The Old New Thing

Raymond’s 2005 MVP Global Summit event diary

September 26, 2005 Sep 26, 2005 09/26/05
Raymond Chen
In case those coming into town for the 2005 MVP Global Summit were interesting in chatting with me, here's my event diary for this week. (Non-native-English-speaking MVPs can hover over the highlighted words for a translation from slang into "standard American-English".) If you want to be sure to catch me, drop me a line and I'll try to...

Kurt would have wanted it that way

September 26, 2005 Sep 26, 2005 09/26/05
Raymond Chen
Several years ago, I had the pleasure of working in the office next to Danny, a phenomenally talented fellow, not just a stellar programmer but also an accomplished pianist, singer, video game restorer, and skier. I remember when he was working on DirectSound3D, we would sometimes put our heads together to nail the formulas for effects such as...

This is an unsupported ride, so if you stop, you will fall over

September 25, 2005 Sep 25, 2005 09/25/05
Raymond Chen
Well, at least I only passed out once. To recap, The E's goaded me into joining them on a ride up Zoo Hill. I'm really not a climber. I'm taxed by the hill on the southbound 520 Trail leading to NE 51st St., so much so that I commute to work along a different route (taking 156th Ave. NE instead) just so I can avoid it. But I accepted...

The Double-E Half Hour of Pain

September 23, 2005 Sep 23, 2005 09/23/05
Raymond Chen
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 ...

Ten things I noticed at the 2005 PDC

September 23, 2005 Sep 23, 2005 09/23/05
Raymond Chen
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 ...

Contradictory feedback from my 2005 PDC talk

September 22, 2005 Sep 22, 2005 09/22/05
Raymond Chen
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...

Coming to the completely opposite conclusion on Windows versions

September 22, 2005 Sep 22, 2005 09/22/05
Raymond Chen
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 ...

Black(out) humor at the 2005 PDC

September 21, 2005 Sep 21, 2005 09/21/05
Raymond Chen
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 ...

Giving fair warning before plugging in your computer

September 21, 2005 Sep 21, 2005 09/21/05
Raymond Chen
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 ...

Please disconnect all cell phones, signal watches, and pagers

September 20, 2005 Sep 20, 2005 09/20/05
Raymond Chen
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 ...