Skype is the thing that seems to work best for my Australian phone calls (at least once/week if not more) and I love SkypeOut for when I’m just too damn lazy to walk across the room for the phone. If I could use a SkypeIn phone number for getting/sending faxes as well as placing and receiving calls and taking voicemail, I’d have one of those, too (only $4/month!).

That said, MSN7 seems to have fixed the a/v sharing problems through firewalls, so now I use it for that and MS Communicator is damn cool, too.

These communication devices are pretty important for a remote guy. Just today, I had an hour long video counseling session with my boss (it takes me about a year to feel like I’m actually capable of any new job I take) and another hour-long IM with one of the architects on my team arguing about what the hell we’re building anyway. The counseling session would’ve happened no matter where I lived, but even if I lived next door to him in Redmond, I wasn’t going to be sitting in the architect’s living room from 12:30am - 1:30am chatting with him; new comm was the enabler.

Here’re some other things I’ve been reading lately:

• “UML Distilled.” This one’s useful to figure out which way the arrows are pointing these days and what they’re filled with. Or rather, it was useful ’til I started playing with the class designer in VS05b2 which rocks hard. I was able to switch back and forth between the designer and code views, defining types and members in whichever view I found most convenient at the moment, confident in the knowledge that the other representation would be taken care of properly. It was a very satisfying experience.
• “Eclipse Modeling Framework.” I find the writing style in this book and the visuals of the tool being described both leave something to be desired, but the potential is there.
• “Building the Data Warehouse.” Of the three books on this list, this book is easily my favorite. The writing style is very readable and it’s just packed full of useful thinking. Highly recommended.

I started “A Semantic Web Primer” today at the urging of a colleague. Chapter 1 seemed to say, “If web sites exposes structured data using a language we could all agree on (or a mapping to a language we could all agree on [or a mapping to a mapping…]), we could build much cooler apps w/ the data that’s already on the web.” I find that to be an eminently reasonable argument. Plus, it sounds line “an ontology” is “a class diagram,” so I’m already at home. : )

Unfortunately, we’ve got a chicken ‘n’ egg problem here, i.e. no one’s going to build the cool apps ’til the info is available and nobody’s going to make their info available ’til there’s cool apps to plug into. How did RSS make it over that hump?

Chapter 2 was a summary of XML, i.e. useless for anyone reading this site.

I’m hoping to get to Chapter 3: RDF tomorrow.

Anyone got any arrows in the back trying to use this technology that they’d like to share?

Sweet!

Whenever anyone hears that I program Avalon, the first thing they think is, “Oh, good, let’s get Chris to create a cool looking UI for us!” They also tend to lump in data visualization expertise and user experience into that mix as well. On the “beginning to experienced” scaled, I’d rate myself in the following way on these tasks:

• Avalon programming: beginner to intermediate, depending on the bit of Avalon you’re taking about
• Visualization expertise: interested beginner (I’ve attended a 8-hour Edward Tufte seminar, skimmed 3 of his books and wished for something more than the DataGrid)
• User Experience design: intermediate in the realm of standard Windows applications but beginner when those limitations are removed, i.e. what Avalon enables
• Graphic art: untalented hack

Seriously, I can’t draw myself out of a paper bag (or in one, for that matter). I hired all of the art done for my web site and I almost never draw pictures for my books. Instead, I write programs and take screen shots or make Mike draw the pictures for me.

Being able to program Avalon doesn’t make me a graphics artist any more than being able to program my financial calculator (which I can’t do anyway) would make me Warren Buffet. In fact, I’m closer to being Warren Buffett than I am to being a graphics artist, which should give you some indication about the gap we’re talking about here…

That’s not to say that some enterprising 3rd party couldn’t create tools to help artistic yarn heads like me produce useful Avalon graphics. If my experience is any indication, there are going to be a lot of developers moving to Avalon that are expected to create wonderful things w/o an artistic bone in their bodies. Somebody help!

May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)

East Campus Courtyard, MIT

42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W

(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)

I can’t attend this year myself, but I’m definitely planning to go to this one and only convention some time in the future (I love that idea : ).

It wasn't perfect, e.g. lots of the fun bits were gone and at least one sub-plot never got resolved, but I liked the new stuff, e.g. the motivation for the end of the movie and the romance. Bottom line: I laughed a lot. We did have a pretty decent local geek turn-out, so that made it even more fun, but it was a completely watchable movie and I'd definitely see it again.

First there was case-correction, now VB programmers in VS 2005 beta 2 get grayed out members in intellisense if they set their ClickOnce properties below FullTrust. Cool!