Life at Microsoft! An update on my career…

Hi everyone, I was looking through the various categories in which I blog things today and I realized my career path has long been missing from this blog. Interestingly enough, I actually started this blog initially with the intent of documenting my career as I progressed through it in a really interesting time in my life (latter half of college) so I’ve decided to dedicate this post as a update to my career for those of you who don’t know yet.

I have been working at Microsoft for the last 6 months doing an internship in Microsoft IT. I began January 2nd 2007 actually so I’ve only actually been there for like 4 months with about 2 months to go. The internship has been a lot of fun, I’ve learned a HUGE amount about how large companies work as well as in regards to the work I actually do there which I’ll get into in a sec. I get to interact with a lot of extremely smart people everyday, the intern program here is very well developed, my manager and mentor are both awesome and very supportive, my team is super cool and very experienced and kind people, and my office mate Alex is an awesome dude as well. I have a lot of fun working at Microsoft, a lot more fun than I originally thought I would actually and it’s been a rewarding experience getting praise for the stuff I produce.

To be a little more specific, I work for the IT Showcase group. It is a content developing group within Microsoft that Showcases the stories of Microsoft best practices and dogfooding lessons learned. I do process optimization within the team which is pretty useful for any group as there are always redundancy issues in any large organization.

In terms of the future, Microsoft is definitely one of the companies that I am looking to work for, I’ve had a really positive experience in the environment, it’s been challenging but a great experience nonetheless.

Hmm, I guess I’m not really sure what other stuff to write about here? Please leave some comments if you have any curiosity about what I do or anything!!

God Must Have Spent A Little More Time On You by ‘NSYNC

First of many new updates to come!

Hi All!

I’m sorry I havn’t been keeping this page updated but my life got super busy over the last couple months! I missed the blog and so now I’m back!

I’d like to give somewhat of a summary of my life over the last 6 months or so, a LOT has happened.

But here are the main points

• I finished up my presidency at Phi Delta Theta. I think of this as one of my proudest achievements in my life so far. I learned a ton about interpersonal communication, leadership, personal responsibility, and organizational behavior. I am proud of what I’ve done throughout my presidency and I’m sure that my successor (joe) will do a great job as he has been doing since I’ve finished up my term.
• I got myself an internship in Microsoft IT. I work in the IT Showcase team doing process improvement. It’s not exactly my specialty by any means but I am eager to see it through it. Its been almost 4 months since I started this 6 month internship and I am really hoping to land a full time position after my internship ends. So far I’ve been doing well and thus… i’m not afraid!
• I am still happily dating my lovely girlfriend Vy! We’ve been doing very well. I <3 her!
• I have started being more health conscious – I’ve been running more often and eating pretty healthy (for the most part LOL). I feel much less sickly than I have before I started doing this and I feel much HEALTHIER (obviously but there’s just no other way to put it!)
• Vy, Elitza,Tako and I went to Mexico for our final college spring break. We lived at the Pueblo Bonita in Mazatlan. It was AMAZING. Hands down the best trip of my life! In total I ended up spending about a grand on the trip but it was totally worth it to get out of the US for a couple days and sit by the pool, feel no pressure to do anything and just eat, drink, play, eat, drink, play, and enjoy life. I couldn’t take that kind of thing for more than a couple weeks but for the 4 days that we were there, Amazing. IN FACT!! Enjoy some pictures hosted by my new favorite google service… Picasa & Google Web Albums

Thanks readers! I’ll be blogging more now I promise! In the meantime, enjoy some tunes by my favorite…

Now Listening to: Snap Yo Fingers by Lil Jon

Google Adsense…

Lately I have been doing a lot of reading, researching, and even a little experimenting with a certain Google product/service called Google Adsense.

For those of you who’ve never heard of it, it is essentially an advertising program and combined with it’s other half, adwords, and Google’s ever popular search engine, they form the perfect TRIFECTA. It is, in my humble opinion, the perfect business model and absolutely ingenious.

To try an explain in pure layman’s terms would be very tedious so I will craft a fictional scenario that will paint a picture for you of the TRIFECTA! Here goes:

Austin, is a web publisher, he runs a website for the purpose of spreading a message that he cares deeply about, say, the preservation of the American comic book as part of American culture. He pays for a server and hosts his files and images and writes articles and updates his page. He has a following of people who agree wholeheartedly with his cause, as well as thousands of people who stumble upon the site from searching for words like Comics, or Marvel or DC. Unfornately, however, Austin is running out of money and as much as he cares for the topic, he cant afford the server costs of xx a month.

Jerry, is an avid comic book collector who owns his own comic store in Florida. He does pretty well there and he’s got a good base of customers. However, he’s a business man at heart and he knows he’s not going to get rich doing this, and all the overhead of inventory and fluctuating demand on comic books is often leaving him with excess inventory of comics and other collectibles. He wants to sell it all so he can expand his store and maybe even start a chain.

Google, is a multi-billion dollar company that runs one of the highest volume (traffic volume that is) search engines in the world. And in case you didn’t notice, search engines are what everyone uses to navigate the madness we call the internet.

And FINALLY You, are just a person, browsing the web, looking for stuff that interests you and in this case you are one of the millions of people that like comics.

Lets see how it goes down.

Austin and Jerry, through Googles efforts in marketing both hear about Adsense and adwords respectively. Austin, a web publisher goes with adsense since he has a website that gets traffic. Jerry goes with adwords since he wants to start a website to sell his excess inventory and such but has no experience with online marketing and has no idea on how to get traffic to his site. How can he sell if no one knows about his page?

