How many times have you watched CSI or some other t.v. show and laughed when their computer does ridiculous things and say “computer programs don’t DO that!” ? Well, I just watched the video of the Longhorn based real estate application by Carter Maslan – and guess what, computers *do* do that now! Especially the Avalon stuff that you see with the mapping and satellite data. Definitely check this out! I am going to email my 3 friends who have been involved with mapping data software (one for IBM’s Geo Coding Plus, one for MapInfo and one for GDT.
Fun with Compressing Web Service Data Returns
I’ve been playing with Xceed’s .NET Stream Compression component and also fiddling with a compression soap extension written by Paul Glavich . I have this kinda big dataset I need to bring down via a webservice to persist for off line use. It’s almost 4 megs. On my DSL it was taking 2.9 minutes to download. Pity the poor user with dial-up. XCeed got it down to 12 seconds. I wanted to compare it to Paul’s component but have been doing something wrong, so he and I have been emailing back and forth. A lot has been just experimenting. Most of the wasted time has been spent editing the damned WSDL every time I update the webservice on the client side. That’s for WSE and for the soap extensions. What a pain. (Hopefully will discover big changes for that with wse2) Since 10:30 I have said “okay maybe tomorrow….” Finally went upstairs at 11:40 and while loading the toothbrush up with goo, I thought…hmmmm maybe… and here I am still at 12:40. Aaach. But really I’m going to bed right now. After I stick in these hyperlinks. Paul and I have been having fun though and I have learned tons about Soap Extensions thanks to the work that he did.
Another LOTR fan
I figure that anyone geeky enough to read my blog has read or seen Lord of the Rings. I never read the books (as a kid or adult – for shame) and hadn’t seen any of the movies. I just watched the first the other night and wanted to drive all the way to the video store to get the next one the next day (but couldn’t) so over the last few days I have been watching hte extras that were on the DVD. Tomorrow I will be going to town so I will get the next one and watch it. Then I get to go see the latest at the cinema. It’s just riveting and I can see why you would want more more more.
focus focus
y’know when you are staring at some code you have to keep adding to and all you seem to be able to do is correct the typos in your comments? “I before E except after C”
Hooray it’s raining
Now all temptations to go out and play are gone – as will be all of our beautiful snow. Boo hoo. Work work work
like a chicken with her head cut off
I’m trying so hard to get through my client’s project. I want to finish BLInk!. I now have 4 conferences (which is 3 separate talks) to prepare for (EdgeEast, DevDays in Boston, DevDays in Connecticut and DevTeach), a review of some bits that I’ve been asked to do, want to play with Whidbey, have not even had a chance to touch LongHorn (et alia), Reporting Services, Yukon and somewhere in there I’d like to have a life. How do you folks all do it? My friend Ali keeps telling me to sleep less, and I keep reminding him that I’m not 21 anymore and just can’t physically do that.
Dinner with a non-geek tablet user
I had dinner (oh wait, ala Scoble, a lovely dinner, a memorable dinner…) with a friend who is the Dean of the Business School at University of Vermont. She now uses a Tablet PC exclusively and loves it. Although I wouldn’t call it “standardizing“ , she indicated that they are going to get a number of tablets in the near future. I was fascinated by this, of course.
I asked her WHY??? Why do you love using the tablet so much? Her response was that she is much more used to writing by hand than typing. An interesting slant for someone like me who types – who knows… 100 words a minute or something insane like that and can’t write for beans anymore with a pen or pencil. I asked her what software she would like to see for the tablet. She pointed to Word, Outlook and Excel, then to the Pen Input Panel. “What more do I need than this?”
This just makes me laugh! I sure hope the marketing people over in the Tablet area read this!
She also sent me home with one of the best loaves of homemade bread I have had in a long time (that she had made). A woman who definitely uses many sides of her brain.
The Weight of your Words
Shelley Powers is in a quandry that comes from becoming what is oft-referred to as an “A-List” blogger. She has definitely risen to the top of the pool of a gazillion bloggers because she has a strong, intelligent and fascinating voice. However, that voice carries a lot of weight and Shelley is now pondering the effects of that. My reading of her post is that she is afraid of getting into a position of having to watch what she says and/or how she says it because her words are not taken lightly. The beauty of Shelley’s writing is that she is wide open. She now views that as a potential problem, but wonders if, for her, there is a point in writing if she has to edit herself.
I have edited this post as I have written it. I do not want to misrepresent Shelley or my high esteem of her by any possible mis-phrasing of my words. Luckily Shelley knows (has learned) that I’m a pussy and that I always mean well in my Pollyanna ways. But this is exactly what I think is distressing her – that she is almost feared, and that no matter what she says, people will read it with pre-conceptions. But, just like Sears software (eek what a geeky typo!) softer side to Shelley – she is a very sensitive and creative person and doesn’t want to be thought of as just a thick-skinned tough woman.
But it is because of Shelley that I would even dare to write a post like this. It is why I moved away from the dotnetweblogs so I could feel free to write a little “outside” if the mood struck me. It took a long time to get comfortable with writing technical posts (and exposing possible complete stupidity). It takes nothing to write about how pretty Vermont is or how much I love my dog. But just plain old writing what I think and what I feel is probably the scariest. And I can easily credit Shelley for giving me the inkling to do so in my own way.
It is fascinating to me that through blogging, we have the potential to expose ourselves so much and because of the nature of blogs, it’s hard to erase our little exposes (that is supposed to have little accent over the 2nd “e“).
I certainly would like to spend another hour at least revising this post to make sure I am not misunderstood in any way shape or form – but I’ve got work to do!
Berners-Lee : raising the bar at teacher-parent’s night
Many have writting about Tim Berners-Lee, “the father of the web”, being Knighted – which is pretty wild. (heck, I guess if they could Knight a Rolling Stone – why not an I.T. superstar?) Halley Suitt has a funny perspective on this as Berners-Lee’s children go to the same school as Halley’s son. That’s got to be pretty strange to have someone you see at the grocery store suddenly becoming a “Sir”.
More Microsoft Hires…
Addy Santo – A fellow blogger from NYC who keeps trying to tempt me to travel south for u.g. meetings and other Manhattan based events. Poor Addy. He just doesn’t realize that after 8 years of living large in NYC, I live in Vermont for a reason now! 🙂
Robert Levy – one of the youngest MVPs (mobile), Student Ambassador and chief of SmartPhoneThoughts.com. Robert was the winner of “who has the most pocket pc devices with them” at the MVP Regional Summit in L.A. just before PDC. Robert and I had emailed, but actually talked briefly on the plane into L.A. without introduction and therefore didn’t realize who we were! We had a good laugh at that when we saw each other at the MVP summit.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing from more in the next weeks.