The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Yes, I am testing my phone.

		July 4 2011 VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

The stairs going up to our roof on the houseboat were attached just in time for the 4th of July. That also means we didn’t have much time to plan a party, but a few friends were able to make it at the last minute for a great show with some great weather.

		Summer 2011 in Seattle VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

What you’re seeing is (1) a little dragonfly on my finger at the houseboat, (2) a long set of steps that Milo hates when I drag him up to Capitol Hill, (3) a wooden Space Needle and (4) the Velodrome in Redmond, WA.

If I could retire today, and for some reason I could keep myself from working on a PC, doing marketing, sales or some sort of tech/business consulting, then I would do the following at all times of the year:

1. Ski (the picture is of my brother, dad and me while helicopter skiing in 2006)
2. Snowboard
3. Kayak
4. Bike (road and mountain)
5. Surf (I’d have to learn how first)
6. Travel the world
7. Hang out with friends and family, preferably during all of the above
8. Photograph and document my adventures
9. Keep up with all sorts of technology to help with all of the above (especially number 8)

Why do I mention this? Because I just discovered a web site that would be great for numbers 1 & 2 on the list: http://www.turns-all-year.com/index.html – how cool is that?

If you win the lottery, please include me on your winnings so I can start working on this list. 

I haven’t shared much via my blog for a while, but here’s why:

1. I’ve been busy looking at what brand advertisers do on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking services.

2. In an effort to train our sales reps around the US (the world-wide effort is coming soon), I visited the following cities in the month of May: Boston, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Some of it was fun, but much of it was just too many cities in a row so I’d wake up and forget which city I was in. I did get to go to the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago, walk the beach in and pier in Santa Monica, and meet up with Lorie for a weekend in San Francisco. 

3. I also spent a week in New York meeting with different ad, PR and media agencies. I also got to meet up with Lorie in NY for a weekend because of this. That’s because she travels for work too – about once or twice a month. While there, we met up with our friend Steve, who lives in Brooklyn – it was my first time there and it reminds me of our neighborhood in London. The photo is of the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, complete with a bottle of Brooklyn Ale.

4. And, we just moved into our new houseboat!

Hopefully more photos and stories will be coming over the summer…

It’s May again, which means I’ve reached another anniversary at Microsoft. I’ve been working at Microsoft for 17 years and I’m still having a great time! Two years ago, I explained some of the skills I’ve gained and roles I’ve had after 15 years at Microsoft. As my resumé/CV shows, I’ve been in a global sales role (Global Account Programs) for the past year and I’ll soon be moving into a global marketing role. However, I thought I would take this time to share some of the interesting things I’ve done in the last 17 years while at Microsoft. My “about” page gives a good narrative of my history here too, but here are ten fun trivia items I try to bring up when explaining my experiences:

1. After my first few months, I became the go-to guy in product/customer support for debugging (reading and understanding) NetBIOS traces with Network Monitor (1994/1995) – that’s cool if you’re a networking nerd
2. I managed the project of moving Microsoft’s support and discussion forums from CompuServe over to NNTP newsgroups. (1996?)
3. In Thailand, while riding on the neck of an elephant, I learned to steer him. It’s more like a suggestion than a command, but it was easy enough to get him to walk to some bamboo and start chowing down. (1997)
4. I met and picked up my wife in a bar in Tijuana. Yes, we were both at a Microsoft event in San Diego, but had gone to Mexico with a bunch of people for the evening. (1999)
5. I managed the team, and was hands-on, for the development and distribution of Microsoft’s biggest demo environment. This was for the Envisioning Show at the Microsoft Technology Centers (MTC). The fun part was presenting it in sort of a consultative selling way, and helping new MTCs get it installed and teaching them how to run the demo in the same consultative selling sort of way. (2004-2006)
6. My dad, brother and I finally went helicopter skiing after hearing my dad talk about it for our entire lives. I’ve skied since I was about 4 or 5 years old (I think) and it had always been a bit of a dream of ours. (2006)
7. Bill Gates and I played with video game technology together at a Microsoft Research event. (2007)
8. I managed the team and was very hands-on for the design, architecture, development and global rollout of Messenger TV into 20 markets and in 12 languages. (2008)
9. Over the years, I’ve directly managed three different teams with happy employees each time. A few I still consider to be very good friends. (1997 – 2005)
10. During the past 17 years, I rode bicycles in 6 countries: US, Canada, England, France, Thailand and Italy (note: Canada included an attempt to go helicopter biking, but it was too cloudy to land so that didn’t work out as we had planned)

