Driving into my neighborhood last night, I come up the hill and come upon a very unexpected scene. Generators. Flood lights. Tents set up. White vans and trucks. Police directing traffic away from the intersection. It looked like a scene out of the X-Files - unfortunately Mulder fell off my Top-5 and I didn't have his digits handy.  Wasn't clear what was going on though.  A fire?  A murder?  There was a detour set up through the neighborhood - kind of a whacky route really - to get to my house.  All a long it were no parking signs from 9/26 to 10/4.  Wow - that's...

I've been a busy boy. ........ Early last month I headed over to London for a long weekend to visit my high-school friend Grant and take in the first few stages of the Tour de France (back when it wasn't a giant mess). I flew into London on Friday morning and we saw the Prologue (a short time trial that kicks off the race) on Saturday, and followed Stage 1 around SE England on Sunday. ...

For the first year or so that Deb and I dated, she had her dog Bailey living out with her folks as she got ready to sell the house she was in. She didn't have him around much until the Fall of 05 when she finally got settled into her new house. I've always really liked animals and Bailey's easy-going demeanor made it easy to get attached to him. The nice thing about a Beagle-sized dog is...

After my last MCE decided to hit the long sleep, I decided to take a step back and figure the simplest, cost-effective way out of this situation. I also decided it was time to address a few other issues that I've been wanting to: 1) I was up to three PCs in my house that were on all the time. This is bad. 2) My office machine was...

So this guy got nailed for not paying fuel taxes on his vegetable-oil powered car. Yes, appearently you can power your car with soybean oil. Anyway, the logic is that all fuels need to be taxed to raise road revenue, etc. Okay, I see that point but really, this setup doesn't make a lot of sense. Say you get a super fuel-efficient car that gets 200 mpg, you're certainly not paying your share then. It's kind of a use tax, but not really. ...

  Paris Hilton, reflecting upon her stint doing hard time. "I used to act dumb. It was an act...." You don't say?  Oh please, tell me more. "...I was severely depressed and felt as if I was in a cage. I was not myself. It was a horrible...

I think people have a special affinity for things that were going on in their elementry school and junior high years. In my case, that was dead center in the 80s. What a great time to be a kid. I was sitting in a meeting the other day when an 80s cultural reference came up and someone made a disparaging comment. Forgive me, I can't remember exactly what it was, but I had the feeling that you get when someone insults your family. Oh, sure,...

Ahhhhhrrrgggg. Last Thursday I had a bunch of spare time on my hands - I dunno, something like 25 minutes - and I decided I'd try to get my Media Center box to go into sleep properly. One of my co-workers had mentioned he got his to sleep and it was great. The machine would happily sleep (e.g. not generating a bunch of heat or sucking up electricity) when not in use and then it would wake up when it needed to record....

This week marks a full year elapsing since the last time my lower back had a major meltdown, or a "flare up" as I usually call them. If you're struggling with back problems, maybe something here will be helpful to you. If nothing else, hopefully it'll serve as a reminder that it is possible to overcome this stuff, at least some of the time. I've been looking forward to writing this for a long time. Hopefully it doesn't jinx me. :) When I was a...

A few months back I posted some questions and ideas around the Digital Cable Tuner support in Windows Vista Media Center (MCE). The idea is that you can finally get a device that allows your MCE machine to tune cable channels. I was looking forward to this because I've wanted to move to a centralized media/music/pictures/DVR server for a while. Well, it turns out the story isn't so great here. I think I understand the whole thing here, and at the end...

Well, Vista launched but there are no CableCard systems that launched with it. So I'm still waiting. I'm not the only one.

Vista launch is now in full swing. Even as a Microsoft Employee I'm still starved for details on the Vista Media Center Edition capabilities, especially as it concerns CableCard. I'm hoping that all of these questions will get answered tomorrow, but as a preview, here's where I'm at with this. I currently have cable service from Comcast. It's a little pricey, but I'm pretty happy with it. My setup is that I've got a 36" TV in the living room off the kitchen that's attached...

Random utility I wrote this week. Imagine you have a bunch of pictures fresh off your 6-megapixel camera that you want to post on your blog, or email to someone. You've got a bunch of them, and they're all 3 or 4 megabytes. So you need to resize them down to a more reasonable size before you do anything else with them. There's certainly plenty of programs that can do this (even MS Paint), but it's still kind of a hassle. So I wrote a...

