After Lisa took me out for a private dinner on my birthday last week, she took me out to dinner again with seven of our friends this past Saturday.  We went to a packed Wasabi Japanese steakhouse and sushi bar on the West side of Knoxville.  The regional Wasabi restaurant is similar to Benihana.  Despite the crowds, service was good and the chef was entertaining.  The food was good, too.

Everybody had a great time.  I appreciate the nice cards, the evening out with friends is really the best thing at my advanced age :-).

P.S.  I find myself posting less frequently due to the overwhelming and intrusively addictive nature of Twitter.  It is so easy to dash off a 140 character sound bite or join a rapid-fire conversation.  If Microsoft brought the immediacy of that sort of community to Spaces, people would flock to the service.  Especially if you could include small pictures and write longer messages.  In comparison, I’ve gotten almost no chat on Messenger for weeks, and I hide the Messenger window (no ad views for you).

-- Walter Lounsbery, 11-25-2008

These are exciting times for Microsoft consumers and developers.  Sometimes it is difficult to know the difference between Microsoft consumers and developers, but that’s a whole other story.  Just after the most comprehensive, confusing, exciting, and opaque Microsoft Professional Developers Conference ever, Microsoft began deploying a huge remake of Windows Live.  The fact that this remake is to be deployed over a period of months guarantees hiccups, bugs, and consumer disappointment.  The screenshots of the remake look great, but how does it all work together?  Since the announced remake includes partnership arrangements with lots of third party social websites, if it works at all it will be a miracle.  Yet another story to cover later after the remake is complete.

Today it seems as if the remake is not gaining traction for Microsoft in one critical area: calendars.  Remember that Ray Ozzie’s early demonstration of easy Web-based synch involved calendar synchronization?  I know, that was years ago.  But it was the genesis of the FeedSynch standards and Live Mesh.  Oddly, Microsoft’s Live Calendar application and its coordination with Microsoft Outlook have since both gone through a number of really bad implementations.  It seems like Microsoft could care less about their Calendar support, providing a number of similar functions and disconnected services such as Windows Live Events.  No doubt members of various Microsoft development teams could point out the wonderful aspects of their calendar-related services and functions.  I don’t think regular people attempting to use those things would share in the joy.

In fact, I am writing this today because Windows Live Calendar not only doesn’t get the events that I’ve placed in Outlook (as it was doing a few days ago), it is randomly showing events I’ve deleted and deleted events I’ve entered directly into Windows Live Calendar.  Keep in mind that Windows Live Calendar and Outlook have really screwy interfaces.  These products also don’t support common operations.  I only try them out so I’ll be able to know when they are fixed.

In the meantime, the paper calendar hanging on the wall of my office has been very reliable.  I think I’ll set up a Webcam hooked to Windows Home Server so I can check it remotely.  The tough part will be entering new events, but right now that’s pretty much feature parity with Windows Live Calendar.

-- Walter Lounsbery, 11-19-2008

I think 2008 will go down as the Year of Ignorance.  I hope this isn’t, broadly, the Millennium of Morons.  It is upsetting for me to recognize enormous acts of verbal illusion (lying) on the part of so-called experts in order to further somebody else’s greed.

The election is over, so you should realize that I am talking about something else.  And that is the wonderful bailout of the automotive industry that the American taxpayer will soon be financing.  To a great degree, a lot of the same nonsense is going on in the entire surge of handouts from Congress.

General Motors has been very vocal and clever presenting its case for handouts.  This effort started long before government started acting on the economic crisis.  Clearly, GM is pushing their agenda to the front with talking points about enormous cash burns, nonexistent revenue, and the impending doom of bankruptcy.  They say if we don’t send them money, a large segment of the economy will shut down and hundreds of thousands of people will be on the street.  They say you can’t turn the enormous auto industry on a dime, it takes a long time to adjust their supply and labor contracts, it takes years to deal with this sudden global economic disaster.

If you don’t realize everything “they say” in the previous paragraph is pure nonsense, it is time for you to wake up and start thinking about what you are hearing.  And no, tuning out critical observations like this doesn’t qualify as thinking.

