Not only did today go relatively fast due to the fact that I was only in my office for all of about 10 minutes this morning, but people liked what we had to show so much, they gave us an award! Ok, perhaps a little background is needed here. This week was the Engineering Forum at Microsoft, and one of the things each day was a pavilion with a bunch of booths set up for various groups around the company to showcase their work. All of the tools that my team creates had a booth today, and I was the PM who got designated to be in charge of it. Part of the day involved a bunch of judges walking around, seeing what everyone had to present, and then giving out awards at the end of the day. Much to our surprise (and trust me, we were surprised), we won one of the awards for Business Value.
My only not-easy thing tomorrow is a presentation (but on a much, much smaller and shorter scale than today), and then I can mentally check out for the weekend. I’m still not really sure what my plans are going to be, but I guess I have another day or two to decide. Even if I don’t, it’s not like my default of TV and video games is really such a horrible way to spend 48 hours.
Personal - Seattle
Tomorrow I have to be at work around 8:30 (yeah, I’m not looking forward to that), so it’s great that I’ve been going to bed over an hour earlier than normal this week since that means waking up earlier than normal won’t be as bad. I guess the upside to this is that tomorrow is basically my Friday in the sense that I have a ton of work to do tomorrow, but then actually on Friday, the entire day is pretty easy. This week wouldn’t be my top choice for one to have right after coming back from vacation, but looking ahead on my calendar, I don’t anticipate another week like this one for a while.
One thing I’ve yet to reinstall on my computer is Office because Office 2010 comes out next week. Even though the install is nowhere nearly as painful as say…Visual Studio, I can live with webmail for a week, and I’ve discovered that I really don’t use Word, Excel, or Powerpoint for much anymore aside from work stuff (then again, I guess school was the primary reason I was using those before anyway). However, just like with Windows 7, by the time the rest of the world gets it, it’s already old news to me.
Personal - Seattle
I reinstalled Windows 7 yesterday, and as I’ve been rebuilding my customizations for everything, I decided to install some Firefox extensions which I had never used before. Specifically, AdBlock and NoScript. While by default they’re a little too aggressive for my taste, it is slightly strange to see all the stuff that gets blocked as a result of having these two addons installed. I’m assuming that the “tweaking” I’ll need to do will drop as I figure out exactly what needs to be unblocked on which sites, but if it gets too annoying, I was able to survive just fine up until now on the internet without either of these.
Even though you don’t really notice since I don’t show the times of these posts anywhere, I have been making my posts slightly earlier since I got back from Dallas. Rather than pushing it right up until the midnight deadline, I’ve actually been in bed by then. Will this continue past about this week? Doubtful, but with less TV to occupy my time up until (potentially) 11 each night, I guess anything can happen.
Personal - Seattle
iPhone 4, iOS 4; all of the new iPhone news today was interesting, but ultimately not anything special enough to make me want to jump back on board for another couple years. Actually, it would only be until next June (assuming I got a phone on launch day), and you might wonder if it would be worth it for effectively 6-8 months (especially considering if I want to get back on the iPhone bandwagon after going to WP7, it would be in the iPhone 6 timeframe). If there was some huge change coming with the new hardware that I felt was worth it, then I might be inclined to say yes. What we have though are video chatting with other iPhone 4 users over WiFi, a higher resolution (but still same size) screen, and a camera that can do HD video. To me, it just isn’t enough to reinvigorate my interest in the platform at this time.
Of course, holding out for WP7 does mean that if I’m not pleased with the platform (or launch devices), I could be stuck with a phone I don’t like for a while. However, whether rightly placed or not, I have faith in Microsoft that they’ll be able to pull it off. The only other option I would want would be Android though, and AT&T is effectively not even playing in that arena at the present time.
Personal - Seattle
With my vacation now I guess officially over, I get to look at all the fun I’m going to have tomorrow. It starts even before I go into work when I need to run by the post office in order to get all of my mail from the past week. Then, it’s dealing with email after email after email that came in until the end of the day (ok, with a few meetings sprinkled in), at which point hopefully I’ll only have new emails from tomorrow left to deal with.
My Thanksgiving flight has been booked, so now it’s just a matter of when I want to book my Christmas flight. I’m pretty sure my schedule will be more “reasonable” for it since the days I would be traveling aren’t going to be the busy ones anyway. Ideally two back to back Dallas trips like this won’t be the norm every year, but if Hawaii is the trade for this happening again next year, I’ll take it.
Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:30 PM: First, I’d just like to point out my perfect record this trip with making posts on the same day as the blog instead of having them come in close to Seattle midnight instead. Primarily this is because I’ve actually been falling asleep and waking up on Dallas time for the past week, so I’m going to be going to bed and waking up really early by Seattle standards until I get readjusted. As fun as going to bed at 10:00 would sound, I don’t expect that to last for more than about maybe a night.
I’m pretty sure I know what my flight plans are going to be for Thanksgiving, and in order to save money, it’s a strange schedule of Wednesday night through Tuesday morning. Even though I’m not the one paying for it (well, to an extent I am, but only to make sure all of my free Alaska Airlines money gets used), saving $100 isn’t an insignificant amount when you look at that I’ll be making an identical trip less than a month later. It doesn’t quite beat the week turnaround time of my two trips last fall, but there will be a third (shorter) one chained on about a week or two later to Vegas. It’s a great thing that I don’t feel about plane rides the same way I do car trips or else we’d have a serious problem on our hands.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:50 PM: Both my mom and Brandon’s mom alone are entertaining enough, but put them together and the entertainment increases exponentially. Throw a party in the mix, and I guess you’d have tonight. Despite the fact that the entire evening was just one big comedy of errors, it was enjoyable, and I’d guess that everyone would be willing to do it again (but maybe with a little less…excitement).
The HTPC situation upstairs is confusing me since there obviously isn’t a bandwidth problem (I can play videos from the server through WMP just fine). That means that both XBMC and WMC have to be doing something in the background that interferes with the buffering and/or transfer rate. Now that I know it’s a software problem the possibility of finding a solution is greater (although limited in the time I have left here) since I at least know it’s possible for it to work properly now.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:45 PM: Wicked keeps its ranking of second in my musical list, but the production tonight was slightly different than I was expecting it to be. I guess it wouldn’t make sense for everything to be identical to the first time that I saw it, but there were some noticeable differences between the two. The biggest probably was that at the end, there was quite a bit of dialogue that wasn’t there and actually changed how it ended (not plot wise though, it was still the exact opposite ending of the book). I don’t really want to say whether it was better or worse, but I think I prefer the way I saw it the first time.
Tomorrow we’re having another “pool party” with Brandon, his mom, and Crystal coming over. Aside from that, my day is pretty empty. Since I’ll actually have stuff to do on Saturday, my goal tomorrow will be to make sure all of the house technology is back in working order. The only big thing I have left is to fix the TV streaming to my dad’s laptop (which, in a perfect world, is just a software installation away), but the HTPC upstairs is also giving me difficulties that I’d like to solve. The big server upgrade + Xbox 360 effort seems to be complete though, so I can be happy that at least one part of my plan worked as intended.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:30 PM: Do I remember why I need to go get the Bow of Light in Zelda: Spirit Tracks? Of course not, I reached that point in the game around five months ago. Am I going to restart the game just so I have the story fresh in my mind? Of course not, I would like to actually finish it on this trip so in the future I can move onto games like Bowzer’s Inside Story (which I have also already started but likely will be subject to the restart treatment). Speaking of restarting games, Bioshock 2 also is needing some attention from me once I get back to Seattle, so I have that decision to make also. I don’t think I’d be losing an insane amount of progress if I was to restart, but it’s all a matter of how I think my time can best be spent in relationship to the enjoyment of the game.
So even though I neglected to talk about it at all, I did go see a movie on Monday that I should have reviewed. While a little delayed, better late than never I guess. Shrek Forever After was supposed to still have one more movie coming after it, but I guess Dreamworks realized that they were trying to stretch the series a little too much. I have to say that I agree what that assessment, and while it wasn’t a bad movie, it was never super good either. I think the first still holds the title for my favorite, although the second does have some pretty cool things about it (especially the big musical numbers at the end). It probably would have have been best for the series for it to end after those two, but it seems Dreamworks is willing to at least put some amount of respect for the series over the money that would undoubtedly be made with a fifth. I can only hope they let Dragon go out on a high note as they begin the franchise plans for it. My score: 7/10.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:45 PM: So, the last time I got my hair cut before tonight was…approximately 5 months ago? Yeah, it had been a while, and as a result, my hair was probably the longest it’s ever been. However, now I have my short, football-style haircut for summer (even though temperature wise up in Seattle, that really isn’t necessary). I’m going to get back to work next week, and it will probably be one of those doubletake moments for people on my team just because I’m going to look so different than I had a week prior.
Xbox 360 connected, check. Successful streaming from the file server, check. Strange cancel symbol appearing next to videos that I’ve never seen before but appears to have no impact on the playback capabilities, check. That last one requires a little more investigation on my part, but the hard part is knowing exactly what to search for in the first place in order to get answers.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle