food.

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Delicious whole fish at Garden House Restaurant on Ko Phi Phi