A Renewing Mind

Last night, while I was working off some pounds in the YMCA, some enterprising individual acquired a new laptop by smashing a window in my car and nabbing my briefcase. They also acquired a PDA, wireless mouse, and reading glasses. It was an IBM ThinkPad T40 – nearly three years old and approaching the end of its lease. It cannot be worth much on the street. It makes me sick to think of the years worth of accumulated source code, email archives, and other documents that are forever lost. I almost left it at the office last night, but I’ve recently moved to an area of the building with heavier traffic and I wasn’t sure it would be safe to leave it. Arggghh!

There are shadows there on the sidewalk. The sun really does shine here once in a while, and when it does, it can be beautiful.

There is a webcam on top of the Space Needle, just a couple of blocks away. Cool! If you click on the Monorail (in landmark locations), you can see the Westin – its the tall round tower to the left of the monorail.

Why do 1,500 people go to a conference about a project planning tool? Beats me, but there are clearly some people that are passionate not only about project management in general, but Microsoft Office Project in specific. The former I can understand. The latter baffles me. That said, I can see MS is including some nice features in Project 12. Stuff like: multi-level undo, selecting tasks not assigned to you during timesheet entry (yea), improved Outlook integration, and more. I haven’t seen anything yet on an RSS feed to provide project task status updates. To me, that would be cool.

The Internet connection here at the Seattle Westin is spotty – doesn’t matter if it is the wireless connection or the cable connection up in the room. It is generally slow and frequently seems to drop out. This afternoon I’ll be switching over to TMobile. It will be worth the walk over to Starbuck’s.

I arrived in Seattle this afternoon for the Microsoft Office Project conference. Frankly, I am amazed that there is enough interest in a project planning tool to warrant a conference. This is not exactly a technology that I am passionate about, but the Project team back at the office wanted an architect to come with them, so here I am.

I went for a walk around the downtown tonight. This is a nice area – if you like shopping at Nordstrom’s or Tiffany’s. I have always stayed in Bellvue when visiting in the past. Staying downtown is a nice change. In spite of the rain, I think I’ll like it here. Oh, I went looking for a Starbuck’s tonight. It took about 45 seconds to find the first one. Then they started popping up every 90 seconds after that. There are, oh, maybe one bazillion of them in the downtown area.

One thing I’m having a hard time finding is free wifi. I know it exists, but I’m not finding anything nearby the hotel. The Westin hotel charges $10 per day. That includes wireless access throughout the hotel, which sounds nice, but I’m limited to the hotel. On the other hand, I could pay $10 and go to any Starbuck’s or the nearby Border’s Bookstore. Of course, I’d then have to leave the hotel. I’d rather not pay $20 per day for both, but I may have to do that.

Yesterday I found a way to access Google Mail from behind firewalls which might normally block browser access to the Google Mail website. I’m not sure I even want to link to this directly. I’ll just say it wasn’t terribly hard to find and I’ve left a breadcrumb trail here as well.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for a few months now, but yesterday some of the real power of tagging started to dawn on me. First was the realization that all of the bookmarking I do in FireFox is nothing more than trying to create a taxonomy. There is nothing wrong with taxonomies, but they are terribly difficult to build and maintain. I have long since passed the point where it was easy to determine where in the taxonomy to place a new link. As a result, I have a mess that I try to reorganize every few months. Without really thinking about it, I’ve started using del.icio.us as a replacement for bookmarking. I may not remember where I bookmarked a site, but I likely do remember one of the tags I used for it. It would be interesting to pull those del.icio.us tags into the browser so I could use them as quick links. I think I’ve heard that flock is doing something along these lines.

A second slick use of del.icio.us is subscribing to my own feed of tags, as well as those generated by others with whom I share an interest. I often want to write something about a site that I tag, but going through the process of tagging at del.icio.us and then separately creating a post is a bit cumbersome. Having the tag info show up in my news aggregator makes it easy to follow up with a blog post at a more convenient time and in a more expedient way.

Listening to Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte’s Inside the Net #4 yesterday, I learned about ProtoPage. This is another start page/personal portal effort, similar to the Microsoft Start Page, but completely Ajax-driven and potentially much cooler than Microsoft’s. Good RSS support, but a little light on tools at the moment. I’m going to try it out for a bit. I’ve included RSS feeds for my ToDo lists from TaDa and Delicious. More on these in a moment.

For most of the last two years I have been forced, in my role as an IT Architect, to repress much of my geek inquisitiveness – including the desire to write a line or two of code. Yesterday it all kind of boiled over into nearly 12 hours of complete indulgence of my inner geek tendancies. More coming up.