Wow... the more I look into this Xbox Live Marketplace DRM issue, the more I find that it's a HUGE problem. There are a ton of stories out there of people who simply don't have what they paid for. It happens in two scenarios:

1. People who, like me, had to send a console in for repair and received a different console as a replacement.

2. People who have purchased a newer Xbox or Xbox Elite for either the HDMI port or the larger hard drive.

In both cases, the problem I detailed yesterday occurs -- you can't access your Xbox Live Arcade titles (or other Marketplace content) without being signed into Xbox Live. Further, other profiles on your console can't access the content as they could before the repair/replacement.

This is made worse by the fact that Xbox Live suffered a pretty big outage over the weekend... so anyone in this situation couldn't access their XBLM content at all. Even to play in offline, single-player mode.

And while there are lots of people reporting the problem, what I haven't run across yet is anyone who says the problem was correctly resolved and that they've been made whole again by Microsoft.

Some links for your reading pleasure:

• This thread in the Xbox.com forums is now at 118 pages with hundreds in the same boat... not 118 posts. PAGES.
• Ars Technica did a writeup about this issue for those considering upgrading to the Xbox Elite.
• A good analysis of the problem here by videogame blogger Matt Brett.
• Someone even created an entire blog called "The Broken Xbox Live Marketplace". It's not been updated in a while, but there's some good info here.
• Major Nelson writes earlier this month in the forum that replacement consoles SHOULD have had licenses transferred automatically... and that anyone who's licenses weren't transferred should contact him. I have... stay tuned.
• The Digital Gamer independent gaming blog has their own tale of woe.
• This guy on Windows Live Spaces has sworn off XBLM content altogether due to the issue... and points to an online petition.

I'd love to hear an honest, open explanation for why this issue is proving so difficult and time-consuming for Microsoft to resolve.

Technorati Tags: xbox live , xbox 360 , support , microsoft , xbox , major nelson , DRM

I try to be patient and understand when a company occasionally drops the ball. I really do. Especially a company like Microsoft, whose ecosystem I've worked in as a developer for much of my career. I generally support their initiatives... but problems with the Xbox 360 -- and now DRM issues with a console back from repair -- have just boiled over.

And crappy support was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

Begin Rant...

Back in September, my console died. It suffered all the same symptoms as a Red Ring of Death failure -- except the red rings. So when I sent it in, I got the privilege of paying $99 for the repair. After roughly a month, I get a console back from them and a letter explaining that, in order to expedite things, this is a different console than the one I sent in. So as of late October, I've got a new/refurbed console that's under warranty for a year. My hard drive's plugged in, so I can see all our profiles and game data. We're set.

Or so I thought.

The problem occurs when my wife or daughter sign into their profile on the console and all of our Xbox Live Arcade games are in "Trial" mode. That's about 15-16 games purchased with Microsoft Points over the last year or so. If I sign into MY profile, the games are in "Full" mode (because my profile was the one that purchased them), but nobody else in the family can play them -- or even access their existing achievements and progress.

I tinker around with deleting and re-downloading the games, but nothing works. So on 11/10, I call Xbox support and open a support ticket. The person I ended up speaking with (Ella, a supervisor) explained that because I was sent a different console, the serial number doesn't match. So the console's DRM system thinks that my wife and daughter's profiles are being used elsewhere and won't authenticate the games.

She tells me it'll take 2-4 weeks for them to "re-associate" our downloaded games/videos with the new serial number. (Why on earth this would take 2-4 weeks is left as an exercise for the reader. I can't imagine). Note that they DO already have the new serial number associated with my Xbox Live account -- she could verify it and knew the warranty dates. But once this "re-association" is done, I'll get a phone call notifying me to re-download that content and then the other profiles will get access to that content.

As of yesterday, it's been 6 weeks. SIX.

