We got lucky. Though there are still 200,000 homes in New Hampshire without power, ours came back on today.

Thought the power surge blew the power supply/motherboard in my Media Center PC :(

I got concerned email from Microsoft (Thanks Natalie & ScottGu) and from local friends (thanks Ron & Jon) and friend as far away as Iran (thanks Armin)

So, I'll be back up to speed by tomorrow.

So... The damage.

• $1000 for Generator, gas, extension cords, batteries,  and ancillary gear.
• $ ??? - For a replacement computer
• 11 impressive bruises from falling down a full icey flight of stairs in the dark :)

It's amazing what we take for granted.

Since there are still so many local families without services, we've opened up our home to a couple of local families to come stay until their own power is back.

Many thanks to all for your interest!

I thought this article at LinuxWorld was interesting [ Click HERE to Read ].

"Some customers are finding that they have a place for both and that Linux isn't necessarily an economic no-brainer"

Now before the SlashDot army starts to spam the MisfitGeek, I'm a LONG TIME Unix guy and Linux user.

I just hate buzzword jockeys that churn popular phraseology to support their emotional argument without qualified data to back it up !

I got lots of email about my Lenovo post and tweets yesterday.

Lenovo never did answer the phone.

Even the internal Microsoft Lenovo Reps never followed up.

But,

"Mark" from Lenovo read my blog posting and emailed me.

When I replied he immediately phoned me.

Not only did he commit to ship me a new keyboard, but he spent time with me on the Lenovo web site to determine exactly which phone number I called so that he could follow up at Lenovo to improve both the phone response and the web site.

Now I know some of you are saying, "yea, but you work for Microsoft and I've had bad service from you guys, so you have nothing to complain about!"

Bad service at Microsoft makes me furious and I literally spend hours every day "servicing" developers who contact me from all over the world. All the guys I work with at Microsoft feel the same way I do about helping our customers.

So, it's not when systematic things (like a phone system problem or a web design mistake) cause a terrible customer support experience that makes me nuts, it's when that bad experience is followed by apathy !

"Lenovo Mark" (I do know his real name but didn't ask his permission to publish it so I'll call him "Lenovo Mark") took an enthusiastic approach to solving what was a simple problem.

Though he offered to have an on-site tech to my office "next day", I declined since all I needed was a replacement keyboard.

Mark shipped it over night. It arrived before 10:00AM today, it took 5 minutes to install and I'm typing on it right now.

No company is perfect, but even the actions of one person reveal the "culture" of a company.

If I hated my Lenovo Laptops, I suppose it would matter less to me, but I LIKE the hardware.

Thanks to Mark for turning a horrible support experience into a great one !

---- FOLLOW UP

It turns our I was on hold with a SALES line. After looking up my warantee information I clicked in a call link labeled services whihch was not, in fact, for "service" as in technical support, but as in the sale of "services".

Upon more detailed searching I did find a list of "Technical Support NUmbers"

Mark challenged me to try THAT support call and see how long I waited !

I called three times.

I NEVER got put on hold, and the longest it took me to get to a real human service representative was 70 Seconds (Note, that's SECONDS not minutes.)

Though I did spend 4 hours on hold with Lenovo - it was not with Technical Support !

Could the web site have been more clear - yes.

Could the copious verbal messages on the service sales live provided some iodentification that would have suggested I was in the wrong place - yes.

Could the Lenovo customer been a bit smarter - ok, yes : )

It almost makes me look forward to the next time I need support.

Some time ago I bought a top-of-the-line Lenovo T61 Laptop for personal use (meaningt not a Microsoft Asset).

I paid for the 3 year, on-site, warranty.

This weekend one of the keys popped off the keyboard, and then a poped anoth one tryingf to get the firts one back on. It looks like the bracked that the key(s) mount to is broken (it's really flimsey) and needs to be replaced.

So I called Lenovo support.....

And waited on hold for more than an hour - then finally gave up.

This morning I called back and here I sit, listening to a message about how my call is important to Lenovo - FOR OVER AN HOUR.