I continue to meet creative, smart, fun, and interesting people all around the world working at, and with, Microsoft. Unfortunately I don’t have time to connect with them as often as I would like to, since they span from different areas of the US to Denmark to Japan to Turkey to England to Belgium and other fun places in the world.

I now document those personal adventures at https://grothadventures.wordpress.com/ and my advertising/marketing thoughts at http://briangroth.wordpress.com/ with only the occasional Microsoft-specific topics at this blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/bgroth/)

For the time being, http://hotdoggerblog.com/ is featuring Milo in front of the Wienermobile. See:

The full picture is from a few days ago:

		Snow day… VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Today, my friends Keith and Lisl joined Milo and I for an adventure in the mountains. The plan was to dig a snow cave and sleep in it, with an option to sleep in the cars if the snow cave didn’t work out. If you don’t know, Lorie has retired from winter sports unless it is somewhat warm (or warmer) and sunny, so she was in LA while we were in 20F weather. It also got colder as the day progressed.

The plan was to go to Hyak, which is now called Snoqualmie Summit East, because for the last few years they’ve been closed since their chair lifts had been washed away by mudslides and generally, they only have about 3 runs, so I didn’t think they were in any hurry to open up a money losing hill. (for background info: I grew up skiing here in the 1970’s because it was the cheapest, possibly free, place for the folks to bring us boys skiing).

We met at the Chevron station at the Summit at 10am, then proceeded to the parking lot which usually has about 3 cars in it, which is equal to the number of backcountry skiers I usually meet on the hill. However, the economy in Seattle must be booming because Hyak (Summit Money-Losing East) is now open, operating, and full of people!

Because of all these people, there are also those damn ski patrol guys there too. (FYI: both Keith and Lisl were ski patrollers at Winter Park, Colorado and I even had an honorary “sweep the hill at the end of the day” experience, which was very cool).

However, the 4 of us hiked up and around most of the area waving to skiers, ski instructors and ski patrollers as they came down. I even heard a few adults say to kids “wave to the doggy”. By the way, I was on on snowshoes, without my snowboard, Milo was barefoot/barepaw, and K & L were on skis with skins. After stopping for a late lunch on the back side of the ski area, which is groomed for another chair that isn’t open yet, a ski patroller came cruising up (also on skis with skins). He told us that we needed ski passes to be there and that  dogs weren’t allowed.

I then had Milo pee on him.

Actually, he really likes dogs and used to do search and rescue with dogs. Milo even liked him and he seemed like a pretty good guy, even if he was upholding some stupid rule of the Snoqualmie Summit area. And no, Milo didn’t pee on him.

We of course didn’t have ski passes since we weren’t using the chair lifts! Apparently, the over-priced ski passes are required for any area that Snoqualmie Summit leases from the state, plus there are no dogs allowed on their land either. So, after chatting to him a bit, he told us we needed to head back to our cars.

As the patroller took off and we prepared to go back down, Milo wanted to follow him. Yes, Milo is a loyal dog to anyone who is nice to him. On the way down, another patroller told us the same thing, but he even said “I really don’t care, but someone told us there was a dog here, so I had to check it out”.”

As we reached our cars, Keith started feeling ill, so we called it a day and went home. I chose not to spend the night there since I didn’t want to sleep in the car with Milo if I didn’t have friends to share in the misery!

Maybe next weekend.