The intern presentations today weren’t all entertaining, but as a whole they were better than sitting at my desk for the same amount of time. A couple of them ventured into the very interesting category and possibly helped to give me some direction to go with my investigating where I want to get involved with Windows 8. Tomorrow is a throwback to the start of last week in the fact that I have an all day training class (just for one day this time instead of two though), so there’s another day down for the week. Thursday and Friday might be slightly harder to fill up my schedule with entertaining activities, but I’ll have the weekend to look forward to as far as motivation goes.
Before I left Dallas (as in, the night before — thanks for the last minute tech-fixing, headache-inducing assignments, Mom and Dad!!) I set up a webcam on both my dad’s and my mom’s laptops so that we could use Skype to talk with each other. Well, tonight was the first time I tried doing it with my stalkers parents, and it at least worked where they could see me. I’m not really sure why I was never able to see them (my mom claims the green light was on the webcam which would indicate that it was actually plugged in), but that’s just one tech mystery to look into the next time I’m home. Actually, I could probably remote desktop in and try to figure out if a specific button needs to be clicked that way, but I am after all just a mere mortal when it comes to tech issues and don’t feel like pulling tech acrobatics unless absolutely necessary.
Personal - Seattle
Lucasarts released a remake of Monkey Island on the iPhone, and now Civilization Revolutions (the console version of the series) has come out as well. I’m not sure exactly what this trend is in porting non-trivial non-mobile games to the mobile space, but it’s interesting to watch. The only bad thing is that the iPhone doesn’t really have the controls for a traditional gaming experience, so whatever does get ported probably is going to be going through a drastic control makeover.
No random meeting invites have shown up so far, but tomorrow at least I get to go sit somewhere besides my office for the majority of the day. A lot of the interns are doing their presentations tomorrow, so that gets to take up a good 4-5 hours throughout the morning and afternoon. Who knows, maybe one of their projects will spark my interest in what I want to do for Windows 8 and actually give me a direction in this time of great boredom.
Personal - Seattle
Steam’s weekend sale was 10 indie games for $30, and even though I already owned one of them (World of Goo), that seemed like too good of a deal to pass up even if I ended up not liking every single one of them. The beauty of Steam is also that of instant gratification; I can definitely see myself being willing to purchase games like that from now on if there’s not some little figurine or toy that I feel like I absolutely must have in the boxed CE version. Of course, in the past quite a few games have fallen into that category, so I might need to break my collecting habit for my digital purchases to really take off.
Tomorrow is the start of a whole week without meetings to go to with my mentor at Microsoft, so either my boredom level will be astronomical, or I’ll find other ways to entertain myself. Hopefully a bunch of random meeting invites will show up in my inbox so I can accept those and have something to do during the day. Even if they sound like the most boring thing in the world, it’d be another place besides my office to go sit for an hour.
Personal - Seattle
I effectively accomplished one thing today while in actuality doing three things. Three movies that I wanted to see, one currently in theaters and two out on DVD, I successfully watched in the past 11 hours. So, let’s get started with the reviews, shall we?
Aliens in the Attic was my first movie of the day and was also the one that I went to go see in a theater. I was going in expecting it to be a kids movie, and on that front it delivered. It was entertaining but nothing special, and not a movie I intend on picking up on DVD. For $8 though, it was a good way to spend a couple hours. My score: 7/10.
I then headed off to Blockbuster and rented two DVDs. Race to Witch Mountain was a movie that I wanted to see when it came out, but I just never got around to going. It was probably my favorite movie of the three today, and aside from not being all that believable at the start of the movie (not in a fiction way, but just in character behavior), it actually ended up delivering pretty well. I thought the movie was going to end with some open ends, but the clips played throughout the start of the credits took care of that. It most likely won’t be a purchase in the near future, but I could see myself getting it once it drops down to the $10 level or so. My score: 8/10.
My final movie of the night was Coraline, and it definitely wins the award for strangest. Once again it just happens to be a film adaptation of a book (which helps to explain so much), but it definitely had a dark element to it that was a little disconcerting. Of course, the director also did The Nightmare Before Christmas, so I guess strange just comes with his territory. Not a purchase, not a movie I ever think I’ll need to see again, but fun to watch while it lasted. My score: 6.5/10.
Personal - Seattle
Uhhhh…Microsoft? I’m just going to go ahead and make a suggestion here; feel free to do whatever you want with it. When you have a group of people that just finished writing your newest OS and you want to throw a party to celebrate, I can think of numerous ways it could be done. Somewhere on the Microsoft campus? Absolutely. Outside on one of the sports fields? Sure, totally fine. Have it set up as a carnival with inflatable slides, blow up obstacle courses, and a mechanical bull? Hmmm, not where I would have gone with the idea. Hey, at least you did have a band/concert thing going on for music, but perhaps you should look into the term “age appropriate”?
