“I just found your site. I love it!!! It is now a regular read for me.
“I read ‘The Human Side of Microsoft’ post on your site and had an idea… What about getting a bunch of people to list what car they drive (or what they used for transport if it is not a car). Aussies tend to be a bit car crazy and you can tell a lot about a person by how they get around!! :-)
“Just an idea…. Take it easy mate.
“Brad Smith ”Canberra, Australia”
Brad, I drive a 1998 Volkswagen Cabrio covertible. It’s kinda funny looking and it’s a semi-girly color (white), but I fit in it with the top up (I have a long torso, so that’s a problem in most convertibles), it’s got a good service record, it gets good gas mileage and the Sells brothers still fit in the back (although not for much longer).
Can the other 55,999 Microsoft employees post what kind of car they drive from Brad? Thanks.
Microsoft stunned investors yesterday with the announcement that they were distributing 75 billion in cash because they had run out of things to buy. According to Microsoft CFO John Connors “With the acquisition of Lookout, we’ve crossed every single item off our shopping list. Frankly, there’s just nothing left to buy.”
“Maybe you have heard some of the stories about the [DevelopMentor] Brains? Brian Randell delivered a VSLive conference talk in a bath robe. Don Box delivered a conference talk in Amsterdam naked from the waist down. Chris Sells, not to be outdone, agreed to pose completely nude for an advertisement in a technical magazine whose readership is 95% male.”
It wasn’t an ad, actually. It was an official photo shoot for an article. Most of the pictures were normal, but they had to pick the naked one (although they did airbrush out the nipples and go another way for the cover : ).
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… : )
