Wow, well it’s been a long day; got to work just after 8am and didn’t leave until just before 8pm. It was a pretty frustrating day — spent most of my time banging my head against the figurative wall on a particular problem. No forward momentum, well, not obvious anyhow. On the plus side (I guess?) today I discovered the problem I’m trying to solve existed in an earlier version of the software, so at least it’s not something we’re going to introduce with this release. On the one hand, that means the bug has been “in the wild” for a while now, which just make it all that much more important. But on the other, if we haven’t heard of anyone exploiting the bug by now well then maybe it’s just not worth getting too stressed out over. Decisions, decisions. I think I’ll spend a few more hours on it tomorrow morning then move on. There are far too many other deadlines to think about.
Ah well. Although my temp. BC license didn’t arrive in the mail today, on the plus side Office 2004 did. I just watched the demo, and it looks like it’s got some nifty features, in particular the Notebook built into Word. Can’t keep up taking notes during a meeting? Just hit the record button, and Word automatically starts an audio recording. Okay, anyone could do that. But the nifty bit is that you can select any line of your typed notes and start the audio playback from that point. Now that’s a useful feature. Which is one of the reasons I like the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft. They actually make some neat, useful stuff. I remember visiting the MacBU while I was interning at MS a few summers ago; the building is like a little island-o-Mac in a Windows-dominated ocean. There are actually Apple posters up in the windows. On one person’s door inside the building there was actually a sticker which said “this is a Microsoft-free zone”. Whatever that’s supposed to mean. Yep. If there’s one thing Microsoft lets their employees be, it’s free-thinkers. Certainly doesn’t hurt the morale department.
Okay, off to bed with me.