So, if anyone from Lenovo reads this, I have a question.

Is your hardware support upgrade option a conspiracy ?

I mean, if you never answer the phone it's all profit, right.

IN the mean time I guss I need to start shopping for another hardware vender.

I received an email yesterday asking why I was "Frustrated by Design".

Well. When I joined Microsoft in 2001 I had just sold a company and didn't need a job for financial reasons (my wife and I have had children since then, so now I actually HAVE to work).

I had actually planned to start another company but the Sept 11th terrorist attacks happened in 2001 and changed my plans.

I could have gone to work for either IBM or Microsoft and I choose Microsoft because I thought it would be more fun.

And, because I hate when people just sit back a complain about what other SHOULD have done without being will to "put their feet in the pond" themselves.

My friends all thought I was nutz and asked me about my decision to join Microsoft, "You spent 20 years being part of the solution, what makes you want to go be part of the problem !?"

It's very liberating to work for a company when you can actually afford to get fired :)

It's part of my wiring to be a little idealistic. Joining Microsoft I still believed that one person could make improvements and drive changes.

One of my managers in the early years at Microsoft (Mike O) observed that I was constantly frustrated when a group would simply be satisfied with the status quo. He said that I was "Frustrated by Design".

Seven years later I'm STILL Frustrated by Design, but still an idealist.

:)

Last night I was catching up on the day’s Twitter exchanges when I can across a conversation between two Microsoft employees.

One of the participants was a member of my team and another was member of the Microsoft “field” DPE organization.

The “DE” was telling the guy on my team that “whether he liked it or not, he working in a marketing role”.

I thought, man, if that DE was so clueless about what my team does, then tons of our customers don’t know what my team does either.

I suppose it makes sense. For years it was just me and the team owner (Simon Muzio).  It’s only been in the last year that we became a full blown team.

The confusion in the aforementioned conversation might start with the fact that a DE (Developer Evangelist) IS a marketing role. A DE’s job is to drive awareness and adoption of Microsoft Developer Tools and Platforms.  Their salaries and activities are primarily funded by a marketing organization.

They do this, for the most part, in very concise geographic areas. For example, there are New England DEs who focus exclusively on developers and customers in the New England geography. (Though there are some “Corporate DEs” who focus on specific technologies with no geographic restriction.)

Now, the DE role has changed in recent years and continues to do so. DE’s are no longer measured on sales impact; they don’t track their revenue impact, etc. But their role is to be expert in Microsoft’s Developer Technologies, to engage customers in their geographic areas, primarily in 1-to-many activities and increase the adoption rates of Microsoft’s products as well as increase the satisfaction levels f our developer customers.

That’s not what my team does.

We don’t really have a team name as yet, though internally we are sometimes refer to as ScottGu’s Secret Ninja Army ☺

Simon Muzio manages my team and apart from our general charter we have the agility to do what Scott Guthrie thinks is important on a week-to-week basis.

My team consists of the following folks:

•    Joe Stagner (Me) – Focusing on Web Technologies with specialties including Security, Scale and Performance, Non-Microsoft Web Developer Technologies, interop, and relative business issues.
•    Jesse Liberty – Focusing on Slverlight
•    Tim Heuer – Focusing on SIlverlight (Tom and Jesse divide up areas of Silverlight)
•    Steven Walther – Focusing on ASP.NET MVC
•    Scott Hansleman – I’m actually not exactly sure what Scott does but he moves between technologies and focuses a lot on unreleased technologies.
•    We have a collection of great support staff that does things like media production and web site management.

So, apart from each of our technological specialties, WHAT do we do and how do we differ from “Developer Evangelists”.

First, we are actually ON The product teams, our salaries are paid from R&D not sales and marketing. This means that our focus is different than that of Developer Evangelists.

Yes, we also do a lot of 1-to-many activities, but to a different end than driving sales and adoption

Our role is two fold.

