Microsoft Student Insider Training Day 1: Travel
Greetings everybody!
Sorry for my recent absence from the blog. Between my trip to Microsoft that I am about to tell you about, finals, my grandmother's cancer and a few other things, my life has been all kinds of crazy lately. Hopefully, starting today, I can get back to blogging regularly like I vowed at the first of the year. Anyway, lets talk my trip to Microsoft!
Since technically, the first day of the trip was the travel day, I will talk about the travel day in this post and then the extra exciting stuff will start in the next post. As of right now, I expect to do a series of at least 4 posts about this trip which will likely have a few other posts sprinkled in and some major news about the Global Geek News Podcast to wrap everything up before we get back to your regularly scheduled blog. Anyway, lets talk the travel day!
Wednesday morning I woke up far earlier than should be allowable by law to make sure I made it to the airport in Colorado Springs with plenty of time to go through the theater that is the TSA and wait at my gate for a couple of hours. Normally the only part of this that I would hate would be the TSA experience but having a bad case of the runs did not make things pleasant. Luckily, I had probably the easiest experience with the TSA that I have ever had. I did have to remove my Kindle from my bag but that was to be expected since they have had issues seeing through it before. Apparently listening to the TSA's guide on how to pack your bag that is posted on their site is quite helpful if you want to have an easy time getting through their checkpoint. The flights from Colorado Springs to Denver and from Denver to Seattle were nice flights but I was rather annoyed that there was no TV in the headrests of the planes which has always been the case on every Frontier flight I have flown in the past. I am still rather irritated about this but now I know to be a bit more picky about what planes I fly on. Other than this, the only scary part of the flight was when we were over Seattle, getting close to landing when suddenly we hit a bad pocket of air or something and the plane went 45 degrees to the left and then 45 degrees to the right before we leveled back out. I am sure we had a decent drop in altitude with it as well.
After the flight, it took me longer than expected to meet up with my driver that was supposed to pick me up and go to the hotel. After waiting around for a while with no sign of anybody holding a Microsoft Student Insider sign, I finally received a call from the driver wondering where I was and where to meet me. Turns out, he was apparently on the other end of the baggage claim area that was no short distance away, but luckily we met in the middle and headed to the car. At this point, I had the pleasure of meeting up with two of the other insiders, Tom Ziegmann (Twitter) and Joe Osborne (Twitter), a couple of great guys that I felt right at home with.
After a decent drive to the hotel which was the Mariot hotel in the Redmond Town Center, we checked in to our rooms and received a backpack full of goodies like an MSDN cup and some spending money for food and whatever else on our travel days. We then decided to kill some time and go walking around the Redmond Town Center to see what the area had to offer. I was quite impressed with how nice the area was and just what kind of stores where there. They had all kinds of restaurants, and stores ranging from a board game store to a Victoria's Secret. Yes, there was even a Starbucks. After walking around for a while, we decided to go our separate ways for the night. I went and had dinner with a couple of my cousins at a restaurant in the town center while they went into Seattle to have dinner at Anthony's. My food was good, but I think they got to eat a lot better than I did that night.
After that, I went to the board game store with my cousins and then called it a night. Having woken up at 4:30am that morning, I was quite tired. That was the end of the travel day and the best was yet to come. Check back tomorrow for day 2, my first day at Microsoft!
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PDC 2009 Day 2 & 3: Silverlight 4 and IE 9
Greetings Readers!
For those of you who missed my PDC 2009 adventures for Day 1, you can check those out here because now it is time to talk about the rest of PDC.
Day two started off identical to the first except I didn't have to register. I immediately headed toward the keynote hall and waited in line with everybody else for the keynote, a keynote which I found to be more interesting than the first keynote.
The day 2 keynote consisted of announcements such as Internet Explorer 9 being in the works for just a couple of weeks and already is making considerable progress on the Acid 3 test. While that is good to hear, I was most impressed with the fact that according to their very early benchmarks, it has nearly caught up to all of the other major browsers in terms of speed. They are also bring GPU acceleration to IE 9 to help take some of the computational burden away from the CPU which is something I have been asking of basically every internet associated software for a long time now. For only 3 weeks worth of work, they are making some amazing strides in the new version of the browser. As impressive as that may be, until I get to play with it and test it out, I will still refer to it as Internet Exploder and point people to Firefox or Opera.
