Because it once was, though no longer is.

Marymoor Park just keeps getting better. Just this year, they added a little Subway sandwich shop, so you don't even have to pack for a picnic in the park. Next, free Wi-Fi (sponsored by MSN). Then movies in the park (sponsored by First Tech Credit Union). The latest addition is free bicycles (sponsored by Dasani). Show a photo ID and you...

Late Tuesday night, Jenny Lam, the creative director for this year's PDC, came by our hallway and asked for permission to rummage through our offices for "stuff". They were looking for props to use to decorate a developer's cubicle in a video they were filming for the conference. I was able to loan her a framed letter of appreciation and my pass t...

Not everything related to the Windows 95 launch went well. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that a local CompUSA store found that their cash registers crashed at midnight, forcing eager customers to wait ninety minutes before the problem could be resolved. The cause: A bug in the cash register software which had lain undiscovered because the st...

Every Wednesday evening in August of this year, Marymoor Park will be showing a movie. Tonight's movie is Bend It Like Beckham. The movie begins at dusk, and a $5 donation is suggested, proceeds to be shared between the park and a local charity. The charity tends to be thematically related to the movie; for Beckham, for example, part of the money...

A limited number of seats at the Windows 95 launch were available to the product team, so there was a lottery to see who would get one of those tickets. The remainder of the team would be standing on bleachers hidden behind the stage, to be unveiled at the grand climax of the product launch festivities. I happened to have been a winner in th...

During the development of Windows 95 (which released to the public ten years ago today), application compatibility was of course a very high priority. To make sure that coverage was as broad as possible, the development manager for Windows 95 took his pick-up truck, drove down to the local Egghead Software store (back when Egghead still e...

Icons are all multiples of eight pixels in width. It's not just because computer people like powers of two. Back in the early days of Windows, video cards were monochrome or, if you were lucky, 16-color. These were all planar video modes, the mechanics of which were discussed earlier. Now imagine copying a bitmap to the screen where both the bit...

The Tablet PC team have a tough task ahead of them at this year's PDC: They have to get people to care about power management. The reason why this is tough is that power management is rarely a deal-maker. If a user is evaluating, say, personal finance software, how much weight are they going to place on which program consumes less battery ...

One of our researchers IM'd me yesterday to let me know that someone she interviewed mentioned that some people suspected that I wasn't real because most of my posts are published at the same time every day. I dunno. The evening news comes on at the same time every day, but I'm pretty sure they're real. Maybe I should be more suspicious. If I ...