I've just completed the upgrade to dasBlog 1.9, and everything appears to be running smoothly.  The application is now hosted on my 64-bit web server with .NET 2.0, and I'm happy to see that the problems I had with it previously running in this configuration appear to be gone.  I'd encourage anyone running dasBlog to upgrade to 1.9 to take advantage of the new features included in this release and to make sure that it works great on .NET 2.0.

Well, after putting up with my PPC-6700 for nearly a year, I finally had had enough tonight.  After my 6700 wouldn't let me make any more phone calls because "I didn't have enough signal".  Of course, while I was getting this message, the phone had a full four bars of signal strength reported. Well, that might seem minor, but given the track record I've had with the phone I decided it was enough.  Off to the Sprint store.

Amazingly enough, they actually had the Treo 700wx in stock, so I picked one up.  So far I'm in love with it!  It's about 1/3 smaller than the 6700, and while the screen is smaller (240x240 instead of 320x240), I'm rapidly adapting to the way it works.  We'll see how I feel about it in a week, but thus far I'm impressed.

Yes, it's here, and it's awesome (although perhaps uber-geeky).  I've installed it in my office where it gets much attention, usually from people passing by asking "what is that?!?" or by visitors to my office who can't stop looking at it.

I can't wait to see what an interview candidate will think of it.

I’ve been starting to wonder where my Pong Clock was… today I found out:

Dear customer,

 

To our utmost regrets, it has come to our attention you did not yet receive your pong clock, which you have paid for, and which had been send already, three weeks previously. After our investigation, it turns out our shipper TNT has seriously f*cked things up. After many, many phone calls, it turns out they “lost” a few shipments of our batch. Meaning, they simply say they can find our beloved pong clocks anywhere, hurray for modern shippers and modern day shipment tracking!

 

Needless to say, they haven’t seen the last of us [or our lawyers] but that does not help you in any way...

 

We have reserved a few clocks for unexpected troubles like this, so it does not mean you can’t have your long awaited pong clock. But we will need to send it again [today/tomorrow], and it can take up to two weeks before it finally arrives at your location, since it’s shipped by postal service.

 

We sincerely apologize, but we simply can’t help, or could have foreseen this much stupidity at a shippers organization. We have done our best to have everything run smooth, but murphys law overruled us, let’s hope it’s all solved when it finally arrives.

Wow, the saga of the Pong Clock continues.  Thanks to Buro Vormkrijgers though for the great customer service and never leaving anyone wondering “what’s going on”.  I know someday I’ll get my clock…

Found a new interesting blog today over on Creating Passionate Users.  The author of this particular post on "We can't leave innovation up to our users" has a pretty good point, the vast majority of people never ask for revolutionary innovation. Very rarely do a majority of users come by and ask for something that is really innovative, like the new Office 2007 Ribbon, the iPod, or Expose.  Listening directly to what your users are asking for often leads to only incremental changes.

Unfortunately I think we're all guilty of listening to these types of incremental requests from time to time.  Some of us perhaps more than others.  It's a difficult game to win however, if you go off and work solely on innovative cool things, you may end up with something that is unusable or unnecessary, and your users won't be happy.  At the same time, you could end up with the next killer feature, and everyone will demand your product.

How do you know what to do?  You make educated guesses, try to figure out what people need to do and how to do it, and most of all, you bet on things.  You will fail from time to time, but it's a better approach than never delivering anything innovative and fun.

As we (slowly) get into the design phase for the next generation of Office, I'm going to keep these principals in mind.

Whoever said that it never got hot enough in Seattle that you needed air conditioning clearly didn’t live in the area on days like this weekend.  Friday we broke like four records in western Washington, and today was nearly as bad.  I think the high today in Redmond topped out at 95, which means my apartment was at least that hot.

While I do have one air conditioned room (for my servers), even it wasn’t a very cool place today.  I spent last night on the couch to keep cool, maybe tonight the room with A/C will be a better place than my bedroom.  At any rate, when I end up buying a house, you can be sure if it doesn’t have A/C I’ll be installing it shortly, no matter the cost.

In the mean time, it’s spending more time out window shopping or at work, both places that have A/C to keep the place cool.  It’s on days like this though that I really wish we had a Sonic around.  A route 44 cherry limeaid would have been awesome today.

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.