My parents will arrive in town this Sunday from Canada to visit us for the next week.  I am taking the week off to spend some time with them and to vacation at home.  With business travel, work, new programs to launch and lots of other highly visible changes at work over the summer vacation got pushed aside.  Thank goodness I love what I do. 

In saying all that I am taking the next week off to spend some time with my family and am so excited to see my folks.  This will be the first time in years that I’ll have quality time to spend with them on their visit.  In the past it has always worked out that when they visit we were launching a product at work, doing a major design preview or were just week or so away from a major event like PDC or MIX.  All types of things that were all consuming which sucks.   My folks were always very understanding (I get my work ethic and drive from my Dad) but we aren’t getting any younger.  Anyhow, this year it will be different, I won’t be scattered and can focus on the visit.

The rest will be great!

Lots of stuff on the work front.   I am still hiring, but have filled 2/4 of my open positions.  Rory will start this coming week working on Channel 9 that caused quite the stir.  I’ve also filled my 10 Lead role too, I can’t say who it is (yet), but you’ve got to see the application video they created.  We’ll post that video very soon on 10.  

Last but not least we got very close to the final draft of the design concepts for a major Channel 9 update that is underway.   This will be the fourth major refresh and evolution to Channel 9 in 2 1/2 years.   We want to refine them a bit more, but will share them via Channel 9 in about another week.  The work on this update does a bunch of things to improve Channel 9, but one of the core things is it will move Channel 9 to the same platform that 10 is built on, resulting on a single code-base for my team to maintain which is going to be amazing.  We’ve been building for some time a media blogging code-base for my team’s network of sites for sometime and using 10 as a test bed.   Now its time to get that over to C9 and move Channel 9 off of the a mutated version of ASP.NET Forums that it runs on today.

A fun thing lately that I’ve had some opportunities with the press, analysts and a few book authors is to talk about the history behind Channel 9.  A bit of it is documented like in the Shel Scoble’s Naked Conversations (that book didn’t really nail it or get all the truth so I’ve been thinking about seeing if Lenn wants to do a podcast about how C9 started, could be fun.  )

Ok Anyhow times to get back to chores, mom and dad will be here in about 30 hours.