eWorld.UI - Matt Hawley

Boy is that a good question, and I’m sure my fiance would like to know as well. Wow, its been over a month now at my new position within Microsoft, and I’m happy to announce that I’ve been apart of releasing my first build here! It’s been a stressful/exhausing past week and a half as we prepped our stuff for my team’s first build. I spent about 75 hours working 2 weeks ago, as well as about 70 hours this week. Yeah, I’m glad I have a weekend now…as I worked for about 15 days straight.

I was lucky enough to get contacted from Apress concerning my blog post praising the FogBugz book that Mike Gunderloy put together for the release of FogBugz 4.0. I just checked out their site, and it looks like my quotes up. Sweet.

So my first week at Microsoft has been one hell of a week. I went through 1.5 days of NEO (New Employee Orientation), be placed into an office that I’m sharing with Cleve (hopefully I’ll get my own office soon, but we’re crammed for space in the building), and be placed on my first development team. At this time, I found out that we’re right in the middle of the spec creation, so trying to pick up the project & learn all my NEO stuff in just 2.5 days has been real fun. The experience is truly different from that of anything I’ve done before…as there’s really nothing like sitting in the lounge all day whiteboarding ideas and writing tech specs.

Heh, I’ve been preparing (link 1, 2, 3, 4) my April Fools joke for the last two weeks now. Boy are a lot of people gullable. To think that so many people would actually believe that Microsoft would hire a good ‘ol boy from Illinois and move him and his fiance across country. I do have to say that my story was very elaborate, though the indications are there that it was all fake (no names used, no specific dates except for my “on-site” interview). What’s even funnier is that I completely made up the Microsoft division that “hired” me. I even got some Microsoftees to join in (thanks gretchen & Cleve!), secretly of course, to help out in making this seem reliable.

After contacting support for BackupPlus, they were of no help, or rather said for me to contact Microsoft directly to get help on the issue. Hah, right. I purchased your software which implies you supporting it…YOU contact Microsoft, not me. There’s some issue when registering components that they “say” works on their installation…heh, I doubt it does they just don’t know what the hell their doing.

So I promptly installed 2003 SP1 last night, only to find out that it breaks one of my most used applications…Backup Plus. This application is great, when its working. It allows you to define backup sets, then compress them & store them just about anywhere you wish. For me, that was storing on CD-RW media. Simply installing a packet writer application allowed me to do this.

Okay, this blog post on CNet is just sad, they’re making fun of the fact that 2 kids in Kansas were going to swap an XBox for a .38–caliber revolver. It seems to me like their down playing the seriousness of the situation just a bit too much. I’m not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but the CNet news articles, which are now blog posts are degrading and degrading fast. This is just another prime example, and I will seriously think about not reading anything that comes from CNet from now on.