At MS (and I think other places too), we have a saying called "Not Invented Here" (NIH), which basically means people don't like anything that they didn't build themselves. In some cases it's due to the difficulty of what us geeks call "reuse-in-the-large" but usually it's because people tend to think everyone outside their group/team/country/town/clique/tribe is stupid and that they can do whatever better. I'll admit I've been as guilty of this as anyone else on more that one occasion. But this seems to permiate the entire world and it bugs me....

After watching the SportCenter guys talk about how Washington didn't deserve the #1 seed, it was great to see them go out and throttle Pacific. We'll see how far the Dawgs go but they really do have a lot of weapons and they showed it today, and as usual (deserved maybe?) NW teams get no respect. Before that, I was dissapointed to see a dreadful performance by my dad and sister's favorite Gonzaga Bulldogs (I grew up in Spokane, so it's kind of the home team), where they looked horrible in the 2nd half blew a 13-point lead against Texas...

We recently took a break from normal bug fixing to focus on peformance issues in Windows Forms. Of course, we track and work on performance all the time (I have a full-time developer exclusively dedicated to performance issues) but you can get some real value by focusing people on it specifically for some amount of time. I actually had a few goals for this: 1) Help re-train the developers on some of the new tools and techniques for diagnosing and resoving performance isues ...

One of the nice things about triathlons is that it's made up of three separate competitive events that you can also do separately. I get tired of training all the time and it's really racing that keeps me focused an motivated. After a 12 year haitus from bike racing, I did a 10-mile time trial just outside of Seattle last weekend. Fantastic weather (it was pushing 70 down there!) and a huge turn out (well over 200 riders) made it a lot of fun. I did it mostly...

Justin Maguire is one of the elite triathletes around here, who happens to work for MS as well. He's got a great website and just posted this info about his core workout, complete with animated GIFs. Good stuff.

I'm down in San Francisco at EclipseCon this week, and the first full day of the show is just wrapping up. I've been mostly tracking the RCP stuff. It's very different than a Microsoft show. For me the big difference that this is the first time I've attended a tradeshow. I've been to 10 or 12 TechEd's, PDCs, and whatnot, but I've always been a presenter, so now I guess I'm getting the other side of it, not only in role but in content. ...