From my desktop, reassembled, restored to working order, and ready for the adventure of conversion to Windows Vista Beta 2, occurring live tomorrow at 9:00 am Pacific at the Windows Vista Install Fair in Building 33.
Problems I anticipate tomorrow:
- Two massive (97.8GB and 111GB) ext2 partitions storing all of my data and media, which are accessible to windows via an open source driver and some registry hacks.
- A messed up ITE integrated RAID controller that is flaky even with the official Windows XP drivers
- Most of the programs that I have installed to test Vista with are designed for making rips of DVDs… not sure I really want to be filing bug reports about those.
Problems I never dreamed of that happened today:
All I can really say is UPS must have dropped this at least 3 times to pull this off:
“Please remain seated at all times while the vehicle is in motion”
You’ll note that that audio card WAS screwed in when it left Green Bay. So where’s the screw? Oh! There it is! Shorting out the video card! (Sorry, you can’t see it in this pic… bad angle) Good Lord.
But, since I had my camera handy, here’s a happier bonus picture of my office at Microsoft:
The two boxes at the left are mine. One’s a decent Dell, the other’s a 3.00 GHz Pentium D with 2GB RAM. It’s fast. You’ll see I’ve also got a pretty nice 19″ LCD (You have to be an FTE to get dual monitors), a wireless keyboard and mouse (though the “ergonomic” keyboard took some getting used to… even Enlight didn’t prepare me for using one full time.), a little 5-port switch and a 4-port KVM. I pretty much showed up on the first day, they handed me boxes with all this new stuff in it and said “go nuts!” It was cool 8-). Oh, and I almost forgot to mention the Microsoft cup, which I think at the time was just water, but could also have been free coffee, tea, hot chocolate, flavored carbonated water (“Sparkling Rain” or something like that), or almost any Coca-Cola product.
I’ll have to post another picture of my office next week, as I’m actually going to be moving offices into an “intern bay” with 5 or so other interns… that should be interesting.