Well, today I am officially unemployed.  I just made my last commute home from Freescale Semiconductor.  I'll really miss my old team and the fun times we've had.

Now that I'm unemployed, Becky and I are free to follow our dream of moving to Washington state in hopes of finding the elusive sasquatch or "wood ape".  That's right, I'm not going to work for Microsoft after all.

My plan is to drive through the forest roads at high speed, hoping to catch the beast unawares and hit it with my huge, 80's style station wagon.  Thinking it dead, I'll strap it to the roof and drive home, only to have it wake up and scare us.  In my panic, I'll brake abruptly, sending the hairy bigfoot flying through the air.

After some misadventures, my family and I will grow to love the gentle giant, and seek to return him to his home, lest he be poached by his arch-nemesis, Jacques LaFleur.  In doing so, we'll realize that if we lived more like these gentle sasquatches, in harmony with nature, that we'd all be better off.

I'm going through the piles and piles of electronics I've accumulated over the years trying to decide what goes and what stays.  I've got a fair number of items that I don't think deserve to be trashed, but I don't want to cart them halfway across the country (literally). So, I've decided to list a few items of interest in hopes that they will find a good home.

The rules are, items will go to whomever I feel like, mostly a function of convenience for me.  If there is alot of demand for an item, money will grease the wheels for you :). If there are specific items you want from the "bundles", let me know and I'll think about it. Here are the items:

• Playstation 2 "bundle".  Includes:
  • console (w/network adapter)
  • 4 controllers (with a multitap)
  • logitech force-feedback steering wheel
  • Handful of games including Amplitude, Gran Turismo 3, Burnout 3 and Socom II
  • All normal cables plus component and s-video
• GameCube Bundle:
  • Console (platinum) (w/network adapter)
  • 1 controller (2 if I can find the other one)
  • 2 sets of Bongos
  • handful of games including Donkey Konga, Zelda (several versions), and Mario Kart (if I can find it)
• Robosapien
• 2 10-inch subs w/amp all installed in box.
• Several PC cases of various age.  One is a very nice black Antec desktop, which I replaced only a few months ago because I needed a tower for my new desk.
• A couple of old CRT monitors.  They technically work, but are old. One is huge (19" I think) one is more like 17".
• Large RC car.  Electric.  Great fun.  with good charger.  A couple of cycles and the battery should be fine.
• Tivo Series 1 - The hard drive is kaput, but there are numerous hacks available to replace it and do other cool things to it.
• Creative Nomad Jukebox 3 - This is an old iPod-like device. It technically still works, but it pretty much sucks. I'd love to just take it apart and hack on it, but I haven't gotten around to it.  It's got some interesting  features. Digital optical input, surround sound support, etc.
• Lots of really old stuff like modems, video cards, etc and stuff that I'm pretty sure no one wants.

I'll add more as I come across it.

Today is our 7th anniversary.  This year, our anniversary is during a particularly hectic time as we prepare to move to Washington.  Becky's been a real trooper, putting up with all the work I'm having to do to get things ready for the move.  Things are coming together though.  The haze is clearing and we can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  It's so much fun to have such an adventure with such a good friend.

Anyway, my parents came up on Saturday and helped us with some projects to get the house ready to sell.  That evening, they watched Jenna while Becky and I went to see the latest installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I was a little confused about a few plot points, like why was Jack looking for the key before he found out that Davey Jones was after him?  Maybe it was part of the whole compass counter-story, and him not realizing why or what he wanted. Personally, I think they rearranged the scenes so they could use the openning scene as the openning rather than where it originally was in the story.  I also hadn't realized that it would be such a segue to the next movie.  Unlike me, Becky saw the ending coming a mile away, which is opposite of the way it usually is.

I'm also glad we had watched the original on TV the other day rather than our DVD.  The TV version had the extra "monkey scene" at the end.  Much of the second movie wouldn't have made sense if I hadn't seen that extra scene.  I wonder when they added it.

Things have been uber-crazy around here the last month or so. The quality and quantity of my posts had been seriously lacking, and there have been tons of things to post about.  Jenna's crawling everywhere, standing up and walking while holding stuff, and starring in a broadway musical (OK 2 out of 3 isn't bad).

Anyway, I've neglected my readers, and I apologize for that. Hopefully that will change soon. I thought I would come up for air for a moment to announce that I have accepted a position at Microsoft.  Becky, Jenna and I will be relocating to Redmond, WA (near Seattle) sometime in August (wow, that's soon isn't it).

I will really miss my current team, our local friends, and church; but Becky and I are super-excited about this new opportunity.  I'll post some more details when I get a chance (and after I learn for sure what I'm allowed to talk about), but for now I can tell you I'll be working on the Common Language Runtime team.

Becky and I are vacationing with her family up in Cape Cod.  We've been up here since Friday evening, but I haven't blogged about it because the trip got off to a horrible start.  I may tell the whole story some other time, but right now, I just wanted to get everyone up to speed.  It's been raining since we got here, but that's fine with me.  We're just hangin out.

Here's a local.live.com collection of places of interest from the vacation.  I'll keep updating it as things happen.  Be sure to check out the bird's eye view images of the house and such.

I'm fairly frustrated.  I got a replacement console back from the XBox repair center last week after mine died.  It seemed to be a fairly quick, relatively painless, and reasonable procedure.  However, when Becky popped in a DVD and got a region code error, I was pretty upset. They had sent a console with the wrong region code setting.  Now, setting arguments against region coding aside, this is riduculous.  Now, I have to go through the procedure of sending the box back AGAIN, and there's no guarantee I won't have some other thing wrong with it. 

I might be less upset about this if I had been given some compensation for this stupid mistake like some complimentary Microsoft points for the marketplace (especially since I have to buy my arcade games again so my wife can play them on her account) or even a sincere apology would have been nice.  Instead, the "technician" simply read a pre-written apology to me without the slightest bit of feeling.

Becky sent me an IM earlier today to let me know that my XBox360 just arrived.  I had to send it in for repairs after it died a week or so ago.  The repair process was pretty simple.  They sent me an empty box.  I took off all the accessories and put the console in the box and dropped it off at the UPS store.  And now it's back! I'm hoping that there aren't any more problems.  I can't wait to download the new system update and try out 1080i DVD playback with my new VGA cable!

If it does everything it says it does, the update fixes every single complaint I had about the dashboard and system software. yippee.

[UPDATE] The VGA settings do not have a 1080i/p compatible setting, so no 1080i DVD playback for me.  Looks like the VGA cable is useless for me.  Back to Best Buy it goes! Here's hoping for DVI support.

I had a conference call with some people in one of our facilities in China.  My manager is currently over there and I was going to run a presentation and demo from over here.  I VPN'ed in from home and waited for the call to begin.  Evidently, the conference room they were in had a broken telephone, so they were unable to call in.  After a while of trying to fix it, my manager said he didn't think they were going to get it working and did I have any ideas.  We were already communicating via Google Talk, so I just hit the "call" button.  A couple of rings later, we had a perfectly clear and relatively delay-free voice communication channel.

I was running the demo via netmeeting, but the netmeeting voice chat is horrible quality and there is a sizeable delay.  I was able to give the whole presentation and demo via Google Talk.  Well, until someone kicked the network cable on the other end and disconnected the whole thing.