The Matt Faus Blog

Well, when I got to Microsoft Tueday morning it turns out that they weren’t quite ready for me to perform the installation. They wanted to wipe an old machine and install a new OS on it, and of course they wanted to backup all their files which took the good part of two hours. So, after spending 35 minutes on a bus and 10 minutes on foot to get there, I left. Luckily I was close enough to the Microsoft Visitor Center that I got to go and check everything out in there.

There was a decent mix of lameness and awesomeness. There was a little booth with a phone on it that let you record your voice, and then after you recorded a message there was a translate button. I said to myself, “Whoa, real-time voice translation, this should be cool.” However, after pressing the translate button and expecting to hear my message in a different language the thing just started saying “Zero, One, One, One, Zero, Zero, One, Zero, One, Zero, One, One”. Yes, everyone and their freakin’ mom knows the difference between analog and digital.

After that I went and played one of the 8 XBox360s they had setup to blow of some steam, and then I fooled around with the computer they had setup with 9 LCD monitors. The coolest thing, though, was a functional interactive display model they had setup. It was kind of like NYU’s FTIR Multi-Touch interface, but not nearly as cool and with pretty pitiful response time. Also, it was just running mapping software so all you could do was pan and zoom around the world, kind of like Google Earth. Needless to say, I zoomed into the UTD campus so that it took up the whole screen.