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Just a handful of tips to make your Macworld Expo experience all that much nicer ...

San Francisco should never be called "San Fran" or, worse, "Frisco". Doing so immediately identifies you as a tourist, and you will be forced to spend your entire visit at Fisherman's Wharf, otherwise known as the Tourist Ghetto. If you must refer to San Francisco by anything other than the full name, it's "the city". New Yorkers must avoid protesting that only New York City can be referred to as such, lest they be simply sent to Alcatraz.

Macworld Expo does not have an upper-case W in the middle. Giving it an incorrect W immediately identifies you as a clueless noob. Saying that you're going to MacWorld in Frisco means that you're immediately taken back to SFO and put on the first plane out of here. Your pass will be donated to a deserving local Mac user.

Don't go over to the Metreon for lunch. The rest of the Expo will go there, and the options there really aren't that great anyway. At least go a little bit further afield to the food court in the Westfield shopping mall. It's on Mission, just a couple of blocks away. The food court isn't bad, and there's a couple of sit-down restaurants in there (I rather like Out the Door). There are dozens of great lunch spots within a few blocks of Moscone; I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to find their favourites (or to comment here with them).

Wear comfortable shoes. It's all concrete and tile, with some carpeting in the booths. You'll be on your feet a lot. If you're trying to decide between the cute shoes and the comfortable shoes, suck it up and wear the comfortable shoes. Cute shoes won't overcome your crankiness when you have massive blisters by Wednesday afternoon.

There are inexpensive chair massages to be had over at Macy's on Union Square. When you're tired of carrying all your stuff around, head over there for a quick pick-me-up. (And then go downstairs to their teensy food court and get a cookie from Tom's. I particularly like the chocolate almond truffle cookies.)

There's a Starbucks across from the W at Third and Howard. The line there is always shorter than the one on Fourth between Mission and Howard.

The folks over at Macworld have an article about Mac developers who made the news in 2008. We get a shout-out in there, given that we kicked the Mac year off with our release.

Working on software is weird. To the rest of the world, Office 2008 is the latest-and-greatest. To me, it's not. I've been working on our next releases since well before Office 2008 hit store shelves. There's plenty of people who haven't upgraded to Office 2008 yet (we had a stellar year for sales, but that doesn't mean that the whole world upgraded in January 2008), whereas I started using Office 2008 more than a year before it launched, and I switched over to using [redacted] a couple of months after the release of Office 2008.

It's the whole dogfood culture: I don't want anyone outside of MacBU to use it until it's been thoroughly tested, so I "eat my own dogfood" and use it first. This trips me up sometimes -- before answering a question about Office 2008, I have to check to make sure that it's accurate for that version instead of for what I'm currently using. If someone asks me a question about Office 2004, I have to point them to another resource (or look through the Office 2004 help) 'cause that feels like ancient history to me.

Okay, back to working on my Macworld presentation. If you're coming to San Francisco, track me down in the hallway or in our booth to say hi!

I'm supposed to be working on my Macworld Expo presentation, but instead I'm linking you guys to an interview with Jake Hoelter. Jake is the Product Unit Manager for the half of MacBU that lives at the Silicon Valley Lab.

Jake came to us by way of Connectix, which lots of you will remember for Virtual PC. Since the acquisition, Jake has worked his way up the ranks. Now, he's second only to Eric Wilfrid, our brand-spankin'-new General Manager.

Looking around the leadership of MacBU, I like what I see. Eric has been with MacBU since its inception, and hasn't left (other than a sabbatical this summer). Geoff Price, Jake's counterpart for MacBU-Redmond, has been with MacBU since 1998. We've got lots of people who have been with MacBU since it was founded, and others of us who weren't old enough to be here (I had just completed my first undergrad in 1998) at the beginning but have spent our whole Microsoft careers here.

Bring on 2009! Hmmmm, I wonder if we might have anything interesting to say next week ...

Getting caught up today, I noticed that Microspotting has done an interview with Dan Wittmer, one of our senior Entourage developers. In a Swiss skater on loving Macs and working at Microsoft, Dan talks about skating, surfing before work, and being a Mac guy at Microsoft. Those pictures of Dan are taken in his office here in Mountain View.

