One of my ongoing gripes about the iPhone, the iPod touch, and Zune product lines are that they don't offer a small, yet useful, feature that the iPod (and iTunes) has offered since 2001: Shuffle By Album. Thanks to the...
Joystiq: From E3: The new Xbox Experience Seen the new Dashboard? I've been playing with it for months now... and it's not even my primary job. Did I mention that we have positions for both Test and Dev?...
No reason for a review here - there's plenty floating out there already... what I will say is the following: + I got an advanced copy through pleading, so I'm already 6 hours into the game and have been enjoying...
Couldn't stop myself from sharing this... yes, this is from a Grifball game this weekend, but even there it's really hard to amass 65 kills. With a K/D Spread of +38. And only 1 Betrayal. *swoon*...
A friend of mine turned me onto BSG just after Season 2 ended. I was aware of it running on the SciFi channel, but after four Star Trek series, ten Star Trek movies, six Episodes of Star Wars, and five...
Now that Super Smash Bros. Brawl has been out for over 24 hours, can someone tell me: how is it? Living up to the hype? A rehash of Super Smash Bros. Melee with new artworks? And if so, is that...
Grif and company seem to have an on going impact on the Halo community. Speaking for myself, it was Red vs Blue that made me aware and an avid fan of Halo, long before I had even bought an Xbox....
I met with some people with Lenovo yesterday - they're on campus to talk about some models that are currently shipping or planned for the future... of course, they had a bunch of existing models from the T and X...
Lo! Behold a Ship-It montage! This collection of Ship-It's are a small sample of my shipped products as well as some of the people I work with... Want some of this? Keep reading: I've got two positions open on my...
Blog and XNA: The XNA Community Games Platform team has announced the first feature of the coming XNA Game Studio 3.0, the ability to build games for the Zune platform. While I'm not at liberty to speculate on a lot...
Admittedly this is somewhat dated, but I still found it to be worth a blog post. Say you work for a software team and GH2 comes out and you want to facilitate some musical smackdown? Within the group, you've got...
Joystiq: Keighley takes on Fox News' seXbox seXposé This one is worth a look, honestly because I love the fact that they parade this woman out in front of the camera to talk about how a video game is making...
Warning: this post is as much for me as it is for you! I've spent a chunk of time setting up my Logitech Harmony 880 remote and wanted to note the settings in the strange event that I lost my...
Yahoo! News: "w00t," a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph, topped all other terms in the Springfield-based dictionary publisher's online poll for the word that best sums up 2007. For more,...
I was having some issues with my Rock Band guitar. Some random strums were being dropped and the fret buttons weren't always accurate. I say that it was the guitar because I was having trouble five star'ing the first few...
I installed Visual Studio 2008 this week.* First thing I noticed? No status bar. Uwah??? Oh, it's probably off by default, like most of the toolbars. I bet if I right click on the toolbar I can show it. No?...
If you work with me, please ignore this post because there is no way that I would take time out of my busy test casing schedule to play a video game. Obviously, this is a guest post, put here for...
I got mine on the 15th - did you want one early, too? We're hiring individual contributors as well as Leads, in both Development and Test. Go to http://www.microsoft.com/careers and look for one of these job codes: 207755 214534 214715...
Swung by the Bellevue Apple store last night, around 8pm. Yes, there was still a bit of a line. Yes, they had no T-Shirts left. Yes, I bought a copy of Leopard for my 1.66GHz Core Duo Mac mini. Ya...
So the new iPods have hit the street. Er, hit the interwebs, since the stores won't have stock until the weekend. I haven't bought a new iPod in a while. A long while. Three years? Maybe. Generation 5. I was...
'Someone should kick Steve Jobs in the nuts.' "Whiner" 'Nah. It's because I'm standing outside of the [Bellevue] Apple Store with a new keyboard and I don't know how that happened.' "Ha." Real live transcript of a TXT message conversation...
I went back to PAX after lunch and found the line to be even longer than when I had left it before noon. Long story short: I bailed. So I went back today around 8:40, knowing that the expo hall...
Ah, the fine sound of a cricket. Sorry for the lack of posts but between work, school, and play I've had very, very little time to blog. Besides, in spite of all the activity, I haven't had much to say...
On Friday morning, I booted my Xbox 360 and spent a little time online with it. An Xbox Live friend happened to look at my profile and promptly posted to the Bungie.net forums that I was playing "Halo 3 Epsilon"....
