John Dwyer's Space

Well it seems like we've been planning this move for ever, and I'm very pleased to advise that we landed in Dublin, Ireland on December 11th.       Our first few weeks here have been wonderful, despite the typical challenges of an international relocation.    

We've found a very nice house just outside of the town of Straffan in County Kildare, and will be moving in in the next few weeks.  

Ireland lives up to all of our expectations for spectacular scenery, historical sites, great food, and people who are sincere and welcoming.   Wherever you look around Dublin you see structures dating back hundreds of years alongside modern commercial and residential development.  

The most challenging aspect of life in Dublin is the traffic.   This is a city going through significant growth, and the road systems are being stressed heavily.   There are major road and transport development programs in progress, and it will be interesting to see how much of an impact they can have on the current gridlock challenges.

The next few months will be dedicated to settling in properly.   Moving into the house, having our shipment of personal effects arrive, and getting the kids into school will be the next major milestones.  

For now though, we're just thrilled to finally be here.   Updates coming soon.

It feels like we've been stalled for so long now, but I wanted to let you know that things are heating up substantially for our relocation to Dublin.   

Next Wednesday the removalists arrive at our place in Redmond and start boxing up our stuff, and then on Friday the containers will arrive to take them away.   For Josie and I this is feeling very much like April of 2002 when we were preparing to leave Australia for the USA.     It's a crazy and unnerving period as the house looks like a bomb hit it, and it's hard to feel comfortable that we're ready for the packers.

There are still some official steps that need to be taken care of before we fly out of the USA, and so we'll be moving into an apartment for a while, and current expectations are that we'll be here for another month or so.   This adds another challenge to the process as we need to put aside the things we need to have access to for the next few months while we're in temporary accommodation in the USA and then in Ireland.

But... it's a very exciting time for us.    All the wheels are in motion now and we know that it's only a matter of weeks now before we embark on this new journey.   Max and Jacqui have fully embraced the opportunity to live in Ireland and their trepidation has evolved to be anticipation and more recently growing impatience for the move.    Josie is spending substantial time online looking at neighborhoods and houses, and we're all reading anything we can get our hands on relating to Irish history and lifestyle.

I'll post more updates as things progress.

It's been a very long time since my last post, and pathetically I can only blame the madness in our lives over the past few months.   Is it a coincidence that you have to write "lame" to write "blame"...

Anyway, things are finally coming together for our transition to a new land in Europe.   The house here in Redmond is on the market (check out our listing on RedFin), and in the first week we've had pretty good traffic through the place despite the talk of a devastating slump in the real estate market over here.   We completely underestimated how much crap we'd gathered over the past 5 odd years over here, and it's been a massive exercise to down size and get the house ready for the prospective buyers.   It scrubbed up pretty well in the end and hopefully we'll have a couple of offers in the next few weeks.

We'd hoped to be in our next location by the beginning of September so the kids would start their new school year there, but as it turns out they're back at school with their friends here for the next couple of months.   I have a feeling they're pretty happy about that really.  Hopefully the move in mid-semester won't be too disruptive.

I'll begin formal transition into the new role later this month, though I've had the opportunity to begin engaging with my new team from Asia and Europe and I'm incredibly excited about the prospect of working with them.  Given that my scope is going to be the International region, I'm gearing up to spend a lot of time on planes for the next few years.   I love traveling so this suits me fine, but recent trips have reminded me that I need re-learn how to travel light.  Given the amount of camera gear I like to carry these days, that's proving to be a real challenge.  For the first few months I'll continue to be very engaged in the current program so it's likely I'll be commuting between Dublin and Seattle every few weeks, as well as testing the bounds of our collaboration and conferencing technologies.

On the subject of technology, I have to plug the fact that we have some really cool advances in the Windows Live platform in beta right now, and some even cooler stuff on the way.    It blows me away that after nearly 16 years with this company I'm starting to get the buzz again like the period leading up to the Windows 95 launch.     I was very skeptical when we started the Software plus Services mantra but having just attended the company meeting I'm brimming with the cool aid again.    If you want a taste of the stuff we have in progress, check out http://get.live.com.    Oh and for something very bleeding edge that is generating demand that blows away all of our plans and expectations, check out http://www.microsoft.com/surface/.   Actually I could blah, blah, blah for ages about the new stuff coming down the pipe, but I won't put you through it.   I'll just say that it feels like we're starting to innovate again at the right pace and with the right level of courage.

Better run.