Monday, August 30, 2004

Greenspun dropped his land line in favor of VOIP. 

Do you like the car movies? I do, but I'm not sure why. 

Pictures from the University of North Dakota campus. 

Movies from the campus: Walking, welcoming, watering. 

Today's first round of pictures take us into North Dakota, barely, in Grand Forks, just over the Minnesota border. Driving on US-2 today through a pretty empty and wet part of Minnesota. I saw a sign on a creek that shocked me. Since I've become a river buff, you have no idea how exciting that was. A hundred miles later, a field of sunflowers. Arrive in town in time for a walk on the campus of the University of North Dakota, and then vegging out in front of the Republican National Convention. Finally, how far north is Grand Rapids? Well, Fargo is south of here. Heh.  

Julie Leung wants tips on hiking opportunities on long car trips too. I've discovered two things. Smallish towns like Ashland are great. Walk 20 minutes down Main St, make a right on First, walk 10 minutes, make a right on 8th Avenue, and zig-zag back to the car exactly an hour later. And you get to see all the neighborhoods (hopefully they're nice, but you can drive around first to make sure they are). Second tip. University campuses are perfect for walks. They're usually pretty well-kept, and designed for walking. The interesting thing about the university here in Grand Forks is that they have this network of interior walkways, just like Duluth. It gets so cold here that it's not practical to walk outside to get from building to building. That's where I'm headed right now.  

Phil Haack shows what happens when XML nerds protest.  

Lake Superior this morning from my hotel room. 

Apparently President Bush called Iraq a "catastrophic success." 

I'm listening to David McCullough's biography of Harry Truman, as read by the author. Fantastic. I've finally found a can't-put-it-down audio book.  

Mary Jo on the Longhorn decision. 

The Channel 9 guys have video of Jim Allchin explaining the decision. 

BTW, "Hard core" means "death march." It's the same trap that Apple fell into with Copland. The devteam was always in death march mode, when one impossible ship date was missed, they scheduled another impossible ship date. When you ask a Microsoft person to say what Longhorn is supposed to do, you get rambly hand-wavy words that mean nothing. A product with a purpose has a two-sentence description that gets everyone so excited they can't wait. Longhorn isn't designed to solve anyone's problems. I think they all know it, but they can't say it out loud because they've all drunk the Kool Aid on this.  

Wired: "Microsoft announces Longhorn, its next version of Windows, will meet its 2006 release date. But to deliver on time for corporate client contracts, a key component -- the underlying file system for the software -- will be missing." 

Scoble summarizes the blogger reaction. 

NeroSoft TimeTrax "records songs from your XM PCR satellite radio directly onto your PC in MP3 format!"