We cannot recommend The Talon Group
News ·Friday January 13, 2006 @ 14:26 EST (link)
Tuesday: Parking was so bad that I couldn't find a space even on P4 or at several surrounding buildings, so I headed home and O joy! O delight! RAS is finally working (amazingly I managed to find my PIN) and I term-served to my build machine; emailed my boss; working from home was fine and the parking congestion was probably due to a couple conferencees, including a Women's Conference (so when's the Men's Conference? and why are we as a company wasting our money on this feelgood crap? Mini-Microsoft, where are you?)
Remote login is fine, except due to some crappiness in the Microsoft-provided connection drivers (perhaps the smart card drivers, which are pretty flaky), it pretty much requires a reboot for each use, otherwise the "verifying password" countup just keeps on going, never completing (I just stopped it at 1360 seconds). Maybe I can get the source and do something about it. Don't put any big bets on that though, because it's probably a political issue to somebody.
Changed my email signature, borrowing a Microsoft Office graphic from someone on the Christians at Microsoft list, and adding my name and "Word Developer"; not too long, and certainly McQuarry compliant, if images are legit (I'll only use it internally at Microsoft, so they are).
Wednesday: We cannot recommend The Talon Group to potential home purchasers; the fees were much higher than expected. I'm not sure about Michael Knoll; I'm not sure what his part in the fees were, but on the whole he seemed a decent guy and tried to get us a square deal, including at the end tracking down some money we were supposed to get back because of a prepayment we'd made that Talon hadn't discounted from the total. On the whole it went fairly smoothly; the sellers especially were great; we bought the place from a fellow Christian at Microsoft; they're moving to a place a few block away (more kids => bigger place); it will be nice to have some friends as close neighbours.
Thursday: My business cards arrived today; first time having business cards, very snazzy. Office is one of the few groups (I think MSN is the other one) that has cards with a colour logo. Started Amityville Horror.
Friday: Finished Amityville Horror (great date for it). Igx (diagram) test failure; tried syncing and rebuilding, fixed an OArt build break, built everything that matters (don't care about Outlook failures now that I don't have Outlook bugs; I've since removed it from my build), trying to run tests again. Bug goals are looking pretty good for the week, around 433% (but given that the goal was 3, from 19 to 16, that's not a huge accomplishment).
Wednesday: We cannot recommend The Talon Group to potential home purchasers; the fees were much higher than expected. I'm not sure about Michael Knoll; I'm not sure what his part in the fees were, but on the whole he seemed a decent guy and tried to get us a square deal, including at the end tracking down some money we were supposed to get back because of a prepayment we'd made that Talon hadn't discounted from the total. On the whole it went fairly smoothly; the sellers especially were great; we bought the place from a fellow Christian at Microsoft; they're moving to a place a few block away (more kids => bigger place); it will be nice to have some friends as close neighbours.