Sunday, June 12, 2005

A must-read article if you work at Microsoft and are interested in using technology to be more effective in your work and to get ahead in your career. Of course none of this can make any sense until you use it. You might want to ask Scoble, because he did use Instant Outlining when he worked at UserLand in 2001. I'll try to work this into my demo at Gnomedex. I'll put my stake in the ground, if Microsoft tries it, it will revolutionize the company. I've never seen an organization more prepared for this.  

10 days to Gnomedex.  

Ed Cone: "A California newspaper posts the full name of an anonymous blogger, and has yet to reply to her repeated requests to the reporter and editor for information on how the decision to do so was made." 

Okay I have this iPod. I stopped using it because I had to start using another computer because the previous one was so infested with spyware, and the iPod started misbehaving and I had an itch to get a portable player that didn't have any DRM at all. So I got an Archos and stopped using the iPod. Then I got a car without a cassette player, and bought a Belkin FM transmitter, and found it doesn't work worth a damn. Dave Jacobs confirms, he got the Monster transmitter, works great -- one problem though, it only works with the iPod. So I charge up the little devil and in the meantime forgot that it was a beeeyutch difficult about working with the laptop I use now, and then I plugged it in and it offered to use the library on this machine. Hah! I said to my little iPod, if I do that you'll throw away all the good stuff on your disk, so I said no. A victory for the little guy. Okay, what do I do now? There always seems to be something you iPod mavens know, some little incantation that gets it to behave rationally, you know, like an Archos.  

File this under The Culture of Instant Outlining. 

Thanks for the excellent discussion in response to the question about home pages and what they are. Very useful. One thing that's going on my home page, for sure, is my Netflix queue. It says a lot about a person. It would be cool if they also told you how long each movie has been in your queue. Some of those have been there a long time, with new films coming on in the number one position. Also it would be great if Netflix had an expanded view of the queue that included descriptions. I got a lot out of just reading them (they are included in the RSS).  

BTW, I already have the perfect domain for my home page. 

ConnectViaBooks: "Find people who share your interests, your hobbies or just read the same books." 

Jason Calacanis: " I wanted to export my Gmail contacts the other day and it turns out that the only way to do this is the tedious ten-step process of cutting and pasting the names out of Gmail and into Excel, saving them as a CSV file." 

Don't get me started 

Brent Simmons tells the story of Eric Albert a heroic developer who works at Apple. In my day there were many such heroes, but one that stood out was Terry Teague, who I believe still works at Apple. I'm glad to hear the transition will go so smoothly for so many.

Our first hero was the first head of developer relations in what was then known as the Mac Division, Mike Boich, who went on to be the founder of Radius, then Eazel, and now is (I believe) a venture capitalist. When the Mac was still in development, in late 1983, we had trouble getting anything working at all. Mike actually came over to our office and helped us debug the code. I was blown away. No one from IBM had ever done that for us. They really wanted us to ship when they shipped. We didn't make it (no one but Microsoft did, they had a very big head start) but we were among the first, shipping ThinkTank 128 in June 1984, we followed with ThinkTank 512 in December, and MORE in September 1986. That was the home run. As they say, it takes three tries to get it right. It was also our third platform, after the Apple II and IBM PC.

Mike and I used to be regulars at the same Thai restaurant in Menlo Park, Siam Garden. Now there's a piece of data you didn't need.

In 1984 our offices were across the hall from John Markoff's, on Elwell Court in Palo Alto. He was then a reporter for Byte. We used to see him all the time, we were friendly back then (and much younger of course). He went on to be the NY Times' ace technology reporter. On my 25th birthday we threw water balloons from the windows in my office in that building. I only remember that because I got an email from Pam McQuesten, who was there that day, on my 50th birthday. I told her I still do things like that. She reads Scripting News. That's one of the cool things about having a blog that has nothing to do with advertising. People you liked from your past find you. Also people you didn't like. :-(