Doug’s World

Catching Up

Man, you can sure fall behind when you travel as much as I have been lately. I’ve got hundreds of emails in my in-box, which I know is perfectly normal to many people here at Microsoft, but to me — a guy who has kept his email in-box pretty tidy for many years — this is uncharted territory. and I’m only in town for a few days, then gone again for a week, so I’m playing triage, and doing it at warp speed.

One fun break I took this morning was to go through all my blog feeds and mark everything as read, just to clean it up. In so doing, I came across a few links I’ll pass on, then back to the grindstone …

The most-forwarded and most-discussed link at Microsoft this week has to be OkayDave.com. This is simply the coolest portfolio site you’ve ever seen. And I still haven’t found anyone who knows what technologies are there behind the scenes, but I’m trying. I’ll pass on the details when I know them.

And speaking of cool, here’s a demo of some emerging Microsoft technology that’s pretty cool. Check it out: you can drive around downtown Seattle quickly and easily, without ever leaving your desk! For more information on how this works (for example, the fact that the database contains 10 million images of Seattle!), see this Channel 9 video. (Yeah, I know, Scoble already blogged about this today, but I had it in my list and I’m not dropping it just because he covered it. Hell, I have readers he’ll never have — Mom, for instance — and they might want to see it, too!)

Speaking of Microsoft bloggers, here’s a cool post by Microsoft blogging maven Betsy Aoki. We need more people who think and write like her, in my humble opinion.

Colligo is one of Microsoft’s favorite ISV partners. Well, mine anway — Nick is a really sweet, smart, easy-to-deal-with guy, and their technology is extremely impressive. If you’re interested in a way to work with Sharepoint data offline, check it out. I saw a cool demo of this product last November, and the next release is going to be a great thing for Sharepoint. It’s cool to see so many bloggers talking about Colligo this week; they deserve it.

Finally, here’s a great post by Omar Shahine on the abuse of “My Documents” by modern software. I could have written it myself, I so strongly agree — stay out of MY documents, you pesky pieces of third-party software! You tell ‘em, Omar.

Which reminds me …

Once I got my head shaved by a woman barber in Spokane. When I first saw her — tall, fashionable, sassy, and dark as coal — I said “you’re not from around here,” and she laughed and said “thank you, I’m from Los Angeles.” Anyway, after she smoothed my scalp she ran her fingers over it and said “Omar, ooh, Omar!” I think it was a reference to a bald rapper named Omar or something, but I never figured it out. Anybody know?

OK, gotta keep moving, I’ve got 48 hours to get my work life in order before I start living out of a suitcase again …

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 3:51 pm. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.