With a daughter who's out of school for the holidays now, and me taking some time off, this obviously becomes a higher priority -- we'd like to play some games together. So I call today (43 days after the first call) and spent 51 minutes on the phone. The first guy I got put me on hold three times because "his computer was booting up, but thanks for your patience". Once he could pull up my support incident, he had me verify a bunch of information, repeat the whole saga, and then put me on hold a couple more times. Eventually, he transferred me to a supervisor, Edwin.

This is when the fun started. Edwin was a complete information vacuum. All Edwin could tell me was that:

• My support incident is still open (duh)
• The problem isn't resolved (ya think? seriously... he related this to me as if it were news)
• Someone should call me when it does get resolved.

What he couldn't tell me is WHEN it would be resolved. He couldn't tell me if it would be days, weeks, or months. He said that "in special cases, it will take longer than 30 days". Given that it's been much longer than 30 days, I asked what was special about the case. His response was "I don't know. Could be a number of things."

After going round and round with me wanting to talk to someone who COULD answer my question (he couldn't connect me), wanting to know WHEN I could expect some resolution to this (he couldn't provide even a sense of scale), and wanting to know WHY this was a "special" case ("could be anything"), he hung up on me.

That's right... he told me it didn't matter if I "called a thousand times, there was no information" to be had so he went through his "thank you for calling" script and hung up on me.

This is where point out that I wasn't insulting Edwin, using foul language, or anything like that. What I was doing was asking a lot of questions because I want to understand why this is still a pending problem.

Obviously, I'm not the only person having this problem... the 360's failure rate is a joke at this point, so there must be thousands of people in the same boat. An exchanged console with more than one profile that has Xbox Live Marketplace content. In at least one case, Microsoft credited someone the MS Points required to re-purchase the games for those other profiles (this wasn't offered to me -- yes, I'd go that route if it would work). The comments for this post are also motivational reading (sarcasm)... I should point out that I am NOT "Shady515" in those comments -- sounds similar, but that poor guy is on his 11th console and has been waiting for access to his Live content since August. Travis had the problem again a few months after posting that. No shortage of similar horror stories on the web.

An Xbox team member explains the problem (but no solution) on this post... where the comments point to a petition on the issue. The petition is apparently centered around people who own an original 360 and would like to upgrade to an Elite -- but can't take their content with them because it's a new serial number.

The kicker for me to blog it... Tonight, I see a blog post from Major Nelson (Xbox Live guy about town) pimping MS Points as a holiday gift -- because I'm not getting screwed out of the Points I've already purchased?

Like the headline says... ridiculous.

Technorati Tags: xbox 360 , xbox , microsoft , major nelson , support , xbox live , fail

I like to think of myself as someone who uses Outlook's capabilities to a fairly high degree. Most people I've worked with tend to use it for email alone and then occasionally for calendar items that are shared among a group (e.g., planning meetings in a workgroup). It seems a minority of people use its Tasks capabilities, which are probably the most important thing in Outlook for me (otherwise, I'd likely just use OWA).

By using the GTD approach to capturing everything (and syncing it to my phone), I've always got a good-sized list of the things that need to be done now, later, and eventually.

Until the other day, though, I didn't realize that Outlook 2007 added a method for viewing task items alongside the calendar items. When I came across this blog post from the Outlook team, which describes the Daily Task List view, I initially thought, "sweet, I'd like to see my calendar alongside my tasks in a more complete way." The new "To-Do Bar" in Outlook 2007 gets me close (right)... and I do like having it over there all the time in the Inbox view. It lets me quickly see month calendars (handy during phone calls when you're coordinating something for a week or more out), along with the next 3 items on my calendar (where I can configure how many items are shown), and then a customized view of my Task items.

It's these tasks that are the bread and butter of my daily planning. Like most folks who use (or in my case, try to use) a GTD approach, I use categories to assign an @context to each task -- then when I'm in that context (@home, @office, @computer, etc), I simply go through the subset and tackle those tasks based on priority. This removes the need for A, B, C or 1, 2, 3 types of priorities and only occasionally will I even use the Low/Medium/High option on a task. Because I try to put everything I need to do into my Tasks (there are typically a couple/few hundred across all the context/categories), trying to prioritize all of that would take so much time that I might not actually get anything done.

