*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

Imagine you are sitting in your money making cube at work one day and an email comes into your inbox that reads: “Do you want to go to Vegas for 4 days and stay at the Paris Hotel? If so, reply and let us know.” Crazy I know but we aren’t the 12th best company to work for in the nation for nothing you know! So on May 19th at about 7:00 in the morning, 175 team members and myself from Quicken Loans jumped on the Fun Jet and headed to Vegas. When the plane landed charter buses were waiting to take us to the hotel. As soon as we got off the charter bus, DWal(pronounced D-Wall, in the orange shirt in the pic, also my roommate for the trip) and myself were looking for some food so we hit “Le Cafe” in the Paris with about eight other team members for some breakfast. After eating, about 4 of us wanted to go hit the tables. Let the games begin!

Today was the first day of the Office Developer Convention 2005 in Redmond, Wa. This is the first time Microsoft has put on a convention for developers revolving around their Office products. When most people think of Office they think of three or four basic apps. Usually this includes Word, Excel, Acccess and Powerpoint. There are however a lot more products that round out the Office tools. Other packages include Front Page, InfoPath, One Note, Live Communication, Visio, Outlook, Publisher, Project, and their server counter parts such as Live Communication Server, Sharepoint Portal Server, Content Management Server, and Exchange Server. With this and many other products that make up the total package there is plenty of things to talk about for a conference so let’s get started.

A few weeks ago Apple introduced a new computer known as the Mac Mini. It is small and cute and is being marketed as a cheap way to own a Mac. Before you run out and buy one, you should stick around to see my comparisons.

It has been several years since I had a dedicated gaming machine. I decided it was time to put together a new Windows machine to play games on, and to continue working on my MCAD certification in .Net. The last big gaming PC I had was way back when I ran Affordable Computers. I honestly let that machine go down after I became the proud owner of a Powerbook. At the time I didn’t have a need for a PC workstation so I stopped using it and just put it up on the shelf. Fast forward a few years from the Powerbook purchase and things have changed. I am no longer doing web development in PHP everything is in .Net now and although I do own a Shuttle PC (AMD 2.4GHz) it just isn’t fast enough for today’s games. As a result I built a new gaming machine with a computer loan from work. It is a perk working for one of the 12th best companies in the US.

I am standing here in the mall waiting on my oil to be changed when I hear familar music from my childhood. I walk over to the vendor and it is super mario playing on a TV. Not only was mario on there but duck hunt and other games totaling 80 games in all. The crazy thing is that all 80 games were in one remote control. This just begs the question, in another few years when are the current PS2 and XBOX games going to fit into one controller?