As it turns out, I never needed to talk about today before today. Of course, I also deliberately avoided it since it would have been a very easy topic to bring up, but I was successful in never needing it. That said, the reason this is an early post is because a component of today involves tonight. Not wanting to split up my discussion, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for the full story.
So, what does that leave us with for today? Well, not much actually. My plans for the weekend still don’t involve any movies, and there’s nothing else of interest to really note. Just so that this isn’t a total throwaway post though, I decided that you deserve an XKCD comic, this one from a few weeks ago:
Just think, my job is to help write the lights that other people use to write the lights that other people use (some to make even more lights that yet other people use).
Comics, Personal - Seattle
Because I have nothing better to think about during the day, I began thinking about how the calendar and how tomorrow marks the end of the first 1/3 of the year. At the end of March, though, 1/4 of the year is over. Then in February, 1/6 of the year is over. Of course, at the end of January, 1/12 of the year is over. But what about after tomorrow? Well, there’s really only one left: June at 1/2. It just seems odd that out of the five “nice” fractions, four of them fall in the first four months of the year. Maybe it isn’t odd at all to other people; it’s possible (even probable) that I just have too much time on my hands.
In the realm of “disappointing gadgets that got cancelled today”, both Courier and the HP Slate are apparently no more. You could argue the former was never actually a product since it wasn’t announced, but then again Pink also wasn’t anything official for quite a long time. The latter I felt like could give the Adam a run for my money, but now, it seems like my mind has been made up for me. Ultimately it’s probably for the better this way, but I already had some very cool use cases in my head with the Play To functionality in Windows 7. Oh well, maybe with the next slate device…
Personal - Seattle
Today we had a “bug bash” which basically meant that everyone was supposed to find all of the bugs that they could in our software and report them. Since my team develops software for other Windows developers to use, the fact that I don’t develop means that I can demo our software pretty well, but I can’t do a ton of real world usage with it. I am quite good at pointing out UI inconsistencies and looking through documentation, so I ended up filing 13 bugs just in those areas which was the most out of anyone by about 5 or 6. There, I’ve played my role as a tester for this milestone, and I can get back to focusing on my PM duties.
I finally reached 58 in WoW on my Horde character, so I’m now into Outland. Fortunately for now the leveling will continue to be at a relatively quick pace until I hit 70. At that point, I’ll be back to the insanely slow progression while I’m on my quest to hit 80. Part of me wishes that the leveling had been a tiny bit slower up until this point just because there’s still a lot of content I never got around to seeing, but I’m probably not willing to make yet another character just to see it. Well, I might have to take that back in part; I could see myself doing another character up to 30 or so just to see the other starting areas, but after that, everything just sort of merges into one bigger path.
Personal - Seattle
Since my TV time yesterday was a little constrained, I held off on watching my Netflix movie until tonight. Of course, it also helped that even if I did sent it back, I wouldn’t be getting another sent to me immediately anyway. Bandslam was compared to School of Rock when it came out, but I just didn’t see that strong of a connection. I totally think that School of Rock is the better movie, and while Bandslam wasn’t bad, it’s just not one of those that I feel I’ll ever want to watch again. It seems like I made the right decision to not go see it when it came out and instead wait for renting the DVD. My score: 7.5/10.
Even though my review score spreadsheet is not yet totally complete from being backfilled, I’m doing my best to at least keep it up to date with my newest reviews. I guess that one project I could look to tackle in the future would be to take all of my DVDs that I’ve never rated and go through them so that everything has a score. That would probably be best suited around trips since plane time would seem to be optimal for watching them without having to give up doing other stuff that I perhaps would want to be doing more. I mean, sure, I’m all for rewatching the LotR movies, but that isn’t exactly a casual movie that you just throw on in the spur of the moment. Especially not the last one. I don’t care what you say, Alexander, the last one ends like 5 times.
Personal - Seattle
I was always planning to receive a DVD from Netflix today, so when one was in my mailbox, I wasn’t that surprised. I didn’t open it immediately, but just left it sitting on my desk while I did those super important things like check my email. Well, Netflix had sent me an email, and upon skimming it, I saw that my DVD was going to be delayed in shipping to me. Uhhh, no? Check the date, it’s today. Look at the name, it’s the DVD I was expecting. Upon closer examination, it said that because they were unable to ship the big bolded title to me, they went ahead and sent me the next one in my list at the same time. How kind of you, Netflix! In the long run there basically won’t be any benefit or delay to this since the other one is supposed to arrive on the day I’d receive my next one anyway, but it’s the thought that counts.
