Check out this little laptop stand I made out of one of our many post-Christmas cardboard boxen:
Sweet Laptop Stand
Laptop Stand - In Action
It make look simple, but I assure you it is not. As Sheryl Crow so wisely said, “It’s hard to make a stand.”
Yesterday it was just a blank brown wall, but now:
Microsoft UDC - Thanksgiving Point, Lehi, Utah
There’s something about having that sign on the side of the building that makes it feel more real.
When a mommy and a daddy love each other very very much, like my wife and I, sometimes they have a life-changing event which starts with a very simple conversation, like, “Honey, do you think we should get a new MacBook Pro?”
At least, that’s what happened in our family.
One night, we were just laying there together in bed. All the kids were asleep. I turned toward my wife and softly said, “What would you think if we got a new MacBook Pro?”
She got a bit of a twinkle in her eye as she turned and snuggled in toward me. ”Why do you want one?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking, pretty much it is time for me to get a decent laptop. Even though I don’t want to spend the money, and even though we are trying to do the Dave Ramsey Dance, I think it is holding my career back. I don’t think it is wise to continue without one. I think it is an investment that we need to make in my career,” I said in the most romantic way possible.
She kind of bit her lower lip, then said, “Well, why are you thinking of a MacBook Pro?”
“Their laptops are simply the best hardware available,” I explained seductively. ”I would dual-boot it with Boot Camp so it ran Snow Leopard in one partition and Windows 7 Ultimate in the other partition. Then I could create a domain-joined account in the Windows 7 partition with a separate virtual drive that holds all of the company data that I can protect with BitLocker. That way I can use my laptop to work remotely and also have excellent Mac hardware. I’m getting excited just thinking about it.”
“Oooooh, baby, I love it when you talk to me like that. Let’s do it!” she said. So with that, we turned off the lights and went to sleep.
Some time later, the long-awaited day came. I was at work when my wife called. ”Honey, it is time,” she said. ”The MacBook Pro is here.”
I rushed home to this:
They are prettier after they are born.
I must admit it didn’t look like much. But I know that true beauty lies within. Within the box, I mean.
Sure enough, we didn’t have to wait long before the laptop started making its way out.
It's crowning!
When they first come out they have this weird whitish covering on them.
Now THAT'S a good looking laptop! He (she) is so handsome (pretty)!
It's a boy (I guess)!
We decided to name him Steve, for obvious reasons.
I attended LaunchUp, a monthly meet-up for people interested in tech startups, last Thursday. My friend Josh Coates, Mozy founder, spoke first, where among other things he described the two types of people at the event: people who have done, are doing, or are planning to do a startup, and people who like to talk about it but are too chicken to do it.
I’m definitely in the second category.
Of course, Josh’s talk was the most interesting, in case he reads my blog. But the second talk, DJ Waldow’s talk on community management, was interesting too, particularly to me as someone who’s tried (and failed) to start an effective online business. It wasn’t so much that there was any one particular point that Waldow made that really stood out to me; rather, the more he spoke, the more I realized how important what he was saying really is: In order to compete today, businesses have to be active in managing their online reputation and in creating awareness of themselves among their customer base. The ultimate? When your presence in the community and the industry is so prevalent that when they think of your business area, they think of your business.
Since I don’t have my own business, I am my own business. So this made me wonder, how well am I doing? How synonymous is my name with the software engineering industry, or other things?
Since I know how incredibly interested you are, here’s a detailed table of my findings. For each term, I conducted a search on both Google and Bing.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan”: Searching for just my name is pretty disheartening. No results relating to me in the first twenty pages on either site. It doesn’t help when you have the same name as a pro football player and a musician. I don’t even show up on Wikipedia’s Matthew Ryan disambiguation page. Hrrmm.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan blog”: Not much better. No results for me in the first ten pages on either site.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan homepage”: Finally, a result. Google gave me a result for www.mvryan.org, my homepage, on page 9 result 9; Bing, oddly, gave their first result for me for my user profile page on Novell’s developer website, from back in my days working for Novell’s developer services team.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan software”: Now we’re honing in. Google’s fifth result on their first page was for my developer.novell.com profile page; Bing gave two results for me on their first page; the third for my LinkedIn profile, the eighth result on that page for my user profile on SourceForge.net.
