I just checked my personal email for the first time in a week, and it was full of great links.
From Scott: a whale blowing bubbles at a little girl
From Tom: golf balls in a blender
From Lynn: an unbelievable dog
In a slightly different genre, there’s this one of me in Barcelona last week: an evangelist evangelizing 
As promised, here are some Barcelona photos. The sunlight didn’t cooperate on our one and only full day together to do some sightseeing, so these are indoors at bars and restaurants, or outdoors in the haze near twilight or after dark when it finally cleared up. They’re all in a 1- or 2-mile circle: the tourist area around La Rambla and areas nearby.
No time to write any witty observations, so please make up your own one-liners for these. And no time for individual thumbnails either, so sorry for making you scroll through all of them. On a day like today, Flickr sounds a little better than it usually does. Ha! Never!
We’re packing for the airport Sunday morning, and I tried to post a few pictures but for some reason that isn’t working and we’re out of time. So I’ll post them when we get back. Saturday was cloudy and rainy at first, so we worked in the hotel, but then in the afternoon the sun poked through the clouds for a while and we went downtown for one last walk around Barcelona. On the hill overlooking the city (”Mount Jew” as Megan calls it), we bumped into Phillipe, a French guy I met at TechEd (a fellow Ask-The-Expert), and his wife and friends, and later we had drinks and tapas with Bruno from Paris and his girlfriend Isabel.
I’ll post a bunch of photos later — but not from the wireless on the SAS flight. I migrated to Vista RC2 on my Toshiba M4 last month, and Intel wireless cards (as this laptop uses) can’t connect to unsecured wireless services. I didn’t even know, because my wireless at home is secured. This issue was big at TechEd, where many attendees couldn’t connect to the free wireless service. A fix is coming soon.
OK, we have a plane to catch!
Here’s my friend Kristjan at the Open XML Developer booth this afternoon. He’s from Estonia, and he reads this blog, but when we look at Google (shhh) Analytics there are no Estonia hits on the geographic statistics. Why? I’ll bet I have millions of readers I don’t even know about!
I just got back online, after a frustrating evening at the hotel in which the internet connection was down and we had to drink in the bar until it came back up. But when we got back to the room, great news was awaiting us.
I could care less whether the Democrats control the House (as they do now) or the Senate (as they may soon). They’re losers too, so it doesn’t really make any difference. But this is finally some good news on the American political front …
April 14: Six Retired Generals call for Rumsfeld’s resignation
April 18: Bush is “the decider” on Rumsfeld
November 1: Bush says Rumsfeld, Cheney should stay
today: Rumsfeld quits!
Now we just have to get Cheney out of there. He went hunting yesterday, but unfortunately nobody has yet reported shooting him in the face.
Give ‘em time, he deserves it. Next!
Yesterday was a LONG day here, ending with a reception in the exhibition hall. In the states, it’s customary to give people two drink tickets — over here, free drinks really means free drinks. So the conversations get a bit loud, and some folks have quite a bit of trouble navigating the 2-inch risers that the exhibits are sitting on.
Here are a few pictures. Time to run back to the booth for another day. Oh yeah, I posted a few shots on my work blog too.
Sunday afternoon we walked the 3 miles into the center of town and took a look at some of the work of Antoni Gaudi, the Art Nouveau architect who gave Barcelona some of its most striking buildings and sculptures. Here are the pictures. Megan has one more photo on her blog, too.
First we went to Sagrada Familia, the giant unfinished cathedral that was Gaudi’s masterpiece. We waited in a long line to catch an elevator to the upper levels, where you walk through narrow concrete passageways and then return to ground level via dark spiraling staircases.
The Sagrada Familia is, well, gaudy. George Orwell, who lived in Barcelona for a while, called it “one of the most hideous buildings in the world,” and he decried the bad taste of the revolutionaries who didn’t destroy it when they had a chance.
Next we caught a cab over to Casa Milà, an apartment building with a bunch of strange sculptures on the rooftop terrace. It was dusk then, and the full moon added a nice touch to the evening. But what’s with the tacky chain-link fence on the rooftop? Geez. We also toured an apartment in the building that is decorated in the original style of the wealthy Spaniards who lived there in the early 20th century.
Later we walked down Passeig de Gracia and over to La Rambla, Barcelona’s nightlife strip, where we had a nice Italian dinner at a small restaurant and chatted with two couples from Michigan who had just finished an 11-day Mediterranean cruise.
Now it’s all work and no fun today (Monday), but we’ll go out Tuesday evening and look around some more.
I got up early this morning and took a walk before the sun came up, then snapped a few photos. We’re a few hundred yards from the ocean — er, the Mediterranean Sea — and there’s a big open area with various modernistic structures between here and there. I didn’t see a single person the whole time I was walking around, nor a single piece of litter. Very tidy!
Anyway, just wanted to post a few photos, and now I have to get some work done. More later.
We´re in Barcelona. You know, in Spain. On the Mediterranean. The place where Picasso used to hang out. I´ll be working a booth at TechEd next week, and Megan´s here for moral support. Otherwise, I might be tempted to not be moral — you know how these liberal Europeans can be.
Lots more later, after we go on some photo safaris. Right now, I´m struggling with internet connectivity.
We´re in a very fancy hi-rise hotel, and the internet options are DSL in the room (darn, I forgot that phone cable I used to always have with me in the 80s) or a couple of run-down PCs with flaky half-broken keyboards here in “the Dali Room.” It´s colorful and spectacular, though — this room has four couches that are shaped like giant pink pairs of lips, for example. I´ll take lots of pictures, just hope I can figure out a way to post them!
Office 2007 and Vista (and that silly little thing called Exchange) are going to be available for business customers on November 30, with the mainstream launch for consumers coming after the first of the year. Here’s Todd Bishop’s coverage in the Seattle PI.
You may have noticed that things have been a bit quiet here on the personal blog lately. The pace of things at work leading up to the above date may have something to do with that. I’m learning firsthand that shipping a product at Microsoft it works something like this:
So things are much crazier than they’ve been, and much more craziness to come. Speaking of which, have to run …
Doug's work blog