I wake up at 10:00, the Cowboys game is on. After they eventually manage to win, then the Seahawks game is in progress. After that, baseball playoffs have been in “full swing” along with a third football game. Even though my TV has been on four different channels today, I don’t think at any point it’s been tuned into a non-sporting event of some kind.
Tomorrow is at least a mildly busy day with two meetings, but unfortunately they’re both in between 11 and 1. I don’t really have a chance to get bored at the start of the day, but I will have a couple hours after the later one where I’ll need to keep busy. Of course, if I wasn’t an expert at that by now, then my past (almost) three months at Microsoft would have been even more boring.
Personal - Seattle
One of the programs that is a part of Live Essentials is Windows Live Writer which acts as a desktop blogging client. Microsoft definitely got the configuration part down as all I needed to do was type in the URL and my username/password, and everything else got automatically configured for me. I figured that since I had it on my computer now, I might as well try making a post (but one well before the deadline so I could do damage control if necessary).
My upgrades to 7 and Snow leopard went perfectly, and I’m trying out Trillian again as my IM client on my desktop. Astra has come out since my last attempted use, and I actually find it to be a much nicer experience. We’ll see if I stick with it for the long haul, but there are a couple features I really like over the official AIM client. Plus, it also allows me to somewhat support Microsoft and use my Live Messenger account even though (as of now) I talk to no one on it.
Personal - Seattle
I say “potentially” because it’s not going to happen. Some nights there’s just too much stuff on live TV that I want to watch, and on those nights, Netflix will not come anywhere close to being touched. On nights like tonight, however, being able to do a Watch Instantly movie is quite convenient and is better than having to decide what movie to play off of my server. The selection in Watch Instantly tends to be a much older set of movies, so this somewhat equates to me catching up on stuff that I’ve heard about or maybe just seen tiny parts of, but I’ve never seen the whole thing and I’m not about to go rent it from Blockbuster. For example, one movie that falls into this category is The Princess Diaries.
Yeah, yeah, I’ve never actually seen that movie all the way through before. I think I might have watched the first 20 minutes or so a couple times when it would be on ABC Family or Disney or some channel like that, but tonight was actually my first time to sit through the whole thing. Considering I’m one of the few people my age or older who still hadn’t seen it, it’s probably not that effective to give my little mini-review on what I thought of it, but it was a good movie. My score: 7/10.
Personal - Seattle
My first Netflix movie arrived today, and with their distribution center in Tacoma (Seattle : Tacoma :: Dallas : Fort Worth), the turnaround time on getting new movies should be pretty quick. I also have my 360 set up for streaming, so on nights that I want to watch a movie but don’t have a Netflix one, I can always stream something from the Watch Instantly selection. So, this means that my movie reviewing will probably pick up the pace as I now have an easy way to watch all the movies that seemed interesting when I saw previews for them in the theater, but I never got around to going to see them.
My first disc from Netflix was Body of Lies, a spy movie with Leonardo DiCaprio and Russel Crowe that came out last year. It wasn’t as exciting as I thought it was going to be, and quite a bit of the movie just dragged along with nothing that interesting to latch onto. If I had seen this when it first came out it definitely wouldn’t have been a DVD purchase, but it was an alright first Netflix movie. Still, not one I feel needs to be added to my collection. My score: 5.5/10.
Personal - Seattle
Barring any unforeseen catastrophes this weekend (or, my just procrastinating stuff for too long), both of my computers will be undergoing procedures this weekend. My desktop will see an upgrade to Windows 7, and my laptop will get a bump to Snow Leopard (but likely with a full reinstallation also). I’ll probably do my desktop first so that it can be redownloading all of its software while I spend time with my laptop. I’ll also be reconfiguring around all the drives in my desktop to hopefully just make life less difficult for installing programs and managing everything (namely, taking out my 74 GB Raptor drive and using one of my larger drives as my OS/system one).
With all this tech work scheduled to happen, something is likely to go wrong. If I was Andrew, something would definitely go wrong, but hopefully I can manage to escape unscathed. I’m going to make sure that my desktop is at least up and running with minimal functionality before starting on my laptop so that I’m not (potentially) left with two unusable computers. Sure, I have my work laptop as a last resort backup, but if I have to go that far in order to reach a recovery computer, my tech prowess isn’t nearly what it should be.
