In another chapter from “How Small is the World, Really?”, Rory stopped by my office this afternoon! After a quick mini-tour of my building, and stopping into see some other blogging type peoples, he went off in search of more places to try out his spiffy new ID badge… it still amazes me the number of different places that gets me into, including my building – after three months I still can’t get over where I work now and almost half expect it to reject my badge some day. one thing that was amusing to us both was seeing each other in Redmond, seeing as we’ve both traveled through OR and CT to get to WA… a small world indeed.
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Nice To Know…
The Microsoft company-wide annual meeting was held at the McCaw Hall in Seattle Center today. Since there were a limited number of seats available, tickets were collected and ID badges were verified at the door (as well as a check for cameras, as is common with most conferences/meetings of this size). Rip and tear tickets? Naw – the McCaw Hall uses a bar code scanner that to verify a ticket, and in that scanner is a Palm III device.
Nice to know they’re good for something, besides just pretending to be a coaster.
The Scariest Question I’ve Heard At Work
Now that I’ve been at Microsoft for over two months now, I thought I’d take a moment and reflex for a minute. As each day comes up, I find it to be slightly different than the prior one, which is a great thing, but I have discovered two two constants throughout my time here so far: I bump into something new everyday and whatever it is, it usually forces me to think. Everyday. But over the course of my time here, there was something that made me go pale and cold when I heard it… and that asks the question: What’s the scariest question I’ve been asked at work?
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Harmony H688
I’ve had a Sony System Commander (AV-2000 – an older model) for years, but I hardly ever use it. I got it to be a replacement for all of my other remotes, and while it was quite versatile, I never felt that good about using it all the time. What I found was that I used my TiVo remote for TV and TiVo/Cable, and if I used another module, I would grab the Sony. All of that changed when I got the Harmony H688 universal remote: I have just one remote now.
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Retirement Plan: Localized
How random is the Web? About as random as I seem to be. Over the last 72 hours I’ve hit the IBM ThinkPad drivers-o-rama center, looked into the doctorate program at University of Washington (and tried to find out if such a degree was covered in my benefits package) and checked to see if one of the local casinos was hiring any unexperienced dealers. I’d say pretty random, but still very useful in my fulfilling my quest for a local casino worthy to replace Mohegan Sun in my travels and long range plans.
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Warning: Storm Front Coming
Thunder? Lightening? Hail? Lava flow? Hard to say, but be on alert: I biked over eight miles today and should herald some type of natural disaster.
Black Light Tattoos?
Over breakfast this morning, a well inked guy was talking to the waitress at the counter, and I thought I heard him mention something about how a new tattoo on his hand would disappear soon – that it would “only show up in black light“. He left, just after that, and before I could ask him if I heard him correctly… is this possible? Tattoos that only show up in places lit by black light? It would be revolutionary for the corporate workforce (I know a few people that would get one if they decide when it showed itself, i.e. not in a high powered business meeting) but how often could you show off your ink if most places don’t have rooms lit by black light? The mind boggles.
Was Clinton a Good President?
I love to ask this question, because I’ve yet to find anyone that can answer it adequately, especially around this time of year. And I ask it now, just in time for this election, since this one is proving that the majority of American’s are clueless about politics – at least the people I’ve been talking to about this online… God, I hate it when people can’t argue their own arguments!
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Lo! I Am Furious – Part II
As part of my move cross-country, my movers lost some items on me. Two of them weren’t all that important, as they were replaceable, but the third was a lock box that had the “dreaded irreplaceable items”: a 50-sheet photo album and a collegiate award. When I first told the moving company, they told me it would take six weeks to trace, and after six weeks I was told “sorry – please fill out a claim”. In the last episode of this story, I was left furious and without much hope of having this work out – the story now continues…
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An Ode To a Vegan
While adapting to my new environment, I’ve been chatting up new people in and around town and work. I’m actually enjoying my first bout of almost anonymity, which is something that I haven’t had many opportunities to experience before. One of the things that I’ve begun to notice, as I meet more people, is that Vegans are everywhere and are often found in attractive women. And this creates a problem for me, to some degree.
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Why Love Songs/Movies/Books Suck
Neil Peart was once quoted during an interview and his words stuck with me for a while: “I think that love songs are actively harmful. They invent this fantasy that people expect their own relationships to live up to and when they don’t they result in divorce.” It’s a quote for the ages.
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The Porting of SharpMT
Just after the Beta 1 release of Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005) I decided that the time was Right to start a conversion. Sure, I could have just opened the existing 2003 project in using the new IDE, but I opted not to do this… basically, this would give me a chance to play with the new IDE and Framework in a project that I was very well acquainted with. It also gave me a chance to update some of the external controls with built-in Microsoft-coded controls, which usually makes for an easier install to manage. The question is, where’s SharpMT 3.0?
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The Men’s Basketball Team Lost in Athens?
I’m embarrassed a bit to say it, but good. Yeah, yeah, national pride, we must win more golds than China, blah, blah, blah, but ya know what? Good. A bunch of Games ago, the ISO decided that pro-players could play, and so we had the Dream Team. That first team walked away with the Gold, without breaking much of a sweat. They plowed over everybody. The world has changed, and they other countries have gotten better. Our players have changed too, but not for the better. I blame the NBA as a hole whole.
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Rare Programming Rant: Cross Thread Access in Whidbey
It’s not very often that I have something to Rant about that’s also Geek-related, but we’ve got a winner, and it’s all about Whidbey and the .NET Framework 2.0. It’s probably a good thing for application security, but from a programming point of view, I feel hog-tied. Oh, and if you’ve never heard of Whidbey, skip this Rant – it’s not for you!
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Pealing
At last, I can stop wearing hats at work. You see, last weekend, I sunburned myself nicely. Ordinarily I burn, then it turns to tan within a couple of days and that sticks around for months. On the rare occasion, I peal after burning, but that usually happens after a really bad burn, which last weekend’s wasn’t. It would seem that by moving to a dryer climate, I peal like an onion, and when that happens, my tan went with it, leaving me with a two-toned forehead… and I thought it looked nasty, so why put anyone else through that? Small price to pay for the dryer summer, though!