PatHelland's WebLog

I received some thoughtful commentary from someone named John and I thought I would share his comments and some of my responses with you all. I’m still trying to get used to Blogging and don’t know how to give better attribution to John than...

I frequently find that people have a different perspective of computing than I do. When I think about it, I am struck by the independence and separation that different systems (i.e. independent services) have from each other. In many ways, this reminds...

I am concerned about how to interpret a “service” and a “system” as differentiated from an application or a hardware node (or Windows “box”). There seems to be no small amount of confusion about the crisp definition...

Some of you may know that I have hundreds of PEZ dispensers in my office and a neon sign that says the PEZ man... My office isn't boring! Anyway, last night my wife, Michelle, and I were at QFC (a local supermarket) and I found the new Easter PEZ dispensers...

Well, I’m sitting on a plane from Washington DC to Orlando and it’s Wednesday evening, March 17 th . Had a great weekend! We (Michelle and I) arrived Friday afternoon to see our daughter and grandkids. Saturday was especially fun...

We expect around 20 people to the house for dinner tonight. That's just immediate family. My granddaughter, Adriana, is turning 14 tomorrow and we are going to have the Washington State part of the family over for dinner. The 25 includes only my 3 local...

Howdy! My name is Pat Helland and I’ve been around Microsoft for almost 10 years as an architect. I’ve been working on transaction and application execution stuff for 25 years or so and I guess that makes me an old man… at Microsoft...