Track and Field was released to XBLA today - how did I get such a score the day of release? True, we did get copies internally for testing before it went live to the public, but I didn't practice....
I just realized that it's Sunday night. I started working on a side-project early Saturday morning. Sure, I took some time to do some laundry, boost some coffee, and eat food (at least I'm assuming I did, since I'm not...
We had a pre-briefing on Monday before the E3 Briefing that happened last night... was I glued to the TV last night to watch it? Um, yeah. There were things discussed last night that even we didn't know about. Like...
Rooster Teeth just released hit their 100th and final episode of RedVsBlue today. Pre-sales of the Season 5 DVD have already started, which is good... even though I've already seen all of the episodes online, I know I'll buy one....
In what was supposed to be a "small" upgrade, I decided to bump up my home machine. It has been almost five years since my last upgrade. Been jones'n for some more oomph. Finally said "why not?" Steve said get...
I'm not sure if it was T-Mobile, HTC, or Microsoft, but someone missed something with profiles (and given the Home Screen reset, I'm saying T-Mobile). The problem is that if you have reminders set to play sound on your Normal...
Earlier this week I upgraded my Dash from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6. The flash went flawlessly and I didn't have to install as many apps to get going, but I did mourn the fact that while Voice...
I'm not sure what's gotten into the Microsoft product name generator, but first Silverlight and now [according to the interwebs the TID is being called] Chatpad? Maybe someone realized that short names that can be tied to the product are...
T-Mobile releases a software flash for my phone - the Dash - that would upgrade the thing to Windows Mobile 6. Have you seen WM6? It's very, very sharp looking. Enough to make me keep on checking the TMo web...
This very well may be the best questions I've ever been asked from some one in IM: "did u go to the anime palooza yesterday??? is your hair blue???" True story, even if the answers are No and No....
Wild stuff. I've been playing a few games of MLB2K7 [from TakeTwo] between Guitar Hero II sessions. Yeah, I know, but it's so much better to play than 2K6 - really, it is. Besides, I thought I had noticed some...
OK, now I'm po'. Not destitute but the freakin expo center put a huge dent in my fun fund. Although, I did end up working a booth for a while. Yeah, I know, it sounds odd to me too, but...
Talk about feeling under dressed... yeesh. and while I couldn't tell you what makes the diference there is such a difference between cosplay and dress-like-a-slut. Anyway the line for registration was at least 150 deep at 8:30am - I...
Yes, that's a new Xbox 360 Guitar Hero II controller plugged in and very much alive on my Windows Vista PC. Now the question is how many awesome things will people put together with XNA Game Studio Express for...
In the past I've talked about being an SDET, specifically for on of the teams in the Developer Tools division at Microsoft. Over the last year I've mentioned a few things about working for Microsoft Game Studio and more recently...
Xbox 360 Elite? News? Sure it is. New to me? Sorta - I've know about a lot of the pieces thanks to beta testing and other tidbits. I'm rather proud of myself for keeping a secret this well, especially since...
Now that GDC has come and gone, life is slowly returning to normal. As part of that, one of things that I noticed at GDC was the response that people had when I handed them one of my business cards...
JunkDepot.com: Junkdepot is a marketplace to find materials for your home wither personal or professional. Stumbled across this the other day... reminds me of eBay but without hell of last-second-suckout auction experiences. Since it hooks up to Google Base and...
About a week after I got a new title - and a new gamertag - I went ahead and ordered new business cards... I don't use them very often, but they are still a requirement for conferences and the like....
Can I talk about this one yet? It seems that CompUSA has been selling it early and Major Nelson is talking about it so I'll take some liberty since I also got my copy a couple of days early. And...
A first look? Months after the initial release? Fine. My first look. I held off buying one because I was on the fence over it - a special offer for MGS employees sucked me right in. I picked up the...
QJ.net: Halo-style Matchmaking for ALL 360 games recommended - If you ask Phil Spencer, Microsoft Game Studios' head of game development, he'll tell you that he wants every new Xbox 360 game to have Matchmaking. So 1UP asked him, and...
Yahoo! Messenger: Built from the ground up specifically for Microsoft Windows Vista, this all-new version combines the reliable and easy-to-use features you've always loved from Yahoo! Messenger with the cutting-edge experience of this new operating system. Holy crap - it...
