I'm starting to think I am a terrible blogger. It's been months since my last meaningful blog post. I think the biggest reasons for my failure to blog are: 1) no free time anymore, 2) lack of anything interesting to say, 3) too much other writing going on. I'm pretty sure #3 is the real reason I've slacked off in my writing.

As you may already know, we're very close to shipping the next release of Office, and that certainly accounts for the lack of free time. The last couple of weeks have been intensely busy often working 10 hours a day. On top of trying to ship this release, I've been brainstorming around what we can do for the next release of Office, working on a couple of side projects, and coordinating efforts with other teams (BCM, VSTO, UM, etc) to make sure everyone is ready for the release and that we're delivering a high quality release.

On the #3 front, I've got my MSDN blog which keeps most of my blogging skills busy with the one or so posts I make a month, plus I'm working on co-authoring a new book on Outlook programmability which is really draining my ability to write for anything else. After churning out 4 chapters so far (2 more to go), I can understand why writing a book is such a difficult task to accomplish. I can't wait until this project is complete.

Someday soon I need to blog about my new gadgets as well. I'm still in love with my Treo 700wx. In addition to upgrading to the coolest phone ever, I've recently rebuild my desktop computer, which now features a Core 2 Duo processor, a Dell 2407WFP display, and the latest builds of Windows Vista. It's a sweet sweet machine, but building it wasn't so great. I have a story to tell, and hopefully I can tell it soon!

More to come soon, I promise.

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.