Still going after all these years.
God bless Sean Bonner and CafePress for immortalizing the best event to date of the election year in cotton and coffee mugs. But what I really want is a t-shirt with this quotation on one side and this quotation on the other.
Our president and vice president. We don’t just do Newspeak; sometimes we speak everything that’s on our minds loud and clear.
Following up on the launch last week of the Microsoft.com blog portal and our RSS platform technology, I wanted to point to the first product site to consume the new capabilities: the Exchange Community site and newsgroup listing. My boss, Kevin, blogged all the things about this release that are cool (dynamically managed no-maintenance content feeds that automatically expose RSS). Bink.nu also has a pointer.
What you basically should know is (a) this is the first manifestation of the vision that I sketched in our original post about RSS blooming across Microsoft.com like a field of little white-on-orange link badges; (b) there will be a lot more of these coming as our version 1.0 community pages adopt the new publishing technologies and get lots of RSS goodness.
From an RSS perspective, this page exposes the following new feeds:
Plus two more that may or may not prove useful: Most Active Exchange Newsgroups and Exchange Blogs. (We don’t know how frequently the listings will change or if people will want to use RSS this way, but we’ll be interested to see if it works for you.)
Feedback, as always, greatly welcomed, especially by Dave Morehouse who is going to be working to roll a lot more of these out across our server-focused sites.
A few goodies:
Well, it didn’t take until Friday to spill the beans. Sent Online is now showing one of my contest photos as an NPR Phonecam Challenge winner. Thanks to Alex Chadwick at NPR, Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing, and the rest of the curators of the exhibit. The contest will be discussed on tomorrow afternoon’s Day to Day show at half-past the hour; audio should be available shortly thereafter.
The photo was taken last summer at the annual Brackbill picnic at the hereditary Brackbill/Hershey farm in Lancaster County, PA (the rest of the photos are linked from the article).
And the rest of the links in that list? Well, now I really have to get better at taking photos, both with the phonecam and my digital camera. The heat is on…
A list whose relevance will become apparent on Friday today:
Stay tuned…
At Art of the Mix and at iTunes, another good driving mix. It might be a while before I get these discs sent out. While I fix my distribution channels (and work on the cover and label art), ping me if you want a copy or if you want to be taken off my mailing list.
Tonight was supposed to be Eastside Sing night for me—the Haydn—but instead I ended up meeting Tom Harpel for a drink at the Stumbling Monk. This is an obscure (in a more literal sense than normal—there’s not even a sign outside) bar in Capitol Hill with no food, no decor, and mostly Belgian and Belgian-inspired beers available. So naturally I had to go, and it was close to where Tom was so it was even convenient.
Tom brought pizza (see the part about not serving food) and we chatted for a while about various stuff—object oriented programming, SQL skillz, beer, east coast vs. west coast, celebrity spotting—and had a relatively conservative number of beers each. I had a Dick’s Silk Lady, an Oregonian beer that contrary to their claims is not exactly light but certainly carries the classic Belgian esters, though with little of the associated complexity on the palate. Better in that department was the Liefman’s Goudenband, the classic darker Flemish beer that is considered a classic of the Oud Bruin (Old Brown) style. It was good but sweeter than I remembered, though still sour enough to raise an eyebrow.
The real danger, of course, was the Monk’s proximity to Half Priced Books. Fortunately I escaped with self control mostly intact. (I couldn’t pass up the Ivor Noël Hume book about Martin’s Hundred, having grown up next door, and the illustrated Comus was a steal.)
Anyway, on the way out I thanked Tom and noted in passing that I would be at the Sonic Youth show tomorrow. “Oh!” he said, “I’ll be there too.” Apparently Rachel is quite the fan. So this is turning into Tandoku week—never a bad thing.
Judging from his remarks in the New York Times today, Prince could go on the road as a Cluetrain evangelist. “I didn’t [pursue the joint concert/CD giveaway strategy] to usurp power from Billboard or SoundScan… But the real power is in community, in actually connecting with people.” Whoop it up.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there is absolutely no better home improvement resource than watching someone else document their own trials, tribulations, and triumphs. In this case, it’s HouseInProgress.net. I’ve pointed to JM and A’s (first initials only!) fine work before, but two things popped out of their archives at me recently which made me grateful to be a frequent reader.
The first is their excellent review of air conditioning systems, in which they point out that you can sometimes install a high-tech high velocity system, which is both lower-impact and provides excellent circulation, for less than it would take to do a comparable forced air system. (In fact, all their “review” articles have been outstanding. Check out the “structured wiring” discussion.)
