As Emperor Zurg might say, Los Angeles' power outage today appeared to be caused by the high voltage equivalent of failing to connect the plus wire to the plus side and the minus wire to the minus side.  Anyway, glad to see they got that fixed.
 
Had a nice dinner tonight with a few VC++ team members and a few MVPs at Engine Co. No. 28.  It's always good to hear the issues faced by the MVPs, both in their day jobs and in their work online with fellow VC++ developers.  Conversation points included...
  • One of the bigger issues discussed is the difficulty in upgrading compiler versions caused by stricter language standards conformance.
  • Performance of compiled code matters.  This is especially important in the world of native-managed interop, where a variety of performance-sapping gremlins can bite you if you stray too far into the woods.   Hmmm... too many metaphors for one sentence; I think it's near bed time.  Anyway, note to self: the VC++ team needs to publish a white paper or two on /clr compilation, interop, and performance.
  • Jim Hogg and Brandon Bray gave me an education on the coolness of Haskell, which I'm now eager to try out.
  • I won $1 from April Reagan for remembering the quadratic formula.  Truth be told, I was a little off, but is it really important whether it's 4ac - b^2 or b^2 - 4ac?  :)
  • Brandon mentioned at dinner that today's precons went well, although they did suffer a bit of a delay due to the temporary lack of electricity.  Apparently there was even some serious consideration of forging ahead with the presentation - GASP - without the benefit of the PowerPoint slides! Luckily the power came back up seconds before they descended into such madness.  ;)
  • And I just noticed Raffeale already put a picture of dinner up on his blog.  Man, he's fast.