Rush hour sucked, the worst I’ve seen in a long time, so we waited out the traffic jam at Parlor Billiards in Bellevue.
Good time, lots of weird people-watching to be done in our vicinity, and we saw a rainbow while walking back to the truck afterward.
We received an email yesterday from Aunt Marsha. She had returned to her home in Pass Christian, Mississippi, for the first time in months. As some of you may recall, Marsha’s home was demolished by Hurricane Katrina and she had moved to Atlanta.
Anyway, here’s what she found, in her words …
Turned the corner on Morton Ave. in MS and was met by bulldozers, cranes, etc. THEY WERE JUST (I MEAN, AT THAT EXACT MOMENT. THAT MOMENT.) DRIVING UP TO THE FRONT PORCH/DOOR OF MY HOUSE TO MAKE THE FIRST BLOW. I STOOD THERE AND WATCHED THEM DEMOLISH MY HOUSE—AFTER TRYING, FOR SOME VERY ODD AND NOT UNDERSTOOD REASON, TO STOP THEM. RUNNING UP CRYING AND SCREAMING, “THAT’S MY HOUSE!” I WASN’T ALLOWED ONTO THE PROPERTY…IT WAS TERMED A “POLICE ACTION” AND THERE WERE ARMY AND SUCH FOLKS THERE WITH GUNS AND DETERMINED LOOKS. THEY DID STOP. THEY TRIED TO COMFORT ME AND EXPLAIN WHY IT WAS HAPPENING WHEN IT DID. THEY EVEN TOOK MY PHONE AND VIDEOED THE ROOF BEFORE THEY TOOK IT DOWN, AND ONE LADY TOOK A LOT OF DIGITAL PICS WITH HER OWN CAMERA, BUT, AS YET, I HAVE NOT RECEIVED THEM VIA E-MAIL.
Marsha, Granny and Aunt Gloria all lost their homes in the hurricane, but they’re each plugging along and rebuilding their lives. Here are a few links to the photos of the Pass Christian area, for those who haven’t seen them:
Immediately after the hurricane, including the destruction at Marsha, Granny, and Gloria’s homes.
Three weeks later, pictures of Katrina’s wreckage all around the Pass Christian area.
Marsha’s home just two weeks before the hurricane, the first time I visited Pass Christian. That picture of Marsha and Megan dancing in the kitchen kept coming back to me when we were there climbing through the wreckage with Marsha and Jamal three weeks later.
My brother Ken has been getting creative with Microsoft’s “Picture It” software. I put his latest creation — a mashup of a wedding-reception photo — on the home page of www.mahugh.com.
I never got around to posting photos from the rest of our weekend.
Saturday night was Jen Keys’s 35th birthday party, and we took a bunch of pictures. The theme of the party was that she was running for President, since you have to be 35 to be elected President in this country.
Sunday we hiked up to Lake Serene, beneath Mount Index. It’s a great workout, so we felt entitled to stop afterward at a nearby bar along Highway 2, the Booby Trap …
Megan: “Do you serve food?”
Surly bartender lady: “Well, that means I’d have to cook, and I hate to cook!”
We sat their for a while wondering whether she meant it, but eventually she brought us menus. So we put her through the hassle of dropping some frozen appetizers in the fryer. Mmm.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
I said recently that I would never have separate blogs for business and personal topics. I lied. I’ve thought about it some more, and have decided that that’s exactly what I need to do.
The main reason I’m doing this is that I’ve felt sort of like my hands are tied lately. If I post a bunch of personal photos and family/friends stuff, then I’m diluting the experience for those who come here for information about Office 2007 and related technologies. And if I post a bunch of technical information about Office, then I’m making Mom and everyone else wade through that stuff to see what they’re interested in.
So I’ve created an MSDN blog, and I’m going to start putting all technical content there, and all non-technical posts will continue to show up here. But first I need to get a bunch of things organized, and this week isn’t looking good for finding the time to do that, so it may be next week that the split will actually take place. Meanwhile, here’s my MSDN blog address: https://blogs.msdn.com/dmahugh/
The Walt Whitman quote above is an in joke for my JoyStik Magazine buddies. Long story, you had to be there …
It’s a busy week for those of us working with Office 2007. Beta 2 is almost out, and many of us are using it internally already. We have a developer workshop on the Redmond campus this week, and I’m meeting with several developers this morning who are building solutions around the new Office Open XML file formats.
Many of these developers are also working with Sharepoint, or MOSS as we’re calling it now (Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server). And coincidentally, the Sharepoint conference is taking place a few miles away this week in nearby Bellevue.
Mary Jo Foley has a good writeup of what’s going on at the Sharepoint conference. As she says …
While Microsoft watchers continue to obsess over Microsoft’s plans to take on Google, few are paying attention to a family of products that could emerge as one of the main revenue generators for the company over the next few years.
