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 series, along with an X300 in tow.
Oh. My. God.
I’m so glad that I left my credit card back at the office…
Continue reading Mini-Review: X300
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 team and I really need to fill them… after all, we’re already in full blown “busy” mode for the Holiday season.
Wanna know what we’re shipping this year?
Updated: here are the two direct links to the positions I currently have open: 214715 and 223754
Continue reading Jump In: Part III version 2
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 of things here – see the FAQ for, well, answers to questions – I will say that a lot of people have shrugged this off as a games specific piece of technology. To that, I just point out that, yes, to compile bits for Zune, you need to use XNA Game Studio 3.0, but: you’ll access to all non-DRM music and pictures, you’ll have access to WiFi, and you’ll be able to put bits that run on the device…
Welcome to the Zune SDK – or as I like to call it ZDK.
(and if I make a “game” that runs on the Zune that offers Shuffle By Album, I’ll be blogging about it!)
BusinessWeek: Building the Perfect Laptop
x300, will you be my Valentine?
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 people that have never played before and people that can accurately play GH songs without a console being turned on… what do you do? Do you make it a winner takes all or do you attempt to mix it up a bit, to get as many people involved as possible?
As the tournament director, I went with the notion that I wanted to give everyone a shot at advancing, so I purposely mixed it up. A lot.
Continue reading How To: Guitar Hero II Tournaments
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 13 year old boys look at women as objects of desire. Right, because their own dropping balls don’t do that. And they wouldn’t have the slightest reaction to the bumping and grinding of MTV. Or certainly not from Cinemax after 11pm.
No, obviously the sole culprit is a video game that shows no nudity unless you play through the entire “choose your own adventure” storyline with a sense of romantic interest. If you act like a dick, you don’t get into the romantic subplot. As the game expert states “you don’t put the game in and it asks you ‘do want to have sex?'” That coupled with the “have you played the game?” ‘No [of course not].’ “So how do you know what it’s like?” exchange actually made me snort. That one of the panelists late in the ‘cast says “I don’t understand why [the ESRB] didn’t give it the highest rating of Adults Only” – uh, maybe because they played the game and got the rating right and you lot all are simply repeating what you’ve heard is in the game, rather than what the game really is?
Personally, I love how the debate and the after interview panel all agree on one thing: it’s obvious that this is a new problem – one caused by the game. In fact, it’s the game’s fault for parents not taking responsibility for their children’s upbringing and what their children do. Oh, sorry, did I just drip sarcasm on your shoe?
Classic newscast.
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 account…
Nothing else to see here, move along.
Continue reading Controlling TiVo HD With A Harmony 880
I had no idea we were doing this… I saw them at a Target in Connecticut.
Neat stuff!
As an impulse buy, I picked up the dock for my Zune 80.
Imagine my surprise to find more than I expect to in the box.
Continue reading Wait, It Doesn’t Cost Extra?
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, see the definition. And props to Chuck for the link – I would have hated to miss this one.
Finally, I can stop explaining the meaning of it to analog people. After, it looks like I’ve used it 419 times on this blog alone, dating all the way back to 2003… this post being one of my more favorites.
Of course, now that it is “mainstream” it’ll probably get over used and die before the end of the year…
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 songs in the Solo Tour on Medium; when I switched to the wireless GH3 guitar, I nailed these songs with no trouble. Must be a faulty guitar controller.
I loved the fact that EA is willing to cross-ship a new guitar to you, if you give them a credit card, so I did that. Got the new guitar this weekend, plugged it in, and was astonished to find that the new guitar was just plain broken. Up strumming only worked two out of every five strums; down strumming either didn’t work at all or got stuck and sent multiple strums to the console. How bad was my playing with this guitar? I couldn’t tell you that; I wasn’t even able to navigate the menus with the controller.
Looks like we’ll be cross-shipping another one – I like the style of the RB guitar more than the GH3 one, even if the GH3 is wireless… never mind the fact that it should work.
Sorta getting sick of buying stuff and having to “settle” or “accept” defective parts and lower quality.
I am now… a Zune owner.
Continue reading I CAN HAS ZUNE?
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? Well then the View menu. No? Window? Team? Analyze? Debug? Build? No. No no no no no!
Tools >> Options >> Environment >> General – check “Show status bar”.
Whichever UX engineer decided that developers do not want the status bar to be shown as a defaulted option is either a sadist or someone that has never met a developer. Whoever authorized this as the default option needs to be dragged over a field of broken glass and dripped in alcohol. If it’s a missed bug, I’m appalled because it means that someone wasn’t running with either a clean machine or migrated their options from VS2005. If it’s a found bug, and Triage decided to simply release note it, they also get the field of broken glass but they get to get dipped in lemon juice and rolled in sugar. In case you couldn’t tell, you’re pretty much boned without a visible status bad: you don’t even know when a build is done, without it.
And I don’t care who it was – even if it was BillG himself – but whoever decided to hide the bloody “Show status bar” on the Options dialog [that has at least 500 set-able options] rather than making it available on the View menu or context-sensitive toolbar menu, well, they’re just wrong to put it there.
Continue reading Visual Studio 2008: Status Bar
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 the masses and in no way reflects my actually life. If you don’t believe me, please check my Xbox LIVE profile! Just because I have no LAN connectivity to my 360 due to floor construction wouldn’t have anything to do with missing status. Nope. No way!
I finally caved. Waded into my electronic-assploded kitchen, grabbed my 360, video cable, and power supply. Hooked it up to a lackluster 20″ LCD and dropped in Rock Band. After all, it’s been in the house for almost 11 hours – thought I’d take a look.
Continue reading Rock Band: The First 5ive Minutes
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
210224