One more this year. BLT went well, as did Kirkland, so my last race was the Black Diamond Tri down in Enumclaw. This one is an Olympic distance race which is twice the distances of the sprint races that are common in town, or roughly a 1/4 Ironman distance (~1mile swim, 25mile bike, 6mile run). Fortunately the weather looked good so I have yet to do a race in inclement conditions. The day kicked off with a troubling start. Enumclaw is about an hour south...

After BLT went pretty well, I signed up for Kirkland, another sprint-distance race that's not only very popular, but very close to home. It's a late-season race that still starts at the regular 7am time so it makes for a dark, early morning. It's pitch-dark until about 6:30. Lake Washington is still relatively warm through September, but the air really isn't. It was very low 50s at start time. You know it's cold when you put your foot into lake water and say "wow, that's...

2005 was good and bad for me. Bad was the weird lower-leg injury that stopped me from running from March through July, but good in that it got me back into racing bikes which has been great. I did a bunch of racing on the bike this year, with okay results given it was my first year and I missed a lot of key early season training. In late July I was able to start running a little bit, and slowly worked up to...

Last month I broke down and bought a Garmin Forerunner 301. I'd been resisting getting one of these things hoping a more compact one would come onto the market. My buddy Fred has a 201, and I liked that but it was a big bulky. Well one day I looked and the price had dropped below two bills so, well, I got one. I'm glad I did. I'll post a more thourough review of the unit soon. But what's most cool about it is that it interfaces with MotionBased, which is a...

There was a bit of a scheduling snafu so we ended up at The Standard Hotel in Hollywood. It's a very trendy but minimalist place on the Sunset Strip. Actually it's one of those places that reinforces the idea that no matter how hip you think you are, well, you're not. For example, when you walk into the lobby in the evening, there is a plexiglass box/room/area up behind the reception desk. Think of the aquarium you see in many places, except instead of fish and coral there's a young woman sitting...

Well here I am again, PDC, in LA (again - I've been to more shows in LA than anywhere else). PDCs are my favorite show because all the attendees are developers. TechEd is a mix of devs and IT people, many of which speak a completely different dialect of geek-speek than I. If you're having problems getting your MOM system to talk to your Sharepoint via SQL over the domain controller registered on AD, man, I haven't a clue what to tell you. So PDC is better. This is the fourth show...

One of the things I've been planning is to have my kick-ass dev team deliver a set of kick-ass whitepapers about Whidbey. Our doc people have really worked hard to deliver a much-improved set of documentation but there's lots of areas where even more technical detail can't hurt. Soooo if you have areas that you'd like some more of this detail, let me know by leaving a comment with your idea and we'll make sure we add it to the list of candidates. ...

Well here we are - in the last strides of the marathon product formerly known as Whidbey. Next week, the plan is to go into "Escrow" which means the bar goes way high and we give some the product some "bake-time" to make sure we've got all real nastiness out of there, and it gives a set of our customers to sign-off on it as well. We're still getting a trickle of bugs but we are seeing the "must-fix" ones slow, which is data that says we're getting there....