Tomorrow is the pre-event (their name, not mine) for something taking place on Friday, and I feel like keeping you in the dark about it until then. No, it’s nothing that qualifies as super exciting on the grand scale of things, but it’s at least something out of the ordinary. You can expect the requisite hints and teasing about it all week long since it will give me something to post about when there’s nothing else, and I always like having a form of post insurance around.
Personal - Seattle
Well, well, iPhone. Even though I might keep using you for a little longer than I was initially planning, that doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily be running your normal OS. Sure, I was very likely to jailbreak you anyway after 4.0 came out due to Apple’s belief that their older phones don’t deserve features like multitasking. Well, some people have taken it upon themselves to port Android to run on the iPhone, and even better, it can dual boot along side the normal iPhone OS. New phone OS, no hardware upgrade, and I still get WP7 (hopefully on a Lightning) by the end of the year? Hey, I’m not going to complain.
I’m continuing to think if there’s anything significant I want to change up on anniversary day (assuming I remember, that is). Given my track record with projects, any modifications would probably need to be fairly small if they’re to get done on time. Of course, nothing says that the changes have to take place on that exact date, but it’s just a little anticlimactic to announce it and then make the change days/weeks/months later. The last thing I need is another “vlog” situation on my hands.
Personal - Seattle
I seriously debated going to see a movie today, but the drive just wasn’t there for a movie that I wasn’t sure I’d like. Considering Iron Man 2 definitely has my interest, I’m willing to wait two more weekends. Until then, I have Netflix and my large library of movies I’ve already seen but should be willing to watch again (and again) or else it was pointless to buy them.
I’ve been trying to get into Naruto, but I just haven’t gotten hooked by it yet. Say what you will about waiting it with the Japanese voices and English subtitles, but I didn’t go for that in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and it didn’t go over well on Hulu this time either. What would take place in one episode of an American cartoon seems to last for two or even three episodes in a Japanese one. Sure, that may be indicative of a deeper story, but it also seems like less gets done in the same amount of time.
Personal - Seattle
It didn’t just take me one day to realize this, but a full 48 hours went by before I noticed that I’d surpassed the the mark of three consecutive years of posting. The first year, it was a huge achievement. The second year, it was still impressive, but maybe not as big as it had been. For the hat trick? Obviously I just don’t care anymore. Now, if May 15th comes around and I don’t make an anniversary post, then we might have a situation on our hands.
So, you want to hear my weekend plans? There will probably be some Fringe watching, there’s bound to be some WoW playing, and there might even be some Clash of the Titans movie going. What there won’t be is any more special date forgetting because nothing is happening this weekend. Well, let me qualify that: nothing I remember is happening this weekend.
Personal - Seattle
I took care of the whole post-How to Train Your Dragon issue by watching Kung Fu Panda tonight from Netflix (surprisingly enough, Dreamworks previous animated movie that came out last year). I didn’t see it when it came out because honestly, I expected it to not be that good. As it turns out, I was pleasantly surprised, but at the same time I didn’t regret not having seen it yet. I think it was a good “transition movie” because a) I enjoyed it, so that ruled out my disliking a movie and blaming it on Dragon, and b) it wasn’t super fantastic, so the slate is clean for whatever I see next. My score: 7.5/10.
Day one of my class went well; it’s similar to my UTD class in a way, but much more meeting-centric than presentation-centric (at least in the portion we did today. Writing is the focus for tomorrow, so we’ll just have to wait and see how that turns out. Regardless of whether tomorrow is interesting or not, it’s bound to be a good day. Chances are that we’ll get out slightly early (like we did today), and that just means an earlier start to my weekend!
Personal - Seattle
Yesterday was the date that I became eligible for an upgrade to a new phone. A few months ago, I was totally on board with getting either an Android or WebOS phone. Considering that the Backflip is the only of the former available subsidized (the Nexus One is only unlocked via Google) and Palm hasn’t gotten around to releasing the Pre on AT&T, no such upgrade happened. As it turns out, this was quite fortunate after seeing what Windows Phone 7 devices will be coming out this fall. Of all the companies you’d expect to make my most desirable phone, I don’t think Dell would be at the top of that list, but that’s exactly what they appear to have done.
So now that my “work” week is done, it’s back to school (in a metaphorical sense anyway). I expect the training class to be a lot like my Professional and Technical Communication class at UTD, and fortunately I ended up liking that one a whole lot more than I thought I would going into it. Give me 24 hours and we’ll see if the same holds true for this class.
Personal - Seattle