In this month's Seattle Magazine, Knute Berger states in his Gray Matters: Just Say None article:

Newspaper and magazine columnist (and founder of Microsoft’s Slate magazine) Michael Kinsley says that Ayn Rand is popular at Microsoft. She was an atheist who originated the philosophy of Objectivism and touted the virtues of selfishness and dog-eat-dog competition. No wonder she’s the darling of Redmond’s chosen.

This certainly applies to me, although I don't ask, "What would Ayn Rand do?.  Rather, I ask, "What would John Galt do?"

Interestingly enough, I also consider myself a Buddhist and those are not contradictory at all (check your premises).

Lastly, John Galt ≈ Zarathustra (at least to me) which is another reason that I am fan of Ayn Rand.

BTW: if you are fan of Atlas Shrugged, you should really check out the perfect union of John Galt & Ragnar Danneskjold in the character of Hagbard Celine within the Illiminatus! Trilogy.

For the second year in a row, I jumped into Lake Washington for New Year's. 

This year, I got to do a 5k run at the same time.

My posts about our team looking to hire experts in these fields has generated a lot of interest, especially the post about "Emacs.Net".

If you sent me email (either to inquire about a job or offering to alpha/beta test), thank you.

As soon as I get a chance over the break, I'll go through them en mass and get back to everyone.

Many of the emails and trackback postings that I saw asked some specific questions that I will answer below for everyone's benefit:

1. Are these positions full-time?  Yes.
2. Are these positions based in the U.S.?  Yes, although for the right person, we will consider remote.  That said, I only have one person working remotely today -- Chris Sells.  He is both the right person and he is only 3 hours away as the car speeds up I-5.
3. Are these positions based in Redmond?  See above.
4. What's the salary?  We are looking for senior people with industry experience designing & building languages, compilers and tools.  We know what it takes to attract people like that and we will pay it.

There were just as many questions about exactly what we are building that I am not going to answer.

If we do our jobs, you should be hearing more about it in October or if you get a job with us, you can find out more about much sooner.

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?