A few weeks ago I realized that I'd be seeing you soon, but was surprised it took until today. So you got a bit of a slow start, huh? That's OK. But as soon as I rolled into the parking garage at the gym at 6:30 this morning, there you were. I found a nice spot on the third level of the garage. I don't mind walking a bit, it's cool. I wish I could be super-supportive, really I do. I think it's great that...

Spain! I got asked to go over to Barcelona to speak at TechEd Europe this month. I was in Barcelona for TechEd in 2001, and it's a great...

I was in Venice a few years ago. I wasn´t a fan. It was dirty, crowded, and rough on the olfactory. I´m now here in Girona, Spain. It has a lot of the same feel, minus the canals and, um, the other stuff I just mentioned. It´s really a nice place, I´d recommend it. More later, plus pictures.

Been interesting watching the election coverage from abroad (Spain). I've got this great image in my head of Karl and George sitting around in the West Wing in the dark. Alone. Drinking and reminicing about the 'good times'. Welcome to "Lame Duckville", population you two. Alright, now can we please get moving on what to do about this war, health care, climate change, getting gov't spending under control, implementing the 9/11 commission's recommendations, cleaning up NOLA, protecting the environment, campaign finance reform, education\ funding, stem...

I've been a fan of Halloween for a while. A few years ago I decided that it's maybe my favorite major holiday. Which is saying a lot because, well, I don't think much about holidays. Anyway, I've always liked Halloween because it's got a better holiday spirit than the the holidays that focus primarily on people buying stuff all day long. Halloween is purely about having fun. You get to dress up, you get to go to parties, you get to eat candy. I mean, really,...

My phone's been ringing off the hook for the last week. Wow, have I gotten popular all of a sudden! No, not quite. You pick up the phone and hear: "Hi, I'm Emerson Bigguns and I'm running for State Senate. I think education is important and I love puppies..." Okay, I suppose if I'm going to get phone solicitations, recordings are nice since I don't feel any guilt for hanging up on them. ...

Powerful words from Kevin Tillman.

The Floyd Landis saga continues. Today they posted all of the case details and documents, as well as a overview of their defense on FloydLandis.com. The opening line reads... "Los Angeles, October 12, 2006 – Floyd Landis, 2006 Tour de France winner, has made public his case documents that use fact-based science to support his innocence in the alleged positive doping test of July 20, 2006. " ...

Back from Interbike (more later on that...) But yesterday, I did some volunteer time at Starcrossed 2006. Those of us that weren't racing signed up to help put on the event since Zoka Coffee was one of the title sponsors. Anyway, Starcrossed is a big Cyclocross race here in Redmond. Cyclocross (CX) is kind of a mix between road bike racing and mountain bike racing. Basically you have road-like bikes wiht knobby tires and cantelevered brakes. You go around a circuit that has obstacles...

Random stuff. Saturday we had our "Meet the Team" ride. In the fall, each of the cycling teams in the Seattle area host a rotating "Meet the Team" ride where people interested in joining a team are encouraged to come out and go on a ride. It's a conversational "no-drop" ride that's about networking more than training. Ours was on Saturday, and we had a great turn out and great weather. It's a lot of fun riding in a group, I've always loved it and...

Back in the Fraternity, we had a thing called Work Week. Work Week was just before school started. We'd try to get all the guys to show up a bit early and we had a list of projects that we wanted to get done. We'd divy up the projects and off we went. Turns out you can get a lot done when the labor is free. Anyway, between work, training, and sleeping, I've always got this nagging feeling that my house is falling apart and...

Just got back from a 2-day trip up to Penticton, BC to watch yesterday's 2006 Ironman Canada. Some friends of mine, Todd and Karolina have been training like crazy for their first IM and it's been inspirational/educational to train with them and watch their journey. They'd rented a house in Penticton and were kind enough to offer Deb and I a place to bunk out, so we headed up there for the weekend. The original plan was to sign up for IMC 2007, but since we're doing IMAZ, that wasn't really a...

Study: Hybrids pay for themselves I don't currently have a car payment, and I like it that way. But next time I do need to get a new car, I'll probably get a hybrid of some sort. I have a car that's fairly fast, and I really dig it, but I'm mostly over the car thing. I think. Anyway, whenever people talk about hybrids (especially people who want to FUD anything that isn't made of 5,000 lbs of steel and guzzles...

