This week my wife and I went to check out a school that we plan to send our two kids to next year. Although the city we live in (Bellevue, WA) has a good school district, we are not very pleased with the results from the elementary school near us. We...

Every once in awhile (though somewhat more commonly now) I receive an e-mail or IM asking a question on the UCMA API. I decided to post the answers to some of the most common questions. Where can I download UCMA? - The release candidate is at http...

Recently I answered an issue where a customer was confused because sometimes we use the Es-Mx locale for the Es-Us language pack. The reason we have to do this is Windows Server 2003 does not have an Es-Us locale. If you try to create such a locale, you...

I have a sneaking suspicion that many of you who use UCMA do not truly know when one should use SipPeerToPeerEndpoint vs SipEndpoint and when one should use RealTimeClientConnectionManager vs one of the RealTimeServerConnectionManagers. In this post I...

Recently, I have seen a few posts on other blogs asking what should one use to create speech server applications. To review, there are four ways to write speech server applications in OCS 2007. 1) Windows Workflow Activities 2) Core API (basically...

Some time ago I wrote about how I moved from the Speech Server team to the OCS core team. Now that I have been on the team for some time, I thought I'd give random thoughts about my perceptions thus far to those on the outside. First, it is a much...

As those of you who read my blog have likely already figured out, I have no problem speaking whatever is on top of my mind. This post has been steaming in my head for some time, but I avoided writing it as I have a feeling that it will offend some people...

IMG_8958 Originally uploaded by kirispupis This photo was taken about a week ago near Petra, Jordan. We hired a guide to take us around and show us Little Petra, which is a smaller version of the gigantic Petra that was recently named one of the new seven...

The following is a collection of travel tips that have significantly improved our vacations since we started using them. Packing lists - Until a few years ago, it seems that I would always forget something whenever I went on vacation. Now what we do...

OK, for those of you who follow Microsoft news this will be old news to you, but upon getting back from Israel and catching up on e-mail I read the announcement that we will acquire Parlano. For more info on this, you can read the brief on Parlano's site...

Yesterday we got back from a two week trip to Israel and Jordan. This was a particularly fascinating trip and there is so much to say but I will stick with my major impressions. - It is rather sad, but from a first hand look I think it will be a very...