Search Term: ”Matt Ryan software engineer”: Google showed me love twice on page one, results three and seven, but Bing really showered down their devotion by giving me five results on the first page. I got top billing with the first result on the first page, along with results four, six, seven, and ten.
Bing really seems to be favoring me more than Google, but surely that’s not because I work for Microsoft; it must just be a coincidence. Anyway, it seems I’m fairly well associated with my profession, but there’s definitely still some work to be done.
Some other searches:
“Matt Ryan Microsoft”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 2
“Matt Ryan Mozy”: Google, page 1 results 2-6 (oddly, the first result is for a Matt Ryan on the mozy.com blog but that isn’t me, even though I worked for Mozy for a year); Bing, page 1 results 1,2,3,5,6,9
“Matt Ryan Novell”: Google, page 1 results 1-6, 8-10; Bing, page 1 results 1,2,4,5,8-10
“Matt Ryan Eclipse”: Google, page 1 results 1,3,5,7; Bing, page 1 results 1,4,6,8,9
“Matt Ryan IBM”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 results 1,10
“Matt Ryan Spillman”: Google, page 1 results 1,2; Bing, page 1 result 1
“Matt Ryan utah”: Google, page 2 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 1
“Matt Ryan 350z”: Google, page 1 result 2; Bing, page 1 result 3
“Matt Ryan world superbike”: Google, page 1 result 1 (and 2, and 3); Bing, page 1 result 5
“Matt Ryan supercross”: Google page 1 result 9; Bing, page 1 result 9
“Seeping Matter”: Google page 1 results 1-4,6,8; Bing, page 1 results 1-4
“Coding Frogs”: Google page 1 results 1,2; Bing, page 1 results 1,2
I hobbled in to work today, because I injured my knee over the weekend.
I work with this guy, let’s call him Newsom, who really doesn’t have a lot of patience for my sense of humor. This is kind of fun for me. So when I limped into my morning meeting, Newsom asked, “What’d you do?”
“I injured my knee this weekend,” I said.
“How?”
“I blew out my knee upgrading my computer to Windows 7.”
Of course this made Newsom mad because he thought I was trying to be funny. But actually, I wasn’t lying. Of course, I was trying to be funny; I’m always trying to be funny. But I really did hurt my knee upgrading my home computer to Windows 7.
You surely remember me blogging before about building my home PC, so of course you remember how I built it with two 750 GB 7200 RPM drives. I used one of these drives for the OS and programs and the other for data. Well, about a month ago I got a corrupt registry file that I fixed, caused by a bad sector on the disk.
As you know, getting a bad disk sector is like having someone move into your neighborhood who puts up Halloween lights. It starts out as just the one, but before long everyone is doing it, and now the whole neighborhood is ruined.
So, knowing that I was going to be upgrading to Windows 7 soon, I bought a new 320 GB 7200 RPM drive to replace my bad disk but set it aside until the upgrade day came.
Which was last Saturday. So I pulled the PC out from under the desk, sat down on the ground, and proceeded to pull the old hard drive out and put the new one in, and then I started the install.
It started up fine, but after a bit it said that it couldn’t use my ASUS DVD drive because it didn’t have the correct driver for it. Upgrading the firmware didn’t help, and ASUS didn’t offer any newer drivers.
Honestly, that thing never worked right anyway. So we headed down to Best Buy to get a new one.
I walked quickly through Best Buy and found me a nice HP DVD writer drive. As a bonus, it’s a SATA drive, not IDE, which is excellent since I had two open SATA slots. And it said it worked with Vista, which gave me confidence it would also work well for Windows 7. So I picked that one up.
I noticed walking around Best Buy that I was feeling a bit of a popping sensation in my knee every time I flexed it.
When I got home, I sat down on the floor again and opened the PC to install the new drive. I started the install again and everything went fine. But when I went to stand up, I felt a very intense, sharp, burning pain in my knee, and it has been like that ever since.
I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I now realize quite clearly: This is ASUS’s fault. Some might claim this is Microsoft’s fault. I’ve thought about this, though, and I know quite clearly that it is not Microsoft’s fault. This is primarily because I work there. And of course, it isn’t my fault. I mean, seriously!
Yeah, ASUS is to blame.
(By the way, the Windows 7 install went without a hitch after that. And, coming from a fan of Linux and Mac desktops, I have to say that Windows 7 is really excellent.)