From http://psp.connect.com: See the car? Looks familiar, some how... in fact, I remembered this: Project Gotham 3 Screen shot via http://www.bizarrecreations.com/ for the Xbox 360. Sony... Sony... you're t3h suck. Shame on you for passing off someone else's game for...
In a nutshell... iTV is right around the corner as Apple TV - is to iTunes what the 360 is to Media Center with 10GB more on the HDD. In fact, I don't think it can download from iTunes directly...
Thanks to a couple of those high powered energy drinks I've had 6000% of recommended daily amount of Vitamin B12 over 12 hours. Not only am I very awake for class tonight but I think I'm glowing. WHoO!!1!eleventhousand!!1...
Make: "I bought one of the Sony eBook readers and wanted a way to read my blogs and other documents offline. So I wrote a tool using a variety of Perl modules to transform RSS feeds into LaTeX and a...
Axiotron: First Tablet Mac Solution to be Unveiled at Macworld by Axiotron and OWC [...] The ModBook is a high-end slate-style notebook computer solution, which was designed in California by Axiotron’s team of German and American engineers and will be...
Do you really need T9 - or in the case of the T-Mobile Dash xT9 - when you have a phone/PDA that sports a full thumb-keyboard? I say "no". Problem is that on my Dash, xT9 was already turned on....
RedVsBlue: PSA "Let's All Go To The Movies" If you go before 4pm tickets are only $75 for seniors I'll be honest: it's not their best PSA but the picked four annoying movie behaviors that I've Ranted about before which...
Talked to Bose today about my probably issues with my speaker system... The one that is out of warranty and will have to be shipped to Framingham, MA for service. It's big and it weighs about 35 pounds. Ugh. The...
Whoa, no posts for over three days??? Yeah well I've been busy with stuff. In fact, I'm in a cafeteria near the 30's - guess who else is here having lunch?...
My last post was type in on a thumb keyboard. Wait, didn't I say I'd never bother with one of those? Yeah, I did, but that wasn't because there was a keyboard involved - it was because all of the...
Apple.com: The new Mac Book Pro. The specs are impressive, especially on the 15" - keeps the size and weight manageable but can be pimped out to almost match the 17" specs - it looks like the only things exclusive...
Looks like Cinemax is running all six episodes of Star Wars from end to end, starting on November 10th. Not so much that they running it, but what I thought it's neat how they're advertising it: they did a really...
Oops. Guess I need more free time. A while back I buckled to peer pressure and bought Deadrising. Great purchase. In fact it was the first game that was able to pull Call of Duty 2 out of my 360...
Talk about Guitar Hero has been swirling around me lately. It's what happens when you work with gamers. Someone had a copy - I call it DDR for your fingers. I tried it out. I suck at it. And got...
Anyone out there going to Gamefest next week? I can't tell you what my team's T-shirts look like - they won't be in until this afternoon - but I'm nearly 100% certain that our logo will be on the back:...
Petition: Add Tarutaru punting to the next Final Fantasy XI expansion pack. [...] Please included a Tarutaru punting mini-game in the next expansion pack to Final Fantasy XI. Everyone was disappointed to learn they could not punt a Tarutaru, they...
PCMag: Why CSS Bugs Me - As we move into the age of Vista, multimedia's domination on the desktop, and Web sites controlled by cascading style sheets running under improved browsers, when will someone wake up and figure out that...
ZDNet: Last week I decided to install a new operating system on one computer in my lab. Not a big deal, really. I install, uninstall, and reinstall various Windows versions all the time. But this particular installation was just a...
JeanSnow: Manga lovers rejoice! A never-seen-before approach to manga made its debut on the Mainichi Daily News on Monday, July 3, 2006. Manglish takes some of Japan’s hottest young manga talents — showcased in the Mainichi’s MangaTown site — and...
TUAW: Daniel Jalkut has discovered that the Mac OS X 10.4.7 update released last week is causing his computer to phone home to Apple. Every eight hours, a process called "dashboardadvisoryd" is contacting two different servers hosted by Apple, ostensibly...
Make: Banana Jr 6000 file server Out-fuckin'-standing. Update: for those of you that have no idea as to why this is beautiful, here's some background. Classic stuff. Really!...
We're having an open house at work tonight. You heard me, an open house. At work. As in Tools and Technologies within Microsoft Game Studios. Yeah, you read it correctly: that means game previews and demos. I don't even know...