Let’s look at a few critically deficient points from GM.  Bankruptcy is declared by companies that can’t meet their financial obligations.  This allows a company to avoid liquidation and get relief to continue operations until they can meet their financial obligations.  So somebody at GM wants you to think they will liquidate while they talk about bankruptcy.  Some large firms have gone through bankruptcy, survived, and thrived.  Some airlines have gone bankrupt multiple times.  While bankruptcy is a major thing, it doesn’t mean wholesale layoff, liquidation, or destruction of their supplier’s business.

What about that enormous cash burn?  Perhaps that is another way of saying that they can’t control their costs.  Majors costs for manufacturers are materials, labor, distribution, and advertising.  GM also has a large loan operation.  If you were to run your own small business, your main financial benchmark would be cash flow.  Do you have more money coming in than going out?  GM should not say one word about cash burn without providing numbers for income and cash flow, which are more important measures.  Steve Ballmer doesn’t care if Microsoft spends $2 billion a month while it is making $5 billion a month.  General Motors wants to exaggerate its problems (controlling expense) and skip the really important numbers.

Maybe GM is the Titanic, and it can’t turn quickly enough to avoid that glacier of economic doom dead ahead.  Or maybe the truth is that they saw how things would fall apart a long time ago.  Their loan business certainly started to implode in 2007 or earlier.  All the auto makers get the best economic projections available, they know every facet of automobile and truck sales.  They weren’t blindsided.  Good or bad, they are seriously working on strategies to stay in business and do better than their competition.  But there is one thing they can’t project until it is too late: when the economy will recover.  If government money is an option to get through the downturn, it is possible to keep all the suppliers and employees on the payroll as long as possible to get the maximum market share on the recovery.  With the taxpayer’s help, GM could possibly hold on through the collapse and remain large enough to seriously dent the dominant foreign competition and crush Chrysler in the Unites States.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

The real question is, does it make sense for you to contribute to the automaker bailout fund?  Maybe you’d like the Japanese automakers to take a hit at our expense.  Or maybe you think the Big Three are just big crybabies that should get their act together based on the money we give them for their cars, no additional handouts required.

-- Walter Lounsbery, 11-7-2008

Congratulations to Microsoft for pulling off another excellent developer conference!  Whatever gripes I or anyone else has about the company, they are unequaled in supporting their community.  While the Professional Developers Conference is just one (huge) aspect of that support, Microsoft has made sure that nobody has to miss out on the conference content.  I can only imagine the incredible amount of effort required to publish all those session videos in a few days, and the resources needed to deliver session material to potentially millions of developers worldwide, at no cost to us.

So while I miss the excitement, energy, and frustration with crowds that goes with attending the PDC, I am perfectly happy sitting in one of the cheap seats.  Actually, thanks to home networking, I can select from a number of very comfortable cheap seats.  Some seats in front of PDC sessions on the big screen.

The past few days I have gathered all the PDC session material available, mainly session videos and PowerPoint slide decks.  It’s a huge set of files and it took a long time to download over a fast broadband connection.  In the spirit of helping the local community, I would be happy to make these files available to anyone at one of the East Tennessee .NET User Group meetings over the next few months.  They’ll be on a USB hard drive, please contact me ahead of time if you are interested so I will know if we need to set up a network.

One of the fun sidelines to PDC was the NotAtPDC conference.  Somebody (Paul Mooney?) started the Twitter account “NotAtPDC”, then a website at NotAtPDC.com.  Virtual sessions were put together by well-known speakers via SharedView and Live Meeting.  Several vendors even donated door prizes.  It seems like all this stuff started up the weekend before PDC and has just about wrapped already.

Oddly, the NotAtPDC Website has a plug for the MSDN Developer Conference.  OK, maybe it’s not so odd to advertise a one-day, regional conference to highlight some of that exciting stuff that was covered at the big event.  I’ve already signed up for the $99 conference at Atlanta December 16, much as I detest driving to Atlanta.  I’ll try to get a motel the prior evening near one of the satellite subway terminals so I can avoid the downtown traffic.

Now that Microsoft PDC 2008 is over, even the attendees are in the cheap seats.  It will take some time to digest the material.  I am interested in about half the sessions, maybe crucially interested in about 20 to guide my training and development efforts.  I figure that we all have that level of review in mind.  It’s going to take a few weeks to really get at the important PDC stuff.

Back to my cheap seats.

-- Walter Lounsbery, 11-3-2008