I had a small end-of-the-season BBQ at my house for the Zoka clan last night. Good times. I had a few extra hours yesterday afternoon, and needed to trim the vines that grow up the railing below my deck - they grow like crazy. But once I get going on chores I usually start getting more done than I'd planned. I've got a long history of fighting the morning glory on my property, and it's mostly been a losing proposition. But, it's been so dry around...

CSS continues to befuddle me. After three years of this blog being hosted at Brian's place, I finally sat down to figure out how to fix the layout issues. I figured out how to generally do it, but I still can't get the CSS right in FireFox/Opera. So, if you're on one of those platforms, the menus to the left are screwy, I know. I'll figure it out eventually...it's something non-obvious that's pushing them over like that. But, hey, I got the "menu-covers-the-content" problem solved, and almost have flow working properly. Yay me.

Another busy weekend. Friday, we headed up to see the Abbotsford Airshow at the invitation of one of my good friends Shane, who's an F-18 pilot and had his plane parked up as one of the static exhibits (e.g. he didn't fly around, he just walked around in his flight suit in Canada and generally got treated like royalty). Good time - we got to check out all the planes, then sit in the Lockheed Martin section to watch the actual air part of...

After being in Chicago visiting family for a few days, I got up this morning planning to get onto the Computrainer and do some long interval work on the TT bike and catch up on the Tour of Germany coverage. My CT runs off of a box that I also use for my server. So I log in and immediately notice a few files on my desktop. They're text files which I opened to discover contained thousands of email addresses. Thirty-five megs...

I can't take it any more: GOP hones its core agenda Flag burning, gay marriage, abortion top Republicans' Senate plan http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/15/GOP.checklist.ap/index.html I just can't. Man do I hope the Dem's can get their stuff together for November because this just has to stop (understand I'm not a fan of the Dems - they accel at sucking...

That darn public school education of mine. I think was cheated. In all those Social Studies classes, you'd think that at some point we would have learned about the section in the Constitution that says the President can do whatever the heck he wants. Maybe I skipped that day, but I think they just left it out altogether, just like they skipped the Intelligent Design section in the biology book. I guess I'm lucky I even got into college with such a spotty education.

Okay, okay, okay, it's been like a million months since I've blogged. I'm going to try to repent. Lots of news to report, but I'm going to do it in seperate entries, mostly for dramatic effect and to make myself feel productive. In a nutshell, I've changed roles and buildings here at MS (I'll elaborate later), training like mad for the new bike racing/tri season (hmm....new bikes?), and been trying to find time to spend with the Xbox 360, which doesn't happen much. ...

Warning: if you haven't seen 'Wedding Crashers' and want to pretend you don't know what's going to happen, stop reading this. Then again, from about five minutes into the movie, you pretty much know how it's going to go. Now I'm not saying it's a bad flick...it's actually pretty darn funny. But what I started thinking about during the last half of the movie is this: do we need one more movie where a woman tells a guy to beat it, and he...

I'm thrilled to see that Initiative 901 has made it onto the ballot in Washington State which, if approved, will ban smoking in indoor public places. If you hear a clock in the background, that's the countdown until we start getting bombarded witih FUD stating that a smoking ban in Washington will cause all the bars and restaurants to go out of business and impede the rights of law abiding, tax paying citizens who just want to have a smoke after dinner, and for gosh-sakes why do non-smokers hate freedom?

Finally found a wireless connection! I've been here in France following the Tour for almost two weeks (which means it's almost time to come home!). We spent 10 days in the Pyranees riding all of the big mountains there and seeing three stages of the Tour. I've always been a cycling fan but have kind of wondered why people spend days waiting for a sporting event that goes by in minutes but now I know exactly why. It's the world's biggest tailgate party and more fun than words can express. Here's some choice pics and...

I've been through a myriad of RSS readers and lately I've been using RssBandit. It just kicks ass, plus it's a damn-fine Windows Forms app!

Ugh, a month goes by without blogging. Anyway, so I've got this great house in Kirkland, about 10 minutes from Microsoft. Behind the house on the hillside, is some landscaping and a big greenbelt. It's nice to look at but has two major downsides. First, all the foliage means my house is spiderville by the end of the summer. I'm not a total arachnophobe but I don't really care for the things. Secondly, keeping up with the plants is quite a challenge. Most of it is easy enough, and I do have a...

