What HAS Rod Been Working on at Xbox??

(Julia & what she referred to sweetly as her baby slug!)

Many of you have asked about what Rod's working on at Xbox. For those of you who don't game, it's a division of Microsoft :D Well, this week was a big week in our house because WE finally found out what Dad's top secret project that he's been working on at work is.... It's called Project Natal.

From what I understand, it's a voice, facial and gesture recognition camera that works as a controller - and will be used to play video games on the 360. Rod's the DevKit guy for Project Natal (Development Kit) - which means a lot and then not so much. He was so excited to finally be able to tell us!!

Branden, a friend of ours, co-worker of Rod's, got to go to E3 - a big electronics conference in California - and was one of the guys in charge of putting on the live demo with all of the big names - and it appeared to come off seamlessly. I watched the demo online and it was exciting to realize that Branden was backstage putting it on!! Woot! Woot!

This week also hails the end of another quarter at Skagit Valley College for Rod. He's supposed to have one more quarter where he will be taking Adobe Flash, Adobe InDesign and Advanced Webpage Design. The webpage design might get swapped out for another class - but probably not.

I am just feeling like it's a good end of week for our family. Finally Rod can tell us what he's been up to and since it's the end of a quarter, we'll be getting our evenings back with Dad!

The two webpages that he's been working on for his MIT classes are:

Our photography: http://www.herronpoint.webs.com

Our cakes: http://www.bluevaser.webs.com (this isn't even alllll of our cakes! I didn't realize we'd done SO many until I had to dig up pictures for this site for his class!!)

If we decide to actually use these sites, we'll probably change them over to their own named sites, for class they wanted us to use a freebie host. We will also probably make quite a few changes after the class has been finalized - and then much more after he's worked on the Adobe Flash. You can do some fantastic stuff with flash. These sites are basic, supposed to show, what he's learned in his books...