The problem with the To-Do Bar is that it only shows you the next few appointments and doesn't show you the grid/schedule style view of your day. You have to read each appointment's details to know when it occurs and then the grid view that is so handy for knowing when you've got available time is left to your imagination. So while I have complete control of my Tasks in the To-Do Bar, its value for viewing the time available to those tasks is minimal.

The "Daily Task View" sounded like just the ticket as I read the post... until I looked into it further and realized the major flaw (for me). Only tasks that have a start date or due date will appear in the list. The list of daily tasks is configurable to show items for each day based on either the start date or the due date, but any task that doesn't have a date assigned to it won't appear at all.

My approach to using tasks is such that I don't use start or due dates at all.

Look at an example task -- "Record screencast to demonstrate new features added in this release." Now let's assume that this imaginary release is January 31, so I'd like the screencast wrapped up two weeks prior (January 17) to allow time for editing, proofing, etc.

I don't put a due date on this task because I don't want it filtered between now then. Instead, I want it in my @computer list every day between now and then so I can make progress on it as time and circumstances allow.

If I DO decide to assign a due date of January 17 to that task, it won't appear in my Daily Task View until that day. Today is December 9, so there are more than five weeks between now and that due date. If I wait until that day to get the screencast recorded, I have failed. I can be a procrastinator at times, but this approach to planning my tasks would spell disaster. Something more important will come up that day. We'll be approaching the release and dealing with a major quality issue. The microphone will break down. The software will crash.

And with that, my hopes for a single, unified "dashboard of my day" we dashed. Ideally, this dashboard includes:

• My inbox (I keep the message count here in the single digits).
• A schedule grid for the day (with an option for a compressed week view)
• My complete task list, grouped by context and filterable to exclude certain contexts (e.g., don't need @home in the office)
• A small calendar view that can be configured for 2-3 months.
• The nav bar on the left so that messages can be dragged and dropped into archive folders

What would really rock would be to have a collection of views like this that could be arranged by the user. Each view would have its own customizations available for sorting, filtering, grouping - just as most of the standalone views in Outlook do today.

Maybe Outlook 2011?

Technorati Tags: microsoft , outlook , gtd , organization , productivity

At nearly the same time as I was complaining about Google Browser Sync hosing up my bookmarks, Omar Shahine wrote a general post about his Firefox use (and conversation-starting Firefox t-shirt). In it he says...

Google Browser Sync allows me to sync all my cookies, saved passwords and favorites between all my computers. This is AWESOME. I cannot stand re-personalizing my web surfing experience on new computers.

Just goes to show you -- your mileage may vary. My experience with Google Browser sync was quick, but painful. In my testing so far, FoxMarks is working great for syncing bookmarks. While it'd be nice to also sync current tabs (I'm not so interested in syncing all settings, cookies, and passwords), handling bookmarks in a way that I can trust is a good start.

Technorati Tags: firefox , google extensions , bookmarks

Sara Ford (from the Visual Studio team) has been running an awesome series of daily tips for Visual Studio tweaking. The series started off as the "Visual Studio 2008 Tip of the Day," but many (most?) of her tips apply to VS.NET 2005 as well. Most of the tips explain tweaks that can be made via the Tools->Options dialog.

Her tip for today is about increasing the font size in the Statement Completion window... which is the little panel that opens when you invoke Intellisense in the VS.NET code editor (either by hitting "." on a reference to get its members or via CTRL+SPACE or CTRL+J -- another recent tip).

The change is made via the "Show settings for" list in the "Fonts and Colors" portion of the Options dialog. While I'd been in there before to set my Output and Command window preferences (green on black, yo), I'd never noticed Statement Completion (and probably wouldn't have recognized it as the Intellisense members list in any case).