UPDATE: Diagnosis is complex tear in right medial meniscus plus partially torn medial collateral ligament. Surgery to come.
Last Thursday, 9/3/09, was the grand opening of Microsoft’s Utah Development Center (UDC) at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi, where I work. We’ve been working here since the beginning of August, so this was more like the “official” grand opening and not the “technical” grand opening when we are first allowed to enter the building without wearing hard hats.
Microsoft invited Senator Orrin Hatch to attend the grand opening. In the spirit of full disclosure many of you who have read this blog for a while know that at times I have exercised my constitutional right to express my opinion on Senator Hatch on this blog before; he does represent my state after all. However, since he attended as a guest of my employer, I’ll keep that out of it for now, and express a sincere thanks to him for making our grand opening a special event for us.
Brad Anderson, the Corporate VP over UDC, was also here, as were other business dignitaries from Utah and some news folk. He demoed to Senator Hatch the Microsoft Surface that we borrowed from Redmond for a few days just for this occasion.
Brad Anderson tells Senator Hatch about Microsoft Surface (Photo Courtesy Andy Hodgkinson, reused by permission)
Then Senator Hatch picked up a plastic guitar, quickly formed a band, and began shredding to Guitar Hero World Tour.
Utah's Newest Band - Senator Hatch and the Important People (Photo Courtesy Andy Hodgkinson, reused by permission)
(They are not very good.)
About this time is when the press conference began. All us employee-types were ushered into the foyer for a photo. You know how when you are trying to do something important, you distract your little kids by giving them something else to do? And how you might even say to your eldest child, “Can you go entertain them while I get this done?” That is pretty much what happened. They sent Senator Hatch in there to keep us from coming back in and ruining the press conference.
Microsoft UDC People, and Senator Hatch. Yes, I'm in this photo - I'm the incredibly handsome one. (Photo Courtesy Andy Hodgkinson, reused by permission)
I know, it looks like a family photo.
Later, we found out that apparently Brad explained to the press that here in UDC we work on “virtualization technology, which is one of the hottest areas in the tech industry today.” This is pretty accurate.
Unfortunately for KSL News, who picked up the story, they don’t really understand what “virtualization” is. So when they graciously ran the news story, they made it sound like both the XBox 360 and the Surface are developed here in Utah. And the Deseret News article made it sound like a lot of the key features of upcoming Windows 7 were developed here in Utah also.
I came to work very excited the next day. I was excited to see how much we’d gotten done in just one month; I had no idea. Alas, I found that the news folk were misled. We are still working on enterprise desktop virtualization, just like we always have. I had to resign myself to the fact that our team is simply freakin’ awesome, not unbelievably freakin’ awesome. Oh well.
Hey everyone, just a quick note to let you know I’ve added reCAPTCHA support for comments. Ideally, I’d like comments to continue to work as before, which is, once you’ve had a comment approved in the past, your comments will auto-approve from that point on. If this is true the captcha should only show up for new commenters and the spam people.
If you’ve commented before but now you are getting the captcha challenge, please e-mail me and let me know, and I’ll see if I can fix it. No promises though.
Sorry for the inconvenience peeps.
Setting up a new computer is one of those things that should be enjoyable, but is mostly just tedium. That’s because there really isn’t a single OS out there that does for me everything I want in a single distribution – at least not one I’ve found. In truth Linux comes closest, but in the case of Linux, there are still some things (like Motocross Madness 2, one of the best PC games ever) that you just don’t get there.
And don’t start giving me lectures on Mac. Same problem applies there. Even without games, I still have pretty much the same setup overhead for Mac as anything else. Macs are great, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t write Mac software anymore, so I don’t have to be showing the Steve-love for a while now, until I start doing Mac development again.