Personal - Seattle
With the launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 today (and the “Windows phone” brand which drives me insane with it’s annoying capitalization), Microsoft had an event/party on campus promoting that Windows phones were good for both work and play. I need to decide if I want to spend the money and get a new phone now since it shouldn’t have any impact on my being able to get a WM7 phone when it launches next year based on rumored launch dates. I’m just afraid that while it might be cool initially, it won’t stack up to my iPhone in certain ways that I’ve gotten used to using it and I’ll be torn between which one to use.
I started my Netflix trial today, so while I’ll maybe be able to get all of two or three movies by the time it expires, I can at least get a feel for shipping times and if I like the service. I can also set up Watch Instantly on my 360 which has a pathetically small selection outside of the TV realm (and to some extent, even within it), but it will be something cool to try out. Even if I only get two movies from it a month it’s still cheaper than Blockbuster, and with a queue I have that’s already up to 30 discs, it seems like I should be set for quite a while.
Personal - Seattle
I had my training class today; it was decently fun but nothing super special to write about (aside from the fact it was long). So yeah, that’s about all that’s happened since my last post. Thrilling, intriguing, and suspenseful, I know. When you’re gone for a week and break out of your normal posting content for so long, it’s quite difficult to come up with enough stuff to say when the day itself isn’t full enough of material.
I downloaded the demos for Uncharted and Uncharted 2 on my PS3 due to the high review scores the latter has been getting, and while the demo of the first was decent, I wasn’t exactly blown away by it. It definitely wouldn’t be worth the $60 launch price (back when it came out almost two years ago), but Amazon has it for $28 now, so if I end up liking the demo of the second, I might throw it in with my next order just for story purposes. Of course, I’ll then either have to pay $60 for the second or wait for it to drop in price, but I’m pretty sure I could find other ways of entertaining myself if I decided to hold off for a while.
Personal - Seattle
I’m too lazy to work up the exact day count, but my estimation skills are good enough to figure out that I’ll have set a new record for the longest amount of time away from Dallas between now and when I go back for Christmas. If I was going home at Thanksgiving then it wouldn’t be longer than between when I left to come up here and going home a couple of weekends ago, but this should be approximately a week longer than that. It seems like this would be much longer, but I guess the fact that I mini-moved halfway makes it feel shorter and more broken up.
Tomorrow, I have a training class from 9-5, and I got an email saying that unlike my others, this one would actually go all the way until 5:00. Hopefully this means it’s entertaining, and I’m not ready to tear my hair out by lunch time. Considering that tomorrow isn’t a real “work day” for me then, I’ll have basically been on a week long vacation by the time Tuesday morning rolls around. Of course, this was a vacation of primarily Microsoft-related stuff that was very possibly more productive than what I would have been doing otherwise, but maybe my normal job will have gotten interesting by now. I can only hope…
Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:50 PM: Ok, so barring any more surprise trips home, this should be my last Dallas post until sometime close to my birthday in December. Thanksgiving will of course have some Vegas posts to throw in the mix, but I expect the remainder of my time to be spent in the great unbranded wilderness of Seattle. That also means my midnight posts have to be made by midnight, but there isn’t much I can do about that.
Jess’s schedule meant that I ended up not seeing him today, but I did hang out with Crayton for a couple of hours and set him up with something that made his roommates quite jealous. Basically, Crayton uses a small-ish (30″?) TV as his monitor, and he had both his cable and his computer running into it on different inputs. Well, a couple of trips to Best Buy (due to needing to exchange something) later, now his TV runs through his computer so that he can not only record shows and use his desktop like a DVR, he can also be watching TV and working on other stuff at the same time due to the greatness of Media Center. You know, sometimes the awesomeness of Microsoft products impresses even me. :)
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 1:20 AM (10/3): HP football game that goes longer than normal? Long drive back because it’s an away game? No problem!! Of course, if I had to worry about posting on Dallas time, then I would have ended up making a post from my phone. However, just being able to worry about one thing at a time and making a post when I get home and am relaxed, with a true keyboard in front of me, is a wonderful thing.
My plans for tomorrow have changed slightly, but everything is still fundamentally the same. I’ll be spending less time in Waco than originally anticipated since Jess will actually be up here in Dallas, so I’ll go down, hang out with Crayton for a few hours, then stop by Jess’s house on my way back. One bonus from this revised schedule is that I get to sleep in a little bit later, so this whole thing about getting home late and making a post after midnight here isn’t going to end up being an issue in more than one way.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle