I'm pretty confident I'm going to regret this. I have been goaded into The Double-E Half Hour of Pain, featuring Eric Gunnerson and The Fat Cyclist. Indeed, Mr. Cyclist has already started the trash talk. My strategy will be to start slow and taper off. (Especially since it will have taken me about an hour and a half just to get to th...
Supplementing Sara Ford's PDC trip report: Some of my own stories and observations from the PDC. I met up with Sara at closing time Friday since we coincidentally had the same flight out. Since the flight wasn't for a few hours, it was nice to have someone to chat with to pass the time. (And yet nobody took her up on her lunch date offer. Wh...
I was looking through the feedback from my 2005 PDC talk, and I noticed an interesting contradiction. The written feedback indicated that the first half of my talk (wherein I talked about memory management and "paying your taxes") was more favorably-received than the second half (on user interface issues). On the other hand, nearly all of the ques...
When I discussed why there is no all-encompassing superset version of Windows, people somehow interpreted this as an explanation of why there are so many versions of Windows Vista. I guess these people never even made it past the title of the article, which argues for fewer Windows versions, not more! Besides, the article talked about the ser...
Trying to make light (get it? light?) of the situation, there were quite a few jokes about the power outage at the PDC. The Hands-On Lab was being set up at the time the building went dark. A bunch of us speculated what the technicians must have been thinking when the power went out just as they plugged in a rack of computers... Perhaps in reactio...
That colleague who gave me the AOL CD that came with a big-iron server later received a prototype Itanium computer for testing purposes. The early Itaniums were behemoths. They weighed a ton, sounded like a weed whacker, and put out enough heat to keep you comfortably warm through the winter. (If you opened them up, you would likely see several ca...
When the power goes out, the first thing you notice is how quiet everything becomes. The hum of the computers in the building stops. You hear... nothing. Bask in its peaceful silence. The next thing you do is turn off all the machines in your office, because you don't want to stress the power grid and network when the power eventually returns ...
Last Saturday night, a group of us (including butt photographer Wendy) attended a performance of the Seattle Symphony consisting of the world premiere of the orchestral arrangement of Shafer Mahoney's Sparkle, Richard Strauss' Don Quixote (with guest soloist Lynn Harrell) and concluding with Brahms' Fourth Symphony. I was pleasantly surprised by...
I guess one advantage of having a web site is that I can publish errata. I haven't watched the Channel9 video (and probably never will; it's hard to watch yourself), but I do remember some of the questions at the end that I wasn't able to answer off the top of my head, but after a few days' research I think I can do it now. The person who asked ...
One reaction to my story about the oldest computer at Microsoft still doing useful work was shock (shock!) that Microsoft suffers from power outages. In the Pacific Northwest, winter windstorms are quite common, and it is not unexpected that a windstorm blow down tall trees (which are also quite common) which in turn take out power lines. And if...
