Funny story...

Back in 2004 (I think), a bunch of us went down to SellsCon.

I was scheduled to give a talk on Web Services Versioning.

The day prior to my talk, Whit Kemmey from the DOD did a talk titled: Using XML for Navy Missile Systems.

During his talk, he would pull up some cool pictures of various US submarines every few slides and everyone loved it.

That night I added a few US submarines pictures to my deck, just to spice things up.

Just as I hit save on the deck, I had a great idea.

A few months before the conference, Don Box was taking some press release photos and he had a few of the "outtakes" on his laptop.

I managed to get one of these photos, add a little caption, and insert it into my slides.

So the progression is:

1. A talk from someone in the DOD on using XML in Navy Missile Systems
2. Their talk has pictures of subs in it.
3. My talk is the next day.
4. I have pictures of subs in my talk.
5. After you see some pictures of subs (to remind you of the talk from the previous day -- about using XML in Navy Missile Systems), I show the below:

I am going through my personal doc folder and restoring some interesting tidbits to my blog (I declared "blog bankruptcy" a while back).

http://www.douglasp.com/doc/a.few.notes.on.the.culture.htm is one of my favorite docs to share (if you are an Iain M. Banks fan).

I have been waiting for the GQ article with the above title to be available online, but I haven't seen it yet, so I will get the quote I like old-fashion way (typing it out):

I had received a call a few weeks back from publicist, asking me if i wanted to interview Bill Gates one-on-one.  Of course.  Who wouldn't want to meet Bill Gates?  But then she informed me that the interview would take place after a small press conference about the Zune, Microsoft's iPod competitor, and naturally our conversation would have to be mostly about the maligned music player.  "Uh, let me get back to you in bit," I said.

My coworker summed it up best: "That's like talking to God but only being able to ask him questions about the platypus". 

For the record, I own a new Zune and I absolutely love it.

As I posted previously, My team is hiring.

Thanks to everyone that contacted us.  We got some good referrals this way.

It turns out that we just spooled up another sub-team that we need to staff.

We are looking for developers/testers to build a tool that I will roughly describe as "Emacs.Net".

No more details than that, but it should be enough to get your brain moving in the right direction.

If you have background writing development tools/IDEs/text editors/etc. at some other company (or inside of Microsoft ), we would love to talk to you.

Email: douglasp@microsoft.com

New Culture novel is coming out... 

Amazon.com: Matter: Books: Iain M. Banks

Looks like there is a new Dune film in the works.

I both love and hated Lynch's 1984 version.

If I remember right, I went and saw it during Christmas of that year.

I loved the film.

I had not read the book first (I was in the mist of my Tolkien phase), but I read every single one in the series multiple times afterward.

I hated the film.

SCI FI Wire

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another -- their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun. 

Can you guess?

The cool part of this is the Google Earth tracking.

It is difficult to write this post with the press of kids around the computer tracking Santa.

NORAD TRACKS SANTA 2007

No Country for Old Men is #1 and I completely agree.

It is actually one of the best movies that I have seen in the last few years.

The ending was so real, powerful and a fitting conclusion to everything that had come before.

Peter Travers' Best and Worst Movies of 2007 : Rolling Stone