The announcement that I was really excited about was Silverlight 4. As many of you know, I have a hatred for Flash and pretty much anything created by Adobe so it is easy to see why I am so excited about Silverlight 4 and the new features it brings. What are those features? Silverlight 4 is twice as fast as Silverlight 3 and has a 30% faster start time. Silverlight 4 can now access your webcam and mic so now streaming sites like Ustream or Justin.TV have the option of moving to a platform that I believe is faster, more efficient (especially with the GPU acceleration) and more secure than Flash. They showed off some of the awesome things that Silverlight 4 can do including basic DVR functionality on live streams which I can't way to get my hands on. I was also impressed to hear that Silverlight is now available on 45% of all internet connected devices. I can't help but wonder how high that would be if Apple would allow Silverlight on the iPhone/iPod Touch but since it won't even let Flash on there, I don't see it happening anytime soon. While that is a great number, I think it can be greatly improved with some strategic partnerships.
The rest of day 2 and 3 were filled up with sessions although I didn't go to very many on day 3 just because there wasn't much that was in my fiend of interest. I did go to several sessions related to Windows 7 which were quite interesting. A couple of the sessions had to do with DirectX 11 in Windows 7 and how programmers could use it for parallel computing and how it worked to improve graphics in games and stuff. Probably the most interesting Windows 7 related session was about changes to the kernel. Although I was interested in most all of the changes whether they were for security or performance or whatever, I was most interested by the changes made to help battery life. It was interesting to find out how unused cores would be put into a sleep state when they aren't being used as a way of conserving power. I was also fascinated by the fact that since most processes don't need the precision being checked every so many milliseconds, that processes would be group to fire around the same time so that there can be a period of rest in between the process check-ins which also saves battery life. There are truly some great changes with Windows 7 and since I am told video of the session(s) have been uploaded to the PDC site, I will likely link to them at a later time since I can't now because the PDC site seems to be offline.
I was going to talk about the GeekFest that took place on the night of day 2 in this post, but since I have video to go with it, I will make it a separate post that I will post later this week. I might also write another post on a couple of other topics but for now, this will be my last PDC related post that doesn't have pictures or video which will likely be in posts of their own once I get around to editing the video. It was am amazing experience and I look forward to sharing more of it with you in the videos to come.
I am now a Microsoft Student Insider, changes are coming
Greetings Readers!
I have some absolutely amazing news to share with all of you. As of today, I am officially a Microsoft Student Insider. What is that you ask? Essentially, it is an unpaid job to blog about various topics that they would like me to blog about. There is one student insider to talk about a specific topic. In my case, I am the chosen one to speak about all things Windows 7. Normally, I wouldn't take an unpaid position, but the perks of the job are good enough that I don't mind it.
While I will be writing a minimum of 15 blog posts for Microsoft over the next year, I am also being sent, all expenses paid, to whatever conferences they want to send me to cover. While I don't yet know a schedule of everywhere I am going to be sent, I do know that I am being sent to cover PDC in LA all of next week. It seems a bit fast considering I just got the job today, but I don't think I can complain too much about a free trip to LA and entrance into an expensive conference and I am getting some awesome stuff too. As part of being a Student Insider, to help me cover the event and others like it, I am being given a Flip HD camcorder, an ASUS eee pc netbook, a Microsoft shirt and some various other things to help with cab fair and such. I am also told that I will have access to talk to higher up people within Microsoft like various product managers and stuff, possibly even some board members either next week or at other times.
I will tell the story of how I got the position in either another post or on the next episode of the podcast which is at a time to be determined since I will be en route to LA at our normal recording time, but I do want to address what this means for the blog.
Although I have wanted a sponsor for some time for the show or the blog or whatever, mainly to help pay for my hosting fees, domain fees and such, at the same time, I have always dreaded the idea. I have build the podcast and this blog on a goal of being 100% honest, 100% of the time with no BS. I have always dreaded the idea of the sponsor because I don't like the feeling that I can't say what I want to say about a topic because I don't want to worry about offending them. The last thing I want to do is open up my mouth and scare way people who want to throw money at me. When I found out more about this position, I hesitated for a bit because of this, but I have decided that despite what I am being given or where I am being sent, I will do everything I can not to allow it to influence my opinions so that I appear to be nothing but a mouthpiece for a company. I will gladly blog about the topics that they request I blog about, but in the end, I will express how I really feel. I will do my absolute best not to censor myself. I will allow Microsoft or anybody else to present their case to me and I will forward it on to my audience, but in the end, my opinion is my own.
