My friend Julie showed me and Akumi around the campus today. She works for the Finance department in Building 4. When I say “campus”, Microsoft really has a collegiate feel to it. We even saw a group sitting in a circle in a plot of grass having what appeared to be a discussion group. We had lunch at the cafeteria there and the food reminded me of my college dining hall, not terrible, but nothing to write blog about.

I’m here in Seattle hooking an unsuspecting Dan Kalish on the drug I call RSS Bandit. He just finished the Washington Bar (after having passed the Connecticut bar only a couple of years ago. Sucks to be a lawyer and move.) and is enjoying a quiet repose. This is my first attempt to a non geek on RSS.

We fly off tomorrow to Seattle and don’t let me catch you even thinking about trying to snake my stuff. I live in a very bad neighborhood, you wouldn’t want to be there after dark or in the nude. We have vicious blind dogs in the yard that have been raised on human meat and will bite anything that breathes or walks funny. And robots in the house with lasers and duct tape and … and Barry Manilow CDs!

I have a bad habit of writing specs in the future tense. Since the system I’m spec’ing doesn’t yet exist, it’s so easy for me to fall in the habit of saying things like:

I’m no professional musician, but I thought the acoustics at the Hollywood bowl was fantastic. They’ve been touting the improved sound with the new shell and improvements. The sound was sharp and clear.

Google originally wanted to raise $2,718,281,828, but based on this article, I predict they’ll be closer to $3,141,592,653. In any case, that’s a big piece of pi. (sorry. really. don’t shoot me.)

Via Mr. Adam Kinney is this hilarious flash video about what happens when the Apple Switch campaign is coopted by Linux users.

My team, Nothend United, tied the Westsiders 2 to 2. Our goalie was phenomenal in staving off their aggresive attack, but sadly the opponents scored twice by capitalizing on deflections of our defense that took our goalie out of position. I scored one off of a penalty kick. For the record, I didn’t dive. I never do.

I have to hand it to Microsoft, they really do listen to their customers. And I don’t mean in that head nodding “I hear you but I don’t know what you’re saying” kind of way so common with people who really want you to think they’re listening, but have no time for you. I posted my question about device support on Don Box’s Wiki and here’s his response:

In this post, Tim Ewald talks about using Doc/Literal/Bare for your web service. There are several benefits he ticks off, but one seems to be the aesthetic effect of cleaning up the format of the XML within your SOAP message. In SOAP, the XML sent back and forth is just the wire format. As a typical developer, why should you care what the wire format is? In general, you shouldn’t. If you have the tools to generate WSDL and generate a proxy off of a WSDL to call a web service, you’re all set.

Dare asks the question whether or not we should change the browser used by RSS Bandit. He was greeted by over 30 comments, mostly in favor of the switch. This is purely anecdotal, but I get the sense alot of people are upset by recent vulnerabilities in IE. I also get the sense that a lot of people feel that upstart browsers are toeing the line of innovation while IE has sat on its fat ass and done nothing lately.

In my last post I discussed a client who requires that we build a web service using a proprietary XML format (lets call it MyXML) so his mobile devices can interact with our platform.

First Kyle, then Micah. I’ve bugged him, cajoled him, annoyed him, till finally he caved and installed RSS Bandit. Took about five minutes before he became a full fledged addict. I have a feeling he’ll be up really late tonight. Next step is to get him set up with a .TEXT blog. I’m so eeeeevil.

I’m taking all of next week off of work. Wohoo! Well actually, I’m only on vacation from my day job. Monday and Tuesday I’ll be working on some contracts I’ve got going on the side. Then on Wednesday, the little lady and I are heading out to Seattle to visit her best friend. Hopefully I’ll have some time to work on RSS Bandit too.

Scientists will soon rip open the door to real Quantum computing. Will it be a peek into alternate universes? Or will it fizzle with a whimper?

Via this article in Newsweek, I found an interesting blog geared towards the professional philosopher but open to others with an interest.

Ian Griffiths blogs about the Monty Hall problem.

Beer Run!

I promised a friend I’d show him some pictures of the time we went to burning man in 2002. So of course, I figured might as well make a blog entry about it. For you geeks out there, the Playa (A nearly level area at the bottom of an undrained desert basin, sometimes temporarily covered with water) has a wi-fi network available. Every year, Black Rock City, a temporary city, is formed in the midst of the desert near Gerlach. This city is the host of the Burning Man festival. It’s about a thirteen hour drive from Los Angeles and the closest city is Reno, Nevada which is about 4 hours away.