Right now I'm sitting outside the Target in Redmond waiting for a Wii.  When I woke up this morning, I figured it would be easy to obtain a Wii at a midnight release somewhere.  However, I forgot that I was going to a movie that wouldn't be out until 9:30.  Anyways, long story short all the midnight release consoles were spoken for at every store I tried.  Now I'm sitting on a bench outside Target, feeling the occasionally sprinkle, and thinking that 8am won't come soon enough.

I'll continue to update this post live from the line, as long as my battery holds out.  Right now I'm about 27th in line, and there are probably 45 in line.  Let's hope no one cuts in line, but there are 99 consoles at this store, or so the online list says.

3:11 AM: Well, the line hasn't grown a whole lot since about 1am.  It's now wrapping around the edge of the building though.  Thus far the rain has held off, but weather.com indicates it may start to shower somewhere aroudn 6am.  Let's hope it holds off until 8am when I don't have to be sitting out in the elements anymore.

4:19 AM: It's too cold out here for what I have on, I'm running home to put on some warming clothes, hope I don't lose my spot!

6:00 AM: Target asks everyone to put away all their camping gear and start to form a real line

6:05 AM: Everyone is ready with no place to go... only a little less than 2 hours till they open

7:15 AM: The weather decides it's been long enough without rain, and the rain starts to fall, not too bad at first, but it does start to pick up.

8:01 AM: The doors open, and in the first 30 of us go.. just to wait in another line

8:22 AM: I've purchased my Wii... I'm out of here!

So yeah, my first 360 died a tradgic death today.  Luckily since it was a launch day console, it's still in warranty and they're going to try and repair/replace the unit.  I'm starting to think that Gears of War is killing consoles.  Several of the people I know with early 360s have started reporting problems since Gears of War came out.  Conspiracy or just bad luck?  I leave that for you to decide.

Lucky for me I'd just purchased another 360 for upstairs, which will now be relocated downstairs for the time being until my console comes back from the repair shop.  Bummer dude.

I do have to admit that I had a great guy on the phone to walk me through the troubleshooting and I was really pleased with the whole experience.  It sucks that I have to send the unit back, but at least the support guy was friendly (and apparently not on forign soil).  He did sound like he'd had too much coffee today though.

As you might have expected from my quiet post over the weekend, Office 2007 has officially gone gold and has been released to manufacturing.

So, does anyone know for sure just how the Zune is supposed to support the AAC format? I've seen it written in a bunch of places that it just plays these files without any problem, but then I keep seeing written on Zune.net the following:

[1] Zune software can import audio files in unprotected WMA, MP3, AAC; photos in JPEG; and videos in WMV, MPEG-4, H.264.

Does that imply that the Zune software supports those formats, and that it does some sort of transcode on the fly to convert them to something that the device supports, or does it just sync down the original file and the device handles it natively?

Given that I have a large quantity of my music in AAC format (unprotected, of course), I'm concerned that there might be a quality loss by playing that music on the Zune.

Anyone know for sure, or do I have to wait for the 10th?

Yes, that's right, we're done.  You might even say we're golden.  More on that later.

I'm starting to think I am a terrible blogger. It's been months since my last meaningful blog post. I think the biggest reasons for my failure to blog are: 1) no free time anymore, 2) lack of anything interesting to say, 3) too much other writing going on. I'm pretty sure #3 is the real reason I've slacked off in my writing.

As you may already know, we're very close to shipping the next release of Office, and that certainly accounts for the lack of free time. The last couple of weeks have been intensely busy often working 10 hours a day. On top of trying to ship this release, I've been brainstorming around what we can do for the next release of Office, working on a couple of side projects, and coordinating efforts with other teams (BCM, VSTO, UM, etc) to make sure everyone is ready for the release and that we're delivering a high quality release.

On the #3 front, I've got my MSDN blog which keeps most of my blogging skills busy with the one or so posts I make a month, plus I'm working on co-authoring a new book on Outlook programmability which is really draining my ability to write for anything else. After churning out 4 chapters so far (2 more to go), I can understand why writing a book is such a difficult task to accomplish. I can't wait until this project is complete.

Someday soon I need to blog about my new gadgets as well. I'm still in love with my Treo 700wx. In addition to upgrading to the coolest phone ever, I've recently rebuild my desktop computer, which now features a Core 2 Duo processor, a Dell 2407WFP display, and the latest builds of Windows Vista. It's a sweet sweet machine, but building it wasn't so great. I have a story to tell, and hopefully I can tell it soon!

More to come soon, I promise.

I've just completed the upgrade to dasBlog 1.9, and everything appears to be running smoothly.  The application is now hosted on my 64-bit web server with .NET 2.0, and I'm happy to see that the problems I had with it previously running in this configuration appear to be gone.  I'd encourage anyone running dasBlog to upgrade to 1.9 to take advantage of the new features included in this release and to make sure that it works great on .NET 2.0.

Well, after putting up with my PPC-6700 for nearly a year, I finally had had enough tonight.  After my 6700 wouldn't let me make any more phone calls because "I didn't have enough signal".  Of course, while I was getting this message, the phone had a full four bars of signal strength reported. Well, that might seem minor, but given the track record I've had with the phone I decided it was enough.  Off to the Sprint store.

Amazingly enough, they actually had the Treo 700wx in stock, so I picked one up.  So far I'm in love with it!  It's about 1/3 smaller than the 6700, and while the screen is smaller (240x240 instead of 320x240), I'm rapidly adapting to the way it works.  We'll see how I feel about it in a week, but thus far I'm impressed.

Yes, it's here, and it's awesome (although perhaps uber-geeky).  I've installed it in my office where it gets much attention, usually from people passing by asking "what is that?!?" or by visitors to my office who can't stop looking at it.

I can't wait to see what an interview candidate will think of it.