January 2004 Entries
There's been a lot of moving around in the Microsoft blogging world, and in the last couple of days the dust has finally settled, and the new default home for what was once http://blogs.gotdotnet.com is now http://blogs.msdn.com. Lots of people worked really hard to make http://blogs.msdn.com a reality and I'm waving a big Thank You to all of them! I'd also like to personally thank Scott Watermasysk for his willingness to move and convert (BlogX to .Text) all of the posts for those bloggers moving...
Yesterday I saw a link for http://kbalertz.com on http://www.asp.net; I had heard of kbalertz before but had never visited. Last night I went to the site and was very pleasantly surprised at the functionality of the site, including the total ease with which I could sign up for alerts by email on some of my favorite MS technologies like Infopath and Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS). And then, being a big RSS fan, you can imagine my glee to find out that I could sign up for a feed of new KB articles...
Tommy took some great photos of the snow today. Look at all of them, if you have time... they are all great, but the photos are Maya are Wonderful
Once I started using Newsgator, I was pretty much hooked. When I only had my one blog on GDN, my blogging life was easy -- I installed the BlogX plugin, and posted away. Once I moved this work-ish blog to GeeksWithBlogs (thanks Jeff!) and created another blog for more personal stuff (it's still a really fuzzy line though), I couldn't post as easily from Outlook because I could only install/use one newsgator posting plugin. I posted a Lazy Web request and lucky for me, Kent responded. I've been using...
Today there was a major storm in the Puget Sound area -- lots of snow, on top of ice that's formed over the last few days. I, along with quite a few of my co-workers, worked from home today. There was lots of angst, as you can probably imagine, as everyone who didn't go in tried to RAS in or use OWA. Me, I just left email open, and let mail update when it could. (I still love RPC over HTTP!) It was a slow email day, which was good; I'm making some progress on the huge number of emails I have in my...
Weird. Tonight I went to the store to buy the requisite 6 pounds of M&Ms (it's a Microsoft tradition to treat your team to a pound per year on your anniversary*) and all they had was black and white. Apparently there is some sort of promotion going on - Oh Hey, check this out: 1. Throughout the country are six black and white bags of M&M'S® Brand Candies filled with ALL ONE COLOR of candies—and a winning game piece. There's a bag for each color of the M&M'S® Brand color...
I can't believe how cold it is -- I like this accuweather forecast . Don't think I've ever seen the word frigid in a weather forecast! Brrrrrrrr
Luckily I'm not a conspiracy theorist, otherwise I would think that this is actually the southern California desert...
There are a bunch of folks at MSDN who read a wide range of blogs (and quite a few of us who have blogs, as well). Sometimes we run across someone who is having trouble with some aspect of MSDN, which they've written about in their blog (for example, Steve Malofsky's library problem and solution). Whenever I read something like this, I always follow up with the author to try to get the problem resolved. While I can't speak for everyone at MSDN, I think this is mostly the norm with the wonderful folks...
Catching up on my reading, and saw that Steve Makofsky, of furrygoat.com fame, has been working on visualization techniques. I found the image in this post pretty interesting. I can see that one of the feeds is Chris Sells, but my eyes gave out trying to see the rest. It's very cool the amount of information you can represent with color, size and quantity. Heh. Wonder what Scoble's would look like...
... that I'm working in the right place. It's Jan 1, Thursday night, and I've been off work since the 19th. I'm going back to work on the 5th, so a few more days off still. As my MSDN pals pop up on IM Messenger (and more and more of them have today), I have to hold myself back from bugging them (sometimes I can't, but they're very understanding). I'm excited to see them online, and even more excited to get back to work. So much fun to be had at MSDN coming up in the new year! I have lots of things...
Last Sunday we went to see The Sound of Music, with a twist. It was billed as a "sing-a-long". The movie is one of M's favorites, so I took a chance and got tickets for the three of us to go as one of her Christmas gifts. It wasn't until Sunday morning that I dug in detail to find out what it was about... and was surprised to read that this particular Seattle tradition involved props and a costume contest, in addition to the songs being subtitled. "Uh oh," I thought, "this might turn out to be a...