Author: karenxiao

went ballroom dancing after work today! haven’t done ballroom since freshman year, but microsoft has unofficial classes every wednesday night so melissa (who’s on the ballroom team at harvard and is really good) got a bunch of us to go today. we learned cha cha and then just had an hour to dance! it was so much fun!!! i can’t wait to go every wednesday night now!

then afterwards, our friends danny and andrew came over and made spaghetti! last week we made stir fry for them, so this week they returned the favor and cooked for us!

chef danny serving spaghetti!

yummy!

microsoft organized a trip for all the explore interns to go sea kayaking in puget sound and have dinner at alki beach today after work! the weather predicted rain for the whole week (although rain = drizzle = occasionally sun in seattle weather terms), but although it was still a little rainy, we still took a chance and went anyways!

we braved rain, wind and huge waves and i thought my arms were going to fall off from all the paddling. but it was totally worth it! we saw tons of wild life and sea lions too, all to the backdrop of the seattle skyline!

afterwards, we were freezing and totally wet, but we soon warmed up with some hot chocolate and dinner at a restaurant by the beach! 

gave my first presentation today to the entire team! i’m in the program manager (PM) part of my internship right now which means that I research, design, and manage the project that I will be carrying out for the next three months.

for the past week, i’ve mostly been researching and coming up with a powerpoint presentation to share with my team and managers about my project. it’s been pretty fun! 

i think overall the presentation was pretty good 🙂

they don’t sell a lot of asian vegetables in the nearby grocery store, so yesterday, i bought some baby bok choy and bean sprouts in chinatown. julia’s never had bok choy before so i stir fried it with some chicken and rice for dinner today! 

woke up this morning and biked to a nearby park with my roommate julia. she brought a sketchbook and colored pencils and we sat in the park and sketched!

i love riding around in my new lime green bike and matching helmet! it also matches all the nature and evergreen trees in seattle!

after lunch, i needed to do some grocery shopping and wanted to explore seattle a bit, so my friend eric and i went to seattle chinatown. we got bubble tea, bought groceries, and even got haircuts!! we found this really great place that had really cheap haircuts. eric wanted to get his hair cut, so i decided to get one too!

before we left, we ate at this vietnamese restaurant. i’d never tried vietnamese hot pot before, so we decided to try it. it didn’t turn out to be what i expected – it was a lot sweeter and not spicy and savory like the hot pot i’m used to. 

it was raining this morning when we woke up so we didn’t really want to go outside. julia and i were itching to move around a bit, so we decided to do ballet!!

julia’s been doing ballet for a long time and even took a gap year before college to dance ballet professionally. we found a playlist on spotify, turned our kitchen bar into a barre (haha) and ended up doing a whole barre routine for an hour! it was fun to kind of get back into ballet! we decided we’re going to dance more often.

eric came by after lunch because he had a car to take us to the pro sports club, this really nice gym that we get a free membership to through microsoft. we didn’t really want to work out so we just signed up for our membership and then took eric’s car to buy julia’s bike while eric and bo, another friend from harvard who’s working at microsoft, played basketball.

for dinner, we went to a restaurant in downtown bellevue called the danube that has italian-german food. it was really great! julia’s friend phil from harvard glee club and lives in the seattle area came as well as another intern on her team and some of his friends. 

from left: kofi, julia, me, eric, bo, and phil

me and my roommate julia!!

my goulash – it’s like a hungarian beef stew – soo good!

the view from eric’s apartment

the windows 8 preview was released to the public today!! there’s some pretty exciting new stuff! the people app that i’m working on this summer will be fully rolled out in the official windows 8 release later this year, but in the meantime, here’s more information and another video about the preview as well as the download link: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/release-preview

for dinner, i made broccoli and pepper stir fry!

first official day! we had new employee orientation! it wasn’t too exciting – we just did a bunch of paperwork and listened to a ton of presentations and important people speak. all interns from our wave who have the same start date gathered in one of the huge conference rooms, split into different tables by division. there must’ve been hundreds of us! i asked the HR head how many interns there were total this summer and he said 1450!

it wasn’t a particularly exciting day, but we got tons of cool microsoft swag like mugs, cups, and a cool bag. but most importantly, i got my badge!!

officially a microsoft employee now 🙂

afterwards, i went to sears and bought a bike! after quite a bit of debating and choosing, i finally settled on a lime green 26” hybrid one!! it’s really cute and i got a matching lime green helmet and a basket!! it also happened to match the shirt i was wearing. 

the guy at the store was really nice and helped me install the basket and even took a picture for me! and then i rode the bike home!

then for dinner, we had our two friends/neighbors who are also explorer interns over for dinner. i cooked everyone my signature pepper and chicken stir fry and they really liked it!!

met the team and set up my office today!! i’ll be working in building 88 (my lucky number!!) with everyone in the windows & windows live division. 

we got there and were shown our offices! i’m sharing an office with grace gee, another intern from harvard. there’s a third explorer intern next door and two regular test interns across the hall. 

room 2653:

task 1 of the day: setting up my pc. i’ve never really set up an entire workstation and everything from scratch before, so it was pretty interesting.

all set up!!

my team is working on the super cool people app for the new windows 8 operating system  (here’s a video about windows 8 and the people app:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDYQmQ-phX8)!

our specific project that we’ll be working on the next three months is to integrate sina weibo (china’s “twitter” and biggest social networking site) into the people app that currently only supports facebook and twitter. 

excited to actually start working on it!

they really weren’t lying when they said it rains a lot in seattle – when i woke up this morning, sure enough, it was raining. julia and i decided to go do some shopping so we walked about a mile to a nearby shopping center and went to fred meyer (the local one-stop shop). 

there’s something very refreshing about the air right after it rains and our walk was actually very nice! there’s lots of trees and everything around us just seemed so refreshing! the weather is definitely much cooler than georgia (we wore jeans and hoodies) but this is the most comfortable temperature in my opinion.

we found out that another intern had a car, so him and his roommate ended up driving us around and we went to a target and a few other stores to buy groceries and shop for bikes. i think i’m an expert on all the different types of bikes now because i’ve probably looked at over 50 different bikes today. we will probably come back and get one in the next day or two.

we were really tired after we came back so made a really simple dinner – mac and cheese and chicken noodle soup.

i also realized that my roommate and i had tons in common! we both do ballet (though she dance profesionally during her gap year so she’s actually really good) and we both like to draw/paint! i’m hoping to get some paints or something and maybe we can paint in our spare time this summer!