Wurm's Blog

What is an HP Engine Room Bundle?

Tuesday, April 07 2009 - my-life, work

A few people have asked me what I got from winning the Microsoft PhizzPop challenges and I did not really know for sure until recently. For the regional in Minneapolis each team was given 3 days of training and copies of Vista, Visual Studio 2008 Pro, Expression Studio and Office 2007. The software and training add up to be worth a good amount that made just being part of PhizzPop worth it.

When we won the Minneapolis challenge we got two things the first was a trip to SXSW09 (South by South West 09) to compete in round 2 the national challenge. What they gave us was full Gold Sponsor Passes to SXSW and hotel stay for 2 nights. Two nights was not much time to experience SXSW concerning that the first night I was still working on code. They could have skipped the passes I only went to 2 events that you needed passes for and one of them we did not even have our passes for yet but we got in because Zeus Jones was up for an award. From what I did get to of SXSW it is a very fun event I hope that I am invited back next year to be a judge and really get time to see more of SXSW.

For winning the National PhizzPop challenge I knew we were getting a trip to the Cre8 conference in Orlando, FL coming up on April 15^th. I am not really sure who this conference is aimed at but it seems skewed towards Adobe products. But my goal for the four days is to do some networking and maybe bring back some new partners for Sierra Bravo.

The mysterious prize was an HP Engine Room Bundle it was mysterious because Google failed me and could not find any information to tell me what it was. I did find some stuff about a reality show on MTV that was called The Engine Room and sponsored by HP. There was a page with a number of HP products that they used on the show, my real hope was for one of the items to be a laptop so the wife could have one to her self and I could have one for work. The bundle was 2 items a HP DreamColor LP2480zx monitor and HP XW6600 Workstation. The DreamColor is a $2000 24” LCD and is way too much monitor for my needs it can display a billion colors and I am sure do a lot of other cool things. The workstation is ok but needs some upgrades to make it useful for me. Since they don’t really fit my needs I have them up for sale on Amazon.

In talking about the Minneapolis challenge I said that there were two prizes but only talked about one the second prize is more of a side effect and it’s just the fact that our team won. It’s a nice that my management knows that the time I spent working on the project was worth it. It is something that our sales department can show to our clients as an example of our work and dedication.