Yeltzland Live

I love my Zune but the (currently) US-centric view of the world is a little irritating when I'm back home.

 

I finally got my Zune Social synching working by setting my regional settings to US - see   - which means my card is now visible! It shows the crap that I've recently been listening too (not including Country Music Radio )

 

It's cool I can also embed it here...

 

 

We went up to London to watch the prologue of the Tour De France last Saturday.

 

It was an excellent atmosphere, with supposedly a million people on the streets watching (although how they guess these things is beyond me). Well worth the day out, even though it was slightly disappointing David Millar and Bradley Wiggins didn't do a bit better.

 

I took a few photos although it was pretty hard to take decent shots of the riders as they went past very fast.

We've just started our long trip over to North America - we're spending a couple of weeks vacation in Vancouver and Lake Chelan, before we stay for 3 weeks in WA. I'll be working during that time whilst Hilary hangs out in Seattle.

 

I've starting posting some of our photos so you can see what we've been up to. Vancouver is pretty cool, although the weather hasn't been great so far it's supposed to pick up for the rest of our stay here. I'll add more as we go along.

 

Update: Now we're back home I've made my holiday video. I've uploaded it to the new MSN video service (http://soapbox.msn.com) which hopefully you can see by clicking on the picture below:

 

If that didn't work, you'll have to wait for Soapbox to come out of beta

I'm very excited about the fact that I have something published on the MSDN site. How cool is that?

 

I've been working on the Windows Live Expo Beta API, and we've recently gone public with our first release (note the "Beta" part!). A few days in we've got our first mashup, and generally it's gone reasonably well.

 

We've got lots of plans to improve the API, but as ever with our small team it's really hard to do everything we want to do immediately.

 

From a personal point of view, having the documentation on MSDN with my name on it is very satisfying - I'm not sure exactly why (other than vanity I guess!) but it does make it seem you're doing something worthwhile.

 

You should check out the Expo Team Blog for more details on the API if you're interested.

I love Windows Live Local, and I love the new features they've recently added - in particular the way it's much easier to setup and share points of interest.

 

For example, here's a view of all the Southern League grounds the mighty Yeltz will be playing at next year. Plus a list of places I go when staying in Redmond.

 

What's also great is the Bird's Eye view of various places in the UK, including around where I live in Hove. The Bird's Eye view has been extremely useful when I'm over in Redmond in finding my ay around. It's a hell of a lot easier to remember where to go when you've seem landmarks on the route already.

For some strange reason I've decided to run in this year's Great North Run, a half-marathon in October.

 

I thought it was about time I did some sort of exercise, and I used to love running when I was a youngster. Whether my creaky old knees will be up to it is another matter, but there's only one way to find out.

 

To try to encourage myself to keep going, I'm keeping a list of all my training runs (on the home page) plus a link to a map on the brilliant Windows Live Local on where the run was - mainly to calculate the distances but also because it's cool.

 

Update: It's all over  - my aging knees weren't up to the training, and after doing pretty well (up to 4 miles every other day) they gave way and I haven't been able to train for weeks. I officially pulled out of the race today, and now realise I just can't run that far. Not very happy about that, but it wasn't totally unexpected.

Just got back from a trip to France over a long weekend. It was absolutely freezing for most of the trip, but other than that it was a great few days.

 

We started off in Lille for Andy P.Ratt's stag weekend, and then Ada, Cobb and me joined Michelle, Liz and Hilary in Paris for a few days - check out the Paris 2006 pictures in the photos section.

 

Back at home now waiting for Spring to arrive and it to get a bit warmer.

You can all see now what my new job is all about. Windows Live Expo has now moved into it's first public beta - US only for the moment I'm afraid, but everyone can have a look.

 

Yesterday was a pretty hectic day as we switched the site over to the latest release, but it all seems to have gone OK so far. We're very happy to receive feedback, which you can leave on the site.

 

It's been a great few weeks working with my new team - check out our picture on the Team Expo Space - but I must admit I'm looking forward to getting back home on Friday.

 

New bit: We also had some dancers around Microsoft's RedWest campus to celebrate the launch - again see the team site.

I thought it was a good time to actually fix up my Space, and the old one was such a mess that it was easier to start anew.

 

So what's this all about? Well, it's just my personal area where I'll be sharing personal photos etc., maybe a few rants every now and then, but probably not much!

 

I've just started on a new team at Microsoft - working on Windows Live Expo (http://expo.live.com). It's an exciting project and my new colleagues have been very welcoming! I've been spending a few weeks over in Redmond getting up to speed on things, but I'll soon be back in the UK mainly working from home. Hurrah!

 

I won't be talking about work on here in general - any technical talk will be over on my MSDN blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/john_pollard/

 

To get things going, I've uploaded a few pictures from the trip me, Rob and Jodie made to Port Townsend - here's a map (made using the fantastic Windows Live Local) if you don't know where that is.