What do you know, those two hours I magically gained back yesterday were actually used for something besides just sitting at my desk trying to stay entertained. In fact, today would probably be rated as fairly productive overall. With two days left in the week, it shall be a battle royale to determine which day will emerge the winner for most productive. See, it’s ways like this how I entertain myself during the non-productive times.
On the Windows Facebook page today, they had an article linked advertising some Media Center plugin called Media Browser. Apparently it’s this cool thing that will download posters, descriptions, etc. for all the movies and shows you have on your computer. I’m not really sure if I want anything like that though, I really kinda like just the standard directory and cryptic filename structure.
Personal - Seattle
So that class that I was supposed to have tomorrow afternoon? Yeah, I got an email this afternoon saying, “Hey, we cancelled it, so don’t show up, ok?” Considering the number of people it went out to I’m pretty sure it wasn’t from lack of signups, but fine, I will happily not go to your class if you don’t want me to. Considering that the rest of my week is decently busy, perhaps I’ll enjoy the two free hours I just gained.
If the Start Menu search was my favorite feature of Vista, the automatically rotating backgrounds definitely have to fight with Aero Snap for that title in 7. While I am aware that Microsoft in no way “invented” this concept for 7, it is nice to just have a new background appear every 30 minutes. Since they’re all from a set you always know what the theme is going to be, but you’re never really sure exactly which one you’re going to get whenever you turn on your computer in the morning or walk back to it after you’ve been away. It’s like a nice little surprise that’s always waiting for you.
Personal - Seattle
Through a series of events that I don’t really remember, over the weekend I was looking at the little CD wallets I made up for all my computers, and in the one for my Macbook, I noticed that the box for Snow Leopard was in it but not the CD. I scoured my two desks, trying to find where I had set it down (expecting it to be near some other piles of CDs), but I couldn’t locate it anywhere. For about 48 hours I was extremely confused as to where it could possibly be until I realized that, oh wait, unlike my Windows discs it was more of a pain to make a duplicate of the Snow Leopard one, so I had actually put it in one of my travel wallets in case disaster were to strike while I was on vacation.
One of my projects this week will be to do a software update on my HP WHS machine with the newest version of their software. Rather than this one being a download, it was CDs that I actually had to order through the mail. The underlying version of WHS is still the same though, so I’m not really sure why it’s disc based aside from making me pay a small fee in order to be able to get it.
Personal - Seattle
While I’m still on board with my Media Browser idea for my parents (for the time being), my love for it has fallen down a notch or two. I’m thinking that with the insane amount of storage I have in my WHS (plus the ability to throw even another drive into it), I might be better off re-re-ripping all of my DVDs and keeping them in their native format rather than transcoding them. While this takes up significantly more space, it also keeps all the menus, special features, and (in some very important situations) subtitles intact. The downside is that the Xbox really just doesn’t understand what it’s being fed and and no idea how to play it. It obviously can play them since it would be able to handle the disc itself just fine, but perhaps my next mini-project will be to see if there’s a nice way to get that to work.
Another downside to this project would be that if I didn’t keep the video file versions around, it would be near impossible to put them onto my portable devices (Zune, a potential slate in the not too distant future). That means I can either convert them on demand whenever I want one (requiring a few hours per movie of thinking ahead), or I can keep both around at the expense of more storage space. You’d think people would have come up with a solution to this by now, but apparently not.
Personal - Seattle
If my Facebook friends are any indication, How to Train Your Dragon is just a flat out awesome movie. Granted, it was on my list to go see anyway, but I’m slightly more excited about it now. I’ve also heard from numerous sources that it’s a better movie (both plot and animation-wise) than Avatar.
I decided that I would go ahead and start watching Fringe as my next TV series to get back on the JJ Abrams train before eventually beginning Lost this summer. I think I’ll still be safe with the second season of Fringe still airing since I don’t plan on watching the entire first season in a matter of days like I did with Chuck (although to be fair, it was more like a half season). Even with Alias, I didn’t race through the series, so I think my decision is fine.