All that said, for people such as myself it was quite fun. I hung out with people from my team who I already knew (both interns and full time employees), and being as easily amused as we all were, the afternoon was very entertaining for us. If this was a typical Microsoft party, I can only imagine what people do down at the Google campus.
Personal - Seattle
My solution for day 1 of being more bored than usual at Microsoft was addressed by doing some of the mandatory online training that I hadn’t completed yet. In this case, it was things like anti-harassment and anti-corruption training. While I could have just sat at my desk without wearing speakers and clicked next occasionally to get through everything, I did actually watch them. I guess if I fall victim to corruption after today, Microsoft will have to reevaluate just how (in)effective those videos are.
Tomorrow is a “ship party” for Windows 7 (even though it went RTM two weeks ago and doesn’t officially get released until October), but apparently that’s just how teams at Microsoft do things. Basically, this solves my no work dilemma by entertaining me for most of the afternoon and preventing me from realizing how bored I would otherwise be. I guess I did choose a really unique time to join Microsoft, as I’ve been getting to celebrate the end of work that I had no involvement with at all, but I still get invited to all the parties.
Personal - Seattle
The marketing pictures don’t really do the appearance of my new printer justice; is it a very awesome looking black (both matte and shiny) with a white base that just screams, “Look at me! Look at me!” Even though it’s partially in direct competition with my desire to be as paper-free as possible, the fact that it has an ADF for the scanner will make scanning pieces of paper much nicer. It also has a built in printing duplexer, so I guess I’d only generate half as much paper as I would with any other printer (assuming I don’t always just print off single page things). However you want to look at it, I’m very impressed with my new printer purchase.
My mentor joked that I should go on vacation for the next week and a half because if I haven’t had a whole lot to do up until now, I’m going to have even less to do while he’s gone. No more random meetings for me to sit in on, no more tools tutorials, and no more “guidance” on what to do until he gets back a week from Monday. So, where does that leave me? Well, I do have one training class next week on Wednesday, but aside from that, I guess it’s back to reading whatever I can find on the internal websites.
Personal - Seattle
So at the end of our class today, we had a “quiz” over what we’d learned. This quiz just so happened to take the form of a game of Jeopardy with our tables each being a team/player. By the end of the game, my team had more than triple the amount of points as anyone else (something along the lines of 970 to 240), so the end of the game was very anticlimactic as to who the winner was. I was undisputably responsible for the vast majority of our points, so it was nice to be able to (silently) take credit for the victory. Next up, maybe the real version with Alex Trebek?
So my printer actually didn’t arrive today, but looking at the tracking information, it was actually never supposed to. Fortunately for me, I’ve had no pressing need to print or scan anything this afternoon, so the delay is essentially a non-issue for me. Although, I guess I really can’t call it a delay if it was never supposed to arrive today to begin with. Perhaps I’ll just need to stick with “lack of an early delivery’ to stay totally correct.
Personal - Seattle
I’ll just flat out say it: I don’t see this training class being all that useful for me in my broader Microsoft career. I’m sure that subconsciously I’m absorbing knowledge that I’ll make use of in the future without realizing it, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m just sitting in a different room in front of a different computer with a real person talking to me instead of a video. Given the likely alternatives, perhaps this is the best use of my time. I’m pretty sure nothing that I’d be doing this week would qualify as a “fun” use of my time though.
I may be seeing some extremely fast delivery times on Amazon purchases living here because the DVDs I ordered on Saturday evening were waiting for me when I got to my apartment today. Even with Prime shipping, that’s still a very impressive speed. My printer should be arriving tomorrow, so then I’ll actually be able to print out what I need (but nothing more) rather than having to save it to a file and either send it to someone else or print it off at Microsoft.
Personal - Seattle
For my first time in almost a full month, I once again get to enjoy the benefits of a triple monitor setup. I’m sure it won’t take me too long to get used to maximizing my use of all this desktop real estate and not needing to worry about constantly switching which window is on top of the others. I’ve effectively killed any addiction I had to WoW after not playing it for who knows how long (although I have logged in for mail reasons), so I now get to work on fitting it into my schedule again in whatever capacity that may be.
Tomorrow and Tuesday I have an “Engineering @ Microsoft” training class to take, so I think I know what my days will be like then. The good news I guess is that we’re in a building right next to the Commons, so I may get my first taste of lunch there. This is the same building that NEO was held in, so fortunately I can at least get that far for finding my way tomorrow morning. Microsoft also does use a relatively sane system for numbering rooms (including floors that start at 1 and not 2 like UTD), so I might even have a shot at finding my room without getting lost on the way.
Oh, and for the record, 4240 pixels is a lot nicer to work with.
Personal - Seattle