XBOX360: Don't ask me for one, but you can find them here ...

Check this site for up-to-the-hour reports on XBOX360 availability. Despite working on the same business group as the XBOX team, I have no way of getting a 360 -- the only thing that MS employees get access to at the company store is a small selection of games and some accessories, but never any full console hardware.

Going to Hawaii, anyway

Even though I didn't win the big trip to Hawaii that I was hoping for in the VE mashup contest, we're going anyway!

Just found out today that I could get the Whistler trip as cash instead ($1500), so I applied that toward a trip to Hawaii that Laurel and I had been thinking about taking for Christmas.

We're leaving on Dec. 18, and coming back late at night on Christmas Day (leave HI at 11 p.m. and get to Seattle at 6 a.m. the next morning, so we'll really be spending XMas in HI).

We're staying at the Hilton.

So, if you're sending us XMas gifts, send them early or send them late, but don't send them during the week before, unless you're shipping them to Hawaii! ;-)

Happy birthday to me!

#37

Done

Well Luxor II is history. I finished it over the course of 3 days from beginning to end without running out of lives playing on "expert" level. I had 27 lives left when I finished the last stage. Whoo hoo! Dave is still back on level 10 :)

Texas two-step

I scheduled a massage with Jeni Spring (the back-walker I mentioned before) for this Sunday. Looks like I was pretty lucky to do so, because she won't be in Seattle much longer -- she's moving to Texas in a couple of months! Anyone in Seattle who is planning to provide Ashiatsu and is reading this blog, I'm sure we could work out some kind of back-walking in trade for search engine hits or something ;-)

Payday at last!

I finally hit the $75 point on Shutterstock, so next month I'll get a check. 342 photos sold in a little more than a year -- not too bad for shots that would otherwise just sit on my hard drive, and I guess I have stocks that perform worse.

There goes the long weekend ...

Not that I planned to get anything productive done this weekend, anyway, but I didn't expect I'd find something to kill the entire thing before it even really got started.

You see, just about an hour ago, I found "Luxor 2" (or more properly, "Luxor Amun Rising").

The best game ever just got ... well, not better, but at least there is a lot more of it, and it is still just as good!

Who needs an XBOX 360 when Big Fish Games keeps pumping out the hits?

Mashup Hero

So, I didn't win first, second, or third place in our MS internal Virtual Earth mashup contest. However, because I submitted about 15 entries, they decided to make me a "Virtual Earth Mashup Hero" (a category that was totally made up after the contest was over) and give me a trip for 2 to Whistler, BC, Canada!

Happy, and yet sort of sad, news

9:58AM Microsoft notches a new 3-year high as it trades hits 28.00

At least it is a step in the right direction, but MSFT hasn't been above 28 in three years? Ugh.

Curling

_DSC1773
Originally uploaded by dstewartms.

I went curling today with my team at MS (Mobile Experience Application Team -- or "MEAT") ... pretty fun, eh?

Best commercial in years ...

This commercial makes me want to buy a Toyota truck. Or get hit by a meteor. Or whatever they are selling.

Best Trek line ever

Patrick Stewart on HBO's "Extras"

You're not married and haven't got a girlfriend, and you don't watch Star Trek? Good Lord!

(Did I ever tell you I met Patrick Stewart, in Whistler, BC, Canada? Well, I did.)

My Top 10 stock photos

	60 copies
	47 copies
	30 copies
	18 copies
	17 copies
	11 copies
	10 copies
	9 copies
	9 copies
	9 copies

$75 / year? I can't retire on that.

I've been on ShutterStock.com for a year now. In that time, I've sold more than 300 photos -- and only have 28 more to go until I hit the $75 level required to actually get a payday, which will easily happen this month if my current rates continue.

Of course, I haven't uploaded photos in a long time, so getting any continuing revenue, however small, from what would otherwise be sitting on my harddrive is a nice thing -- and last month was my biggest ever, with 51 photos sold.

MapPoint Talk

Thanks to Chandu Thota for mentioning my recent VE+Amazon mashup on his blog "MapPoint Talk - The Developer Way!"

Chandu is the creator of the "blog map" you see on the sidebar of this page and happens to sit a few offices away from my manager.

Hey, Chandu, maybe in addition to putting my stuff on your blog, you could also talk really loudly in the halls about how great my work is? ;-)

Read all about it!

Another VE Mashup (I'm going nuts with them!) called "Read All About It!" ... center the map and get a list of books on Amazon.com for that area. It is centered on Honolulu to start with ... no reason.

That was a quick buck fifty!

Turns out, the "Amazon Mechanical Turk" is real, alright. I just made $1.50 by identifying 50 pictures of locations in Seattle as the human component of a computer program!

Is it jive, turkey?

I can't believe I just stumbled across this instead of finding it on a million blogs or discussion lists: Amazon Mechanical Turk.

The idea is amazing ... you write a computer program that does something hard for a computer to do, but easy for a human to do, like figure out if a photograph contains a person.

When you run the program and come to the "figure out the hard part" bit of the program, an actual human figures out the hard part and puts the answer in the computer.

This is so "evil genius" that I'm just mad I didn't think of it first.

If it isn't just a joke, this is bigger than any "innovation" from Google I've ever seen ... almost makes me sad I blew off Amazon midway through the interview process (although not really).

World on fire

I've made another Virtual Earth mashup, this one showing the more than 21,000 wildfires on planet earth, using my own quick "spatial clustering query system" (i.e., that means you don't see all 21,000 fires if you're zoomed all the way out, which would take forever to load, but instead you see "clusters" of nearby fires, and they expand out as you zoom in closer).

See this site from the amazing "poly9" folks for my inspiration if you'd like to try something similar, although I'm doing my own algorithm as a) they only handle 5,000 points, and b) I wanted to try it ;-)