Doug’s World

My Mom, lost in African cyberspace

Hi Mom! I decided to put your comment right here at the top of the page, so that you’d see my response. Here’s the comment you posted on that Vista/Office thread, which I just saw for the first time:

For those who don’t know, my Mom is traveling in Africa somewhere with her brother Jim and my cousin Cari. And she’s going to send us some cool posts about her trip, which I’ll share here with the world, but she seems to be having some technical difficulties.

OK, Mom, I have no way of knowing what you’re doing wrong. You didn’t exactly give me much information to work with there. But … I see a clue. Your comment is coming from “spainishlavonne” but your Hotmail account that Greg set up was spanishlavonne. So perhaps you’re simply spelling the name wrong?

Maybe hi-tech young Cari can help out. Or maybe you could give me some more information — post some details on this thread, and we’ll figure it out. But DON’T post your actual password here. There are lots of right-wing nutjobs who would like nothing better than to hack into my Mom’s email account and send nasty spam to the world as LaVonne. We have to be careful, living in a fishbowl like this!

OK, Mom, your turn … please keep trying, I’m sure it will be worth it when we hear all the details of what you’ve been up to.

Office and Vista. Free while they last.

OK kids, here’s the deal: watch three webcasts about what’s new from Microsoft, and you can get a full, licensed copy of Windows or Vista for free. Really. It’s like those timeshare-condo sales pitches my Mom always wants to go sit through in order to get a free lunch or something — just suffer the sales pitch, and there’s a reward at the end. It’s all explained at PowerTogether.com.

And even if you have no intention of doing that, you might want to watch this.

Creative foreign policy

North Korea presents an opportunity for a new approach to world affairs, and I’m glad to see that we’re trying non-military tactics first on this one.

Now if we could only do something about the flow of beige and brown trenchcoats to Iran, I think we’d be well on the way to containing the Axis of Evil. London Fog, are you with us or against us?

Life in Baghdad

I’ve decided to take a break from expressing opinions about anything going on in Iraq. What do I know? I’ve never lived there.

But Zeyad has. So has Nabil.

The weather outside is frightful

When I got up this morning, I found an email in my in-box from Nick. Attached were two photos of fresh snow in Spokane, 300 miles straight east of us.

I drove to Redmond, and was inside Building 20 from 6:30AM to 5:30PM. When I stepped outside to leave, I was a bit surprised to see more snow on the ground — a full inch, and still falling hard — than I’ve seen since moving back to Seattle last year. Traffic was a mess, silly people were sliding all over, so I insisted we do the prudent thing and stop at Chili’s to wait out rush hour.

Then we drove home, only to find that our entire neighborhood was closed: these Snow Closure signs we’ve seen around were suddenly in place, blocking people from driving down the steep hills into Leschi. I found a way to sneak around them, but it wasn’t obvious. (I think Megan may be blogging about our closed neighborhood soon, by the way.)

Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll be stuck here tomorrow. I deliberately parked in the driveway, just to increases the chances of that. Our driveway exits to a very steep street, so if there’s any more snow in the morning we probably should stay home all day. Safety first, you know.

… let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

The Seattle Marathon

I got up this morning and started working, that being all I do any more, and after a while I heard hooting and hollering outside in the rain. I looked out and saw a few runners going past. Then a few more. And a few more.

Just did a search online, and it seems today is the Seattle Marathon, and we happen to live right on the route. They had 11,000 runners last year. Guess I better get used to the hooting for a few hours. The web site says our street will re-open at 2:15, six hours from now.

They have some nice typical Seattle weather for the event — the current temperature at nearby Sea-Tac is 36F/2C, and it’s raining.

What happened to the blog?

Hmm, doesn’t seem to be much going on around here. In fact, it’s the longest between posts on the blog ever. Same for the work blog.

Well, remember that graph I posted a few weeks ago? The launch is next week (I hope it’s OK to say that now!), so that’s probably explanation enough.

The funny thing is, I don’t really have anything to do with the launch at all. I just happen to have a big deadline that comes on the very same day: Friday, November 30. That evening, while Bill and Steve are toasting the town in Manhattan or wherever they’ll be, I’ll be packing my bags for a trip to Paris to deliver a 3-day workshop on my favorite technical topic these days, Open XML.

And by my current calculations, if I don’t sleep more than 6 hours a day, don’t take a day off, never go out to eat, never workout, and don’t do any chores around the house (please pretend that’s something new, Megan), I should be ready by mid-afternoon next Friday.

Here’s my current desktop configuration, optimized for the task at hand. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

The Home Office

I’ve been spending a lot of time at the new home office this week, and I love it. Great views of sunrises (like the new blog header), and it’s a nice little walk to a Starbucks down by the sailboats of Leschi. Great place to hole up and grow a beard.

Is it me?

Nic referred me to a page on Ken Rockwell’s site about the surprising sturdiness of the new 18-200 lens. Since mine is in the shop after a very minor mishap, he knew I’d find it interesting.

So I emailed Ken yesterday, and today my saga appeared on that page, as the guy in Seattle, i.e. no location.

So let me get this right: everyone else finds this lens really durable, and mine falls apart when I bump it a bit. But it’s not just me: a friend of our neighbor David dropped his and it broke in two.

My friends Don and Sam

I’ve spent all my time lately immersed in Open XML. Makes your skin itchy after a while, all those tags and attributes.

Anyway, there’s these two guys: Don and Sam.

Don, he likes order in the universe. He thinks in terms of the big picture: where is everything, who is everyone, go there and do this to that, you know the type. Controlling. In charge.

Sam, on the other hand, he’s a free spirit. “Just tell me what to watch for, and what to do if I see it.” Then he wanders freely around.

Funny thing is, for some tasks Don has the best approach, and for other tasks Sam does. And it’s sometimes surprisingly hard to predict whether Don or Sam will do the best with a givent task. Sometimes you just have to try each of them and see who does a better job.

Don is the DOM API for programming with XML documents, of course. And Sam’s the SAX API.

Seriously. That’s how they compare and contrast.

OK, enough levity, back to Open XML …