Very slick and I can see this making it a lot easier to find things in the list... it really makes it stand out in front of the code that's being edited.

Nice tip, Sara! Now I need to go back into that portion of Tools->Options and check out some of the other UI elements that can be tweaked in that "Show settings for" list...

Technorati Tags: visual studio , intellisense , microsoft , configuration

Lesson learned -- all that comes from Mountain View is not gold. Or stable. Or safe.

While I use del.icio.us for 99.47% of my bookmarking needs on the web, there are always a couple dozen or so URLs that I leave in Firefox's local bookmarks file. Examples are for sites that I want on the browser's toolbar, private or internal URLs that aren't public, and bookmarks that have search keywords assigned.

For a while now, I've wanted to sync up my Firefox bookmarks at home with the bookmarks on my office machine. Most of these get used on either machine and it's a hassle to remember to add those bookmarks and search shortcuts in both places.

So when I came across the Google Browser Sync extension, I thought, "this is PERFECT!"  It would sync up not only bookmarks but also settings and any open tabs. That seemed great for those times when I had something open for reading in the office, but didn't get to it. Shut it down on that machine and it would open up on my home machine later.

I installed the extension on both machines, let it sync up, and then merged the bookmarks in both locations. After that, I went through a process last night of cleaning up and re-organizing those local bookmarks. I spent over an hour getting rid of the ones that were old, cleaning out the dupes, and adding more search keywords.

Today, they're gone. On both machines. A couple of folders are completely missing. Nice, huh?

Thankfully, I found a backup of the bookmarks.html file from before I installed the extension... so while I've lost the cleanup work I did last night, I haven't completely lost the original bookmarks.

Anyway, be warned... if I'd have taken the time to browse through the Google Groups discussions for this extension, I'd have probably avoided it altogether and perhaps tried FoxMarks instead. But I figured Google's stuff is pretty solid... again, lesson learned. Thank goodness I didn't have it sync passwords and all of my other browser settings.

So... back to that cleanup effort (again).

Technorati Tags: firefox , bookmarks , google browser sync , google

It started several weeks ago. When playing Madden 08, I would occasionally get weird color glitches. It reminded me of the old CRT days when your VGA cable would get loose -- it was as if I was looking at my television through green-colored glasses. "A bug in Madden," I thought, plus a reboot would always fix it. It happened rarely, so no worries.

On Friday, 9/21, a Dashboard Update went out for the 360 and this green-glasses thing happened again. "Uh oh," I thought, "it's not Madden." At the end of the update, the 360 rebooted and I got a black screen. I could hear the startup sound and playing with the controller would result in sounds as I moved around the UI. I just couldn't see anything due to the black screen.

I tried different inputs on the television. No joy. I bought a new video cable to rule that out. No joy. So if it's not the television or the cable -- gotta be the box. What seemed even more bizarre was that I wasn't getting those three red lights -- the Red Ring of Doom.

"That really sucks," I thought, "especially since Halo 3 releases next week... but at least Microsoft extended their warranty." They announced this a while back because so many boxes (especially the initial "launch day" boxes) were having problems due to overheating. Mine was not a launch-day box -- I got it about 4 months after the 360's release. So I'm covered, right?

Poor, naive me. Turns out Microsoft extended the warranty but only if you get the RRoD. In the open letter from Peter Moore (Xbox Head at Microsoft):

...we are announcing  today a three-year warranty that covers any console that displays a three flashing red lights error message.

A box with the symptoms mine was showing -- not covered. Lots of unhappy people on support forums about that issue... including many people who recommend giving the box a thump on the side (reminding me of an old television set we had when I was a kid) or wrapping the box in a towel to overheat it on purpose. I didn't want to do either of those, but I called Xbox Support to see what my options were. No amount of complaining, griping, or asking to speak with a supervisor mattered -- I'd have to pay the $99 repair fee if I wanted it fixed.