You may have noticed the higher gas prices over the last year or so. Looks like they're going to stay that way, which got me to thinking about all the bad things that'll happen if they continue to go up: People may consider living closer to their work They may start taking public transportation or other means of commuting People may start...

So the Republican's still believe that Rossi won the Goveernor's election this past fall by 100 votes and want to take it to court. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. But I've got two words for you guys: Florida 2000. Sucks, huh?

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...

Mostly by chance, I saw Million Dollar Baby on the same day it won Best Picture on tonight's Oscar's. I usually don't pay much attention to awards type shows but this year's crop does seem pretty good. I haven't seen Hotel Rwanda or Ray yet but I have seen Sideways, which I mostly liked, but was way out of it's league with Million Dollar Baby. Let's just say this, MDB is one of the best movies I've seen in a long time, if for no other reason than the sheer volume of emotional response it elicited. ...

I've got a pretty high pain threshold for cool-new stuff that isn't 100% ready for primetime. For example, I love my Sound Blaster Wireless setup (I bought two of 'em even!) even with all it's rough edges, connectivity issues, and crappy library management. It does what I need it to do and generally makes my life better, so I'm willing to put up with it. I was complaining to Brian about this the other day but it continues to be such in the pain in...

The fact that the US pulled out of Kyoto irritates me to no end. Was it a perfect treaty? No. Will it solve the problem? No. Will it cost some money and take some effort? Yes. Is it a step in the right direction? You bet. CNN reported this today. Nothing new in there except for the fact that pretty much everyone who knows what they are talking about agrees that not only is global...

Went down to Cabo over the last week. Had a lot of fun and it was nice to get away, get some sunshine, and get fairly cozy with some of the local Humpback whale population. A couple of funny things happened. First, Mexico's election was last weekend (pretty sure it was all of Mexico but it was in the state of BCS at least). They do their elections on Sunday and don't allow alcohol sales on Saturday or Sunday. ...

I blogged a while back about my "Technojuggle" which was an effort to streamline the various gadgets and services I'm using, particularly focused around minimizing the number (if not the total cost) of bills I'm paying. The lynchpin in this strategy was being able to drop my land-line. Normally this would be no problem (e.g. cell-phone only), but I live near some sort of black hole from which cell signals can not escape. Unless it's cloudy, then it works sometimes. But it's not reliable, so I need a land line. ...

I thought last season was the last one they could stretch it out for. But no!, 24 is back, this time in what appears to be real HD (as opposed to that 480p stuff Fox has been doing the last few years), so it looks and sounds better too. Plus it's off to a decent start, minus all the contrived love story stuff. I'm tuning in to see stuff get blown up, thank you very much. Whenever Jack Bauer goes apeshit on somebody, it's...

Back in Spokanistan for a few days around Christmas with the family. I've eaten way too much, watched some football, but a good time. It's way too cold here.

There's nothing more frustrating than pseudo-science. So if you think you support this, please read this. I thought this was all settled back in 1925, but I guess we're still stuck on it, which doesn't bode well for solving any real problems.

I'm a pretty big fan of anything that has a display on the front or jacks of any sort on the back. But lately I've been redoing some stuff to simplify my setup and save some money in the process. One day I was looking at my home phone bill and wasn't too happy I was paying almost 50 bucks a month for something I hardly use. I only have a home phone for two reasons: I live in some sort of a cell phone black hole in...

Did my second Tri this weekend, went pretty well. I'm reatively capable of swimming in a straight line now, which is huge. I also learned that 3.5 miles is the max I can run without socks on. This race had a 4.3 mile run, the last mile of which my shoes were busy knawing away at my feet. And I'm coming to terms with the fact it might be time to upgrade the bike. I think the 1990 Trek 1400 with probably 25K+ hard racing miles on it might just be past it's prime.

For Brian's bachelor party. No, I'm not telling you what happened, that's against the rules. But I will tell you that as far as I'm concerned the Hard Rock is the place to stay there. I'd been through there plenty of times but never actually stayed at the Hard Rock. A couple of us spent all day at the pool on Friday and had a great time. Believe it or not 105 degrees in Vegas isn't all that bad by the pool. What's nice about the Hard Rock is it's small, and...