I took last week off to visit my family in frigid Michigan for the holidays. (Sorry, I don't dream of a white Christmas.) Today was my first day back at work, and so I had to dig out from all that email.

As I twittered extensively yesterday, getting back here was quite the odyssey. I left my parents' home at 11am EST on Friday, I walked in my door at 7pm PST on Sunday. So working through my email today was a treat, at least comparatively speaking!

Yesterday, on Mac Mojo, we gave a quick update on the progress of Messenger.

Windows Live Messenger has just entered beta (along with several other Windows Live apps). Their beta is important to us because WLM is moving to a new backend for their audio/video support. This new backend is the same one that's already in use by Office Communicator Server. Messenger:Mac users who are using OCS2007 servers can do audio/video chats today -- I've been using it for several months to chat with my (currently snowbound) colleagues in Redmond. WLM using the same backend as OCS brings us here in MacBU one step closer to being able to give users of the personal service the same support for audio/video as can be found in the corporate OCS service.

They're in beta, so they're still ironing out a few things. If you come by the Office booth at MWSF, we'll be giving demos of our support for audio/video on the personal service.

So someone came up with the five stages of Twitter acceptance: denial ("that sounds stupid"), presence ("I've got an account now"), dumping (posting links), conversing, and microblogging (publishing useful info and conversing). He followed it up with 9 ways to make Twitter more useful for you, which are more aimed at marketing than at being a real person.

I've been on Twitter since April 2007 (username nadyne). I guess I'm somewhere between (4) and (5). Most of my tweets are about conversations, with forays into offering information. Since I'm not here to market (if you've clicked through those links, you'll see that the title of the blog is Influential Marketing), I'm okay with that.

Yesterday afternoon, I was working at home, digging through my email and trying to let my background process work on my MWSF presentation. Suddenly, Twitter and my RSS feeds exploded with the news that there's no Stevenote this year, and Apple won't be at MWSF2010 (and the subsequent news that Apple cancelled Christmas too).

Well, Steve won't be there, but I will, along with the rest of MacBU. Okay, not all of us, but the booth is entirely staffed by MacBU and our MVPs, with a couple of crowd wranglers thrown in for good measure. We've got a little theatre set up for giving big demos, and of course you can ask anyone in the booth to talk through something in one of the apps.

If you want to chat with me sometime during MWSF, here's my schedule right now:

• Monday and Tuesday, all day: I'm one of the presenters for the Office:Mac Power Tools two-day session. My talk is scheduled for Monday afternoon, but I'll probably be spending most of those two days there.
• Thursday 2pm-6pm: in the booth
• Friday 10am-1pm: in the booth

I'm sure that there's more (I haven't listed any of the parties or the beer swilling), but that's my official schedule.

See you in San Francisco!

A writer's work is never done. After Office 2008 went out the door, they started collecting data about the help. Based on this feedback, they've been continually updating the help, releasing new and updated help topics every month.

As part of their efforts to provide help that's helpful, we've now made some short video help available. You can view it within the Office:Mac 2008 Help Viewer (make sure you're in online mode) -- type "videos" in the search box, and you'll see 'em all.

Now, they're also available as a video podcast in iTunes. Search for "Office 2008 for Mac" in iTunes, select the podcast, and subscribe. Or you can just follow this iTunes link.

There's currently 23 videos there, with more coming in the future. We produce all of our videos in-house, even down to the voiceovers -- those are real MacBU people you hear there.

Update Tuesday is here, and today it brings Office 12.1.5 and 11.5.3. Office 12.1.5 is a combo update. You must have Office 12.1.0 or later installed; if you've skipped something between 12.1.1 and 12.1.4, this one will get you completely up-to-date. For Office 11.5.3, you must have 11.5.2 installed.

For Office 12.1.5, there are security, stability, and performance improvements across the suite. Entourage gets a time zone update, and Word has some formatting improvements when saving to .doc. Excel has a bunch of fixes, including several calculation issues. For full details of what's included in here, read over the knowledge base article for 12.1.5.