Moments pass… Jerry now has a rudimentary website up and running and has bought the following keywords though adwords, comics, Marvel, DC, Spider-Man, wolverine, and other such keywords.  Austin, whos website is already getting traffic for people searching those terms will place adsense ads on his webpage. This means that austins webpage now has advertisements on it. Not annoying flashy ones you see in places like myspace and such though. They are just plain text, they are informative and they fit in with the rest of the site. All done.

Now whenever people search for any of those keywords, marvel, dc, comics, wolverine, spider-man, they will get austin’s page, and upon going in there see Jerry’s ads, and maybe if they are interested, click on it, jerry pays google XX cents for each visitor this way and google pays austin xx-x cents for each person austins page sends to jerrys page. With thousands of visitors austins making hundreds of dollars, googles making a few bucks (but hey they’ve got millions of people making a few bucks for them), and jerry’s paying hundreds of dollars; but selling thousands of comics!

It sure sounds like everyone benefits huh? Yes its true, they all do. All three of them, or should I say, all TRI of them.

Thank you.

My 21 Run

What an amazing night… where do I start and where do I end? It’s hard to say but I’ll try.

I started the day off with an AMMAAAZZING meal with my buddies Kevin Tako and Tyler and my love, Vy, at Todai where I ate for free and ordered my first beer. Asahi tallboy. Nice lil Japanese beer. Todai is freaking awesome. Coming out of the restaurant we saw this cute korean couple downstairs in the mall (we were at pacific place in the top floor) get engaged as the guy put up this HUGE sign and asked her to marry him. It was pretty cool, we ran down (actually slowly lowered down through the elevator) to take a look at them to see if they were good looking or not. Yes they were.

ANYWAYS!!

We went back to the fraternity and just hung out for a while until it was almost dinner time. People started showing up and so after we had a good crowd of like 10 people, we headed down to Buca Di Beppos in downtown Seattle, close to the Space Needle. By the time we arrived there was already about 15 people there waiting, I’ll try to name them ALL!

1. Austin (me)
2. Vy
3. Tako
4. Kevin O
5. Tyler Stone
6. Morgan H
7. Jin
8. Tin
9. Michelle
10. Cheryl
11. Jason Church
12. Mike S.
13. Jenny Choi
14. Mary Wang
15. Alisha Wang
16. Sandra Wu
17. Jason Chuang
18. Kellen
19. Andrew Yang
20. Daniel De Los Palos
21. Jared Chu
22. Elitza
23. Nick
24. Ely Ess

Dinner was freaking awesome. We all ordered pasta and pizzas family style and all shared together. I was given about 5 drinks at the place before we left for UW and continued our drinkfest.

I started the Ave Crawl at the irish emmigrant and ended at earls. My crawl consisted of 2 bars… LOL.. And as for the question I know you all have in your head (in case you werent there anyway): Did Austin make it to 21 Drinks on his 21st birthday? The answer is no. I didn’t. I did however make it to 17. 19 if you include my lunch beers but I don’t. I’ll try to name them all. Correct me via a comment if i missed any people above or any drinks below.

1. Shot of Yaeger
2. Shot of Yaeger
3. Washington Apple
4. Cement Mixer
5. Chocolate Cake
6. Shot of Crown Royale
7. Pabst Blue Ribbon
8. Liquid Cocaine
9. Blowjob
10. Jaeger Bomb
11. Irish Car bomb
12. Whisky on the Rocks
13. Shot of Whiskey
14. !!MYSTERY!!
15. Wild Turkey
16. Irish Car bomb
17. Irish Car bomb into a full Beer

Overall, i had a great time and though I did get WAY too drunk, appreciate everyone taking care of me (especially Vy and Lorenzo) and spending that saturday evening with me. It was both unforgettable and VERY forgettable. As always, I am the ultimate paradox. LOL

Pictures to come soon

Frazzle Feeling (aka FF)

How many of you have ever had the frazzled feeling? I got this word (frazzle) from my big bro in PhiDelts, Tim Tran, as he used it to describe how he feels during tests and through especially trying periods in his life. I’ve decided, and actually had decided a while ago, to use it much in the same way.

Currently, I feel frazzled because I feel like there is too much work to be done. Not just at work but all over. All over my personal life, all over my family life, all over my passions and hobbies, and even in my relationships. Don’t get me wrong however, I openly welcome all challenges that come my way in life and overall I feel like I have a pretty good attitude on how things come down. I’m fairly (to very) optimistic, I’m easygoing and yet I’m ambitious and in my personal opinion, I’ve actually been putting forth a lot of solid WORK over the last couple months to actually push myself in the direction of my dreams. I’ve been happy doing all this and I’ve been tired. In fact, I’ve been so focused on these goals that I’ve set for mysefl (if you’ve ever seen my room you would know what I mean) that I partially feel like I’m losing a bit of myself for these goals. I may have made a grave mistake and taken on more than I should handle. I want to find out my limit, but I also kinda don’t you know what I mean?

I am even achieving several of these goals with , well not ease, but with determination and though I am tired I am putting forth the amount of effort necesary to maintain my relationships and bonds and ties. But maintainence is not what I like to do. I like to excel in these kinds of things and even if I will be maintaining less and exceling at more, that will be a worthwhile trade to me.

I will have to decide in the coming days what, of what I’ve picked up, to set down. It’ll be interesting to see how things roll out.

Until next time all of you thousands of faithful readers!!!! Until next time!!!

Currently listening to

Pachelbel’s Canon & Other Baroque Favourites