What in the hell is going on at Hasbro? I saw a blurb the other day that a Toys'R'Us in Canada had a Transformer version of the Millennium Falcon. I said "uwaaaah?" A quick search on the domestic Amazon site...
...or would you rather help people build them? My team is hiring and we're looking for some excellent SDET to join us - can you code? Do you like C++? Are you proud to find bugs in code? Are you...
I brought my Jetta in for servicetoday... should be the last trip before I my lease ends and I turn it in, so that was all whoo hoo and stuffs. I also realized that I'm going to have to renew...
YouTube: Jeremy Clarkson on the Top Gear Ariel Atom Custom built, under 30K pounds, 0-60 in under 3 seconds, over 600hp, and goes over 120mph. Uses a Honda Civic Type-R engine, so millage should be OK, not that you'd care....
Whoa, Randy has a technology post about technology, coding and testing? Yep, I do. And if you're neither tester nor developer, don't bother reading the rest of this - you'll just get pissed at me for wasting your time with...
I have registered to play in the PokerStars World Blogger Championship of Online Poker! This Online Poker Tournament is a No Limit Texas Holdem event exclusive to Bloggers.Registration code: 7330476 For registration purposes; please ignore!...
Yeah, so I finally buckled and ordered a new ThinkPad. What can I say? Lenovo sucker punched me with an uber-discount that they threw at Microsoft employees. And they dropped it some more by the time I decided to finally...
It's been a strange week for me. I'm wrapping up my job of 23 months and getting ready to start a new gig on Monday (from MSDN to Microsoft Game Studio) true, but I went ahead and complicated matters further...
By now, if you're a gamer, you've heard about the latest and greatest from E3: the PS3 has been officially announced with ship dates (November 17, US) and pricing (499/599). The Wii has been officially announced with a date (Q4)...
Nearly two years ago, I decided to shake the snow globe that was my world for the sake of change. The last couple of months I've had my mind mangled by having too many choices available to me and I've...
I was in Vegas over the last week's end and was pretty amused to see Oxygen Bars in a number of different casinos and hotel malls. I know it's been a long term theory that casino operators pumped oxygen into...
Picked up "Major League Baseball 2K6" [for the 360] from Take 2 yesterday. I think I'm the only person in the area that cares about it: I haven't heard a word about it from anyone else yet. True, the Xbox...
Conran Shop Online: Nabaztag, the Wi-Fi bunny, keeps you in touch with the world through a wiggle of his ears and by the changing colour of his body. Through wireless technology, Nabaztag is permanently connected to the Internet, allowing you...
fosfor gadgets: If someone would have presented a XBOX 360 for me and my friends 20 years ago, I’m pretty sure we probably would have fainted. When you compare similar games from the mid-eighties with today’s top notch video and...
Major Nelson: A new backward compatibility update is now available for the Xbox 360. You can see the complete updated list here. This is rocking: Black and Star Wars Battlefront II are now supported on the 360. Black has been...
Xbox.com: Friends Management Comes to My Xbox. Accept or decline requests.Xbox.com has always been the place to find out about new games and hardware, learn about your fellow gamers, and check out upcoming events. With the launch of My Xbox®...
The Godfather comes out for the Xbox, PS2, and PC tomorrow. No 360 version though - at least not yet. What makes me go "WTF?!" is that the 360 version might not be available until Christmas. At least that's the...
I just spent the last ten minutes playing around with the Technical Refreshed release of Beta 1 of Office 2007... most specifically, I was poking around PowerPoint, of all things. I know... it's not the typical application for a Test/Dev...
I've had enough of supporting multiple feed types, so I've said "screw it". I mean I had 0.91 as index.xml, 1.0 as index.rdf, 2.0 as index2.rdf, and ATOM as... I don't know what ATOM is because I haven't publicized it....
Who's Paul Dini? He's a writer that has given us a bunch of excellent story lines over the years... check out his "resume" of sorts at IMDB - I had no idea the same guy was behind so many different...
Furrygoat.com: Now that the February CTP for Vista is public and Windows Sidebar has been unleashed to the masses, I thought it might be fun to walk through creating a simple gadget. And since I recently joined the cult of...
A while ago I compiled a CAB file for my MPx200 that removed all of the cheesy AT&T Wireless images that appeared on all of the confirmation dialogs with the original "standard" Smartphone images. All of the original images were...
