Taking a break from responding to Slashdot responses I had a bunch of stuff in my inbox to clear out.

1st Proven VSCmdShell Fan
People have told me they would use a command shell integrated well into VS, but this quote is the first real proof I have that anyone enjoys the VSCmdShell project.  It's enough to motivate me to more coding in the near future. "Thanks for taking the time to build/create the VSMCShell add-in for Visual Studio.  As a gainfully employed numerical modeler who almost exclusively writes number crunching console applications, your add-in is a real time and space saver for me.  I don't think there is any better IDE for writing, testing, and debugging scientific computer codes." And hey, you can get the code and contribute as well. 

Answering the Google Mailbag
Eric answers questions from his google referral mailbag.

"How do you forget about a girl you get over vacation?
It just takes time, kiddo. 
What to do if he doesn't propose?
Take the initiative already!  This is the 21st century!
Is it good if I want it real bad?
I'm not touching that one."

Good Times!

Starting a Pimp Program
According to the "Church of the Customer" Tivo appears to be getting desperate by pimping out their best customers:

It doesn't seem like TiVo gets it. For the past four years, the 65,000 members of the self-organized TiVo Community forum have traded ideas on:

* How to convince friends and family to buy a TiVo
* How to deliver impromptu sales training sessions to Best Buy employees whose sales pitches need work
* How to be a better TiVotee

A few TiVo reps monitor this worshipful congregation, but they do little to actively gather feedback or rally evangelists to their side. What a waste. Now, TiVo's new strategy is to monetize its relationships with customer evangelists and turn it into something it shouldn't be.

It serves, to me, as an important "don't do this with our communities" reminder to those of us at Microsoft.  Listen, gather feedback, and rally... don't pimp.

Mark Cuban on HDTV and Hard Drives
I swear, I saw this before it was Slashdotted as Mark's blog is a must read for me. Regardless, it is still a good piece that makes you think. Yes, I really do think that higher quality (not watered down) bit rates for media distribution will help eliminate piracy. I get the sinking feeling that we'll have humans on Mars before I get the bandwidth to make it easy to distribute 1gb movies.

Ok, I'm in Eweek Now
It seems that every day someone forwards me another article that talks about my blog post from two weeks ago. This one is from Eweek and actually quotes me pretty well. One thing to remember however, is that anything is this space (more open/shared software from MS) is going to start small. I'd be shocked to find out something big was going to be announced soon. I actually think it would be a mistake not to start small and experiment first. 1000 people did not start blogging in one day.