The other was their article about running coax cable through the walls yourself for a low impact (no cables tacked up on the outside of the house!) installation. Cool, practical, and painstakingly illustrated. I’m not sure it’s always possible to find an unused electrical outlet to avoid punching another hole in the wall, though, especially in older homes.
Here’s what I didn’t write about while we were shipping the Microsoft.com Blog Portal last week.
First: Spider-Man 2 at the Cinerama. While I should definitely have gone to an earlier show (I was, shall we say, a zombie by the end of the 10 pm show), I thought this was a very well done film. A touch heavy perhaps on the “poor Peter Parker, his life is so hard” schtick—but then without that it wouldn’t be Spider-Man. And it was nice to see Dr. Curt Connors (“The Lizard”) and John Jameson (“Man-Wolf”) make appearances, though I don’t think either of them would be a big enough bad guy to carry the third film. That honor is clearly going to go to Harry Osborne as the Hobgoblin.
Second: had a great time at the Cyclops on Friday courtesy Arvind and Kim (who sent the Evite) and Peter, Catherine, Jay, and Ravi, who came and hung out for a while.
Third: thanks to Erikka and Jeffrey for the fabulous Sloan barbecue.
Fourth: looks like it will be a busy week. The East Side Sing will cover some good Haydn; Sonic Youth on Wednesday; and it looks like I will be heading to Portland to hang out with Shel and Vik on the weekend. So much to do, so little time.
Microsoft Community Kitchen: Blogs and RSS come to Microsoft.com. I won’t repost all that I wrote there, but the bottom line is now it is much easier to find blogs by Microsoft employees about the product or technology you’re interested in.
Oh, and that hidden feature I mentioned? How about an OPML blogroll of every registered Microsoft blog, categorized by product? How about one just for SQL Server, or Longhorn, or Xbox? Or Internet Explorer? If there are others you want to see, let me know and I’ll post them.
Sorry for the lack of posts today. I’ve been waiting for something to happen that I want to write about. I have very little patience, especially when I’ve eaten some of the M&Ms from the bowl outside my office door. (This is a tradition at Microsoft on some anniversaries. Today is my second anniversary as a full time Microsoft employee, and I decided that even though the second is not traditionally an M&M anniversary, I couldn’t pass it up.)
Sometimes ego surfing turns up some scary results. My Feedster RSS feed for jarrett turned up one of those last weekend: a Boston Globe article entitled Back Bay Chorale tabs Jarrett music director. So in the city that was my home for two years, there is a Jarrett who is directing a well known amateur chorale.
But it gets better. He was born in Virginia.
Boston Globe: WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). Lisa pointed this article to me, I think as explanation for how she thinks about technology purchases. I can certainly say that WAF played a big role in the decision to upgrade my PowerBook. The deciding factor was the ability to do video chats with my inlaws, which I had previously considered a cool bonus but not necessarily a deciding feature.
What does this have to do with hi fi? Well, it certainly explains Lisa’s desire for flat panel TVs, her agreeing with me that we at least need to look at DLP front projectors, and her oo-ing over the new flat panel speaker line from Bowers and Wilkins.
Doc Searls: And the living is easy. Doc writes about his childhood summers in Brick Township, New Jersey, just a few stoplights away from the part of Lakewood in which I spent my Independence Day weekend this year. I was probably even in the parking lot that now sits over where the Searls family played hide and seek fifty-plus years ago. When Lisa visits the beach with her parents this month, she’ll go to Mantoloking (mentioned in Doc’s post from last year about summers at the Shore).
For what it’s worth, Doc, I’m with you on the fresh blueberries. Only my version was late July/early August harvest in southeastern Virginia. For many summers we’d visit a berry farm in Gloucester, across the mouth of the York River from Yorktown, and fill a 16″ by 30″ by 24″ Igloo cooler half full of blackberries and a smaller one full of blueberries. The tradition (started as a birthday gift for my dad, later moved to my Mom’s birthday because the blueberries were riper) lasted from about the time I was 10 or 12 in the early to mid 80s until just before I went to grad school in 2000. That fall my parents sold the house in which I grew up in Newport News, Virginia, and moved to my dad’s family farm outside Asheville, NC. To the best of my knowledge, they haven’t found a pick-your-own place there yet. But I still keep my eyes out for the first blueberries every summer, and am still quite capable of devouring several quarts of them without blinking or losing stride.
(Fellow Jarretts, I can’t remember the name of the farm we patronized; feel free to jump in on the comments.)