The SharePoint collaboration/workgroup software family could be one of Microsoft’s sleeper hits in the not-too-distant future.
Don’t worry, Mary Jo — few users may be paying attention to Sharepoint yet, but lots of developers inside and outside Microsoft are working long hours to give those users something to pay attention to by the end of this year.
We’re planning to take a lot of hikes this summer. It’s good exercise, inexpensive (if you already have all your gear, anyway), and the Seattle area has so many great hikes to choose from.
So today was the start of the season for us. Instead of reliable, crowded, nearby Mount Si, we tried to do High Rock Lookout, down near the southwest corner of Mount Rainier National Park. But there was too much snow on the road and we had to park about 5 miles from the trailhead. So we hiked up through the snow, getting intermittent glimpses of nearby Mount Rainier through the trees, until we found an unobstructed view to take some pictures.
The translucent layer of clouds clinging to the summit was a nice site. Anybody remember what that’s called? (Seriously — there’s a name for those clouds.)
I was cruising down Rainer Avenue on the commute home today, enjoying Warren Zevon’s “Learning to Flinch” live CD. I had the volume up quite a bit, just to hear all the musical subtleties even when hip-hop-throbbing pimpmobiles were around. (And Zevon’s music is so subtle, you know.)
Anyway, I noticed the traffic around me started behaving strangely. People were stopping in the street, or pulling over, and everyone was doing it at the same time and being really cooperative, more like synchronized swimming than the usual dog-eat-dog traffic patterns on Rainier. Cool, I thought. I started to accelerate through the parting sea of vehicles, singing along with “The French Inhaler,” when suddenly I noticed all the flashing blue lights in my rear-view mirror.
I stopped and let the two patrol cars race past me, sirens blaring. They swerved through the scattered vehicles, traffic returned to normal, and I cranked the volume back up. A minute later, the same thing happened again: everyone politely pulled over, and me in the left lane with two patrol cars swerving around me.
I got the camera out, and somewhere between Orcas and Graham I passed the four patrol cars at the scene. Of what, I’m not sure — they all had those cute little blue gloves on, and were patting down one guy, while another guy stood nearby. I looked close, but our old friend Officer Creamer wasn’t there.
I had to start listening to “French Inhaler” three times before I got all the way through it!
If you’re planning to install Office 2007 Beta 2 when it becomes available later this month, here are a few things to know that may save you time and headaches later.
NOTE: This information only applies to Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook. I’ll discuss some of the issues and options for server-side installation of MOSS and other components later.
First, regarding side-by-side installation, the good news is that this works fine for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. You can, for example, have the Office 2003 versions of these programs still installed and working fine alongside the Office 2007 Beta 2 versions. Outlook, however, requires that you make a choice: you can only have one version of Outlook installed. My advice is to take the plunge and go with Outlook 2007: it’s stable, reasonably fast, and has many cool new features.
Speaking of Outlook, here’s an issue that some people (including myself) have struggled with when installing the beta versions of Outlook 2007: email profiles. If you install Outlook 2007 and have any problems with Outlook, the first thing to do is to delete your email profile (under Control Panel / Mail). Then, the next time you start up Outlook, it will step you through re-creating the profile. This isn’t always necessary; I had to do it when going from Beta 1 to Beta 1 Tech Refresh, but not when going to Beta 2. Your mileage may vary.
Another thing to know is to un-install all previous versions of Office 2007 that you’ve installed (if any). This is important, and it’s clearly explained in the installation instructions, but some people still try to skip this step. Don’t — you’ll regret it.
If you’ve created any Open XML documents with previous versions of the Office 2007 beta, save them in the binary formats before you un-install the previous beta versions. This is especially important if you have Beta 1 installed — the schemas have changed since then, and Beta 2 will NOT read DOCX, PPTX, or XLSX documents created with Beta 1. If you fail to do this and get in a bind where you have Beta 1 documents that you can’t open any longer, I may be able to convert them for you if you’re not in a hurry and it’s just a few documents. And if you ask nice.
I’ve mentioned before that there will be converters to allow previous versions of Office to read the new file formats. The converters for Office XP and Office 2003 will be available when Beta 2 becomes publicly available, and they’ll be a free download. Keep this in mind when planning your strategy for migrating to the new file formats.
Here’s something I have found very annoying, but it is what it is: in order to have the cool search functionality within Outlook (which really rocks in Office 2007), you must upgrade your Windows desktop search to a new beta version. this was not true in the previous beta versions. Instructions on dealing with this issue are provided during installation.
Beta 2 will be available in English, Japanese, German, French and Spanish versions. If you need another version … how are you reading this?
That should be enough to get you started. Getting excited yet? I just did the upgrade to Beta 2 today (we get it a little sooner than the rest of the world :-)), and I love it.
NOTE: The photo on the Tablet PC was taken last week in Chicago. I normally shave every day.
