I decided to refresh the color palette of my site a couple days ago and just now finished up my last edits. While I liked the previous blue and green scheme, I think this new look is a bit easier on the eyes and has a nice warmth to it.

Rock Band 3 is finally in stores. Get at it. I’m extremely excited to see how the community embraces the Pro modes and how long it takes for them to FC some of the harder Pro Guitar songs.

Lately, I’ve been working alongside our web team at HMX to help roll out the new rockband.com. It should be live at some point today to coincide with the launch of Rock Band 3.

And now that RB3 work is winding down, I’ll finally have time to start updating this site again. Stay tuned.

I got into work this morning to find my new business cards waiting on my desk for me. They look great and thankfully came just in time for me to catch a plane to GDC tomorrow around 5pm. I’ll be packing my bags shortly, but until then it’s time to check out what Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has to offer. As a long time Battlefield 2 player, I’m hoping this comes closer to offering the Battlefield experience to the consoles than Bad Company initially did.

In other news, Rock Band 3 was announced today and I can finally say that I’m working on it and it is awesome. Unfortunately, that’s all I can say for now, but it’s nice that I’ll be able to tell people at GDC what I’m working on, rather than dancing around their questions.

March looks like it’s going to be a pretty hectic month: lots going on over at Harmonix, GDC in a week, PAX East at the end of the month, and all the while looking for a new apartment to move into by April 1st. Don’t envy me, please. Despite all that, it’s always nice to have a loaded schedule as it presents a unique challenge. When things get hectic, I’m personally reminded of the time I spent in Venice when I had to budget our project out; there were meetings to schedule with various Venetian companies that hinged on our liaison’s presence,  programming tasks, localization, documentation, and so forth. Basically, all the rigors of a software development cycle all crammed into two months.

If I made it out of that project without a hitch and a couple banana stickers to show how amazing of a job my team and I did, I can definitely get out of this month with nary a scratch.

Just a quick check-in for the site: the Projects page has been updated with a few of my past and current projects.

Now to the meat and potatoes: The news of the Windows Phone earlier this week was certainly a breath of fresh air in the mobile market. As a user who switched from Windows Mobile to the iPhone, I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum; the horribly antiquated interface design on underperforming hardware and a smooth interface with a robust library of applications, albeit excessively locked down. The interface on the Windows Phone 7 Series is absolutely amazing (I’m already a huge fan of the Zune interface and am glad to see it carried over) and the features it boasts, specifically Xbox LIVE and XNA support, are enough to give Microsoft a huge boost in the mobile realm. With the Xbox LIVE support, Microsoft will likely see a large influx of Xbox 360 users that would simply love to be earning achievements on the go and enjoy robust messaging and rich presence support for other online LIVE users.