Oh, there’s so much going on right now.  Work is busy.  Home is busy.  The wedding was wonderful and the honeymoon at Biras was super-wonderful.  Now we’re the in the process of getting the Graham house ready to sell and look for a new home, hopefully in the Redmond / Woodinville area.  It will just boggle my mind to be close to work and to Seattle.  We’re going to miss Graham, no doubt, but it’s going to be replaced with lots of fun. 

A Proposal for Extensible Style Language (XSL):holy smokes, I found this while cleaning out my office for a move.  XSLT is a heavily used technology for transforming one document into another document.  It started out quite different than where it is now.  Here’s a glimpse into what I first started working on when I moved to Redmond: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-XSL.html

Beauregard “Boo-Bear” Richards: best Great Pyrenees puppy ever.  Euzkotar Blade Runner.  http://home.earthlink.net/~pyrs/beau.html .  Rest in peace, Beau.  We love you.

Thoroughly Modern Millie at the 5^th Avenue: Elisa and I went to see Thoroughly Modern Millie Saturday night at the 5^th Avenue Theatre in Seattle.  The play is a fun, musical farce and when I saw an ad for it I was interested in going; then we were lucky enough to get two tickets on Friday.  The best part of the musical for me was the part where Millie’s boss is stricken with Miss Dorothy and then dance: the dancing was wonderfully athletic and elegant.

It was the first time I’d been to the 5^th Avenue Theatre, too.  WOW.  It’s a good size theater with three levels and very ornate wood carvings, inspired by Chinese decorating.  Walking up to our aisle filled me with a sense of awe and expectation I hadn’t felt in a long time.  The sound was great.  The stage lighting wasn’t.

And I saw the most creative use of subtitles in a musical in a long time (if not ever).

Munichand Linux: “Ballmer chuckles over Linux Woes.”  Reminds me of when a bunch of us programmers we’re pulled together for a presentation including Total Cost of Ownership.  A company or a government agency with Office ends up spending a small amount for the actual software.  A lot of money goes into installing, maintaining, and upgrading that software.  That’s why Office is supposed to have a simple upgrade story (no reboot required) and can’t go touching system files (to do such would be a worrisome risk that some customers will understandably balk at).  We provide value not only by providing useful features but also by being easier to maintain.

So going for free software doesn’t mean you’re saving a big bundle of cash.  It’s going to cost you more with-respect-to maintenance and most likely with-respect-to lost productivity and effectiveness.  There’s zero reason for a business to actually do this unless they can develop a better business by being on Open Source (how many raised hands are there out there for that?).

So it comes down to being political or some other choice beyond economics.  Interesting quote from Ballmer:

“The people who are making political decisions instead of business decisions, we’re going to lose some,” said Ballmer. “The people who are making business decisions based on where are the applications, what is the value, what is the lowest cost of ownership, we’re not losing them.

“For us, anything that becomes a political issue, nobody wins them all on merit.”

Eric Richards.

I have to say, this upcoming movie is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long, long time: 

http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/309382.html

Immortel — A live-action Enki Bilal movie!

The 9MB teaser and 35MB trailer are here, and I think this is already my new favorite movie.

Related…

[jwz]

 InfoPath 2003 SP1 Preview released today!  Locations:

·         http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=D5ADC839-73F4-4299-ABA0-E88C90B25144&displaylang=en for the main preview.

·         http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7E9EBC57-E115-4CAC-9986-A712E22879BB&displaylang=en for a Visual Studio plug-in to help make managed code business logic authoring easier.

Some of the new features (ones close to my team’s hearts bolded):

• More control choices, including Master/Detail, File Attachment, Recursive Section, and Choice, as well as custom-authored controls..
• Better schema support, including built-in support for schema changes.
• Printing improvements, including page breaks, margins and print settings.
• Improved e-mail deployment of sandboxed solutions and auto-updating of trusted solutions.
• Better management and categorization of solutions.
• Tablet PC support improvements.
• Increased support for rules and roles for declarative business logic.
• Enhanced XPath expression support, including calculations without writing script.
• Additional data adaptors for email and SharePoint Products and Technologies lists.
• Better support for custom migration plug-ins.
• Enhanced Object Model (OM), including OnSave event, offline state, submit, and digital signatures.
• Improved support for secondary data sources.
• Additional support for business logic written in managed code (requires a separate download).
• Enhanced OM for external automation and windowless mode for application-level calls.
• Better support for ADO datasets and diffgrams to round-trip data changes.
• Additional support for complex scripts, such as right-to-left and South Asian languages.
• Enhanced support for digital signatures, including partial signatures, non-repudiation, co-signing, and counter-signing.
• Improved stability and performance, including auto-save and data recovery.

Dude, Where’s My Country? I finally sat down Saturday to finish reading this Michael Moore book.  I’m a Moore fan from way back (Roger & Me, TV Nation, all that).

I liked the book a good deal, but I’m surprised at how dated it is already.  The focus of the book is to take a not-so-serious yet serious look at the W. administration and put down what’s needed to have a new administration in place after the election of 2004.  Yet you run into dated parts where Moore muses how he thinks Wesley Clark would be a good candidate (in the meantime, Gen. Clark of course tried and pulled out). Some other interesting highlights:

·         The part on page 189 that starts: “Admit that the left has made mistakes.” Yep.  I especially like “Mumia probably killed that guy.”  And that Nixon has been the most liberal President we’ve had in 30 years.  Oy.

·         Downplaying Nader’s role in electing Bush (just in time to do it all over again).

·         Pushing for Oprah to run for President.

·         Providing more background than I’ve personally read about Bush & Co’s relationship with corporations and the Saudi royal family (I didn’t realize privileged Saudi’s were able to fly around and out of the US right after 9/11 while the rest of the aviation infrastructure was shut down).

·         Covering an idea I’ve had of my own of forming the Common Sense party (well, CommonSense so it can be one word at listable on ballots in some parts of this country).

I personally think no one had high domestic expectations for the current administration, and they’ve given us abundant low-results.