If all goes the way I hope, the type of content on here and the podcast will not change, there will just be more Windows 7 related stuff and when it is something that Microsoft wants me to talk about, I will make that very clear so that you can factor that into your judgment of my writing when you read my posts.
I primarily see this as an opening door that I have been trying to work my way into for the past 2 years. As many know, I have been trying to get a job at Microsoft for nearly 2 years and I see this as my way in and I will do whatever I can to achieve my dream while keeping my integrity in regards to Global Geek News but I suppose we will see how it plays out. Anyway, there may or may not be a podcast next week. Since I will likely be in flight when the show is recorded, it will definitely not be released on Tuesday like normal. There is a small chance of recording on Wednesday but at this point, I am not holding my breath. It is most likely the case that we will end up skipping a weeks show but I don't yet know. I will keep you all informed.
More to come!
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We are looking for writers!
Greetings Readers!
We are looking for people interested in writing for the Global Geek News Blog. If you want to write news as it happens or if you just want to share your opinions in the media, entertainment and technology space, we want to hear from you!
In effort to have fresh content all of the time on the blog, we are looking for dedicated writers with thoughts and opinions on just about anything. All we ask is for a few posts a week at least but we won't limit you on how much you can write. You are welcome to never stop writing if you want! If you are interested in writing for us, shoot me an email at pcnerd37@globalgeeknews.com or put your response in the comments with a way to contact you (email preferred).
I am departing from TechVi
Greetings readers!
I come bearing a little bit of sad news today. As many of you know, since the middle of May, I have been writing over at the awesome tech news site, TechVi, but as of today, that is over. Unfortunately, things are too busy right now for me to try to write on a regular basis.
Three weeks ago, I started going back to school and what free time I enjoyed is now occupied with school related tasks. That is part of the reason why I haven't been blogging here quite as much as I would like and why this week's podcast was a couple days late (but it is up now, so go listen). Things are also getting busier for me at work so I don't have the down time at work to write or anything like I used to. I wish there were more hours in a day so that I could do everything but unfortunately my time machine still has some bugs to be worked out. I am not giving up anything on the Global Geek News so you guys have nothing to worry about there.
For the time being, this will be the exclusive place where I write all of my tech related opinions. Of course you can still find out what is going on with the rest of my life and various other things at my personal blog, Pcnerd37.com.
I really hate having to leave TechVi, but until things improve, it must be done because I can't be relied upon for regular writing until things improve or I can find a way to be more efficient. I do hope to write for them again in the future as it was the best writing experience I have ever had, I am just not sure how soon the future will get here.
I want to thank all of the guys at TechVi for everything they have done for myself and the site in my time there. Randall Bennett, the owner of TechVi is an amazing guy to work for and I look forward to working with him in the future. The dedication and skills of the entire team are amazing and I wish all of them great success in the future. You guys rock!
A slight change from the last announcement
Greetings Readers!
After seeing that things have improved traffic wise now that the holiday is over, I have decided I might have been too hasty in my changes to the blog. I am still going to bring back the Geek News Daily Podcast and cut down on short posts, but I don't think I will cut them out entirely. I will not put my focus on the short posts, but as news breaks and I have time, I will post news. I will put my emphasis on longer posts but you will still be able to get your tech news from here if you wish. If you want to get the latest news, I recommend checking out the Geek News Daily Podcast when I bring it back. I was going to bring it back today but I am sick so its not going to happen most likely. Hopefully it will be here tomorrow. Anyway, if you want to get your news as it breaks, I highly recommend checking out the other site that I write for, TechVi.com. Anyway, that is whats going on and I will tweak my strategy as I feel it is necessary.
Check out the latest Global Geek News Podcast!
-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray
A major change in the direction of the Global Geek News Blog
Greetings readers!
After last weeks post saying that this month will be do or die for the blog, I decided there is no use in delaying the inevitable. While it looks like things might turn around now that the holiday is over, I have decided that it is time for a change. This change won't be a completely unfamiliar change, but it is a departure from my recent blogging strategy.
