Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill.

While this letter has gotten around pretty quickly already, few of the reports mention the most glaring problem with the accusation: Microsoft didn’t develop Counter-Strike. Counter-Strike is an add-on for Half-Life, developed and sold by Valve Software. While Valve was founded right in the city I’m living in, and is headquartered just minutes from Microsoft, their only remote connection is that the game was eventually released for the Xbox platform in addition to the PC.

Aside from the confused Thompson laying blame on the chairman of the wrong company, does he really think a game like Counter-Strike can be the root cause of Cho’s violent behavior? Perhaps the fact that he was a bullied outcast in school might’ve contributed to his decision to murder students at his own university. Perhaps the manifesto and DVD he mailed to NBC between shootings, with images of him holding a gun to his own head and a knife to his own throat, might indicate some psychological issues that go deeper than a video game can induce? Cho was clearly a psycopath, and psycopaths aren’t created by video games.

Then I met with someone that did more technical work for MSIT who went through my experience more in depth. He was great too, I got to talk a lot about myself which doesn’t always happen with some interviewers, but it stayed conversational. We spent some time talking about Vista and the bugs in the RCs and even into Microsoft Hardware — he promised to let me know if he can find out why nobody has the keyboard I’ve been drooling over since September in stock even though the ship date for the 7000 series was supposed to be 1/8.

A couple hours later I met up with some manager types from DuPont where I worked last year and talked about coming back if I didn’t get an offer from Microsoft. It’s always good to have a backup plan. The two Microsoft interviews went well but I don’t honestly expect an offer — I have no recent work experience developing in the Visual Studio environment, with .NET or anything that’s come about in the last 4 years or so since moving off to C++, Java and PHP.

My direct manager, who offered me his job before I left, already left the company for another position, but he made sure everyone else knew I was the best programmer on the team when I was there, so they definitely want to re-hire me.

The Microsoft group that flew in got an e-mail out to everyone that interviewed with them through Drexel’s career development center to let us know they were having an info session type gathering in the evening which I just got back from. It was real casual and they and a student from Drexel that worked there last year (and is going back to join the Xbox XA team) talked about life at Microsoft and in Seattle.

About half an hour into it they pulled out a brand new Xbox 360 with a bunch of games and had everyone throw their names in a hat and raffled it off. I won! I haven’t owned a game console since the Nintendo 64, which my parents had paid for so many years ago. I’ve never spent my own money on one, but now I get to try out everything I saw when Bill Gates gave the CES keynote address last week — Xbox Live, Xbox TV, Vista Ultimate’s media center integration with Xbox Live, using the Xbox 360 controller to navigate MS Live Virtual Earth. I’ll have a lot of fun with this.

A great day in the end. I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on so I’ll stop writing here, but I also got to meet Richard Stallman in person, the man behind GNU and the free software movement. He gave an hour and a half talk at Drexel about software patents that I managed to get to between interviews and classes. Very interesting guy.

Hyperlink Cues with Favicons
CSS and JavaScript which automatically displays the favicon icon of each website a page links to next to that link.

Programming Books
A new, user-ranked directory devoted entirely to programming books. Most of the books I’ve read are recommended there, as well as quite a few that I’d like to read this year.

When you read code, imagine typing it by hand.
Tips for better understanding others’ code, especially when it’s in an unfamiliar language.

YouTube is Better Than the Superbowl
A 75-second film Dove released at no cost on YouTube that brought a bigger traffic spike than their Super Bowl commercial.

Vanilla
A relatively new open-source PHP message board package I absolutely love. It’s well written, extensible through plugins, actively maintained, and devoid of unnecessary features that could be added as needed for individual boards.

Design Snack
“Digg” for web design inspiration. A website gallery which uses user votes to decide what gets featured on the homepage.

adClustr
A site dedicated to helping you blend text advertising into your website design. CSS snippets and images to help style text ads from AdSense, YPN, and Text-LinkAds.

Sweetie
A set of 150 icons for use in web applications. Free for commercial use and provided in PSD and PNG formats.

Feel free to share anything interesting you’ve found this week in the comments; if I do too maybe it’ll end up in my post next week. I’m off to watch the live webcast of Bill Gates giving the keynote at CES.

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