July 9, 2004 fun

Matt Pietrek, My Hero, Starts A Blog

When I was but a wee Windows lad, my heroes were Charles Petzold and Matt Pietrek. I learned Windows 3.1 programming from Petzold (along with everyone else) and learned to love what was going on underneath from Matt. Plus, not only did Matt write Windows Internals (the title and style of which would inspire my own Internals book), but he also wrote a monthly column for the Microsoft Systems Journal, which I would lovingly read cover-to-cover every month.

So, when I went to speak at my first conference and Matt wanted to talk to me about something, I was on cloud 9 (not to be confused with Channel9). I wondered what obscure technology that I’d most recently written about on the DCOM mailing list that had caught Matt’s eye. What deep COM or ATL issue did he want to take up with me? I had arrived!

The topic of Matt’s conversation? The x86 Prayer that he had posted on his site had moved and he wanted to know why all of the 404s were originating from my site (I was linking to it on my Fun page). I had not arrived… : )

We’ve become closer since then and now Matt’s got a blog. Wahoo!