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Friday, July 19, 2002 Are you ready? - [4:00 PM] I don't know about you but I love Harry Potter! The books keep getting better and better and I certainly hope the movies do as well. My family and I have listened to the audio books over and over and over, they're quite good. Highly recommended. Anywho go visit the site, it's fun and full of interesting stuff, like how to view the deleted scenes on the DVD! New .NET Series - [9:56 AM] Quite a while back Richard Caetano, of StronglyTyped, put together a couple of articles on his experiences with VB.Net and C#. Today he's introducing a whole new series for developers short on cash. It's definitely worth a look. Movie line of the week answer - [8:56 AM] Hey hey! Every guess I got was correct, all seven! I know, I know, not killer numbers but that's ok. Thanks to those of you that played. The correct answer is... Jerry Maguire And our winner is, Mr. Tyler Love. Congratulations Tyler. Big event, at 3:00 AM Last night Kim wakes me up, "Rob there's something going on outside. I just heard a really loud bang." I look out on the front porch, nothing. So I decide to sit and listen for a minute. There it is again BANG! Man it shook the house. It was so loud and strong that I thought it was coming from inside the house. I went up stairs to see if we had an intruder, nothing. Hmmmmmm. Time to go outside. I grabbed my trusty "Peacemaker" (An Easton green-label from the day) and head outside, don't see anything immediately. I start walking toward the street because I see headlights shining on the road from further up the block. That's when I see them! FLAMES! Huge flames shooting up in the air. I knew where it was right away, the lumber yard. Two blocks over and two blocks up. It was fully involved. I zipped back in the house, got dressed, grabbed the camera, and headed over there along with a neighbor. Our little fire company was doing a terrific job, but they couldn't do it alone. Only an alley separated the lumber yard from a block of houses, yikes! While I was watching them fight a couple of engines arrived from Tulare and Visalia. I counted at least seven engines in all. Exeter only has two as far as I know. Thanks for helping your neighbor guys, we appreciate it. Around 4:00 AM it looked like they were getting the upper had so I went back to bed. This morning I drove by and there was still one engine on the site putting out hotspots. The yard's store, which was where the blaze appeared to have started, was a gutted shell. It looked like about one-third of it's materials behind the storefront were destroyed. The homes on the other side of the alley were all fine, that's a relief. Thursday, July 18, 2002 Interesting, no really - [12:27 PM] I decided to follow a link on Scripting today to Aaron Swartz report on the MacWorld keynote. On Scripting Dave apparently found "I applaude Apple on their beautiful user interfaces, clever implementations of ideas, and innovations in products. I just wish they'd do something to help out the rest of us." to be the interesting piece of text (it has some journalism name that eludes me at the moment.) When reading the post I found it interesting that Apple is incorporating ideas from other vendors into OS X(Jaguar). Oh, I'm sorry, it's called integration. This is what killed Microsoft in court. Integration, or bundling, of features into the OS. It's ok for Apple to do it because they haven't been found guilty of monopolistic practices, 5% market share and a competitor walking on egg shells can do that for you. Funny how the competitive landscape has a way of correcting itself without intervention on the governments part. Apple is kicking some major butt. This is why breaking Microsoft up really isn't necessary. I know, I know, a lot of you won't agree with me. Maybe the fact that Microsoft is my employer blinds me to the "obvious". Just remember one crucial thing. No platform can survive without developers, not even Microsoft. Movie line of the week - [9:06 AM] It's been sporadic over the past couple of weeks, sorry for that. But it's that time once again, are you ready movie buffs? Then let's get started! Show me the money! Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here. Wednesday, July 17, 2002 Sick individual - [12:34 PM] Furious. That's how I feel right now. A man kidnaps a five year old girl and kills her. The police had better find him before the general public does, otherwise there may not be much of him left to prosecute. Sickening, just sickening. More services - [9:12 AM] Looks like Amazon has entered the service arena. They've apparently implemented some SOAP interfaces for doing something with books? I'm not going to go hunting because other folks have done the footwork for me. It's hard to get excited about anything Amazon does, I can't stand them. That said it's nice to see them implementing web services. Now if they'd just become profitable (I mean consistently and not through the use of creative bookkeeping.) More on bloggers and hardware choice Steven Vore has elaborated a bit on my question from yesterday about Mac bloggers vs. PC bloggers. I'd love to see weblogs.com include something like hardware and software choices. Maybe we should get the blogchalk folks to do the same, or better yet hook blogchalk info into weblogs.com. Tuesday, July 16, 2002 WarCraft III - [3:55 PM] Wow! I think I'm gonna have to go out and buy Blizzard's latest installment in the WarCraft series, check out the trailer! Waiting on a build - [8:25 AM] Interesting question from Mr. Steven Vore. Are Mac users smarter? The report states that Mac users are more likely to create a web page, really? Here's my question, do more Mac users or PC users have blogs? Mornin' Net Neighbor - [7:51 AM] Steve Pilgrim: "Does anyone have advice on how to determine the right tool for the job?" - Steve has quickly become one of my very favorite reads. He's all over the board with his posts, that's good IMHO, and he asks lots and lots of great questions. So go give him a hand with his latest question. Steve, I've messed with Photoshop and I currently use Microsoft PhotoDraw. I think the key to any photo editing application you decide on is taking a year to get used to the features, yes I said a year. I have no doubt I haven't even scratched the surface of what PhotoDraw can do and Photoshop is probably a few zillion steps above it! Personally I'd probably buy the leader because there are going to be more books available to help me get started. Go get one of those Dummies books and read it front to back, that should get you into 1/1,000,000th of the functionality. Monday, July 15, 2002 Just a matter of time - [11:33 AM] CNet News: "Hack attacks on Linux on the rise." - You had to know it was coming, right? As Microsoft begins tightening the belt on security holes it's only natural that folks would start hitting Linux based boxes. Good Mornin' Y'All! - [8:45 AM] Hey hey! I'm back in the office and ready to code! It's really amazing how little things change while you're gone. Nothing major to report on the project which is really nice. The point man for my feature work did a great job of scheduling so I'm right on track. I need to complete six days of work this week then I can really relax next week. Relax is of course relative, I can relax as much as I want while working on our bedroom! My wife has been very patient with me. I work at a snails pace. Anywho gotta play catchup, e-mail can be a steaming pile of poo when you've been gone for a week. I think my final unread count was ~400, ouch. I know folks that have more to read when they're gone for a day. Is that productive? In a word, No. We need to find a better way to communicate; e-mail is overused, especially at Microsoft. Sunday, July 14, 2002 Quick Stop - [7:32 PM] Had to drop by the office tonight so my build box would start building again. Passwords had to change while I was on vacation so my box hasn't built anything since the fourth. I'm gonna be back in the office tomorrow morning and I need a build. Yes, I'll be back in here tomorrow. I thought I'd postpone my vacation by a week since we're having so darned many softball games next week I won't get to spend any time with Kim or the girls. Better to just work through that week and take the next one off. It's a good thing. My batteries are pretty much recharged so it's not going to hurt me any. Just puttin it off by a week. Looks like my brother hates life again. Come on Jay, cheer up. I have a HUGE box of software sitting at my house waiting for you. If that doesn't cheer you up I don't know what will! It continues to cook here in the Valley. When I left home at 5:30 tonight for my softball game it was 102. We played six games yesterday and according to another guy on the team it was hotter then. There must be something wrong with my brain.