So now my Xbox is somewhere between Colorado and Texas in the supplied box that lots of people refer to as "the coffin".

A few things I've learned over the last couple of weeks:

• The $99 fee covers shipping three times. First, they get a box to me (took 7 business days). Then the console goes in the box and heads to Texas (en route now). Finally, the repaired box comes back.
• That fee also re-sets my warranty for another year. I plan on using the crap out of it to put that to the test.
• I may or may not get the same box back, which surprised me. The box I get back may be someone else's refurbished box with a different serial number. As long as it works and doesn't look like a Best Buy floor model, I don't much care either way.
• There are a TON of people who had problems on or near that fateful Friday, 9/21. Two different .NET bloggers I read (Scott Hanselman and Travis Illig) had it happen within a couple weeks. A Google search turns up a TON of problems occurring in late September. I doubt that Microsoft will ever admit that the Dashboard Update caused a problem or is even related. But checking out this thread makes it hard to claim "coincidence".

On the plus side... one of the guys at work has a 360 and hadn't used it for months (the horror!), so he brought his in for me to borrow. This added a few more things to the list of what I've learned:

• There are some very nice people in the world. It's great to have a console to use during this season when a LOT of interesting games are being released (Halo 3, PGR4, Call of Duty 4, Guitar Hero 3, FIFA 08, and more).
• Plugging your hard drive on to the side of someone else's console works like a charm. It was as if I was using my original console, except...
• His console is much, MUCH quieter than mine. When it's at the dashboard, you can barely tell it's on and even with a disc spinning, it's still much quieter than mine ever was. So much so that my wife is in favor of buying a newer one if the repaired console doesn't come back as quiet as this borrowed one. It's THAT noticeable.
• The dashboard update doesn't break every Xbox... his wanted the update as soon as it was turned on and before it could continue. Went through like a champ (though not without me sweating a bit!).

So... I'm sure it will be a couple more weeks before my repair console returns and it'll be interesting to see what's changed. Noise? Serial number? Heat dissipation? Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: xbox 360 , hardware , red ring of doom , microsoft , support , repair

Back in July, I posted about the on-going problems I was having with my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop. It was just about a year old and was facing its fourth house call by a local Dell tech contractor. In the comments for that post, John B (an employee in Dell's Customer Advocacy group) contacted me to let me know that he agreed -- it was time to call it a lemon and get a system exchange.

I'm happy to update that the process was quick, painless, and couldn't have been easier. I simply emailed John with some details about the system and my contact info (service tag and my home address) so that he could find my record in their support system. Once he confirmed those details, he got in touch to let me know that a new machine would be on my doorstep in a week or two (5-15 business days).

It was just over a week when the new machine arrived. When I opened the box, I was initially thrown off because the new machine didn't look like the old one. The new make was of the newer generation -- an Inspiron 1720. I'm happy to report that the new machine has been running well for several weeks now and I've not had any problems with it.

The new machine arrives in a box with a pre-paid shipping label for the old machine. All the instructions were included for packing and shipping, including the DHL 800 number to have them come pick up the old machine at the house. Piece of cake.

The machine itself wasn't quite a one-for-one swap, but overall I'm quite happy with the way it worked out. Some of the things that vary from this 1720 to the older 9400 I had are:

• The 1720 doesn't have a DVI output. As I never really use the machine with an external display, it's not a big deal to me. If I did need an external panel, this might be a concern.
  
• They (John?) did upgrade the machine to a Core 2 Duo T7300 processor (from plain ol' Core Duo), as well as a drive upgrade to 160GB 7200rpm (the original was an 80GB at 7200rpm). Very nice
  
• It's got five USB ports on it, while the older machine had 6. I rarely use more than two at a time, so this wasn't a big deal to me at all.
  
