The Man Who Sold The World

YouTube has everything. This is my favorite performance on any of the music contest shows ever. Heck, this is one of my favorite performances by anyone ever. I am very much looking forward to Jordis Unga's CD later this year. Enjoy! If you go to her web site you can hear a short clip of a song from her new disc. It sounds great!

Bush joke

So Cheney goes into Bush's office and says "Mr. President, there was a car bomb and 300 Brazillians died".

Bush says "how many people are in a brazillian?"

Workflow for Team Foundation?

We have a number of scenarios we'd like to enable in future releases of Visual Studio Team Foundation that would really benefit being part of a generalized workflow framework.  Things like code review/checkin processes, build release and staging, etc.  And no matter how many scenarios you cover, customers will always come up with more.  Building workflow into a system can be hard enough without having to make it extensible too.  Fortunately, Microsoft is working on the Windows Workflow Foundation as part of WinFX.  This looks very promising.  One of the folks on the team, Mark Schmidt, has written an authoring tool that looks interesting.

A company I worked for many years ago developed a huge workflow system for OS/2 and Unix so I've always been intrigued by this stuff.  It was ginormous and had all sorts of memory limits, usability was poor (it used lots of non-modal windows - and I mean lots), and everything was so darned generic that as a user you really had too much of the implementation exposed to you.  The problem is that it was a generalized engine that wasn't really a proper API that had a GUI slapped on top of it.  When what you really want is an engine that manages the flows and allows you to build a tailored customer experience that is relevant for your scenarios.

Stay tuned...

Musical Journey Part 7

My senior year in high school was a blast musically. The band with Eric, Steve, and Mike D. continued. We took on Chris Vernon as a singer. He was not the most versatile singer but he was good to jam with and a truly great guy. He was one of the funnest people I've ever been around. We continued playing Sabbath, Priest, Trower, The Cars, Pat Benatar, etc. We played keg parties and hung around with each other a lot. This was a great time really.

Then it came time to play the high school talent show. Lots of obstacles here. First, I was in trouble for some reason or another and was on restriction of some sort. Eric pleaded the case to my dad that it was not fair to the rest of the band to miss the opportunity so my folks relented and I could play the show. Then the talent show committee (or whatever it was) said Mike D. couldn't play in the band because he didn't go to our high school. So I filled in on bass - it sucked because we couldn't play the more interesting tunes we had planned on. Also, I didn't know the bass parts for the tunes we did play beforehand so I had a quick crash course on the tunes. We pulled it off and basically rocked the house. Of course we lost to some girl that did a really boring Asian dance. What a bunch of BS!!! Still, the talent show led to us getting to play a couple more keg parties.