For Office 11.5.3, there's stability performance improvements across the suite, and Entourage 2004 gets the same time zone update as Entourage 2008. Full details are, as always, in the knowledge base article.

Go forth and download!

Last year, for the very first time, we got all of the North American MacBU team together in one place. There were dozens of people who had worked together for years but didn't have a face to put with the name (or, more likely, the email address). As one of the people who travels between Redmond and SVC frequently, I found myself frequently introducing people from the two locations and letting them realise how well they actually know each other.

It was such a success last year that we did it again this year. Even though we did get to meet last year, there was still a lot of the same thing happening. Part of it was that we had one of our overseas team here, part of it is that we've done an amazing amount of hiring in the past year. There were enough new people around that it was hard to keep track of them all.

Watching everyone interact over beers, bowling, and billiards reminded me of one of the reasons that I like working here. Okay, so most of us can't bowl (yes, we usually do take home the MacBowl trophy, but the bowling prowess of a few hasn't helped the rest of us with our bowling scores), but we're willing to give it a go and have fun trying. There seems to be a few more people better at billiards.

I ended up staying out until well after 2am with my co-workers, sharing cocktails and good times. A girl can't complain about co-workers cool enough that this is something that you want to do with your Thursday night.

Longtime MacBU observers will remember Roz Ho. Roz was our General Manager when I first signed on. She left MacBU a couple of years ago to accept a promotion within the company, and is now the Corporate Vice President for Premium Mobile Experiences. The folks over at Channel 9 have an interview with her about leadership and believing in yourself.

Knowing that it's possible to work your way up through the ranks to GM and on to even bigger and better things is one of the things that I like about Microsoft. I know that there's a lot of support for me to continue to grow my skills and take on the world.

I got into computers and assorted geekery early. My dad was always an enthusiast, and so I grew up with his somewhat eccentric collection of computers.

My dad's, and thus my, first computer was a Timex-Sinclair 1000. I remember my dad buying magazines with programs printed in them, which we would painstakingly type on the little keyboard. Dad had the thermal printer, the 16-KB RAM pack (necessary for playing Frogger), and the cassette deck for data storage (also required for Frogger -- I'm sure that there were other tapes, but I only remember Frogger). The computer overheated easily; my dad took to putting a big glass of ice water on it to keep it cool. I'm sure Dad still has this computer, and all of its accessories, stuck in a closet somewhere.

The next computer that I remember was a Radio Shack Model 100, which I think we got when I was 7. Instead of simply copying programs out of magazines to type into it, Dad bought a book (which, I have to admit, I still remember fondly), and together, we learned BASIC. The way he tells the story now, I was a better programmer than he was, although that might just be him editing the story after the fact to match up with my current position. :) I'm sure that there's at least one of these stuck in a closet somewhere at my parents' house, too.

In high school, we had a single computer class, which I took. It was my first introduction to an Apple. I don't remember much about it, other than continually getting in trouble for getting to school early, waiting for the teacher to go to the lounge to get his coffee, and running a program on all of the computers in his lab to play a little jingle whenever someone tried to type on them.

Somewhere around this time, Dad got his first PC and discovered MS-DOS, and then became an early adopter of Windows. My best memories are of the Sierra games, most particularly (another computer thing which got me into trouble; if you're starting to sense a theme, you'd be right) Leisure Suit Larry. I'm not sure that my high school programming course taught me a lot about programming that I didn't already know, but it made a difference to learn that there were other kids who was interested in computers too.

In college, I met OS 7 for the first time in my programming class. Being 1993, the language of choice for an introductory programming class was Pascal, and Turbo Pascal was the compiler we used. Turbo Pascal celebrated its 25th anniversary this week; Anders Hejlsberg, the original author and now here at Microsoft, offers up his memories of it here. When I worked as the medical director of a Girl Scout camp the summer after my freshman year of college, my camp nickname was Dr Pascal, because I always had my nose stuck in a programming book.