In spite of a previous post I have a new T-Mobile branded SDA sitting in front of me. I knew the local TMo store had them in stock, but they were mean to me when I walked in to check...
The new SDA is available at the local T-Mobile. Yet, as I told Anna, I'm trying to convince myself that I don't need it, and I told Steve, I'm doing everything in my power to keep my fat ass in...
Xbox: Master Chief Dual-Wields His Way to Windows Vista "Halo 2," the award-winning sequel to the instant classic "Halo: Combat Evolved" to make its PC debut on the Windows Vista platform "Halo 2," the game that redefined first-person combat and...
GeekStuff for a razor? Yeah, it's got a battery, so pftftft. Well, it can have a battery, as they have two models this go around, much like there's a Mach 3T and a Mach 3Power... Since I've been using the...
I finally broke down and decided to record some shows that I should have been watching for forever but always forgot about and I noticed that the Comcast DVR was acting weird. Oh it was working just fine, but the...
Donut 04 D0nut o1 is no more! Thanks to a new option in the 360 dashboard, I'm now D0NUT O1 Randy No Arms! Well, d0nut o1 for those that are l33t-ly challenged: Put your gamertag here too. It's neat actually......
Jensen Harris: The good news for fans of usability worldwide is that an historical moment is upon us. As of Tuesday [17-Jan-06], we have officially flipped the switch to turn off Personalized Menus by default for all apps in all...
Some upgrade news on two fronts... one is that of OS. The other is that of home audio: a new receiver. More after the jump - this is working out to be a much longer post than I planned -...
The rule of thumb, when jumping on a bandwagon, is to always look forward before your feet leave the ground. Over the last 24 hours I've spent, um, 18 hours or so working on getting some anime content down to...
Over the years I've written a few posts about the iPod, XPlay, and iTunes for Windows. Over the years, I've amassed a number of comments on these threads, with people looking for help - sometimes from other readers and other...
For over a year I've been using a Harmony 688 universal remote and been rather happy with it. Well, now technically it's a Logitech Harmony 688 universal remote, since they bought out Harmony a while ago. It's been a great...
boingboing via Gizmodo: Xbox 360 DRM makes your rip your CDs again --- Microsoft's new Xbox 360 has a dumbass DRM countermeasure: it won't let you store MP3s on its hard-drive unless you rip your CDs again using your Xbox....
FurryGoat's Law just got another case study for validity. The Adventures of Teapot the Cat: rsstroom reader - toilet paper printer! A crazy new product out of Taiwan seems to be aimed at the feed dependent of us out there....
Not sure what is going on, exactly, but it would seem that my category pages are completely hosed. I have them set to "last 25" which used to show the last 25 posts for each category. It still seems to...
The Xbox 360 has USB ports, right? Anyone try hooking up a USB keyboard to it? Ya know for typing in text messages? Saw this article on Gamespot: We also asked Chris Satchell, the General Manager of XNA at Microsoft...
Saw an interesting article somewhere in the wild about not being able to view your Live account information from your old Xbox, after you've transfered your information to the Xbox 360. The article went on to say that you wouldn't...
Yet another Xbox 360 Update. Sorry about this, but well... the 360 is going to be the major source of new news in my life for the next few days... and what's wrong with that, anyway? I've also recently noticed...
Went to ebGames at 9:10. Got a few fists full of swag! XBox team stopped by, too. In ebGames by 12:01. Out by 12:08. Setup in 1080i, switch my Live account to the 360, and streaming music from my PC...
Just a couple more hours and the 360 hits the shelves on the east coast; a few more hours after that, it hits the west coast. Which means in about three hours I'll go line up with a bunch of...
There's been a lot of news lately on two fronts: portable video - in the form of the Gen5 iPod and PSP - and the Xbox 360. This has caused a lot of whining inside my head......
Reuters: Electronics retailer RadioShack Corp. on Tuesday said that it has agreed to sell Apple Computer Inc.'s iPods, adding the popular music player to its shelves. I've got nothing against this - seeing as my local Radio Shack is a...
Bloomberg: Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, threatened to pull its Windows operating system from South Korea if antitrust regulators order the company to remove programming for instant message and movie player services. I have nothing to do with...
RTM. Three letters that have taken over two years to put on a label, and sixteen months of my own time, but it's been printed. It's been posted. It's available to MSDN Subscribers. It'll be on store shelves in November....