Anyway, I’m willing to bet that at my new job my development machine will be a Windows machine – it’s just a hunch I have. So here’s the rundown of setting the machine up for usefulness and effectiveness.
| Basics | |
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First is Firefox. Firefox is a great web browser, fast and pretty reliable. Once you’ve got Firefox installed, you’ll want to grab a handful of Firefox plugins. When I set up next, I’ll be trying Google Gears, AdBlock, FireBug, Better GMail/GCal/GReader, Tab Mix Plus, FaviconizeTab, Fission, and GreaseMonkey of course. I keep IE around because sometimes I need it, but I make Firefox my default browser. |
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In addition to e-mail, I use calendaring and news readers (RSS/Atom) almost every day. A lack of decent free options in the past got me used to using Google for all of this stuff. But if I were to decide to use rich applications for these purposes instead, I’d give Thunderbird, Sunbird, and RSSOwl a try. |
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Next is OpenOffice.org. I know, most people use Microsoft Office. I realize it is better. I realize it is more powerful. I realize it is more ubiquitous. It is also expensive for my purposes. Stick with Office if you like it. |
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For instant messaging I use Pidgin. Since I’ve got friends using MSN/Hotmail, Google, and Yahoo! among others, Pidgin gives me a great way to be able to chat with all of them in a single IM client. And it has some great plugins that I’m eager to try out. |
| Multimedia | |
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For listening to and organizing music, I’ve been hearing a lot about Songbird and I think I’ll give that a try. I don’t buy music from iTunes and I don’t have an iPod (I know, lame). If I did I’d go with iTunes. Although, I do like iTunes Genius feature, so I might go with iTunes just for that. |
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When it comes to audio editing, Audacity is where it’s at. I’ve used Audacity to make ringtones from some of my music MP3s, to edit and mix recorded WAV files into MP3 files, and even for my son’s science project to examine the differences between sound waves. A must-have. |
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In doing research for this blog post, I ran across these apps: MediaCoder for translating and saving media files, Handbrake for ripping copies of your DVDs to formats for your handheld, and ImgBurn for creating DVDs. So I haven’t actually used them yet, but I can hardly wait to try them out. Managing video files and recordings is something I built my computer to do, but finding the software to get the job done has been tough. Hopefully I’ll find the answer among these tools. |
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DoubleTwist is a new application I’m eager to try for managing the transfer and synchronization of files from the PC to your handheld device. I’ve got a really cool little Sony Ericsson phone that is supposed to work flawlessly with DoubleTwist; can’t wait to find out. |
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I’ve used The Gimp for my photo editing for years and, for me, it removes any need for me to buy Photoshop. I’m sure Photoshop users would disagree. But hey, I’m not a graphic artist. I’m just a guy who needs to edit photos from time to time, even for my job, and can’t justify the expense of Photoshop. Lately, friends have been telling me about Paint.NET, and what they are telling me is that they like it better than The Gimp. That’s a high standard in my opinion. I’ll have to check it out. |
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Ah – where would I be without Steam? Steam’s client is free to download and serves as the launching pad for most of the games I play. A lot of games I really like, such as Audiosurf and World of Goo, I first found out about via Steam. Every time I launch it it seems there are more titles and more publishers available through Steam. |
| Security | |
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Truecrypt is a highly regarded application for encrypting data on your PC – one I’ve been meaning to try for a long time and plan to soon. I know, I should do this. Eraser, on the other hand, is one I’ve used for a long time. It makes it really easy to truly erase files from your computer by performing multiple overwrite passes to keep your data from being restored after you’ve intentionally deleted it. |
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For managing the applications that launch automatically when your PC starts, it is hard to beat Mike Lin’s Startup Monitor and Startup Control Panel applications. Startup Monitor runs discretely in the background, and just notifies you when some application has requested to be run at startup, allowing you to decide whether to accept this or not. Startup Control Panel offers a simple view of the applications already scheduled to run at startup, and allows you to disable them. Great for improving boot times and free resources, not to mention helpful in keeping your desktop secure from rogue apps running in the background doing who knows what. |
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Spybot Search & Destroy is essential for keeping your PC clear of spyware and adware that want to do evil things behind your back. It integrates with most common web browsers, including Firefox, to help lock them down to avoid evil cookies and other tracking software from sending information about you to others. |
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If you are up for trying a free PC antivirus application, ClamAV is the answer for you.
Okay, I haven’t used it and probably won’t for a while because I’ve already got a license for a security suite. But if you are in the market it is probably worth a try. It certainly could not be worse than BitDefender (that steaming pile). |
| Utilities | |
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Daemon Tools is a simple utility that can mount local disk images as filesystems. Mac does this very easily, of course, with .dmg files, but you need a tool like Daemon Tools to do it on a PC. Use Alcohol 120% to create mountable disk images from game CDs, for example, which will enable you in most cases to play PC games by mounting the disk image in Daemon Tools instead of inserting the CD. Or use it to mount ripped DVD ISOs when you are converting them to a format you can use on your handheld. |
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Many years ago, Novell had this really great product called iFolder that you used to synchronize files between multiple computers. Like many Novell products, it was a really awesome product that nobody ever heard about because Novell can’t figure out how to market anything. But Novell employees know about iFolder and most of them are like me – once I got used to using it I could hardly stand to not have it.