1.)    To communicate product details and strategy (and thereby catalyze real and full understanding of the technology’s intent) directly from the folks who design and develop the products
2.)    To ACTIVLY solicit feedback from developers, to aggregate that feedback and present it to the product feature teams and thereby by shape the developer products that we are developing today and that we will develop tomorrow.

The 1-to-many activities that we do are, in large part, simply the vehicle that we employ to connect with many, many developers in order to gather the data we need to positively affect the product our teams build.

While all Microsoft employees are interested in customer satisfaction and adoption, my team’s positive results in these areas might be thought of as by-products of the ongoing conversations that we MUST have with customers in order to bring much needed data back into the development process.

They are not the end target result of our activities.

While both teams are important to the Microsoft Developer community, I think this difference is very important, both for developer customers to know, and for DEs to  understand.
DE work primarily with the product that we release.

Our team’s role is to help DETERMINE what those products should be.

Anyway, that's what our team does (I think :) - might be different next week.

Questions ?

This is the recently opened Apple store here in Boston.

I can't wait for until the Microsoft store opens, or the Zune Store, or the Windows store :)

One of my flights to ZendCon08 was delayed 2 hours last week.

This is the last thing I want to see at the customer service counter where people are all trying to reschedule their connections.

I was wearing a "Microsoft DevDiv" shirt.

Not to Windows Team, in the next service pack to all versions of Windows, figure out how to blank the blue  screen after 60 seconds :)

I guess EVERYONE isn't a Chrome Fan :)

Interesting commentary about the REAL business goals of .Chrome

Read - CNN Review: Google's Chrome needs more polish

The GPL dudes have invented a new Operating System.

WINDOWS :) - http://www.reactos.org/

I especially get a kick out of how it's a complete rip-off of Windows, but their web site has a bunch of dialog protecting their Trademark !

I know that a small but ridiculously loud minority in the Open Source community have nothing better to do with their energies than to hate all that is Microsoft, but really, what's the point.

If a guy runs Ubuntu on his laptop and Centos on his server, I get it! Working at Microsoft doesn't make me stupid. I have a box I se every day that runs Linux and I have a MacBook Pro that I use every day too. (Though if I had to pick only one OS it would still be Windows)

I get why Linux is fun. How does that thing work? Crack the code! I want a good custom phone screening system, no problem, I'll write a custom filter for Asterisk.

But if you want / need to run Windows Applications or Windows simply makes the most business sense for you, why would you want to use a "not as good" clone ?

If you wanna use Linux use a real Linux - if your gonna use Windows - use a REAL Windows !

From - http://www.vistanews.com/

 

According to the Broadband Report, as of last March 57% of U.S. households had broadband Internet. These high speed connections make it possible to enjoy multi-media applications, something that doesn't work well - if at all - over slow dialup connections. And Internet users are taking advantage of that capability. By March 2008, more than 78 million videos had been uploaded to YouTube, the popular video sharing web site that was created in 2005 by three former employees of PayPal and was acquired by Google a year later. This means more than 150,000 videos are uploaded every day. http://www.vistanews.com/IB5SB2/080710-YouTube-Statistics

Many of these are relatively short, homemade video clips that people take of themselves, their kids, their pets or whatever else they find interesting. The proliferation of cell phone cameras that can record short videos has made it very easy for just about anyone to become a "roving reporter." Your YouTube account includes a feature that lets you create a mobile profile on the site and then get a special email address to which you can send your videos as MMS messages from your cell phone. You just enter your mobile phone number and provider name. You can also watch videos on your browser-equipped cell phone. Just go to http://m.youtube.com.

In a society where everyone longs for his or her fifteen minutes of fame, YouTube gives us what we want. Aspiring stand-up comedians can get an instant audience, or you can share the video of your wedding with thousands of strangers around the world. Your creative efforts don't exist in a vacuum, either. Those who view the videos can assign ratings to them so you know exactly where you stand (or don't).

Not all the videos that are uploaded to YouTube are originals, though. Looking for that Macbook Air commercial with the "New Soul" song? A quick search on YouTube will bring it up for you in all its glory. Or you might prefer this parody: http://www.vistanews.com/IB5SB2/080710-Parody

Or you can click on the News and Politics category for news clips of everything from President Bush's last State of the Union address to Associated Press footage of the recent Colombia hostage rescue.