• The new machine has a bigger keyboard and a full numeric keypad to the right of the main keyboard. As a result, it's got less empty space on the left/right sides of the keyboard than the old machine. The layout of navigation and editing keys is still taking some getting used to (e.g., PgUp, PgDn, Home, End), but overall it's handy to have the numeric keypad. The biggest adjustment has been that the main keyboard isn't centered on the machine... so I offset my hands a bit while I'm using it.
  
• The new machine has an NVidia GeForce 8600M GT video adapter in it. So far, I'm very pleased with the video performance. The older one had an NVidia in it as well, but it was the GeForce GO. I expected the newer machine to have a higher Windows Experience Rating than the old one, but it actually dropped a small amount (due to the graphics card). Then again, I'm using the default driver that Windows Vista put on the machine and haven't checked Dell's support site to see if there's something new and improved available for the 8600. I don't do any gaming or hardcore DirectX/OpenGL stuff on this machine, so the video performance hasn't been an issue.

Getting up and running was mostly straightforward... I did have a bit of a panic when I went to re-pave it, though. As Rick Strahl mentioned on his post about a new Inspiron 1520, the larger capacity SATA drives on these laptops require a special driver. Without it, Vista initially installs just fine but then blue-screens after the final reboot. The first time it did that, I got well and truly panicked!

A quick search on Dell's support forums, though, turned up a couple possible solutions... you could do as Rick did and disable the AHCI mode in the BIOS (putting the drive in plain old ATA mode). It sounds like there's no performance or stability hit either way. The other route, which is the one I took because I was doing the pave anyway, was to download the AHCI driver from Dell and expand it on to a USB thumb drive. Insert that in the machine during the Vista install and then point to it during the step where it asks about third-party SCSI or RAID drivers. Once I did that, all was well.

Interestingly, it sounds like some of the problems Rick had with his NVidia card are similar to the issues I had... while his issues led to instability during WPF development and the inability to use an external panel, mine led to black screens and what seemed like the eventual burnout of the built-in panel.

After searching around quite a bit, there are also reports of issues with those machines being susceptible to static discharge problems. I definitely felt that "tingle" from time to time with the older machine and was using the standard 2-prong AC adapter that Dell ships. Apparently, it's now possible to order a 3-prong adapter if you want it but Dell sounds fairly confident that the 2-prong shouldn't be a problem.

In any case, the newer machine has been ROCK SOLID for the last several weeks of regular use. No instability, the temperature seems to be well within the normal ranges, and it runs very very fast.

Thanks again to John and the rest of the Dell Customer Advocate folks for taking care of me on this.

Doh - that reminds me... I need to make sure the extended warranty I paid for was transferred to this newer machine! Off to that support site again... :)

Technorati Tags: dell , hardware , support , customer support , solution

Via a post the other day from Lifehacker, I've been checking out a new site called XTimeline at http://www.xtimeline.com. The site allows you to create web-based timelines based on data you provide, using a couple of different file formats (CSV or RSS), or by entering events on the timeline by hand. The coolest option is to provide an RSS feed and it creates a timeline with points along the line for each item in your feed. Once you create an account and log in, you can create your own timelines, share them with others (or make them private), embed them into your own site, and so on.

The image above is based on the data from a Yahoo Pipes RSS feed I created a while back. It's a feed that pulls together items from this blog, my del.icio.us bookmarks, and other online accounts I have. It's not very interesting or voluminous, but it did highlight how easy it is to create a timeline. The only thing that wasn't immediately intuitive was that there was an extra steps to "add events from RSS", wherein it takes the published date for each item out of the feed.

In addition to creating timelines from RSS feeds, you can upload data in CSV format, browse through a ton of public timeliness others have created, identify favorite timelines, rate them, tag timelines with keywords, and so on. Some cool examples include a history of the internet, the history of video games, and a timeline of music in the United States (embedded as an iframe below).