When I left Novell this was a big big problem for me. Finally Dropbox came along to address my problem. Dropbox allows you to do what iFolder did years ago – synchronize files between multiple computers. Dropbox is not nearly as full featured as the latest iFolder 3, but at least this one you can use without being a Novell employee. |
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As I’ve said before, once I started working for Mozy I realized that online backup should be considered essential for anyone. I really don’t know why a person wouldn’t use Mozy. Even if you are backing your data up on a second drive, USB drive, thumb drive, etc. you should be using Mozy, to automatically provide a secure backup copy of your data in a separate location – for recovery from fire damage, for example.
Having worked at Mozy for the past 14 months, I can vouch for their solid technology which is, in my opinion, the best in the industry without question. You need online backup, so why not use Mozy? You can back up 2GB for free or as much as you want for $5/month. |
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For archiving and compressing infrequently-used data, I recommend 7Zip. It will unpackage almost anything and will package in the most common formats, including Linux-compatible TAR/GZ formats. It’ll also do encryption and self-extracting packages in some formats. In other words, it’s pretty much everything you want in an archiving tool, for no cost. |
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I haven’t tried Everything yet but I plan to soon. This is a highly rated desktop search engine along the lines of Spotlight for Mac. Windows search I mostly use as last resort, but if this is anything like Spotlight I’ll use Everything all the time. |
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Freemind is a note-taking application that I’m eager to try. I’ve been needing one of these for some time, so I’m anxious to give it a shot. |
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I consider Cygwin an essential PC utility. Since I’m a lot more familiar with the Linux shell than the PC DOS-style shell, Cygwin provides me with a command prompt I’m comfortable with. Cygwin comes with a large number of helpful tools, like the GNU C complier suite, ssh/scp, wget, and others. |
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I’d also consider SQLite an essential PC utility. SQLite is a very simple file-based SQL engine that is very useful and freaking awesome. I’d recommend a PC utility for using SQLite but there really isn’t a good one. Probably your best option is SQLiteSpy. |
| Application Development | |
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I’ve said before that if a person’s going to learn to write software, I think the two most important languages to learn are C and Python. Since you already installed Cygwin you probably already have a C compiler on your machine, so now you need to get Python installed.
In addition to Python, Ruby seems pretty interesting and one you should definitely look at, in addition to Python (and not instead of Python, not yet anyway). You should note that if you plan to do Python and/or Ruby development, you’ll probably want to get used to doing that natively on your machine, and not via Cygwin. So don’t depend on the Cygwin Python and Ruby interpreters – use the native interpreters instead. If you must, use Java. Sometimes there’s stuff you just can’t do without it. |
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Ah, Eclipse: the mother of all development environments. Having worked closely with the Eclipse foundation and been part of starting an Eclipse project myself, I have a strong affinity for Eclipse. For Java development, I’d consider it one of the best, if not the best, Java IDE available. It’s also a great free alternative for a lot of other languages and application types. Get not only the base Eclipse, but the plugins for C/C++, PHP, RCP/Plugin development, Data Tools, Test and Profiling Tools, and Web Tools.
And if you aren’t going to get the Eclipse Python plugin, you’ll want to install Eric instead. Eric is a pretty good little Python IDE that works on both Linux and Windows. You’ll need PyQt for Eric to work I think. If you are really wanting to do development in C# and .NET instead, but don’t have the .NET platform, you could try SharpDevelop. I haven’t tried it though, so I can’t say – and in my new job, I’ll be doing my C# development in Visual Studio, which is certainly better. |
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If you want to try out simple GUI programming, especially cross-platform GUI programming, try wxWidgets. You can program directly to wxWidgets in C or C++, or in Python using wxPython. If you think GUI programming with wxPython is your cup of tea, you might also want to try Boa Constructor, which is a good Python development environment with GUI building tools. |
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For web development on a Windows PC, I love WAMP. This simple bundle offers Apache, MySQL, and PHP all together in a single package that you can easily start and stop all as one.
