I Love the 80s! (3D)

Tonight's the big night -- the last two years of the 1980s, as served up on VH1. Then I shall have all ten hours on my ReplayTV. It will take only a little video editing to create my own single-commentator version I shall call, "I Love Rachael Harris" ...

Nah nah nah nah, nah nah nah nah nah

Listening to "Dyslexic Heart (Album Version)" by Paul Westerberg from the album The Resterberg

Did someone call for help?

Well, if they did in Seattle, you can see it in real-time on my Seattle 911 Locator.

And the record-breaker

Track of Tropical Depression Alpha

Wilma VE Track

Watch it move ...

Will Code for Food

Ironic that I'm doing freelance web design after leaving a well-paying job at MS? A little. A friend from school hooked me with the NW School of Massage to do some web work.

Check it out:
Cool new site
Ugly old site

Now everyone tell me how good I am! It's a work in progress. All I have done so far is take the content that they had on the original site and reformat it. Next I'll add new content and new functionality.

Hey, I shipped stuff too!

Inspired by Dave's list, I pulled out my own Ship It plaque from the box of stuff from MSFT that I still haven't sorted and disposed of yet. Mine also has Fame and Shame.

Fame

• Pocket PC 2002

Shame

• Microsoft Mobile Information Server 2002 Enterprise Edition (could that name be any longer?)
• Smartphone 1.0
• Windows Mobile 2003

And I think I worked on Mac Office long enough to have gotten a Ship It if I had stayed. I guess that could have gone on the Fame side. At least I got the ship gift, which is what's really important. Anyway, it's nice know Bill and Steve "thank [me] for the lasting contribution [I] have made to Microsoft history."

Still Spatial

Got another mention in the Very Spatial podcast! Thanks, Sue -- there really was no need to make that correction (she mentioned last time that I listened to the podcast while biking, but that wasn't me), but it's always fun to hear your name unexpectedly! And of course, it would be nice if people thought I was excercising more than I am ;-)

The Pillars

As promised, here are the Pillars of Fame and Shame, and why each ship-it is in each. Note that "fame" and "shame" don't mean I think that the product was good or bad, rather my own reflection on the amount I deserved the ship-it award for my work.

The Pillar of Fame

• Plus! for Windows 98: My first gig as a developer, I worked on the Deluxe CD Player
• Windows 2000: More Deluxe CD Player work, plus lots of little updates to the multimedia apps
• Pocket PC 2002: Developer on Pocket Internet Explorer
• Windows Mobile 2003: Dev lead for Pocket Inbox
• Windows Mobile 5.0: Dev lead for Pocket Inbox (for most of it)

The Pillar of Shame

• Greetings Workshop: This was back in the day when if you worked on a component, and it shipped in three products, you got a ship-it for the third one. So I never actually worked on Greetings Workshop. I was a tester on Microsoft Audio Manager (aka "Audioman") and never actually even used Greetings Workshop
• Windows 98 Second Edition: I made one bug fix in this product, which involved deleting a single line of code in the MIDI file player.
• Windows Me: Believe it or not, this *should* be in "Fame" but once you stick it on the plaque, the ship-it is hard to remove. Why? Wasn't "Me" a silly product? Well, yes, but I put it in "shame" figuring that I'd get another ship-it for Windows Media Player 7, which I really did work on a lot. However, turns out the "Me" ship-it was to represent WMP7, as it was its primary ship vehicle. Oh well.
• Smartphone 2002: I didn't have much to do with this product, although Pocket IE just happened to run well on it. I was more involved in the later Smartphone versions, which were covered in the "Windows Mobile" ship-its.

Ship It!

I got another Ship It award today, for Windows Mobile 5.0 ... the big question: Should it go on the Pillar of Fame or the Pillar of Shame?

(The old-style plaque that you would attach the little ship-its to had two pillars for the awards, and I decided one side would be "fame," for stuff I felt I really did work hard on, and the other "shame," for stuff I, well, didn't).

Since WM 5.0 took so long to get done, I worked hard on part of it, but wasn't even there for the actual end-game, so it was really a toss-up.

In the end, I had no choice but to put it on "Fame" -- "Shame" was full!*

Now the entire plaque is full, so I need to move to the newer style of plaque, which doesn't have pillars, so I'll never be faced with this decision again.

I'm at home now, and I can't really reel of a list of what ship-its are on which pillar, so maybe that'll be a blog post for tomorrow.

* "Shame" had less space on it anyway, which is why I picked it to be "Shame" in the first place. It's not like I have as many failures as successes, but it's certainly close.

nano gets a big brother

I couldn't keep Laurel's birthday present a secret very long (I think I lasted 30 seconds). Unfortunately, it won't get here before her birthday, but close enough.

Isn't that Spatial?

My Virtual Earth Shapefile application is mentioned on the Very Spatial Podcast this week. Neat!

Update: My mention is at the 6 minute mark. (By the way, I listen to their podcast all the time, but not while riding my bike, so there must be another MS employee who listens, too).

Listening to "A VerySpatial Podcast - Episode 12" by VerySpatial from the album Very Spatial

More Virtual Earth stuff

I made the ViaVirtualEarth site gallery "pick" again, as well as the VE Team blog for my "shapefile reader" -- check it out (a shapefile is common file format for Geographic Information Systems applications). Even better stuff to come that I can't mention here yet ....

Virginia: For lovers?

If you are one to believe marketing hype, Virginia is for lovers. Granted that I have only been here for a short time, but I have found some other slogans that may be more appropriate:

• Virginia is for huge trucks taking up both lanes of the road
• Virginia is for country music and Christian stations on the radio
• Virginia is for bad coffee
• Virginia is for strange plumbing problems
• Virginia is for fast food
• Virginia is for humidity
• Virginia is for country music and Christian stations -- on TV
• Virginia is for a hotel check-in desk that says, "This is the house of Christ" but I have to think that Jesus would stay somewhere less ... stain-y.

Thanks, Apple!

After years of faithful service, my Sony laptop's hard drive failed. Unsatisified with any of the current laptops on the market, I decided to try to upgrade my drive instead. Problem: Sony uses a type of drive that is hard to find locally, and I need the laptop for a trip next week, so ordering a new one online is difficult.

While looking up the replacement drive on the web, though, I noticed a lot of hits for "ipod" showing up -- turns out, the same drive in my laptop is also in the Apple iPod 3rd and 4th generation players.

Well, Laurel and I have an old 20-gig 2nd gen iPod ... would it work? I popped it open, pulled out the drive, put it in my laptop, and voila -- XP is setting up as I type.

The only bad thing is that the iPod drive was 20 gigs instead of the 40 I had in there before, but this is plenty for my trip and gives me lots of time to order a larger drive!