Tony Screiner is spending the next week or so covering the new security features that XPSP2 includes for IE, starting today with the new Authenticode dialog (which is very reminiscent of what’s coming in Whidbey’s ClickOnce and in Longhorn). Subscribed.

Looking for old screenshots of Windows 3.0 or BeOS or MacOS? Tim Tabor posted a nice web site dedicated to capturing screenshots from as many OS GUIs as possible, including desktops and icons.

As much as I love writing code, I realized long ago that it’s really the act of bending my computer to my will that I really love. Programming’s just the only way to really do that. After a few decades, you’d have thought we’d have come up with something better. Our industry’s pioneers agree that programming is holding us back, but don’t really know what we’ll use to replace it. Ideas?

Sure, sure, Microsoft men have steady paychecks and are level-headed, but why is it that women don’t want us for our animal charisma and indeflatable stamina? I believe it was the Nerds movie that featured the quote, “All jocks think about are sports. All nerds think about is sex.” : )

[via The Scobleizer]

If you haven’t done any MapPoint programming yet, you really should. I had a ball at it and now the MapPoint web service is free for the first year if you’re an MSDN Universal, Enterprise or Professional subscriber.

[via Early Adopter]

NetFlix brought “Hell House” to my house the other day and I just finished watching it (in fact, the credits are still rolling).

Hell House is the name of a specific kind of “haunted house” exhibit that some churches run every year at Halloween. This movie is a documentary of the church that originated the practice and is in it’s 10th year, having had 75,000 guests over that period. The hook is that the church puts on little mini-plays showing real-life horrors, e.g. domestic abuse, rape, murder, drunk driving, abortion and, sin-of-sins, homosexuality (which doesn’t hurt anyone, of course, but gets them on the news every year).

At the end of each tour through the Hell House scenes is a room with a member of the church applying age old used car salesman techniques to pressure people into converting or recommitting to the church. There success rate is 20%, which is why hundreds of churches around the country have adopted this practice.

It amazes me that such a thing actually happens. The techniques they use reminds me of a cross between the horror movies we was made to watch in driver’s ed and the pressure our society puts on our children to believe in Santa. Don’t cults get into trouble for this kind of thing? Truth is truly stranger than fiction.

I have absolutely fallen in love with X1. I don't search my email, attachments or file system anymore; I just type a few character into filter fields until the results have narrowed enough to show me what I was looking for. This is but a small part of what WinFS is going to enabled and it already saves me hours/month. Highly recommended.

Tracey Friend is an MS recruiter and she called to talk to me about some stuff I’m working on that could attract some fresh meat (and she also told me some stuff that sent shivers up my spine, but that’s another story : ).

Tracey was very friendly, just like all of the MS recruiters that I’ve met. In fact, MS recruiters are getting so friendly, that now HR is blogging. What’s next? Giving away the source? : )