(This is the part where the Mozy PHP bigots comment to tell me how rotten PHP is, and where they tell me how much better Perl is, and where I nod and pretend to agree in order to keep the peace. So bring it on.) WAMP is great for your typical free-style web application development, especially if you are building from an existing framework, which is quite likely to be built in PHP. If you’re building from scratch, however, you would probably want to strongly consider Ruby on Rails, in which case you’ll want to install RubyGems to get Rails and other goodies. Finally, I hear Kompozer is a pretty good HTML-style editor and page builder, and I might give that a shot sometime. |
Yesterday was my last day at Mozy.
I left Novell and came to Mozy just over a year ago. For a variety of reasons, I chose to leave Novell even though in my case I had to take a cut in pay to do it. I don’t regret this decision at all. I’ve learned tremendously from Mozy, met a lot of really great people, and really loved working at Mozy. It’s a great company with a great product, but the best part about Mozy is the people – there are some really great people there, many of which I didn’t really get to work with as much as I would have liked, and I’ll definitely miss the opportunity to work with them.
At my one year mark last May, I took a step back to look objectively at my job at Mozy. This happened to coincide quite closely with EMC’s recently announced employee 5% pay cut, which of course also affected then-current Mozy employees. (By the way, you have to love how EMC told the press that they were “asking” employees to take the cut – it was more like “we’d like to ask you to take this cut in pay, or leave.”) I looked at the tradeoff I’d made a year earlier, now with greater insight, along with the adjusted compensation, and realized that I wouldn’t have made the decision to come to Mozy last year after all.
It’s an odd conclusion because I still would have made the decision last year, knowing everything I’d learn and the relationships I’d build.
It was at this point that a great colleague from a former team at Novell, one of the two best teams I’ve ever worked on (the other also from Novell), told me that the company he is now with was hiring, and asked if I would be interested.
Truth is, he and I had discussed this exact position about a few months before, and I’d told him at the time that I was happy where I was. But then EMC changed the dynamics of our employer/employee relationship, and when he approached me again, by this time I was willing to consider a change. And as my new employer and I considered it, we both came to the conclusion that it would be a good thing.
I’m really looking forward to this new opportunity. I’ll learn a lot, I hope to contribute a lot, and know for a fact that the team I’ll be on there is outstanding. At the same time I’ll miss the cool of Mozy. It’s still a great place with great people. Especially if you are considering working there now – the 5% cut does not apply to new hires, and I know they are still looking for great engineers among other things.
It’s been almost two years since Guitar Hero II came out for the XBox 360. I know this because that is pretty much why I bought one. That, plus I was working at Novell at the time, and our project had just been cancelled again, so I was kinda bummed, and I needed to blow a lot of money to feel better about myself.
Amber said yes, and I was pretty stoked. So I bought myself and XBox 360 from BestBuy. I’d heard about the now-famous Red Ring Of Death, so uncharacteristically I decided to pay for the extended warranty.
Unsurprisingly, our XBox 360 eventually decided to sport the Red Ring Of Death – a fate, much like real death, that is unavoidable for older XBoxen. What is pretty amazing about this experience is that ours chose to manifest the Red Ring Of Death about one month before the warranty expired.
Really. That is pretty incredible. That’s how I know it has been almost two years since Guitar Hero II came out.
Microsoft, I hear, has been pretty cool about handling this Red Ring Of Death thing, and since my machine was less than two years old I figured I could get Microsoft to replace it. But then I remembered having purchased the extended warranty. So I took it in to BestBuy today to see if they would replace it.
(By the way, can you guess what the customer service associate typed into the “Reason for Return” field on the return form when I brought back my XBox 360? ”Red Ring Of Death.” I don’t know if that is funny or embarrassing.)
So here’s what happened:
Yeah, this Red Ring Of Death thing ended up being pretty sweet. I completely upgraded my XBox 360, got some new games, a new controller, and reset the factory warranty for, uh, negative $40? Sweet.
Only bad thing: I lost all my old saved games, because I can’t figure out how to save them to a memory stick. Am I a doofus, or is it just not doable on the XBox 360? It seems like a software engineer should be able to figure that out.
Oh well. It is a small price to pay for such a sweet deal. I’m looking forward to 23 months from now, when hopefully my XBox 360 will Red Ring Of Death again.
CodingFrogs – My Development Blog