No, I didn’t get my desktop yesterday after NEO, but I should be getting it tomorrow morning. These things meant that today was the last time I could really get this post in because, let’s face it, I’m going to be on my desktop almost exclusively once it gets delivered. Sorry, Apple, but I’m still going to take Vista (and soon to be 7) over Leopard.
Someone somehow related to the car transport people called me today wanting to set up a delivery time, so that might mean that my car is here already. If that’s the case, that’s just one more thing I can check off of my list of stuff that has to get done. Considering I wasn’t expecting it until Friday, getting it a day or two earlier just means that I don’t have to keep driving my stupid looking rental car.
Personal - Seattle
NEO actually went quite well today because I mainly didn’t even try to understand all of the parts which would be considered “boring”, electing to wait until my parents come up in a couple weeks and have my dad look it all over for me. Tomorrow I get to sleep in until closer to what has become my normal time and show up around 9:00 for someone on the team I’ll be working with to give me a tour. In Microsoft terms I believe this would be my “peer mentor”. See, I did pay attention at some points during the day today.
I haven’t gotten my computer or email or anything fun like that yet, but that will be part of my agenda for tomorrow. I do have my badge which is an important part of my Microsoft life, but that was really the only fun thing that I walked away today with. Well, it’s the only thing if you don’t want to count the messenger bag and all of the stuff in it that they gave us.
Personal - Seattle
In 12 hours from now I’ll (possibly) be bored out of my mind sitting in New Employee Orientation, or NEO as Microsoft likes to call it. In 16 hours I’m pretty sure I will be bored as Andrew said that the second half of the day makes you want to bang your head against the table. I’ll then maybe get my desktop as a reward for not giving myself a concussion depending on if I get out of NEO early enough for them to deliver my stuff.
So, how did I spend this last day of my summer? Contrary to what you might think, I actually didn’t sit around my apartment all day or mindlessly drive through Seattle trying not to get lost. Instead, I went to visit some friends that live a little less than an hour north of Seattle and spent a majority of the afternoon up there. Aside from my GPS attempting to route me around traffic that I could very obviously tell didn’t exist, there was virtually nothing of interest about today to speak of.
Personal - Seattle
I had my first Mexican food in Seattle today, and while it was decent, I have to say that they could use a few pointers from Texas. There is no On The Border or anything up here so I can’t do a direct comparison, but Azteca could work on making some better tortillas and add more flavor to their fajita steak. They do have the whole chip thing down pretty well, however.
I picked up a form from Andrew today that I asked him to print out for me which I was told I need to being on Monday, but according to him, they have a gigantic stack of them there. So, all I really need to remember to take on Monday morning is my passport since that’s the only thing I have which satisfies the documentation requirement for being eligible to work. Life is actually more convenient than it was at Rockwell Collins since that’s the only thing I’ll need rather than my birth certificate, social security card, or other things like that.
Personal - Seattle
Two days ago, I gave Half-Blood Prince a score of 8/10. In my review I wrote for Vox Populi, I only gave it a 3/5 (for those of you mathematically challenged, this would be approximate to a 6/10). In both cases, I had to work with the scale given to me. To clarify, I will be buying the DVD when it comes out, and I very likely will enjoy just as I do with all of the other HP movies. Giving it a 4/5 on VP, though, would put it just one score away from “perfect” since VP doesn’t use a half-point system like I do. I personally had enough issues with the movie that I felt it wasn’t up at the same level as other movies that I would easily give a 4/5 to. Because of that, I had no choice but to give it a 3. That doesn’t change my blog score of an 8 which I completely stand by given my rating history here, but I just didn’t want anyone to think that I was unable to scale scores appropriately between two different systems.
It took me about 50 minutes to get from my apartment into downtown to meet Julia today, and my conclusion is that Seattle really needs to create freeways that are wider than two lanes on each side. Sure, if it were up to the city government here everyone would probably use public transportation (and in their defense, it does seem like they have a quite effective one set up), but seriously, there shouldn’t be a gigantic traffic mess at 1:00 on a Friday afternoon trying to get into downtown. Fortunately I won’t be making that trip much, so I can just ignore the fact that the traffic situation here is somehow even more messed up than Dallas.
