You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!
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[ed: I took out all the links in this post because apparently there are links on this site that dump adware on your machine and some of my readers have been bitten. My apologies. If you must go to the site, here’s the link, but on your head be it: http://quizilla.com/users/BaalObsidian/quizzes/How%20grammatically%20sound%20are%20you?/]

If you’re looking for my wife, Melissa, her email address is msells@sellsbrothers.com. Her email is pretty reliable now, so send her some! It makes her so happy…

My brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Joel and Beth Howie are online again. Drop them a line.

Another friend of mine since grade school, Pete Clark, is just coming off his hiatus recovering from a dot-bomb and spending time with his new child. He is now the principle in pclark.net Consulting, LLC.

If you live in Portland, OR and you’d like to get together for breakfast with a group of “congenial nerds,” check out the Nerd Breakfast Home Page. I like to get there myself when I’m not traveling (or sleeping in : ).

This just in!  Matt Pietrek’s wife took this pic of (left to right), Don Box, me and Matt Pietrek. Sorry about the lack of a smile. I was having a lot of fun hanging out at Matt’s house that day, but can never manage to smile for the camera. BTW, ask me to tell you how all of us spent hours debugging a screensaver that day…

 

According to Amazon’s Alexa project, sellsbrothers.com is the 151,443rd ranked site by traffic in the world and is in the 48th percentile speed-wise. That sounds pretty crappy, but considering how many sites there are, I don’t think that’s too bad (although I admit to not being able to think of many sites to try that turned out to be lower ranked than mine… : ).

Of course, Yahoo!, MSN and Google are 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

I had coffee with Arlo Belshee today. He's done years of successful XP programming and when I say "successful," I mean increased and predicable output. In fact, the techniques he described for XP programming, he also applied to sales/marketing and got the same level of improvements. He's got an idea for the culture of a product team, including all levels of management, that makes me drool. If you get a chance to hear Arlo speak on this topic, you should do it. He's downright inspiring.

Charlie's description of the next big thing to come to home entertainment nails it. I can't wait to be able to plug in a media server with a giant hard drive for my burned DVDs and CDs and my cached TV and radio programs to be made available, along with live TV and live Internet/AM/FM/XM radio, at any PC or TV in my house. I've already begun preparing.

I've been reading ActiveWin for years to pick up various Windows news tids and bits, but have never been mentioned 'til the MSDN Tour. On the other hand, I'm not sure how my boss is going to feel when he learns that all I do (when I'm not giving tours) is blog and collect information about the Microsoft interview process... : )

Matt Powell has posted a quiz about MSDN based on the video tour Channel9 posted yesterday. These questions were kind of embarrassing:

“1. According to Chris, what does PAG stand for?

“2. What does PAG really stand for?

“Extra Credit: Of the 100 people that make up MSDN, how many of those people are part of PAG?”

I knew that the odds of me getting the PAG acronym right were small, but I think I got the *spirit* of it right… I haven’t been this sheepish since Sara, the Matriarch of MSDN, had to remind me that I was a Content *Strategist* not a Content *Specialist* after my first public posting. : )

In the 2nd installment of my series rebuilding Solitaire using Longhorn technologies, I dive into 2 of the 5 Avalon families, specifically controls and panels, and build something that is at least approaching how Sol is supposed to look.