I was trying to figure out how to write this post without sounding self-important. I was thinking maybe enumerating some of my teenage aspirations and how they panned out. Or maybe relating the story of when my mom told me I could be the next Bill Gates, who, as she explained, “wrote the first DOS” (yes, I realize this is inaccurate, but my mom isn’t exactly a computer scientist). But I shall not bore you, dear reader, I’ll just cut to the chase:

I’m going to work for Microsoft!

I’ve been hired to be a Premier Field Engineer (PFE) specializing in .NET. What is a PFE, you ask? Well, they’re experts. That’s pretty much the job description. Go to premier client sites and fix stuff. Or conduct a training or chalk talk. Or help a client optimize their code. Like I said, the job is to be an expert. There’s a lot of emphasis on getting training and specialization, which is something I am especially looking forward to, as well as plenty of encouragement to blog and participate in the .NET community, which is something I’ve been looking for in a job for a long time.

I got Scott Hanselman’s permission to borrow his Venn diagram from his own Blue Badge post, because it’s just so perfect. I’ve spent a lot of time in various combinations of two of those circles, but I’ve never been lucky enough to be in the intersection of all three. In my interview, I told my soon-to-be manager that this was my dream job, at least judging by the criteria Scott explained. I’m looking forward to this new adventure, and I can hardly wait to see what it brings.

The HP Touchpad is HP's tablet.  You may remember it from the mildly amusing commercials with Russell Brand.  It runs an operating system called webOS, formerly of Palm.  This is not to be confused with the other two big tablet operating systems; Apple iOS (featured on Apple's iPad) and Android (Google's tablet/phone OS - incidentally, I have an Android tablet, an Acer Iconia A500, which I love dearly and will probably gush about in a blog post soon).  

Well, in case you haven’t heard the big news in the computer world, HP is getting out of the PC business.  As part of that, they've instructed retailers to liquidate their Touchpads starting tomorrow (Saturday, 8/20/2011).  The 16 GB version is going to be $100, and the 32 GB version will be $150.  So if you have any desire for a tablet with a functional web browser that runs Amazon's Kindle software and Angry Birds, this would be the right time.

Me, I prefer my Android tablet, and obviously the future software possibilities for the Touchpad/webOS are, well, a little in doubt.  I wouldn't be surprised to see some other big player come in and buy webOS from HP, though.  So if you've got an interest in a tablet and a Benjamin to drop, I'd say go for it.  At that price, what do you have to lose?  It’s a tablet, it runs Kindle software, yet it still costs $40 less than a Kindle (without “special offers”).

Okay, just spent an hour or so with our new Kinect. My initial impressions:

It's definitely geared toward kids and casual adults. I got bored with the included minigames pretty quickly, just as I did with the Wii. I'm expecting to get more mileage out of something like Dance Central or that exercise one that's coming out soon.

If you're worried about space in your living room, good - be worried. As it is, I had to push our loveseat back by about three feet, and I still just barely had enough room. Bearing that in mind, I really don't want to show this thing to the kids, because they're going to want to play it every damned day. And moving the loveseat back where it goes is a PITA because you have to lift it so you don't get it caught on the edge of the living room rug.

The Xbox navigation with Kinect is kinda neat, but I'm not going to move my furniture around just to use it. I'll stick with my tried and trued remote control or Xbox controller.

More thoughts to come...

I'm running for the Board of Alderman in my hometown of Smithville, Missouri.  I've set up a campaign site, and I get to meet the public as a candidate for the first time tonight at a candidate forum being hosted by the local newspaper.  Whether I win or lose, I am honored to have the opportunity to get to know the members of my community, and I hope I get to serve as their alderman.  Whether you live in my ward or not, please be sure to vote on April 6!

Watch this.

I'm doing a side project that is part of the Gamer Lounge experience in Best Buy.  It gets unveiled near St. Louis this weekend. 

If you pay attention, you get a hint as to what I've been working on.  Right now, I'm under NDA, so I can't say much about it, but I will say this…  I jumped into this project feet first.  Oorah.

When doing the slides for my optional parameter video, it never even occurred to me that PowerPoint may be able to accommodate aspect ratios other than 4:3.  While watching my video after it posted to YouTube, I started wondering if PowerPoint would support 16:9.  Sure enough, from the Design tab, click “Page Setup,” and the first configurable property, “Slides sized for,” lets you pick from several aspect ratios, including 16:9.

