Saturday, September 13, 2003

When I was a kid, the source of universal knowledge at home was the set of dusty encyclopedias that my Mom inherited from somewhere. Today, it’s the Internet, via Google. That in itself makes Google the fulfillment of most sci-fi novels’ description of the the-store-of-all-human knowledge (I wish the text of all books were up, but that’ll happen in time…).

Anyway, it didn’t hit me just how comprehensive Google was ‘til I typed in ‘“Joe Grammer” wife’ yesterday (I was calling and wanted to be prepared to address his very nice wife by name in case she answered the phone). In 0.39 seconds, Google gave 45 results, the 3rd of which contained Joe’s wife’s name! It was Joe himself who’d mentioned his wife’s name in a mailing list post but still, that’s pretty damn scary…

Here. Hilarious PDC03 Red vs. Blue video!

Here. I'm sure it won't last, but the WinForms book has broken 1000 (908) and has an average 5-star rating with three reviews, saying very nice things like: "This book rocks! ... All chapters are brilliant." "The localisation and resource usage in the managed world are clearly described and you won't lose hours trying to access resources in your code anymore!" "I stayed up all last night reading Chris' new book... I enjoyed every single page." And, of course, the quote that makes my life complete: "Move over Petzold, Sells is here."

Here. Keith Ballinger from the Applied XML Developer's Conference, part 2.

Here. Speaking at the PDC? Going to the PDC? Missing out on the PDC? Check out the PDC Bloggers site, which should keep you neck deep in news (but if you're not there, you're still missing a massive love fest... : ).

Here. The one where I take a look at all of the things that the typical marketing guys has to balance and thank goodness I just get to think about developers. : )

Here. Raymond explains why the taskbar defaults to the bottom of the screen (because old apps would position themselves under it a lot when it was on top). Since I defected from the Mac, I always move mine to the top and like it, but did have problems for *years* about apps moving up under there. For those few that still do, I've long since memorized the key sequence: Alt, Space, M, which flips a window into "Move Mode" and lets me use the arrows to move it down. I can understand why MS didn't want to teach everyone that and instead just put the taskbar at the bottom. : )

Even in my short time at Microsoft so far, I’ve have already learned a *ton* from marketing. Of course, I’m working with lots of marketing folks as we get closer to the PDC. Because of my role, I have to worry about what’s good for the developer. Marketing guys, on the other hand, have to balance that with what’s good for the administrator, what’s good for the user, what’s good for the company, what’s good for the shareholders and what’s good for a bunch of other folks I don’t even know about. And, they have to do it for all of the streams of information coming out of the company, which now includes lots of informal streams like newsgroups, message boards, user group talks and blogs. Anyone that can balance all of these folks and still get developers what they need has my unabashed respect.