Creating an account is free and requires only an email address. I don't see options around "premium" services, so aside from some subtle ads on the site, there doesn't appear to be an obvious monetization plan -- not that wikipedia has one either, right? Either way, it's a really cool site for data and infoporn geeks. They've also got a blog where the founders/developers update on site improvements and changes. In their initial announcement, they answer the "Why Timelines?" question:

Why make a site just for timelines?
Making a dynamic timeline widget isn't enough -- you need to have a place to create, store, and share them with other people.  We like to think of xtimeline as a cross between wikipedia and youtube.  Like all user-generated content sites, you can upload your own thoughts, media, and opinions.  Eventually, we think some timelines will become well-known enough to be online references.

I really dig seeing cool visualization tools like this, especially when (just like Swivel and Many Eyes before) they make it so easy to explore and create new views of data. Well done!

Technorati tags: xtimeline, data visualization, infoporn, timelines

Greg Reinacker (Founder/CTO of NewsGator, a local company) and Brad Feld (of the Foundry Group and a Boulder-based VS/startup blogger) both posted recently about their first computers.

For me, the "computer geek" bug bit pretty early. When I was 12 or so (early 80s), I had a friend whose father bought him a TRS-80 Color Computer. He'd have sleepovers at his house and we'd stay up very late hacking out "games" (loosely defined) that were of the Choose Your Own Adventure variety. They were completely text-based and offered multiple choices at each turn. We learned quickly to map out the story's flow on graph paper.

It didn't take long to decide that I needed a computer of my own, so I started saving. Eventually, I got a paper route for the San Jose Mercury News and that helped me reach the savings goal pretty fast... I was pretty excited to purchase a Commodore 64 with my own money. My parents helped out by buying me the cassette tape drive (so I could [painfully and slowly] save my work) and a dot matrix printer. The following Christmas, my grandparents bought me the 300 baud modem for it (funny story: I learned years later that my grandparents argued over whether to get this because they'd just seen the film War Games). A year or so later, I bought the disk drive for it... which was both more expensive and physically larger than the computer itself!

I spent a whole lot of time hacking on that thing, including punching in program after program from "Compute Magazine". You'd punch things in by hand and try to run it later... but it was guaranteed not to run, so you'd have to go back through and try to find the typo.

In high school, I got in trouble once in a History class and was given some "extra" homework -- I had to write "I will not cause a disruption in Mr. Whatever's class in the future" a hundred times. I asked the teacher if it would be alright if I typed it a hundred times because A) I had a lot of homework and B) I needed the practice typing. Not having any idea what he was agreeing to, he said it was alright.

I went home and wrote something like this:

10 FOR I = 1 TO 100 
20     PRINT "I will not cause a disruption in Mr. Whatever's class in the future." 
30 NEXT I 

Fire up the printer, run it, and I was done... I remember this because it was the first time I realized that I could make a computer work hard so I wouldn't have to. Thus, a career was born.

That computer was also my first experience with the online world. I had to borrow my parents credit card to make it happen, but I got my first Compuserve account with that C64. Between cruising forums and writing code to peek/poke sprites on screen, I spent hundreds of hours on that machines.

Later (shortly after high school), I got an IBM PC XT 8088 clone that had two 5.25" floppy drives in it. One was the system (the OS and whatever app you ran) and the other was for data (to save your documents or whatever). Later, my uncle hooked me up with a 10MB hard drive... it was a beast and sounded like a jet taking off. I still remember messing around with jumpers to get it all working.

That 8088, with an amberchrome monitor, was the computer with which I first combined my other hobby -- music. I bought a serial port MIDI adapter and the original release of Cakewalk for DOS. Connecting a synthesizer to a computer opened up an amazing new world to me. I've been a Cakewalk (now SONAR) user ever since, despite dabbling with other products. It just "feels right" to me.

From there, it's been a series of 286, 386, and so on... I've never owned an Apple computer (though the MacBook Pro is sure tempting these days) and have been a PC junkie for over 20 years now.

Technorati tags: commodore 64, first computer, cakewalk, trs-80