It’s pouring buckets again today, with strong winds last night blowing some nasty winds.  Fortunately, I’m extremely well-prepared, so it’s just another storm for me.  That said, I’m looking forward to what’s next: This is a good time to remind...

Just when we thought summer was near, we get reminded that we still live in the Pacific Northwest.  Look at the view from my office window right now: Somebody rescue us from this cold and snow!

I upgraded my work laptop with Windows 7 a month or two ago (and I love it!) and most things are going smoothly.  But one feature I’m loving a lot is the ability to swipe my finger across the fingerprint reader built into my Lenovo X60 TabletPC. ...

Continuing my Virtual eComm attendance , here are some notes on other presentations; Dean Bubley ( Disruptive Analysis ):  Starts out with a great quote “Don’t assume” because consensus viewpoints are often flawed.  (I would say consensus is...

Continuing my Virtual eComm attendance , I’m browsing through several more presentations.  Ordinarily I’d write my thoughts quickly in Twitter and be done with it, but sometimes it’s nice to have the longer flow and easier format of a blog post. ...

My boss, XDH kept mentioning Scandinavia in his Twitter feed from Ecomm, so one of my first stops in my Virtual eComm attendance was the presentation by Alan Duric , CTO at the Norwegian telecom company, Telio ASA. Telemetry and real time communications...

You’re not alone.  Telecommunications companies kept their #1 spot in Washington State last year for total number of complaints filed with the Attorney General’s office.  They’ve been number one for the past decade. Industry 2008 2007 2006 2005...

Last year’s eComm was a wonderful way to see the latest cool stuff going on in the field of new communications technology and (more importantly) meet the people who are behind it all.  The conference site, unfortunately, had poor internet coverage...

I’ve hate handwriting. I’ve been using keyboards since I learned to write and my fingers just don’t want to use a pen. But there are too many occasions when people expect the “personal” touch of a handwritten document, so I couldn’t get out of it completely...

Sometimes the best speech apps don’t really use speech recognition at all. I mean, yeah, there’s an audio stream and yeah there’s some processing, but you don’t always need the computer to understand what was said in order for it to be useful. My favorite...

Look at the list of things Americans now list as necessities (according to a new poll by Pew Research ) Car 91% Clothes Washer 90% Clothes Dryer 83% Air Conditioning 70% Microwave 68% TV 64% Home Computer 51% Cell phone 49% Dishwasher 35% Cable TV 33...

The Apple Macintosh was launched 25 years ago, which seems like ancient history because of course it is, but it’s fun to reflect a little on it because it brings back lots of personal memories for me – especially memories of what I think was the true...

One more week and I’ll be off to Miami for ITExpo East.  I don’t usually look forward to trade shows, but I really enjoyed the last one and we have so many cool things planned that I can’t wait to get there.  The organizer, Rich Tehrani, wrote...

I still run into people who cite the “Qwerty effect” as evidence that sometimes a big head start will give an inferior technology unfair market dominance at the expense of “better” ones.  This theory has been disproven historically (it’s not true...

Now this is sad… Only 18 percent of us know a scientist personally, according to a 2005 survey (subscription required), and when asked in 2007 to name scientific "role models," the results were dismal . Forty-four percent of Americans couldn...

Here's a cool new app from a sister team of mine: http://www.microsoft.com/tag/ First, download the free app to your Windows Mobile phone (takes just a couple seconds). When you run the app on your phone, it starts the camera automatically. Just aim the...

I've been following the conversation in the blogosphere (and in last night’s Calliflower podcast ) among the VOIP pundits, arguing whether VOIP is dead or alive. I'm sort of an outsider to all this, since I've only been following VOIP for the past year...

Every great new social phenomenon has a "fad" phase , where zillions of people join in because, well, because zillions of others are joining. A few years ago I suddenly reunited with my old friends at Apple Japan because suddenly it seemed like...

Traditional media is being killed by the plummeting costs of content creation and distribution, thanks to wonderful new technologies like cheap HD camcorders, easy-to-make podcasts, and Twitter . The resulting lower barriers to entry make it possible...

Michael Wolf is right on, at GigaOM, when he questions the long-term importance of CES .  I got a lot out of attending in person last year , but I bet I’ll get even more out of it this year by not attending. There is value in having a shared experience...

There’s no shortage of disk space in my house, but only a small amount really needs to be backed up.  The music and photos --  yes of course you want that backed up, but why waste gigabytes on a database that can just be recreated later anyway...

I've lived here now for almost five years, and traveled here and considered living here for more than twenty years, but I finally saw this movie for the first time last night. I found myself getting emotional -- no, not over the sappy chick flick parts...

I had a fun conversation this afternoon with Rich Tehrani of TMCNet . (You can listen to the recording here ). I like Rich's podcasts , and I try to listen to as many as I can. My favorites were the ones earlier this year with Chris Lyman (talking about...

This new paper, by Microsoft Research scientists Ryen White and Eric Horvitz, must have been written about me. Web search is my first stop whenever I am wondering about a physical ailment (I mean, condition--well, you know what I mean: some physical situation...

I remember during the Tech Crash earlier this decade, a lot of my friends took advantage of the downturn to start a new company, many of which formed the seeds of what we now call Web2.0. Just in time for today's economic downturn, Microsoft has started...