You might be wondering whether some of these videos might be copyrighted, and in fact many of them are, and are posted on YouTube without the permission of the copyright owner. And that brings us to our latest controversy. Although some companies don't seem to mind having their material reposted to YouTube - and may even encourage it, for the publicity - others aren't so happy.
In 2007, Viacom (the media conglomerate that owns MTV, Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks movie studio, among others) invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against YouTube, demanding that they take down more than 100,000 videos that Viacom claimed had been posted in violation of copyright laws. Viacom also filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google/YouTube.
As part of that lawsuit, Viacom asked for the log-in names and IP addresses of YouTube users and records of who watched what videos. And last week, U.S. District Court judge Louis Stanton granted that request, ordering YouTube to turn over their database logs to Viacom. Despite many protests from organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the judge dismissed concerns about user privacy. http://www.vistanews.com/IB5SB2/080710-YouTube-User-History

Viacom's allegations of copyright infringement seem particularly egregious in light of the accusation from one film maker that Viacom tried to sue him for posting his own video on YouTube, which Viacom had used on their TV commercial without his permission. You can read his blog post about that here: http://www.vistanews.com/IB5SB2/080710-Viacom-Copyright

The lawsuit against YouTube is important because it could set a precedent regarding the responsibility of a web site for content that's posted by others, as well as defining what is and isn't "fair use" when it comes to capturing snippets of a TV program or other copyrighted video. The DMCA includes a "safe harbor" provision that exempts hosting companies from liability for copyright infringement - if the hosting company removes the material when notified that it's in violation of the copyright laws. YouTube contends that they comply with this requirement and also have other measures, such as the 10 minute limit on videos, that discourage copyright infringement.

If Viacom wins this one, it could open up a much bigger can of worms. A new interpretation of the DMCA safe harbor provision could affect more than just video hosting sites. Web sites that host discussion forums might be held liable for what users post there; this would probably cause many of the online forums to simply disappear.

But regardless of the outcome of the suit, YouTube's users have already lost. The twelve terabytes of log data that Google must now turn over to Viacom contains viewers' log-in IDs and IP addresses, the time each viewer began watching and the video that he watched. The judge seems to think this information can't be used to identify individual users, but how many people do you know who use their names or some variation thereof as their log-in names on web sites like YouTube? And even if you don't, an IP address can be tracked back through the ISP to the user account to which it was assigned at a particular time unless that user goes to the effort of using anonymizer services, something that the vast majority of casual users don't do.

There has been no indication at this time that Viacom or anyone else intends to go after the users who watched copyrighted video clips, but who knows? Who would have thought the RIAA would sue grandmothers and 9 year old kids for illegal sharing of music? And even if that doesn't happen, does it make you a little nervous that someone is going over the records of what you watched and when?

Tell us what you think. Does Viacom, as a copyright owner, have the right to demand not only that YouTube take down the videos that belong to them (a reasonable request) but also that YouTube provide them with information about the viewers who watched those videos? Should YouTube or any other web site hosting content that's uploaded by its visitors bear the responsibility for that content if it violates laws? Would it bother you to have the records of your viewing habits made part of a court proceeding, or do you subscribe to the "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about" philosophy? Should video sharing sites such as YouTube be restricted to homemade videos only? Or should the "fair use" provisions of the copyright law allow you to post small portions of a TV show, news program, etc.?

I got an email last night from Eduardo.

Eduardo "Love's VB.NET", but is concerned about his long term career prospects because he keeps hearing about C#.

The Pie Chart from the Telerik Survey suggests that C# has surpassed VB.NET as the .NET language of choice. For the record, I don't think this accurately reflects the division. I would guess that it's more like 55% VB.NET and 45% C#.

People ask me all the time why I choose VB.NET instead of C# for my videos. The truthful answer is, I don't. I use VB because ScottGu asked me to use VB.NET.

