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GeekStuff

Jump In: Part III version 2

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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 →

bar

Random Person Night

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Random person night at the bar, last night… not many regulars, yet the place was still busy. Compared to the beerfest last week, this week was mostly about darts and pool – that too was as random as the people. Not weird people mind – just… random. Like the chick that was drawn like an anime character but acted like fathead decal whenever her boyfriend was within a 5 feet radius. Or the ex-boyfriend of a bar regular that showed up completely unexpected. Not too random on it’s own but this is the second ex to show up at the same bar in two weeks; she missed the first, found the second. Then spent five minutes of her seven minutes in the place, telling me how little impact his being there had on her, before she ran out the door.

Totally random. A lot of potential for drama, too, yet nothing spun up, which isn’t a bad thing really…

Whoo!

GeekStuff

XNA Game Studio 3.0 and Zune

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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!)

Rant

ORLY? YARLY!

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MSN: Are Starbucks’ ‘skinny’ drinks offensive? […] Much of the controversy focuses on the use of the term skinny to describe the fat- and sugar-free drink. One blogger, “SassySexyShapely,” questioned whether people should be offended by the word. As reported by Starbucks Gossip, one barista refused to use the term, calling it politically incorrect.

I’ll admit that I don’t always blog about critical issues. That I sometimes muse over things that other people might not be all that important… things that certainly aren’t life or death, but I still think they can be important to me. I don’t expect anyone to change because of them; I don’t expect anyone else to even care about them. That MSN picked up this story, it tells me that either it’s a really slow news day or there is a large group of people that really care that calling a drink “skinny” might be offensive to them…

And I say, with the utmost sincerity that I can muster: if this is the most important issue you have in your life, get the fuck off my planet.

Rant

Tenacity

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International Herald Tribune: Excerpts from Castro’s letter […] For many years I have occupied the honorable position of President. On February 15, 1976 the Socialist Constitution was approved with the free, direct and secret vote of over 95% of the people with the right to cast a vote.

What a fuckin’ loaded comment that is. Even so, it is a leader that out lasted nine Presidents – all of which he was able to annoy in some way – and never relented to external pressure from non-allies…

Gotta admire that kind of tenacity, even if you do condemn his politics and treatment of his citizens. Or not – makes you wonder if we’ll be lifting an embargo any time soon.

Cigars and baseball players anyone?

bar

Perception Short-Sighted Women Suck

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The other night I was standing at one end of the bar. It wasn’t that busy; I was mostly chatting up the regulars, swilling a beer. I looked up and noticed a woman walking up to order something with ears that were all kinds of shiny… I’m a Geek. I notice shiny things. I noticed that these shiny things were a couple of C’s. Yes, there were a couple of C’s under her shirt, but they weren’t the only ones: the ones in her ears had one C stamped over over the other, with one of them flipped backwards: the Chanel logo.

Not the normal sort of shiny you see in a bar in the Pacific Northwest.
Continue reading Perception Short-Sighted Women Suck →

bar

New Category: bar

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Why a bar category? I’ve been going to the same bar on and off for the last few years… since moving out to WA, actually, since my first apartment was within walking distance to the place. I still leave near by, but I haven’t had a reason to walk home in a while; I just don’t drink long enough when I stop by.

Anyway, I’ve been noticing most weeks that I end up with a story that is generic enough to be shared without embarassing anyone that I know. Usually, anyway… at the bare minimum, I’m betting that these posts will be an often reminder for people that are married that they should be happy to not be dating.

At least that’s how I’m seeing it… time will tell.

Windows

Vista: Registry Shell Namespace Extensions

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CodePlex: The Windows Registry Shell Namespace Extension allows Windows Explorer to view and interact with the Windows Registry data via Explorer windows. It demonstrates existing Shell extensibility points like IShellFolder2 and SHCreateShellFolderView and also demonstrates new concepts in Vista including the property system, property schema extensibility, and content indexing via Protocol Handlers. This project is implemented using C++ and ATL.

This is pretty freakin’ cool… I just installed it – even though it’s beta it seems to be working no problem. Even shortcuts and Copy Path work with it…

Not for your casual computer user of course – if you are asking yourself “what’s the Registry” you want not part of this tool!

GeekStuff

How To: Guitar Hero II Tournaments

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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 →

Rant

Thank You, Giants

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I just want to send a big ol’ Thank You to the New York Giants for their performance in Super Bowl XLII. Without their help, there would have been a cache of smug and strutting sports fans in Boston and I’m really sick of hearing all of that cheering in the Northeast.

Yes, folks: after winning 18 games and losing the championship… that’s as a calibur of choking that is on par with, if not bigger than, losing the last four of a best of seven in other sports. Miami’s record from 1972 remains intact. And even if my ‘hawks didn’t get to the game, I’m glad a team I still care about won (and a team from a sports city I care so little about lost.)

Thanks, Big Blue.

Rant

*sigh*

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MSNBC: Giuliani dropping out of Republican race

Meh. Now I have to go take yet another bumper sticker off my Jeep… pah.

Either way, this country deserves whatever it gets, after this election, be it the anamatronic whitehead, the “new” Kennedy, or the chick – considering those options I very well may take an interest in maple leafs.