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I’ll do a larger update on Microsoft later. In the meantime though — download Office 2007 Beta 2. Completely new interface, completely new functionality. I’ve been using it for a while and it just went public. It rocks.

Waking up at 6am tomorrow to head out on a 5 and a half hour flight to Seattle. My first day at work at Microsoft is on Tuesday and it's all hard work after that. I probably won't be on IM that much but I'll check my email a lot.
To all my friends who are going to great places, doing amazing things, or just those I'll miss a lot: Good luck with everything and take care.

After a week of dealing with my super static Sony Ericsson T637 (and having to deal with my girlfriend being incredibly annoyed) I figured I'd head over to CTC and get it checked out. Replacing the SIM card didn't do anything, so I went for an upgrade and decided to spend a little more money and get a Smartphone:

Cingular 2125:

• Windows Mobile 5.0
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE Worldphone
• 1.3 Megapixel Camera and Camcorder
• MS Outlook Mobile email, contacts, calendar
• Windows Media Player 10
• MSN Hotmail/Live and Messenger
• SD Card Slot
• Speakerphone
• Bluetooth / Infrared / Mini-USB
• Java Support
• And most importantly: no static.

Ever since I was little (well, not too little), my parents have let me make every important decision in my life. The "decision" has usually been something like leaving my old private school of 8 years for public school, going to ncssm, choosing which summer camps to go to, what internships to apply to, what jobs, which college, etc. Usually none of these decisions have been particularly hard to make; I always had a deep bias for one side over the others.

But now I'm stuck. I just finished my third year of college. For the past four months, I've known that I could graduate in December, and I always thought that's what I would do. Here at home though, I've started thinking… and the one emotion that I'm starting to feel — the one thing that I've never even predicted the possibility of — is starting to surface.

Regret.

Sure, the decision I had made was straightforward. Apply for jobs in the summer, graduate in the fall, and hopefully work at a good company in January. Then I realized.. there are a lot of things I would regret that January and the months after. The most important one would be spending that last semester with my friends. I've known some of my friends for five years; I've been with my girlfriend for almost two years. My dad says to go with my instinct — that instinct is to stay, but part of me is pushing me to start working. I want to spend time with my friends, but I can't simply goof off that final semester. If I am going to stay, the tentative plan is to do research and take graduate classes, but I'm not sure if that will really help me at all for the future.

Also, if I do stay, I'll get time to work on my Computer Science Honors project, which, at the moment, is pretty large in scope. But if I stay… I'll be sacrificing 6 months of work… but then again, I'm not even sure if that's significant.

So that's where I am — the crossroads. This is probably one of the most, if not the most, important decisions I'll be making. I've talked to my friends, my parents, my professors, my mentors at work. Ultimately, I have to figure it out.. soon..

This entire semester two other developers and I have been working on a web queuing project for submitting protein folding requests. About an hour and a half ago, we completed our final presentation. We have a little more documentation to do and some more tasks to flush out, but other than that, we've written a complete end-to-end system that allows you to submit tasks, see them in a queue, distribute them to a possibly clustered compute environment, and get your selected outputs (movie files, graphs, whatever you want) back.

This has been probably the coolest, and most fun, project I've ever worked on. Not to mention that it's the most successful project I've worked on. Our client presented the project at a DARPA (DARPA = government branch that researched and developed the internet) conference two weeks ago. We're in the process of working with our client to write a paper on it, and our client is in talks with other universities around the nation to distribute the web application to their servers.

In four months, we've developed the world's first protein folding simulation on the web. How frickin cool is that.

Here's a screenshot of the main page, after you login: