I use colors in my Outlook/Exchange calendar to help me denote what type of work everything on my calendar falls into, and this week there’s a very heavy correlation between time and color. The earlier in the day something is, the greater chance of it being purple; the later in the day, the greater chance of orange. What is nice to see is very little white because those are the times where I have nothing going on.
I almost gave up on Assassin’s Creed due to a mission that was just being overly difficult, but then I discovered how the game intended for you to play it. Once that happened, the game got much easier (and more fun, strange how those are connected so often). I know I’m near the end for two reasons: first, the main NPC told me so; second, I cheated and read the plot summary online last night, thinking that I wasn’t going to bother finishing the game. Either way, shouldn’t be too much longer before I can call that game completed.
Personal - Seattle
Since I’ve been using Windows Live Writer to makes posts for so long, I rarely ever go into my blog’s dashboard anymore. In fact, when I logged in a couple days ago, I had about 30 spam comments that Akismet has caught which I needed to empty out. Well, since I don’t go to the website that much, I had apparently forgotten to update my age on the About page, and for the past month, I’ve still been 22. I understand that as people get older they like to fudge their age a little bit in order to make them seem younger; if I’m already doing it inadvertently, I wonder how much I’ll adjust it by when I do so knowingly?
Firefox 3.6 has a setting in it to make each tab have a thumbnail (just like IE does), but it’s disabled (and not easily user accessible) by default. I believe it was turned off for stability purposes, but we’ll see if it crashes on me any now that I’ve turned it on. While I gain the ability to jump to a specific tab, it will also help me cut down on the number of tabs I have open at the time (can easily get upwards of 20, and if a program tries to generate too many thumbnails, Windows will just display them in a list instead). Hi, my name is Jeff, and I’m a tab addict…
Personal - Seattle
For what felt like a short week, it’s a very good thing that today was Friday and that the next two days are the weekend. Two days of rest will be quite nice to have, and then hopefully next week will go just as quickly as this one did. My calendar for next week already has a decent amount of stuff on it each day, so that at least takes care of the “not a whole lot of downtime” part of the equation to making it feel like a day goes by quickly.
I’m not really sure what my plans are going to be for this weekend, but I don’t think a movie is anywhere on the radar. There are some out that I want to see (and more coming out shortly), but I guess I just feel my time can be put to more productive use in other ways. Well, definitely as far as the productivity:price ratio goes because anything I do here is technically infinitely better.
Personal - Seattle
My body still doesn’t feel like tomorrow should be Friday, and on that same note, it doesn’t feel like it’s almost midnight tonight either. It should be like 10:30 now at the latest, but alas, it is almost time to go to sleep so that I can wake up early enough in the morning. I guess with nothing on TV tonight to watch as a time guide, my body just has no external clock to sync to. I’m not sure exactly what that says, but I’m guessing it probably isn’t good.
I made some progress in Assassin’s Creed (still the first one) today, and hopefully this weekend I’ll finish it up and get to move onto something else on my shelf/table. I’m thinking that the choice might be the first Modern Warfare just to play through the single player campaign before I start MW2 and get used to all of its control/feature changes. Similarly, that’s why I’m still playing through the first Assassin’s Creed when the second is supposed to be much better.
Personal - Seattle
What would have otherwise been a boring day at work in my office was actually a quite busy (but still boring) day in my office. You see, Microsoft has this technology called BitLocker that is supposed to keep evil haxzorz from breaking into your computer and stealing all your infos. As it turns out, trying to do an OS upgrade on said laptop apparently makes you a hacker. I spent seven hours trying to make my laptop work again, and while I was ultimately successful (resorting to the tried and true reformat approach), I disabled the part of my computer that allows BitLocker to work, not realizing that’s basically what everyone else does so that they don’t have to put up with it.
Apple announced their tablet today, the iPad, but (thankfully?) I’m not impressed at all. I’m not the only one, and Twitter has even taken to calling it the “iTampon”. It is essentially just a 10” iPhone/iTouch that (optionally) has 3G access (for $15/30/month) but no voice calling, no camera, no multitasking, and basically nothing else that would make me want one over a netbook/slate. In fact, halfway through the event, I was thinking to myself that compared to an iPad, Chrome OS was looking quite decent, and I’d happily take a device with that instead. I guess it really is all about perspective.
Personal - Seattle
I think the fact that I spent maybe less than two hours total in my office yesterday has thrown my mental calendar off, because it just doesn’t seem to me like tomorrow should already be Wednesday. I mean, if tomorrow is Wednesday, then there are only two more days after that until the next weekend. While you won’t find me complaining at all about another weekend coming too soon, it just feels like…this week isn’t long enough? Hey, maybe I need to have more of these super full days more often if this is the result.
Tomorrow is not one of those days. I have gained a couple things to do tomorrow, but for the most part, it will be a “sit in my office” type day. Granted, it will be a “sit in my office, send and answer emails, write specs, and do other sorts of work” day, but it’s the sitting in the office that just gets old after a while.
Personal - Seattle
This morning I got to see a live demo of Project Natal, and all I have to say is this: for all of you who have been waiting Minority Report type interactions with your computer (which, if you didn’t know, Microsoft helped design for the movie), you have less than a year to wait. The Wii is cool and everything, and I am admittedly a huge Nintendo fanboy because of Mario and Zelda, but no Wiimote and no Sony “ball on a stick” motion controller is going to come close to what Natal offers. I say this not only as a Microsoft employee, but as a gamer who is absolutely, 100% going to get Natal.
So, now that all 360 fans are sufficiently jealous of what I got to see today, the rest of my day was fairly busy but nothing all that exciting happened. Tomorrow my day is slightly less busy than today (and there’s also no Natal demo to go see), but my day doesn’t really get boring until the middle of the afternoon. Soon I’m going to have some new specs to start writing up, so that may or may not get started tomorrow.
Personal - Seattle
Alexander has been moving the Edgeworks site from its old host over to a new one (the host Andrew and I use), so I’ve spent some time this afternoon helping him go through all the steps to get everything migrated over. Of course, not everything can go smoothly, so quite a few questions have been directed at various support people figuring out exactly what needs to be done in order to accomplish a task. Currently I’ve given him some instructions that will hopefully finish up the process, but if not, we plan on tackling it again tomorrow night.
Tomorrow is a good and busy day for me, not starting too early and not going too late either. Between when I start and the end of the day I really only have like an hour break, so the good news is that I should definitely be able to stay occupied. Fortunately there is also very little running between buildings going on, so I’ll actually be able to get to stuff on time and not need to worry about leaving early in order to do so. A week of days like this might be a little much, but I could definitely go for 2-3 of these each week.
Personal - Seattle
Let me tell you a story about a technology loving son who, in an attempt to make his parents’ lives easier, set up an HTPC that was intended to stream downloaded shows and copied movies from a server to a TV. Let me also tell you about two parents who, when something goes wrong with said HTPC, call up their son now living in Seattle and expect him to be able to talk them through what needs to be done. This son, realizing that such a setup might have worked when he still lived in the same city as his parents but is now on the other side of the “too complicated” border, decides that a simpler solution is required and begins his search for a device that is pretty much dedicated to the functions he needs it to do instead of being a full computer. This change will cost his parents money, but they’re willing to pay it because they agree that something less complicated would be nice. This story, fellow stalkers, was the story of my life today. I have yet to find the perfect solution, but that’s won’t stop me from searching.
Basically, whatever the replacement is needs to be able to do two things: 1) stream the file formats from our server that all the media is in (AVI/Xvid and MP4/H.264), and 2) be able to actually play back discs for when my parents go rent a movie or whatever (I think digital distribution might just be a little much to introduce them to). Perhaps the best solution is to actually go back to a two device setup: a DVD player and something along the lines of my WDTV Live (in this space, I’m very intrigued the Boxee Box that should be coming out sometime soon). There are also options like the Popcorn Hour that could fill either the combination or just the streaming role. Finally, an Xbox 360 or PS3 would also serve both roles just fine (I should know, I use them both for that purpose), and with the latter they would even get Blu-ray compatibility. Honestly, the PS3 may end up being the best option for them all around, but I’m keeping my options (and eyes) open for now.
Personal - Seattle
For whatever reason, I was under the impression that the football games this weekend were Saturday and Sunday night, but as it turns out, I was mistaken. According to the NFL’s website, the games are both on Sunday (fortunately not a 10:00 start for me on the first one). Granted, the error wouldn’t have been catastrophic since I would have figured out Saturday night that they were both Sunday, but that gives me a good 3 hours tomorrow to do something else besides watch football. Sure, I would really have that freedom even if there was a game tomorrow, but now we’ve gone from something semi-interestable to pretty much nothing.
Since we obviously know my weekend plans now (newly acquired free time tomorrow, football on Sunday), I guess the only thing left for me to talk about is…work? Not really, nothing all that exciting happened today. Netflix? I’ve just been watching Dexter; the disc I have from them (Battlestar Galactica) is still sitting next to my TV (so no new review yet). Video games? I played Borderlands today for like an hour, does that count? See, sometimes coming up with stuff to talk about every single day here can be a little hard to do.
Personal - Seattle