A short time ago, I announced that in effort to get the blog to grow, I would start doing small posts throughout the day to make sure you get the latest in tech news. Unfortunately, for the amount of reads that the posts go, it wasn't worth the time suck that it had become. So I am officially announcing that my idea of doing small posts throughout the day is dead. However,I am not killing the blog! I am committed to continuing to do my signature long posts at least a couple of times a week if not daily if I can manage it. Don't be afraid, I won't let you go without your news!
As a replacement to the short posts, I am resurrecting the Geek News Daily Podcast! Starting tomorrow, (July 8th) the Geek News Daily podcast will return in a new and improved format that will make sure you get all of the important news every day. It generally takes me much less time getting out a podcast than it does finding and writing up a bunch of small stories which is why I made this decision.
Did you like the short posts? Do you prefer text over audio? I have you covered there too! As I announced on the Global Geek News Podcast several weeks ago, I am writing short posts very much like you saw on here over at TechVi.com. A team of people including myself post stories throughout the day to make sure you don't get behind on the latest tech news. Also make sure to check out the daily video with the site's owner, Randall Bennett as it is an awesome show.
Speaking of video, you know how I mentioned last week how I wanted to branch into video? That is still in the cards although I seem to be having a hard time finding some good webcam recording software so that I can record the video. If you have any recommendations for some good webcam recording software that works on Windows 7, please post them in the comments.
Anyway, that is all of the news that affects the blog, now a quick note for the podcast. Wesley is out of town this week, so there will not be a show released today like normal. Instead, I will either do a solo show that will be released tomorrow or Thursday or I will bring on a guest host to fill in for Wesley for this week. Things will be back to normal next week.
Check out the latest Global Geek News Podcast!
-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray
July is do or die for the Global Geek News Blog
Greetings Readers!
After doing some soul searching, I have decided that July will be the do or die month for the Global Geek News Blog or at least in the format that it is now.
Last months numbers were by far the highest we have ever had on the blog but I am still not happy. The only reason that we had the highest traffic month last month was because of a couple of day spike from my post about the Tonight Show background. If you remove that spike, while the first part of the month was good, most of the month was far below normal despite all of the content I have been posting. With numbers on the decline, I am seeing little incentive to keep the blog alive.
I want to be very clear on this, this has absolutely nothing to do with the podcast. The Global Geek News Podcast will not be affected by this in anyway other than the fact that I won't be plugging the blog anymore if I decide to shut the blog down. I am extremely happy with the growth I have seen with the podcast and the quality of shows that we have been producing and while I have some tweaks in mind for the show, at this point I see no major changes coming to that other than the fact that we need to start doing more guests again.
Anyway, if numbers don't improve in the month of July, one of two things will likely happen. Either I will kill off the blog entirely or move almost entirely to doing the blog in video or audio form at least as an experiment. If I do kill it entirely, I will most likely resurrect the Geek News Daily Podcast so that you will still get all of the latest news from me.
If you want this blog to continue in its current from, make sure you either visit it daily or subscribe to the RSS feed. Also, make sure to pass along the stories to your friends and family that might be interested in them through things like twitter, email, IM or however you interact with people.
Check out the latest Global Geek News Podcast!
-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray
Major changes coming to the Global Geek News Blog
Greetings Readers!
After some thought, I have decided to make some major changes to the Global Geek News Blog. Starting now, I will be doing fewer long posts like I have always done. I will still be doing them but they will be the minority of the posts here.
Starting today, I am going to focus more on bringing you more news in a timely manner. While I will still do my longer pieces that take more of an in-depth look at various stories and topics, I am now going to start posting shorter posts with more news and less opinion in effort to keep you up to date on the latest in media, entertainment and technology news. You can now expect multiple posts every day and it if you want to keep up with everything, I highly recommend subscribing to the RSS Feed. I will still try to do my longer pieces a couple of times a week but they will no longer be the sole focus of the blog.
Also, a quick side note, I am also writing for another tech site now which you can find out who in the newest Global Geek News Podcast!
If you have any ideas or suggestions regarding these changes, please put them in the comments and I will address them and take them into consideration for future posts. Also, this in no way affects how the other bloggers on this site function as this is just from me at this time and since I am the main poster, you will see a large difference. Anyway, that is all of the news for now. I may have some more news coming later so stay tuned!
-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray
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