Personal - Seattle
I officially now know why people love GPS systems. Not only is it stupid simple to get anywhere (provided you have an address or an intersection), it even gives you a little map that follows you around so that you can discover routes on your own that otherwise would be near impossible to find (navigating downtown Seattle, I’m looking at you). I am a total convert now, at least until my GPS gives me wrong directions and gets me lost.
I was using my GPS downtown in order to locate where I’m meeting Julia for lunch tomorrow. I could probably get there without needing it now, but I may not be quite as skilled at escaping the downtown area. We only (easily) successfully accomplished that once on our prior trip, and while I could probably retrace our steps, I figure there must be an easy way that I simply haven’t discovered. Perhaps I should pray to the GPS gods tonight and ask for their guidance tomorrow afternoon.
Personal - Seattle
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was a decent adaptation of the book, but like with almost all the movies, some of the things they chose to leave out baffled me. I can understand changing the intro (to show the actions that are talked about in the first chapter rather than just showing the conversation), but to cut and write around arguably the biggest action scene in the book? This one isn’t that action heavy to begin with, so the fact it was left out shocked me. Ultimately, I think it makes a good companion to the book, but I think that people who only see the movie without ever having read the book would be fairly bored, at least comparatively with the others. My score: 8/10.
I didn’t expect my previous post to generate such a Facebook comment response, but I’ve been getting notifications all day long. I have no reverse import available (to my knowledge), but I think that it’s probably the post/note that I’ve gotten the most comments on ever, and they were all in some way related to my lament of my single monitor situation. I’m still trying to process exactly what it says about both me and my friends that a topic like monitor resolution can generate such a discussion.
Personal - Seattle
I think Apple designed Expose because most Mac users must only use one screen. If it weren’t for that, I’d be going insane from window switching due to the complete inability of the dock to handle that. I still prefer Windows for single monitor management and will be quite happy with my computer arrives next week (with all three of my monitors even).
This post is coming early because I’m going to see HP6 later tonight with Andrew. I think I could give a fairly accurate review of it right now rather than tomorrow, assuming that it “suffers” from the same differences from the books that the other HP movies have. The trailer has already hinted at one major difference that will be interesting to see how it impacts the story.
Personal - Seattle
I’d venture that over the past couple days (at least), the weather here in Seattle has been 30-40 degrees cooler than Dallas. On top of that, my parents informed me that I left just in time as our upstairs AC went out Saturday night, and the upstairs of our house has been in the 90s or so since. So, I guess I got quite lucky with my escape to Seattle and cooler temperatures as a result.
Tomorrow I’m going on my apartment tour to an unknown number of locations (but since it’s only 3 hours, I’d guess somewhere in the 3-5 ballpark). I also get a bunch of leads to follow up on my own, so that will extremely likely be something that I do later on in the week. It would be nice to have something decided by the end of the week so that I at least know my move in date and can begin planning accordingly. Effectively, that means two things: letting the movers know when I need all the rest of my stuff delivered, and giving my parents a date for when they need to buy plane tickets up here.
Personal - Seattle
One of the things I’ve found myself doing is actually navigating into the Applications folder on my laptop in order to launch programs not in my dock (the equivalents of the Windows Start Menu and Quick Launch bar, respectively). In Vista I would just hit the Windows key and start typing into the search box. Well, I can actually be doing the same thing in Leopard with Spotlight, I just haven’t ever thought about doing it. I’m sure that I’ll find other ways like this to optimize my workflow over the next week or two and just be getting used to it when my desktop arrives, allowing me to return to the land of Windows.
In order to occupy my time today, I went to go see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I felt like it was probably a little too long at 2:30, and some of the (many) repeated jokes could have been cut, but it was still entertaining. A movie with giant robot battles and stuff blowing up doesn’t exactly require the most engaging story even in the world, even if that’s what the critics want to think. My score: 8.5/10.
Personal - Seattle