I’ve been tagged a coupla times, so it’s time I fessed up with Five Things You Don’t Know About Me:

1. In college, I was in a fraternity and not just a geek fraternity, but an actual, national, recognized social fraternity (Phi Delta Theta). I figured I was geeky enough in high school, so needed a place to learn to at least hide my dorkiness. Obviously, I failed, but it was a very fun four years. : )
2. In college, I coded in Unix using VT100 emulation software via a modem to my school’s DECs from my Mac IIcx running System 7 (I worked two jobs all summer to earn half of the $6000 it cost me to purchase the thing in 1988). It was the combination of the best programming and best UI experience at the time (although on two separate OSes). After graduation and working a job for a coupla years where I programmed Unix all day, I needed to look at Windows 3.1 for the first time because I had an interview at Intel. I could only stand to use it for about 10 minutes. They hired me anyway as a Windows programmer and, thank goodness, it’s much gotten better. Windows is now my favorite programming and UI experience (and I’ve used both Unix and Mac OS X several times since then to make sure).
3. I am a fetishist; my fetishes are domain names and phone numbers. I can’t think of a cool domain name without a) checking to see if it’s available and b) purchasing it if it is (the one that sticks in my mind is clownporn.com, but that one was long gone). If I ever have a cool idea for an app, I must first purchase the domain name (I own appsettings.com and I just purchased 16 domain names the other day for another thing I want to do). Likewise, if I see a 7-digit phone number without a 0 or a 1 in it, I am physically compelled to surf to phonespell.org to see what the possible 7 and 8-letter words are (my old home phone number was 642-JOHN, the name of my eldest son). Of course, I’ve written my own program to do the permutations of numbers to letters, but phonespell does that cool dictionary lookup and grouping thing. I also added the phonespell support to Dave’s Quick Search Taskbar Toolbar Deskbar.
4. I have jumped out of a perfectly good airplane (not Alan Cooper’s plane).It was just before I got married and I took my best man. We both used parachutes. The fall was surprisingly quiet, but the stop at the sudden bottom was unpleasant.
5. The equal-rights-for-humans theme that sometimes pops up on this site isn’t because I’ve seen friends discriminated against and now I have to change the world (I don’t actually know very many people that are homosexual), but rather because I think it’s the right thing to do.

I tag Don Box, Chris Anderson, Michael Weinhardt, Tim Ewald and Ian Griffiths.

P.S. What’s the deal with the shape of the Pentagon and the Seal of the US on money (the eye at the top of the pyramid)? Damn you Doug Purdy for getting me The Illuminatus Trilogy when I’m supposed to be writing a book!

Iron Man 80% Spider-Man 70% Catwoman 55% Hulk 50% Green Lantern 50% The Flash 45% Robin 42% Superman 40% Batman 30% Supergirl 30% Wonder Woman 20%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Dr. Doom 58% Mr. Freeze 55% Lex Luthor 53% Juggernaut 48% The Joker 45% Kingpin 45% Apocalypse 42% Poison Ivy 38% Riddler 37% Venom 36% Green Goblin 36% Dark Phoenix 33% Magneto 27% Catwoman 25% Mystique 20% Two-Face 20%

Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

P.S. Happy New Year!

″?Keeping up with their tradition, Don and Chris sing an inspired song for the holidays.”

Merry & Happy!

I love it when we do a good thing:

“Effective today (December 22), the one year warranty is now the standard for all Xbox 360 consoles. Customers that experience hardware issues with their Xbox 360 within one year of purchase will have their consoles repaired at no cost. Moreover, the new warranty policy is retroactive, so consumers that may have already paid for out-of-warranty Xbox 360 repair within one year of the console’s purchase will be eligible for reimbursement of their console repair charges.”

I’m a big Vista fan, I’m loving Office 12 and I live on my WM5 phone, but the Xbox 360 is currently the coolest thing we do. And it just keeps getting better.

P.S. If the postscripts aren’t appreciated, why do they get all the feedback?

I don’t know why the MS interview page is suddenly digg-worthy after all these years, but it’s nice to be dugg:

I’d like to thank the academy…

P.S. I’m not looking forward to giving up the tax cuts when the Democrats tax the presidency (the 2008 elections are theirs to lose). How about we cut our military in half so that it’s just the most powerful on earth instead of more powerful than the sum of all the rest of the armies on earth?

When it comes to Web 2.0 apps, online maps are easily the thing I use the most. I don’t go anywhere these days w/o first pulling up the map on MapQuest, Google maps or, for a coupla years now, local.live.com (starting back when it used to be called MapPoint). I generally use Google for my search engine, so don’t think it’s just the MS employee thing pushing me — I genuinely like local.live.com better.

Google and MS have been in an arms race for years on the maps stuff, doing fancy stuff like 3D globes and other goo that looks good in demos, but that I don’t need. However, in this war of the world (so to speak : ), today MS fired a decisive shot across the bow, I think — the “Send” menu. This is huge for me, because I can send the directions to my phone, either via SMS or via email, and I get a great display clearly optimized for my smartphone. Not only does it have a great mini-map, but the directions are easy to read (saving me from printing the directions for just a single trip) and it has a link to reverse the directions (the one thing I never remember to do).

Oh sure, I can do the same thing with the Google maps “Email” menu, but when I follow the link on my phone, there’s no map (although there is a handy link to reverse the directions). Also, the directions don’t read as well and I swear it’s faster to surf to the local.live.com directions (although this might just be the MS bias talkin’ : ).

On the other hand, I just noticed that Google maps has a new “Add destination” link for multi-destination trips, which is the only thing I use AAA online TripTiks for and you have to be a member to access the feature (I am, but still it’s kinda clunky…). Hey, local.live.com guys — can I have that, too?!?

P.S. I think I’ve scared the most reactionary, close-minded folks away, so I think I’ll cool it on the postscripts for a while (’til I feel like it again : ). BTW, my definition of “close-minded” is “those who don’t think I have the right to express my opinion,” not “those who disagree w/ me.” Hopefully I managed to shake the former off my RSS feed while keeping the latter.

“Through further advancement and feedback, Service Pack 1 … provides over 70 improvements for common development scenarios including:

• New processor support (e.g., Core Duo) for code generation and profiling
• Performance and scale improvements in Team Foundation Server
• Team Foundation Server integration with Excel 2007 and Project 2007
• Tool support for occasionally connected devices and SQL Server Compact Edition
• Additional support for project file based Web applications
• Windows Embedded 6.0 platform and tools support

For more information, see the Microsoft Download Center:

• Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite SP1 (includes SP1 updates for Standard, Professional, and Team Editions of Visual Studio 2005)
• Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server SP1
• Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions SP1
• Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista Beta″

At the time of this posting, VS05SP1 update for Vista download wasn’t available, but it should be directly.

P.S. I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season with peace, love and understanding.

Lord knows, I love Rory, but easily my favorite thing are his comics. However, he doesn’t do enough of them, so if you’re looking for a Rory-alternative between comics, check out xkcd. This is the one that made me realize just how Rory xkcd is:

I wonder how often this happens to Rory? : )

P.S. I look forward to the day when it’s just as easy to get int’l news in the US as corporate-spun news. The world will be a better place when we realize that we’re not the only ones on the planet.