Last month, Danyel blogged about Microsoft Research’s moving into a new building, Building 99, and linked to several newspaper articles about Microsoft’s expansion in general. I’m somewhat familiar with the Microsoft campus, having interned there in 1995 and visited a few times since, so I was curious to find out even more.

On Microsoft’s web site, I found a couple of maps showing its Campus Development Plan, one from February 2006 (PDF), and another from November 2007 (JPEG). There are a couple of minor differences, which is to be expected as a master plan is implemented. One of them shows how the footprints of Buildings 94–98 have gotten more funky:

But more interesting is a change in the original campus. Currently, there is empty space next to Buildings 5 and 6. The 2006 map shows the space occupied by a new Building 7, where the 2007 map has it renumbered to Building 37:

7 makes more sense than 37 — why the change?

There has never been a Building 7 at Microsoft. The numbers jumped from 6 to 8. Company pranks soon began referring to the mythical Building 7, such as sending new interns there for an urgent meeting, or employees announcing they were heading over to Building 7 when they were heading out for lunch.

So not surprisingly, there was an outcry in the company when facilities announced a new Building 7 in the expansion plan. Luckily, facilities has a sense of humor and decided to renumber the building. (I guess there wasn’t a Building 37 either…)

• Microsoft campus mystery lives on · Nancy Gohring, Network World, May 16, 2007

Last week was the most action packed I’ve had in a while. Between Monday and Saturday, I only spent Wednesday night at home:

• Monday: to the Computer History Museum for a panel on the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64, my first computer
• Tuesday: ice skating with friends at the Sharks ice skating rink near Spartan Stadium
• Thursday: to Stanford to view the final presentations of CS 147, the undergraduate human-computer interaction class
• Friday: a hot chocolate tasting party with friends from Stanford, followed by hanging out with other friends from Caltech
• Saturday: up to San Francisco with high school friends, to the Legion of Honor for an exhibition on Marie-Antoinette and Le Petit Trianon, the De Young Museum for a reception with the artist in residence and a high school classmate, Anli Liu. Then another high school friend joined us for dinner.

Not surprisingly, on Sunday I decided to relax. In my case, that meant reading through a bunch of newspapers and a couple of months’ worth of my friends’ blog entries. I picked up a few interesting tidbits on the way, which I’ll write about over the next few entries.

• For you Billy Joel fans, Here Comes Another Bubble.
• Earlier this year, Conan O’Brien was in San Francisco for a week. Watch his visit to Intel (part 1, part 2) and you’ll be impressed with what he gets away with. And I bet Sam Wo Restaurant in Chinatown is getting a bump in business after Conan’s ad for the hole-in-the-wall.
• Bustin’ out of the late ’70s, the pop band Dschinghis Khan seems to be Germany’s answer to the Village People. A video of their 1979 hit, “Moskau,” has become one of those odd Internet fads. To top it off, someone made a “translation” of the lyrics.
• The Second Life hype is unreal. Leave it to the TV show The Office to deflate some of it. And the advertising firm DraftFCB announces their debut on Second Life by parodying it.
• Kurt Thomas probably would have won the gold in gymnastics if the U.S. hadn’t boycotted the 1980 Olympics. To keep himself in the public eye, he starred in the movie Gymkata, one of his more ill-advised career moves. But it’s left us with gems such as a fight scene where the village well is conveniently shaped like a pommel horse.