So my first week at Microsoft has been one hell of a week. I went through 1.5 days of NEO (New Employee Orientation), be placed into an office that I’m sharing with Cleve (hopefully I’ll get my own office soon, but we’re crammed for space in the building), and be placed on my first development team. At this time, I found out that we’re right in the middle of the spec creation, so trying to pick up the project & learn all my NEO stuff in just 2.5 days has been real fun. The experience is truly different from that of anything I’ve done before…as there’s really nothing like sitting in the lounge all day whiteboarding ideas and writing tech specs.

I’ve also found out that working longer hours is just the culture there, yeah yeah – I knew it was going to be like it, but I didn’t realize how tiring it was going to be. What I do like is the flexibility of hours, as I have to be there 8 hours (or more), but am required to be there from 10–4. BTW, if you’ve never heard so many acronyms in a single day, go work for Microsoft…you’ll get lost within the first 15 minutes.

Okay, its bed time now because I need to head into the office early and take care of some things prior to be in the lounge all day spec’ing things out.

Heh, I’ve been preparing (link 1, 2, 3, 4) my April Fools joke for the last two weeks now. Boy are a lot of people gullable. To think that so many people would actually believe that Microsoft would hire a good ‘ol boy from Illinois and move him and his fiance across country. I do have to say that my story was very elaborate, though the indications are there that it was all fake (no names used, no specific dates except for my “on-site” interview). What’s even funnier is that I completely made up the Microsoft division that “hired” me. I even got some Microsoftees to join in (thanks gretchen & Cleve!), secretly of course, to help out in making this seem reliable.

So whats the real story? Well, Microsoft did purchase my source code, and I did send them a resume. However I was never called for a screening call or even got to go out there for a on-site interview. Its amazing on how much detail one can find about the interview process on the internet to make a good story great.

Update: Okay, the cats out of the bag…the post lasted about 2 hours before someone finally caught on that this post WAS the joke. For real, though, today is my last day with Integrity and I will be starting at Microsoft on April 11. God, that was funny!

Update2: Man, seriously, I’m still laughing over here…and so are my coworkers. Truly a masterpiece. BTW, I can’t help but feel like running around in a white towel (and nothing more) just like the guy in the Holiday Inn Express commercial…great ideas do come while your in the shower.

After contacting support for BackupPlus, they were of no help, or rather said for me to contact Microsoft directly to get help on the issue. Hah, right. I purchased your software which implies you supporting it…YOU contact Microsoft, not me. There’s some issue when registering components that they “say” works on their installation…heh, I doubt it does they just don’t know what the hell their doing.

So, what did I do? Well, I ditched BackupPlus for one (because I installed SP1 again), and for good this time, and doing what every developer does, created my own “ZipUp” utility. This merely takes in a semi-colon delimited listing of files to zip up as well as a location. It then does just that, zips up the files to a brand new zip file with a unique file name and stuck in the supplied directory. Sure, its not as elegant as BackupPlus, but you know what – it gets the job done!

Take that Avantrix…no link for you!