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I´ve been up to so many things that sadly I haven´t had time to blog about them. But I´ll try to recover some points with this entry and keep everybody up to date in what I´m doing and what is that keeps me so busy

So, first important stop: the ACM meeting in New York last week. The ACM is interested in launching some new programs and get feedback on their current ones, so they invited some student from different parts of the US, and some foreign countries like China, India, UK, Mexico or Spain (yes, that´s me). It was a really good meeting, lots of feedback and interesting ideas and great for making friends with some of the wonderful people in the group (Cat, Gabriel, Kevin, Leslie, Sidhan, Jeremy, … thanks to you all for making all this a wonderful experience! see you all soon!)

I also seized the opportunity to go around NYC (with the invaluable help of Rakel and Cat, of course) and visit some famous places. I´ve left the picks in my gallery. I´d reccommend you not to miss the National History Museum, and get time enough so that you can go to the Metropolitan and MoMA, not like me (agh! couldn´t see Starry Night! }:/ )

Well, for this ACM meeting I took 3 days out from work, so I rumbled on back to Redmond on Wednesday to prepare for the demo day of my team´s second scrum sprint on Friday. Some FxCop compliancy, some last moment changes… as usual. The demo was OK, we finally have some application scenarios running on the devices and the performance is wonderful! (Compact Framework, even it´s version 2, it´s quite tricky when it comes to what you can and can not do in order to achieve performance. I´ve been reading about that a lot lately so I´ll probably try to write more about it when I have time)

But, on Thursday, during all the debugging and FxCop’pping I had another very interesting thing coming. Microsoft Research normally brings guest speakers for their talks, which makes them really nice events. Last year they invited people such as Cory Doctorow from the EFF, who gave a talk about why DRM was evil, or Benoit Mandelbrot, whose talk was based on how to apply fractal models to the study of Economics.

But this Thursday´s talk, in my oppinion, beated them all. This week’s lecturer was Steve Squyres, lead scientist of NASA/JPL in the Mars Exploration Rover mission, and astronomy professor at Cornell University. He has recently written a book called “Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity and the exploration of the red planet” which is a detailed diary on the experiences of the Mars rover team (and that I reccommend reading, it is not technical at all and he really has narrative writing skills, so it is like a light interesting story) His talk was basically like his book: no slides, just photos and videos of the different stages of the Mars mission, from the initial launch to the current state, including all the problems, the new discoveries and a lot of philosophical stuff from Steve´s side.

I just loved it! This only strengthens my desire of working for NASA some day in the distant future. There is so much to do in astroscience…

Well, at the end of the talk I approached him, thanked him for the talk, and got a photo taken with him and my book signed (yes, I like this things THAT much, I can´t help it)

So, that’s all for now, folks! Plans for this week include a lot of stabilization/debugging/reviewing work before Sprint 3 which will probably keep me quite busy, but… Hope to steal some time during this weekend to visit the Experience Music Project and take some tour photos of the Redmond campus to show you on my way back