That's all part of what got me here today. If my dad hadn't been so excited about computing and got me to learn programming with him when I was a kid, where would I be today? I can't even begin to imagine.

If you haven't yet jumped onto the Office:Mac 2008 bandwagon, the holidays are bringing lower prices. Office:Mac 2008 Special Media Edition, which includes all of the Office apps plus Expression Media, is now up to half off. The fine folks over at Amazon are listing it for $179, which is nothing short of a steal (and cheaper than the Standard Edition, which doesn't include Expression Media!).

Over on Mac Mojo, I just put up a post about the Entourage favourites bar called you're my favourite.

In the course of writing that post, I learned that I currently have 34 separate folders for incoming mail. All of them are populated by mail rules. The only thing that ends up in my main inbox is stuff from my manager or stuff that's addressed directly to me. I didn't realise I had that many incoming folders, so I didn't even consider counting how many other folders I've got. I really don't want to know.

Someone with more artistic skills than I have (although, let's be honest, that's pretty much everyone) has created a bunch of holiday themes for Office 2008. They're available for free over at Art of Office. The themes include ones for newsletters for your holiday letters, gift tags, note cards, recipe cards, and lots of other things.

While waiting for my plane to leave earlier today, I read a friend's personal blog. In it, she has posted a meme that I've seen go around personal blogs and Facebook lately. The first time that I met this meme, it was coming up with your porn star name: your first pet's name plus the street you grew up on. (In case you care: Smokey M-21, which doesn't seem like a name that would get me far in that particular business.)

This has expanded to include your Nascar name, witness protection name, detective name, and a few others. Reading over this meme, I realised that all of this information that she has posted has a lot in common with all of those security questions my bank wanted me to answer: favourite colour, father's middle name, etc.

How secure can those bank questions be if many people are posting this information to their blogs? So many of these questions are easy to find with a few minutes on a search engine (my Facebook profile will tell you what high school I graduated from, and then in two more minutes you can find my high school's website to learn what our mascot is. Where is the security?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, every October, Microsoft has a giving campaign to encourage its employees to engage in charitable giving.

MacBU takes part in this, with our very own twist to it. We have a bake auction every year. It's like a competitive bake sale. This year, I entered three items: strawberry cupcakes, a raspberry tart, and strawberry pate de fruit. My efforts landed me fourth place amongst the bakers in terms of money raised.

I support two charities: KQED public radio and RAINN. Listening to the other bakers and the bidders, there was a great array of charities supported. MacBU had strong participation across the whole group, and I'm really proud of us for helping out our communities.

The fine folks over at Amazon have introduced a new initiative: Frustration-Free Packaging. You know the feeling: you buy something in one of those bloody plastic clamshells and can't open the stupid thing. (Pun unintended, but my fingers have ended up bloody after cutting myself on them!) According to the main Amazon page that describes it, their goal is to "deliver products inside smaller, easy-to-open, recyclable cardboard boxes with less packaging material".

There are 19 products currently available with this new and improved packaging. Seven of them are Microsoft mice in various colours (my favourite is the pomegranate red one, in case someone on the hardware team is reading this and feels the urge to send a review mouse over to me ;).

I'm really pleased to see Microsoft on board with this. The out-of-box experience is an important part of the user experience. Spending ten minutes trying to saw open a clamshell, only to cut yourself on the sharp edges of the plastic, is not a great way to start off your experience with a new product.

Good news for Mac users -- the Netflix "watch now" feature is available for beta testing. Using Microsoft Silverlight, you can get instant access to many Netflix films.

I've been playing around with it, and it's pretty cool. I tried it from my rather-less-than-snappy hotel room wifi connection and was really surprised to discover that there was no stuttering at all, and the video was great.

Currently, my media server at home is a PPC Mac Mini. This is yet another reminder that I need to get a new home machine so that I can get the instant access on something other than my laptops!

If you're a Netflix subscriber with an Intel Mac, you can opt in to Netflix's beta program. Looking over my current Netflix queue, it looks like about 30 of the 150 movies in there are available for instant play.