Personal - Seattle
Fine, fine. While today might have “technically” been called the Windows Team Meeting 2010, it was in reality so very, very much more than that (but we knew that going into it). This event too falls under the “if I told you any specifics about it, I’d have to kill you” category, but there is one thing I will say: while the world may be all excited about Windows 7, I’ve seen the future, and it looks so insanely awesome that I’m definitely going to enjoy my job at Microsoft for the forseeable future.
With this week now over, the next big thing I have to look forward to is…well, that’s a great question. I’m thinking it will probably be at the end of May when I go back to Dallas for the week of Memorial Day (and get to see Wicked!) since I have no other trips planned between now and then, and work should go back to being pretty standard for a while. I still have to decide what I want to do with all my free money from Alaska Airlines, but that trip will probably be in the summer timeframe.
Personal - Seattle
With the amount of time I spend online and social networking that I do (although the Twitter thing has yet to take off with me), I’m a very offline oriented person when it comes to my email, contacts, and calendaring solutions. I wasn’t a fan of Google’s offerings even before working at Microsoft, my email is with Yahoo but I still just pull everything into Outlook, and while I probably should make better use of Windows Live, I’m just not that impressed with its web interface either. Beyond that, I also have three Live IDs, so the question would arise with which one to use.
My “main” one is just my Yahoo email that I’ve set up a Live ID on, but that means that my email doesn’t live in Windows Live like everything else would. Seems slightly illogical to me. I then have my Hotmail address which I’ve had for quite a while, but it has historically just been my junk email address, so I’m not really sure if I want to start using it as a primary for anything. Finally, and what would presumably be my best solution, is to use my @live.com ID which has the benefits of both having the email functionality as well as being used for basically nothing up to this point in time. Really the decision will only be important once I get a phone with WP7S on it, so I have a while to decide what I want to do.
Personal - Seattle
Remember about Friday? Well, the first piece relating to that happened this afternoon. The surprise was that I wasn’t expecting this exact piece to come until after Friday. I’m fully aware of my vagueness here, but doesn’t that just make it all the more exciting for you? It should because that’s totally what I’m going for here.
Tomorrow afternoon I have a training class just like all the ones I had in the couple of months right after I started. Fortunately, this one is different in that it only lasts for two hours instead of the all day long ones I dealt with previously. I know that I have one this week, one next week, and potentially more in the future. Just in case you were wondering, these aren’t really related to Friday at all unless you want to use the connection of my job. In that case, I guess everything would be related to Friday.
Personal - Seattle
As part of my entertainment throughout today, I looked around the internal career site just to see what potential job offerings would be like once I’m ready to switch out of Windows. In about the first 5-10 seconds of searching, I saw not one, not two, but three jobs in Xbox/Games for Windows that I would love to have. So, the good news is that they’re definitely out there now. Will they be when I want to (and can) switch? I can only hope.
Even though I didn’t play WoW today, I’m aware that the newest patch came out for it. Since I play with zero addons currently, it makes patch days much more bearable. Often times you have to deal with forcing out of date packages to load, random errors popping up because APIs have changed, degraded/broken functionality until the author comes along to fix it, etc. Since Blizzard tends to stay on top of all these changes for their default UI, I’d have none of these problems. There are a few that I really would like to use, but not doing so forces me to play slightly differently, and in doing so I tend to view playing much more as fun instead of work (but fun work).
Personal - Seattle
It’s just a short term assignment, but I now have a third role while being in the same position at Microsoft. This one is purely for the purpose of “load balancing” and should theoretically end at the end of the current milestone, but we’ll see what ends up happening. After all, Microsoft has shown that it can never be too predictable with schedules.
Tomorrow is effectively an entirely empty day for me with the exception of a single 30 minute meeting in the morning. This will result in me needing to exercise my highly trained and refined entertainment skills or run the risk of becoming quite bored. I fear that I’m only so good at it because I was able to save up so many forms of entertainment for so long when I actually had work to do, but now that I’m having multiple days each week where I have to entertain myself, it’s going to become harder and harder to stay occupied.
Personal - Seattle