At first, I was a bit queased out :) - I first started programming in "C" in 1978 and C++ in abut 1988-1989. So languages of "C" flavor like Java and C# are just familiar to me.

It took me about a week before I was I stopped thinking about the syntax I was coding in.

I just don't think the choice between C# and VB.NET really matters.

The one statistic that does matter is that companies seem to be paying C# developers more than they want to pay VB.NET developers. I suspect that this statistic, like most, is irrelevant if taken on face value alone.

It's possible, even probable that the C# programmers they hire have more of a systems programming background in C++ or an enterprise development background in Java so that C# is the syntax flavor of choice, but that flavor choice is a byproduct of their skill set and it is that skill set that earns them more money.

If a company pays C# developers more than VB.NET developers for no other reason than syntax choice, I'd probably choose to work for another company as I prefer to work for really smart folks :)

I'd be surprised if anyone could suggest a business application to me that REQUIRED it be written in one language over another (at least for non-business reasons.)

To me, the choice between VB.NET and C# seems a much less significant one than the industry seems to want to make it. It's a stylistic choice. A philosophical choice. Even an artistic choice. But not really a NECESSARY choice.

Sure, TO ME, C# code "looks better". And FOR ME, coding in VB.NET is a bit faster. Since I'm happy to switch back and forth, I lean toward building class heavy back ends in C# and front side stuff in VB.NET (though not always).

The power is in the .NET framework and in the productivity of Visual Studio. Does that make VB.NET and C# just the duck tape that ties them together ? :)

Below are some links to articles that discuss the VB.NET versus C# issue.

In the mean time, Eduardo, write great applications in which ever language best suits you and let those applications be the strength in your resume. Not the syntax flavor they are written in.

---

Murray "Flash" Gordon has a great VB and C# Comparison on his blog [ Click HERE ]

Wikipedia also has some good information. [ Click HERE ]

Nigel Shaw has a good article at The Code Project with some sound conclusions. [ Click HERE ]

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror also has a good post. [ Click HERE ]

The Pie Chart above is from the Telerik Survey [ Click HERE ]

Most people haven't had a chance to play with Microsoft Surface.

It's one of the coolest technologies in a long time !

[ Click HERE to watch the video. ]

Since most of us Geeks are caffeine addicts......

"Coffee consumption has been linked to various beneficial and detrimental health effects, but data on its relation with death were lacking," says Esther Lopez-Garcia, PhD, the study's lead author. "Coffee consumption was not associated with a higher risk of mortality in middle-aged men and women. The possibility of a modest benefit of coffee consumption on heart disease, cancer, and other causes of death needs to be further investigated."

[ Read the article HERE at Science Daily. ]

In a piece in eWeek's June 2, 2008 issue, Darryl K. Taft writes about Microsoft making an offer to Grady Booch in the pre Ray Ozzie days. He goes on to suggest that while he personally is not criticizing Ray and he has "much respect" for the guy, some of his colleagues say he is "not the guy".

Note to the press (who, in all honesty, I most frequently hold in contempt)......

Give Ozzie his go before you start judging what he may or may not accomplish after Gates steps away from Microsoft's day-to-day.

In my opinion, Ray Ozzie is better choice to assume the role of technical strategist at Microsoft anyway.

Ray Ozzie's record includes great, innovative technical ideas which were realized in the form of successful software PRODUCTS.

Lotus Notes, like it or hate it, was THE thing in it's day and is still well used. One could argue that it's decline came only after IBM acquired Notes and failed to evolve it as it's user base required.

Groove was also a visionary product that filled a gap not only in the "technology industry" but in Microsoft's product portfolio.

Ray has had suitable time to adapt to the culture at Microsoft  and be advised by BillG prior to his pending Microsoft status change.

On the inside, it seems that Ray is more and more coming into his own as a technical thought leader inside the company.

I henceforth put a one year moratorium on all Ray Ozzie second guessing by any writer who has not himself (or herself) conceived a technologic innovation who's gross sales do not stand today in excess of $100,000

Coming soon !