Refreshing

I’ll start off by apologizing for not posting in a while. I tend to go through stages where I feel like blogging.

I had a really nice day today, so I figured I’d share.

It all started this morning. I was on the way to work and decided to call up Nokia to get the status of a repair. You see, last year I bought this cool device called the n770 Internet Tablet. It’s got a 640×480 pixel touch screen, bluetooth, wifi, runs a flavor of Debian linux, and has a large development community. I got it new from Woot.com for about $125. A couple of months ago, it stopped working. I could tell that it was on, but the screen appeared to be dead. I mailed it in for warranty repair and waited. Anyway, fast-forward two months; Nokia has had my repair status listed as “Waiting for Parts” since March 7th and I’m starting to miss the convenience of the device. So I called their customer care to ask what the story was. The 1st tier agent took my information and put me on hold for about 1 minute. He then came back and told me that he was researching and asked if he could put me on hold for another minute. One more minute later he came back and told me that he had Milton on the line from the Executive Resolutions department and that he’d take care of my problem. Milton greeted me and made sure that he understood my situation correctly. He then told me that, rather than making me wait any longer, they will send me an n800 tablet instead. The n800 is the next model up, came out about a year after the n770, and has much better hardware in it (including a faster cpu, and even a little camera). Naturally, I accepted the offer. That’s an epic win if I’ve ever seen one.

I got into work at around 10:45am and took care of some emails and questions from co-workers. Later, I went to get some teriyaki for lunch with Alex. After lunch, I went over to one of the buildings at Microsoft for interviewer training. A large part about working and advancing at Microsoft is helping in the hiring process. We take a lot of pride in hiring the “best and the brightest” people. The class was fairly interesting and flew by quickly (thank god since it was 4 hours long). Nothing scandalous to speak of…they just taught how to ask good open-ended questions and what kinds of things you shouldn’t ask about (race, religion, age, etc).

After training, I stopped by Alex’s office to say hi and then left to head back to my office. I got outside and saw that it is a beautiful day: sunny, blue skies, and mid-60s. I couldn’t pass this up, so I took the long way (albeit not necessarily on purpose). I walked about one mile.

Right now, I’m relaxing in my office catching up with email. I’ll probably spend some time coding before I leave.