Seeping Matter

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.

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:

• On April 6, 2007, I purchased my XBox 360 from BestBuy for $399.
• Some time ago, Sadie gave one of my XBox 360 controllers a drink of orange juice.  It got heartburn and never recovered.  After that, we let Oakley play with it since it was completely non-functional.
• Last night I packaged up the XBox 360, with all the accessories and the non-functional controller, to take back to BestBuy.
• Today they gave me a brand new one, which means:
  • My new XBox 360 has a 60 GB hard drive instead of a 10 GB hard drive.
  • My new XBox 360 has an HDMI output where the other did not.
  • My new XBox 360 came with two new video games where the other did not.
  • My new XBox 360 comes with a brand new manufacturer’s warranty – clock reset.
  • My new XBox 360 only costs $299. So I got also got a sweet BestBuy gift card for the difference, which I am thinking might be well used to buy something like Fable II.

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.

Sorry it has been a while. A new job means a new schedule and I’m just getting used to it. But around these parts, we don’t really care about jobs. We care about being a half bad boy, and I have to say I’ve made some real progress in this area.

The first, essential step was to restore my leather jacket status, which was done over the Christmas holidays. I now have a black leather jacket, like before. This was a very important step – I literally felt the levels of half-badness rise once I put it on for the first time!

The second and probably biggest step to increased half-bad-boydom was when I acquired my electric guitar, a new Ibanez RG-350 SP1. You can see a picture of it here to the left. I have to say, this is a pretty sweet guitar. It takes me about 15 minutes to get the thing into tune, but once it is in tune it stays in tune quite well even with the Edge III Tremolo on the bridge – and you can bet that I use that sucker. I am the king of the dive-bomb!

You also gotta love the sharktooth inlays on the neck. The neck is nice and fast, the guitar is not too heavy, and very versatile. It has a great sound for all kinds of music.

If you are going to have an electric guitar, you also need an amplifier, so I got one as well. The Line6 Spider III series amps are, in my opinion, great amps for the money. I picked up this little 15 watt practice amp for $100. That’s a pretty good price for a brand new amp that offers reverb, tremolo and chorus along with the distortion. Four programmable presets make it real easy to find the right sound for a song quickly.

Sorry, this reads like an ad, but I really love this stuff. I can’t really play very well, but I am very good at making lots of really awesome loud noises. Sometimes, all you really need to do is make some loud noises to get in touch with your half bad self.

Another good way to do that is by playing Guitar Hero II, which I bought for my XBox 360. Finding this game was no easy feat. I visited several stores before I was able to find it at a nearby K-Mart. (Good advice for the future – if you can’t find something at a mainstream store, try picking it up at K-Mart, where nobody shops unless they absolutely HAVE TO.) This game deludes me into thinking that I really can play the guitar, until I move over to my real guitar and jump back into reality. Guitar Hero II – a good time in a $90 box.

All combining to make me more half bad than I used to be. When you combine this with the job switch, things are definitely looking up!