Hirlpoo West : Life outside of Microsoft

Doughnut to Sphere

ddysart — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 00:11:36 GMT

I can't remember who turned me on to Ze Frank, but it is a welcome break once in a while. Today's episode's discussion of the Field Medal is hilarious.

Playing with Writer

ddysart — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 22:38:00 GMT

Though hardly breaking news at this point, I'll point folks to the new Windows Live Writer blog posting tool. I've been playing with it for a couple weeks no (we were under quarantine about talking about it) and like it pretty much so far (though I still have a tendency to use the web interface Community Server gives you). The public seems to like it too. I'll be curious to see what folks do with the plugin API. Tim Heuer has already put together a Flickr plugin that eases inserting Flickr images. The photo below is a photo of my son that I've got up on Flickr:

Inserting that took a couple clicks, though on Flickr itself, getting the HTML to insert a photo elsewhere isn't too difficult.

BTW - the above shot is one of my first "keeper" photos I've taken using the awesome techniques outlined by David Hobby on the Strobist blog. David is a photojournalist for the Baltimore Sun and has been sharing load of techniques for doing off camera lighting (all for real cheap, assuming you already have a DSLR).

Floating Bed

ddysart — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 23:17:00 GMT

I saw a lead photo for this article. A Dutch designer created a floating bed based on magnetic attraction/repulsion. It looks pretty nice. The article talks about folks with piercings not having issues, unless they go underneath it (say to dust or sweep or whatever).

Seems to me I'd probably want to lay off using a laptop in bed too. Any magentic field strong enough to hold my fat butt up in the air, let alone the matteress has got to be strong enought to affect the harddrive.

Meeting the legend

ddysart — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 22:43:00 GMT

I'm traveling to Redmond next week with a customer for a briefing. One of the evenings we are scheduled to have dinner with the legend, Robert Scoble himself. Even with all the hatin' he's been getting in the Mini comments lately (which I agree, have become quite unproductive - but like an auto accident are hard not to watch), he is still willing to sit down and chat with our customer, on his own time (though I'm sure we'll pick up the tab).

[Side note: I was looking back at some old posts and noticed a lot of bad text, mainly from what looks to be apostrophes. Dang that's ugly.]

On being your family's tech support

ddysart — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 22:02:00 GMT

Though I can't say I've been through anything quite this rough, everyone I know has been through some form of this.

Mmmm Coffee

ddysart — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 17:07:00 GMT

Though it has been open since April, I’ve only just discovered the new Dunn Bros. Coffee shop on Capitol in Pewaukee. Those from the Minneapolis area will know this place for sure. For the initiated Dunn Bros claim to fame is how freshly roasted the coffee is – they roast it right in the store. I stopped in this morning since I was detoured onto Capitol and didn’t have time to make coffee this morning. I figured what the heck, plus they have free WiFi in the place, so I could do a little work there, enjoy my coffee and then head into the office.

I’d also been meaning to pick up some beans from there. When I was in college, Milwaukee and the surrounding area had no idea what good coffee was (hot and brown? Must be good!) This was before the likes of Alterra and others which now make it easy to find a good cup of joe (Alterra and Fuel Cafe opened near the end of my first tour of duty here). So I’d import Dunn Bros when I’d go home fir the holidays. Today I thought I’d pick up some Kenya. When I inquired if they had any, the clerk asked the fellow near the roaster if they did. He said, no, but if I could wait 20min he’d roast some for me (he only had about 10lbs of green Kenya beans left). How is that for fresh (and service)?

Unfortunately, since the integrated wireless in my laptop has been refusing to work with most networks, I was offline most of the time I was there, but I did get through a backlog of mail offline as well as get most of the week planned out.

Alton Brown in Milwaukee tonight!

ddysart — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 23:01:00 GMT

According to his web site, Alton Brown of Good Eats fame (the nerd's chef) is going to be in the Milwaukee area this evening at Harry Schwartz books in Brookfield. I'm definitely going to try and make it there, if the snow doesn't keep me away.