Wish I’d thought to look for that sooner.

So I downloaded the bits from MSDN, and dropped it on my Eee.  The process just couldn’t be easier.

1. Start with a 4 GB USB memory stick.  Partition it with a single primary partition, formatted to FAT32.  Then copy the contents of the Windows 7 disk onto that stick.
2. Reboot your Eee.  Press F2 to go into the BIOS setup, and disable fast boot.  Reboot again.  Press ESC to boot to the USB stick.
3. Perform the Windows 7 setup. 
4. Boot into Windows 7.  It will recognize every piece of hardware except for the ACPI device.
5. Install the latest Intel graphics driver (Windows 7 RC version found here).  This is required for the ACPI driver to function properly.
6. Install the ACPI driver from Asus, found here under “ATK.”
7. Enjoy Windows 7 goodness!

My wife, Michelle, and I have three sons, Connor (4), Cade (2), and Collin (1 month).  While Collin isn’t quite old enough to get into computers, Connor and Cade both love it.  Their favorite educational programs are the Reader Rabbit series, followed closely by several Blue’s Clues games. 

To make life easy on mom and dad, as well as to protect the CDs, we ripped all their games as ISO images using ISO Recorder and keep them stored on my wife’s laptop.  Even using the ISOs, the procedure for playing the games at the kids’ request was still a pain in the neck:

1. Log on to the laptop using either mine or my wife’s account.
2. Navigate to Control Panel and turn down the mouse sensitivity to something more appropriate for a preschooler.
3. Mount the ISO for the game they’ve requested using Virtual Clonedrive.
4. Launch the game.
5. Watch the kids close the laptop lid when they were done, forcing the laptop into standby mode with these full-screen kids’ apps still running and the mouse sensitivity turned way down.  Meaning the first thing we’d have to do when we woke up the laptop was bring up task manager to kill the kids’ app (which would inevitably be pegging the CPU at 100%) and then dig into control panel to readjust the mouse sensitivity.

At some point in there, I realized there had to be a better way.

So the first thing I did was give the kids their own account on that PC.  I created a limited-access account with no password (my wife and I both keep our accounts password protected).  I logged on with that account, set the icon size to large, the mouse pointer scheme to extra large, the folder options to “single-click”,  and set the mouse sensitivity to low.

Then to ensure that the kids didn’t do anything on that system that I didn’t want them to, I ran a tool called Windows SteadyState.  This thing rocks.  It lets you lockdown a PC (and individual accounts on that PC) to a very high degree.  It’s not unlike some of the more draconian GPOs I’ve seen, like in schools and libraries, but it works on a standalone PC. 

It took me some trial and error to get the lockdown to what I thought was an appropriate level.  For example, I left the new-style start menu enabled so that there were no icons placed on the desktop that I didn’t place there myself.  I also re-enabled Fast User Switching, which SteadyState disabled, by setting HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DisableFastUserSwitching to 0.

So now I had a solution to a lot of my problems, just by hitting Windows-L to drop to the Welcome Screen, and then clicking on the kids’ new profile.  The last step was making it easy for the kids to launch their programs.

Putting big, single click icons on the desktop was a no-brainer, but I obviously couldn’t expect the kids to mount the ISO images before launching their programs.  Luckily, Virtual CloneDrive has a command line mount utility.  Good old-fashioned batch files to the rescue!  Here’s an example of the files I wrote, this one to launch Reader Rabbit Toddler:

@echo off
start /wait "c:\program files\elaborate bytes\virtualclonedrive\vcdmount.exe" "c:\disk images\Reader_Rabbit_Toddler.iso"
timeout 7
cd "\Program Files\The Learning Company\Reader Rabbit Toddler"
rrtw32.exe

The “start /wait” was, I had hoped, so that the CD would be available to the system immediately after that line was done executing.  It wasn’t, so I added the “timeout 7” for 7 more seconds of waiting before trying to launch the program.  The Blue’s Clues games, interestingly, will show a screen asking the user to insert the disk, so the wait isn’t an issue with them.

Finally, I created shortcuts to these batch files on the kids’ desktop, using the icons from the actual executables. 

Now my boys can easily launch the programs they want without any intervention from mom and dad, and mom and dad don’t have to worry about the boys getting into things they shouldn’t.