Due to a recently flood of trackback spam, I've disabled the trackback service on my blog.  Hopefully I can come up with a better way of filtering spam and non-spam trackbacks and re-enable the service in the future.

If you’ve been keeping track of trends on the Internet recently, you may have heard about the Pong Clock that was developed by a small design firm.  After months of waiting for legal battles to subside, components to be produced, and everything else to work itself out, it is finally on the way!

No ETA for arrival yet, but my invoice was received, my payment was recevied, and everything looks good to go.

I’m not really sure where I’m going to put it yet, but it seems likely to be gracing my living room (yes, I’m a total geek).  However, where else do you put a limited piece of high-class gamer art?

With my family in town for the 4th of July, we’ve been going around hitting all the “vacation spots” in the area.  We’ve gone whale watching (saw some wonderful Orca whales up north), visited Snoqualmie Falls, the Boeing Museum of Flight, and other attractions.  On Sunday we got the bright idea of heading down to Tacoma and checking out the Museum of Glass.  What a mistake.

For some reason, the city of Tacoma has an oder that just can’t be ignored.  It seems to go away nicely when you’re inside a building, but anytime you’re out in open air you’ll notice the smell.  However, if the attractions in the town were great enough, I wouldn’t let this bother me.  For some reason though, last weekend was not a good weekend to be at the Museum of Glass.

From what I’ve read and seen online, the place is supposed to be spectacular.  Great examples of cast, sculpted, and blown glass were suppose to abound.  However, for some reason this was not the case this weekend.  I think it shows that you really need to check what exhibits are going on at the museum, and not just assume they will be glass-related.  At the time we visited, there was only one glass-related exhibit (of 3 total exhibits).

The result was that I saw more glass in the parking lot that I did inside the museum.  The hot shop was pretty cool (hot shop = where they make and blow glass), but having actually done this before, it wasn’t that exciting to me.  After checking out the hot shop, we looked around the museum’s galleries, to much disappointment.  The hallway to the bathroom featured more glass art than all of the galleries put together.  Additionally, there was more glass outside than in, with the towers of Chihuly’s blue glass towers on the bridge behind the museum. 

Unfortunately, that was it.  There were no great glass art pieces around the grounds of the museum, nor inside.  Totally disappointing.  At least I got to see the towers on the bridge.  Next time, unless I see ahead of time a good exhibit going on, I’m going to skip the entry fee for the museum and just check out the gift shop and the museum grounds.

Must have forgotten this last week while I was at TechEd. My first MSDN article went live last week.  Check out “Code Security Changes in Outlook 2007” to check out my first article.

Rory Blyth has a great post over on his blog about some of the problems with Microsoft today and what needs to be done to fix them. I’d have to say that he’s right, while Microsoft does have some absolutely great products, MS does have a serious image problem that needs to be cleaned up. 

While his message may be a little rough, I think his points are pretty clear.  Definitely worth a read.

I had a great time at TechEd 2006 this year.  I spent most of my time at the Visual Studio Tools for Office booth in the green technical learning center. Ended up visiting with a whole bunch of customers over the 5 days and really had a great time.

On Tuesday I was invited out to the Boston Aquarium for a New England clam-bake to celebrate the Office MVPs and partners. I’ve just finished posting the pictures and videos of some of the sea-life on Flickr and YouTube.

For pictures from the aquarium, check out this photo set.

There's also the following videos, mostly of the turtles swimming around the large center tank at the aquarium:

Here I come!  I'll be hanging out in Boston all week at TechEd 06.  I'll be around in OFC-1 (where that is, I'm not really sure yet).  I think this TechEd is going to be really exciting, we've got Windows Vista beta 2, Office 2007 beta 2, and a ton of other really cool things to talk about (like Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster shipping last week).

My blog is pretty slow as it is, but it's only going to get slower next week (or so I would guess).  See you after that!

Not so much fun tonight.  I managed to make it home though.  More on this later.

I’m impatient, I know, but does it really take 30+ hours (and counting) to take my new Dell laptop and put it in a box?  It’s been in the “boxing” stage for the last 30 hours.  It seems to me that this is an amazingly long time to take the laptop, but it in a sheet of foam, and put that into the pre-made cardboard and foam packaging along with the necessary cables, adapters, and leaflets.

Don’t get me wrong, considering this laptop will be travelling a great distance between the time it is packaged and handed off to UPS and the time it gets to me, I want it to be well packaged and ready for the travel.  But still, I want to play with my new toy, so please hurry it up!

I ordered a new Dell Insprion E1505 last week with all the bells and whistles, and I’m eagerly waiting it’s arrival.. which won’t happen until the end of next week it seems.

I've updated PictureSorter for a few issues that have been reported.  It should no longer crash if you attempt to open a folder that doesn't exist (like a disconnected network drive).

I've also done various other minor fixes all over the place.  Nothing big though.

Download PictureSorter 1.0.5