Well we've figured out who this Captain Brownstar guy is. Turns out he's also got an eye for the critical problems of today. Such a keen eye has he, that we've decided to commision him as a guest columnest here. Captain Brownstar's Log, 03 March 04: ...

We've got some major problems in this country. One problem that isn't getting nearly enough attention is the need for standarization of spicyness scales between different restaurants. See, I like spicy food, and when you go to a Chinese, Thai, or Indian restaurant, they have spicyness in terms of stars (but as we'll see, they're not the same stars). Mexican restaurants have little peppers by the food, and some wing places have "alarms" from 1-7, and regular old places have mild/medium/hot. But that's just the...

Captain Brownstar (whoever that is - I have my suspicions) has requested pictures of naked chicks. I'm sorry, I can't deliver that due to the new rules imposed by CBS and other confused organizations surrounding content that's family friendly. And if anything, I strive to be family friendly. As such, I have chosen to post this picture depicting a woman participating in everyone's favorite new party game: sword swallowing. Enjoy! ...

I suck at blogging. I feel like it's fair to say my life is as interesting as your average persons but I can't think of things to write about. Well, that's not entirely true but I'd prefer not to self-incriminate. But we did have a bad ass double rainbow over campus today. That was cool. Unfortunately it was due to some really nasty weather.

After a month of pretending I'm a contractor I've pretty much completed my media room. I still need to get a screen but the projector looks pretty darn good on the primer-white wall. Can't wait to see it on the screen. But like all projects, now that it's pretty much done I'm kind of wondering what to do next. 'Course watching TV, movies, playing XBox has filled up plenty of time on it's own!

So I grew up where it's really nice in the summer but nasty in the winter. I came left in part because of less of that winter nastiness. Snow is neat to look at but 50 and raining is much easier to deal with than -20 with snow drifts everywhere. In case I didn't remember what nasty winters were like, well, we've had two weeks of it now. It was cold for a week and a half, then it snowed a bunch, then it got...

Lucky me that my good old friends Brook and Dyan called me today. I went to college with them (and to Europe with Brook a few years back) and it's great to catch up with old friends. Plus they were nice enough to be the first guests to hang in my fancy ass new couches and coffee table set up. It's great to hang with old friends because you always can just relax and not worry about anything but what's going on with them and remembering the old days. Damn I'm a...

So I finally got some furniture for my living room. A leather sofa and two matching armchairs. They're way cool, except for one thing. They smell kind of funky. It's not really a leather smell...kind of like a new car smell but less fun. I'm hoping it goes away within a few days. Ugh.

is not working until after the New Year. Vacation. Nice.

Remember that "grown up house" I got back in September? Well it's great but the downside is that my old townhome has been on the market since then. And I give two mortgages a solid two thumbs down. Well, I'm happy to report that the townhome closed today. Phew!

As with every year, the DevDiv holiday party turned out to be a lot of fun. It's amazing how those just come and go though -- another year speeds on by. It's great to see everyone in a truely outside of work environment though. It makes me remember how fortunate I am to work with so many people that I genuinely enjoy being around. Once again, Melinda did a fantastic job putting the whole thing together! ...

Seems to have stopped working. I went outside on Saturday, it wasn't on. Went around the corner, reset the breaker. It came back on, and about 15 seconds later pop!, it turns back off. Now it's dead. Sigh...

I've been a Sprint customer for years, and a primarily happy one. Unfortunately I get basically zero signal here at my new house. It's just a dead spot -- 100ft up the road is fine. So with number portability available now (which some folks have had trouble with, but mine was super smooth), I've switched to T-Mobile, which is good so far. I've wanted to switch to GSM for a while anyway. Only real thing I've noticed is that calls seem to take a little longer to connect. ...

I bought myself a real grown up house in September. It's great but doesn't really have a ready-made spot for a Ridiculously Larger Than Necessary Television®, so I'm redoing a rooom downstairs to be a Media room. Erick, Fred, and Chris have front-projectors and they are totally the way to go if you've go the space (nevermind the money...). Chris has a good idea -- buy the reasonably priced InFocus X1 now, wait for the...

So here I am in the blogsphere. After Cap'n and Pepe have been doing it, I started feeling left out. So here I am. Before I do anything else, I need to thank said Pepe (Brian) for setting me up here. I owe him a burrito.