Okoboji: a lake, a mythical university, Kevin Moore's blog

I ran into my good friend Charlie on the bus tonight. Not only is Charlie a great Ultimate Frisbee player, but he's also a PM on the Excel team. Not only did Charlie introduce me to the wonder that is the pivot table in Excel, he also told me that the...

Like many people, I subscribe to the agregate MSDN RSS feed to get all feeds from Microsoft. Except, there are at least a few (and probably more) amazing blogs from other softies that are not on MSDN. If you are not reading these guys, you should be....

...but I really like the command prompt. There have been a lot of posts about Monad on MSDN Blogs. Take a look at the demo on Channel 9. http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=25915 Very cool.

Kidding... Adobe makes some amazing Windows applications, but am I the only one who would like web-hosted PDFs to open outside the browser? After a quick search, I found the simple solution (for v6.0 at least) Open Adobe (Acrobat) Reader from the start...

I found a great walk-through on how to enable file sharing on Windows XP. http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/xp_filesharing/index.htm Besides this article, there are a number of other great resources for Internet Connection Sharing, among others...

Never underestimate the value of a catchy title. This entry is about Longhorn, though—specifically the work we are doing in People and Groups to bridge contact lists--not only between application, but between devices. My good friend Jeremy...

Microsoft is serious about spam, but one can always use more help. I’ve been using Sneakemail since my senior year of college. It works great. Create an account on sneakemail. When a web site asks for your email address instead of giving them your...

I love running the highest performance, most stable OS Microsoft has ever produced on my desktop. The problem: a lot of the features that make a sense for a server OS, make little sense for a desktop. An example is the Display Shutdown Event Tracker...

April 19-25 is TV-Turnoff Week. (CNN has an article .) When I first moved out to Seattle in the summer of 2002, I spent a month in Microsoft-provided temp housing. I'd come home from work and spend 2 hours vegging in front of the TV. When I got my...

Our friends in Media Player have done a fine job with Media Player 9. One slight problem: I think they got their first use experience a little wrong. Usually when I launch Media Player, I want to listen to my music, not watch a trailer for Scooby Doo...

Since I work in the OS division, I image my work machines quite often. (Not as often as a lot of our test team, but more than most people.) Besides putting my task bar at the top of the Window and switching my keyboard to Dvorak , there are also a...

An article I'd never expect to find on a Microsoft site, but I guess it's just more proof we're a big company. Master the Skills of Influence and Persuasion The overview: How do top salesmen and leaders persuade others to act and motivate people...

First, a simple one: you can drag a file or folder from Explorer to the CMD window. The path to that file/folder will appear as text which you can use in a command. Pretty spiffy. Second, short-cuts to the Run command in the start menu. 1...

Ray Ozzie has an interesting perspective on Longhorn storage: moving to a common store may have the same benefits of using common protocols on the Internet. I hope so!

I'm finally caught up with all of the stuff I wanted to blog. On a sad note, an interesting question: Is the Internet Dying?

A great article about the technology and politics behind broadband. Our friend Professor Lessig just wrote a related article for Wired . Both are good reads.

Those of you lucky enough to attend the PDC keynote this year saw the cool glass effects we're working on for Longhorn. Well, you don't have to wait for Longhorn to get glass on your desktop. You can do it with IE right now! http://w3future.com...

I like using templates for sites. Sadly, there won't be support in ASP.NET until the next release. Thankfully Paul Sheriff has a work around: Simulating include Files with ASP.NET Server Controls

How many books do you have that you haven't touched in the last [insert double-digit number] months? Exactly! These clever kids have implemented an idea I was toying with last year: a distributed library. The name for their project: Distributed...

I grew up in Iowa [close to Okoboji ]. I've done my share of knocking my home state, how I'd never live there, etc. Well it turns out that Fast Company disagrees. It turns out that Des Moines, IA [the state capitol] is the best place to work...

In one part of his Artima interviews, Anders Hejlsberg discusses the notion of simplexity. I've started using this word a lot as I find it applies to a great deal of my work. Amar , my esteemed GPM, pointed me to another article by Joel Spolsky on 'The...

Part 5 of the interview I posted earlier. This one talks "about DLL hell and interface contracts, strong names, and the importance of interoperability." http://www.artima.com/intv/interop.html

I use IE at work. It has a nasty habit of forwarding searchs to MSN search, which also pops up ads on my screen. What I want: if it's going to do autosearch, at least use Google . The solution: customize IE with some registry hacks provided...

Another little CMD window utility that I learned recently: start . I just typed start /? and I learned way more than what I was expecting. I usually just use it when I want to open a Explorer window at my current location. c:\foobar...

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html It's fun the things one finds when clicking around blog rolls. Windows Messenger 5 was the first application I worked on at Microsoft. I was put in charge of localization and I learned an...