Forget that my family constantly asks me things like “I got an email from eBay today that said my account was closed. Should I click on the link and give them my credit card details?” Forget that I’m constantly having to watch every single link I touch. No, I need Outlook’s new anti-phising protection because with all my computer education and experience, I got bit by an phishing attack.

In my defense, it was the perfect storm opportunity:

• We’ve just moved and I’m still dealing with a ton of change of address issues
• I ordered several books from Amazon in the old house that hadn’t been delivered before we moved
• I had just placed an order that morning on Amazon that morning w/o my caching settings, forgetting to update my credit card billing info

So, when the Amazon email came in telling me that there were problems with my account, I didn’t hover my mouse over the link before clicking it. When the page came up, looking just like an Amazon page, including the bit where they strip away most of the options when you’re entering payment information, no alarms went off. Even when they asked me for my PIN, which I don’t use for my credit card, so I don’t know it, I entered everything else, e.g. login ID, password, credit card, expiration and even that extra code they stick on the back these days and pressed Submit before I thought anything might be amiss. It was when they complained about the lack of PIN and sent me back to the same page to enter it that, too late, I thought to question this site.

Of course, I canceled that credit card right away and began changing all of the sites where I use that same user name/password combination (most, frankly). But still, it put a kink in my day (and I honestly don’t know all of the sites where I use that user name/password combo).

And so, while I’m installing Office 2003 SP2 as we speak, I have to wonder: why is it that anyone can send an email claiming to be whoever they want? Isn’t that a problem worth disrupting the world a bit to fix? I think it is.

IMDB: “8.4/10”

Oregonian: “A-”

Wired News: “And it’s those human elements — the undeniable chemistry between the crew, the tense standoffs between good guys and bad, Mal wrestling with his conscience — that make Serenity work.”

New York Times: “Scene for scene, ‘Serenity’ is more engaging and certainly better written and acted than any of Mr. Lucas’s recent screen entertainments. ”

I never knew about the series while it was new, but have seen it 2.5 times since it came on DVD, loving it all the way through every time (last weekend, we watched it straight through). And not only that, but my family loves it, too, which is why I haven’t asked my geek friends to come along to this one with me; this is a sci-fi movie that my whole family is looking forward to. How often does that happen?

These light sabers look very cool. It'd be nice to give my boys something that they could fight with that didn't break in 5 minutes (of course, I might need one, too, just as a backup...).

Stuart asked me to post this (although I took out the marketing goo). Ari is a fun speaker and is not to be missed.

The Indigo User Group Road Show rolls into Portland tonight, Wednesday, September 28, 2005 at 6:30 PM, and this is one PADNUG meeting that you definitely do not want to miss!

FREE and open to the public, but registration is required for this special PADNUG event. Register today!

Join top Indigo team members Ari Bixhorn and Richard Turner for an inside look at Microsoft’s next generation technology for distributed programming.

WHAT: Microsoft Indigo User Group Road Show
WHEN: 6:30 PM, Wednesday, September 28, 2005
WHERE: Intel Jones Farm Conference Center Auditorium
2111 NE 25th Ave, Hillsboro, OR 97124

Attendees will also receive:

- A special DVD with the latest Indigo pre-release, whitepapers, labs and demos
- And a chance to win an Xbox and other great door prizes.

As MS releases new frameworks, folks always ask “Does MS use this?” Of course, MS has tons of existing apps that would be silly to rewrite, but when we build new stuff, we generally use the latest frameworks that make sense.

Towards that end, John Gosman continues his history of Expression Interactive Designer aka Sparkle, mentioning the percentage of managed code in  (100%) and the number of P/Invoke calls (1 — HtmlHelp) to get what is probably the most amazing app I’ve seen in years, whether managed or not.

Here. I've posted the b1 and Sept (PDC) CTP samples and change notes for Programming Windows Presentation Foundation so that you can use the book for either beta 1 or the Sept (PDC) CTP bits and be equally successful. Enjoy.

Here. The one where I’m swamped in technical things to do and am loving it.

I am having so much fun, I can’t not tell you about it.

After a few months of wallowing, I found out something about myself: I’m really good at digging into the state of the art, whether it’s one technology or a feature across technologies, if I have a problem I’m trying to solve. However, if I’m just wandering in a space w/o an explicit goal, e.g. give a presentation, build an app, write an article, I’m lost; I just can’t muster any juice. What this means is that when I present my thinking in an area where I’m wandering aimlessly, I’m not married to any of my conclusions. If someone pushes back, I can’t really get behind my conclusions because I just don’t care. If you’re giving a presentation on how you think a certain technology should be used and you don’t have a firm opinion one way or the other, that’s just death.

So it wasn’t pretty for my first couple of months in my new project team. I never felt like I was making any progress because I didn’t understand what problem we were trying to solve. How can you know how much further you’ve got to go if you don’t know where you’re headed?

So, when my boss walked into my office with an actual problem, I jumped at it. He asked me to understand one of the internal applications that another team built at MS and give a presentation on it. The presentation was to a group of architects from across MS. The idea was to pick something to build that was real and that we could learn from as we attempted to apply what we hoped our product would be when it was done (developing prototype product functionality along the way). The catch: I had 36 hours to prepare the presentation (16 of which would commonly be used for sleeping), there weren’t any product architecture docs and nobody knew anyone from that team. I didn’t get much sleep, but I did prepare a presentation that amazed the audience given the amount of time I had. Plus, we ended up picking that app and we’ve been building it all summer, with me writing some of the code and leading the team writing the rest of the code. We’ve been through two milestones and are in the middle of a third, learning a ton about what we were going to build from solving an actual problem. That learning has fed into a product plan that I’m working on with my boss and that we’ll use to capture our team’s thoughts and then getting our management and our internal partners on board.

This goes along with me learning how to be a real MS Product PM, giving my PDC talk, organizing a group to fix what I don’t like about the technologies that I found out about during the preparation of my PDC talk, working on three books and helping to get Genghis resurrected for .NET 2.0. So, I’m busy doing so many wonderful technical things that I can barely stand it. Wahoo!