Corey Gouker's Machine Inside the Mind

I could've upgraded sooner but I figured I'd wait till I got back. I think I'll do this first thing tomorrow. I've already downloaded the bits, I've just got to save my little theme and pop in the new stuff. I can wait till tomorrow though

I am totally knackered! The drive back from LA was long. Luckily though, I had Dom as a passanger so I got to use the nice car pool lane all the way back which probably saved a good 45 minutes. We ordered a pizza when we got in, watched some pre-recorded TV on the MCE while reading the mayhem on the blogs. He gets to suffer in my old bed that's in my sisters old room, and now I get to fall asleep to the sound of my laptop fan spinning at 10480RPM's... Maybe I'll actually unpack tomorrow and go through all the swag we got during the PDC. I must finally get things organized here that's for sure. Tomorrow though I think I'm going to show Dom exactly what I mean by "middle of nowhere" but then also take him down to Palm Springs. So till tomorrow... Yawn.

Scoble just told me about the get together:

"Let's meet tonight at the Hollywood grill inside of Universal Studios at 8PM (#19 on the map, close to the entrance) http://www.pazsaz.com/unimap.html."

I'm definitely going to be there! .

Dom invited me to join him, Thomas Lee, Steve Foster, and Mary Jo Foley at a little get together at the Westin Bonaventure for coffee and a little breakfast. It wasn't really what I expected but I was actually quite surprised by Mary Jo Foley. She's not really like the other members of press that I've talked to before. She's really quite interesting, very knowledgeable and quite cool. I had the please of driving the lot of us from the Bonaventure to the LA Convention Center, luckily we're all still alive to enjoy this nice keynote that's mainly about MSR.

It really kicks ass, I really enjoyed this water demo we just had, the ripples, the reflections, refactions are so much nicer when they applied their extra little effects. As an example, they had it so that when you get lower or higher in height from the water level the intensity of the reflection changed accordingly. At the moment we're being shown new ways to think about contacts and people and the way we interact with them. And now there's some thing really awesome called Wallop. It's a new way to blog and to moblog from the looks of it. A way to really connect the blogs together and see the interactions between the people blogging. From the looks of it there's a much bigger push on images in their model. But the key thing I'm getting out all of this is that they really want all the information we know that's out there much much easier to navigate through. It's kind of like the best of MSR brought out at the PDC . Just awesome.

I didn't think that my quote would make it into the Seattle Times but I guess it did. I didn't have a clue what she'd put in but it looks pretty good. Little bummed that she didn't put MVP or mention Project Hurricane but that's okay.

I've been losing my WiFi signal and/or IP on an almost constant rate here at PDC. Both of my Orinoco Gold 802.11b cards just can't seem to keep a signal.The Wired LAN seems to be a little bit better except for some slowdowns now and then. The Network Tech guys do seem to be trying to keep things together though so that's good. I just wish it was five nines up time, but it's not

So far it's pretty interesting, came in just a little late. But had a cool little demo of Mono I think this could be a good thing, will have to tag it for later.

You can tell Mark is happy as well. Just met up with him and Dom at the PDC Pre-Conference. We can't make it into for free food or any of the sessions since we don't have the nice little orange wristbands but we can still use the WiFi . The goodie bags are pretty darn nice too. More to come tomorrow I think when we receive the bits and other stuff. Hopefully I'll get a load of photos today while this place is still pretty empty. Everyone is talking about Longhorn... This is awesome!

It's only the first day and I can already tell I might lose my voice by the end of this. My throat is kind of dry and itchy (could be from the fires but I doubt it). I did so much talking today that it's no wonder my voice is going. A piece of advice to anyone going to the PDC or anyone that's speaking... Be sure to bring plenty of throat losanges... Ricola's usually do the trick just before going on stage.

So today was awesome! It started off at 5AM and after an hour and a half drive which should've been 45 minutes due to fog I made my way to the Bonaventure hotel. After I parked I got out of the car and noticed I didn't have my wallet so I checked again and couldn't find it in the car. So I assumed I left it at my aunts, I found out later when she called me on my cell that it was found under the bed. I remember it falling off last night but forgot in the morning. I also thought all my nice business cards were in my wallet and in my MSDN CD Case but it turns out they were in my backpack all along, argh! Anyway once I found the meeting room and things got started, it really flew by so I must have been having loads of fun .

One thing I forgot to expect was to be overwhelmed with names and faces. I'm pretty bad at remembering that sort of thing usually so I've come up with a simple way of at least remembering what I talked about with each person I meet... Simply get their card and write their IM and quick reminder of who and what they are all about. This way when I do get the chance I'll be able to follow up. So Chris Muench, I haven't forgotten, I'll make sure we figure out your Optical Out on MCE .

So today we saw a number of people present:

• Emily Freet, Community Program Manager - Academic and Tony Hynes, MVP God opened things up
• Sean O'Driscoll, Director, MVP & Community talked about the MVP Program as a whole and also displayed the stolen MVP Ad that's really from Project Hurricane
• Wes Miller, Program Manager (forgot to ask which program but it says Windows Server on the handout?)
• Lenn Pryor, Director, Longhorn... nice demos from him
• Keny Levy, Product Manager, he talked about the XML Data Designer in Whidbey
• Jamie De Guerre, Program Manager talked about the Compact Framework

From what I saw just today, I can safely say that Longhorn is going to blow everyone away! Even the Apple people with their little kitten they like to call Panther will be wishing they could be the big alpha lion that is Longhorn. Their jaws are going to drop. Anyone that doesn't develop using VisualStudio.NET or anyone that doesn't even develop with any Microsoft technologies is going to drool. Best way to sum it up is that Longhorn is real!

We ended about 6PM, had some more pretty yummy finger food and free drinks. Dom and I didn't leave till about 9PM. Some of the time we talked to Joel Schonbrunn a Digital Media MVP plus my MVP Lead Andrew Brown, both of these guys kick ass . We quickly chatted with Tony Hynes about Project Hurricane and I think we got him interested. Alex Feinman was also on hand to help chat about MCE plus his skills came in handy when he helped repair a demo for the Compact Framework peeps. In the end a good majority of the time was spent talking to the extremely cool, and awesome Emily Freet. She kicks ass. Half way through the convo Tony came up again, and he said "Emily, I want to tell you about this cool thing you've really got to look at, it's call Project Hurricane". Me and Dom just burst up laughing. So I guess we got him more than interested and from the sounds of it Emily is too. Woohoo !

So I dropped Emily off at her hotel, and then we stopped off at Dom's hotel to grab his stuff and get directions to Mark's hotel which was much easier to find since Dom was simply reading me the directions off his TabletPC through MapPoint 2004. So I drop Dom off at Mark's hotel and leave back to base at my aunt's. It's now 1AM, I got in at 11:45PM.

I'm shattered. But I told myself that I must blog. It's my duty. And it's my goal that for this entire week, I will have more personal blog (self written content) entries than any of the current personal blogs I read (might be hard since that includes Scoble as well ). This isn't just for my own personal benefit and record. It's also because I know there are many many people out there that want to know as much as possible about this stuff but couldn't make it. People like my friend Jon, who's stuck with the entertainment of people talking about supposedly leaked 4051 builds on IRC, LOL. Jon, I really wish you could've made it down... You know, the Bank of Corey is currently offering very attractive interest rates . Activate today, wink wink.

I really can't wait till tomorrow, and the next day and the days after that, should be quite the experience.
So with that, I bid you goodnight.

You can tell Dom is happy. Just look here, he's being told about the new XML features in Whidbey. Minutes earlier he was drooling. I wonder what he's like when they've actually got Mountain Dew on hand . Scary thought. On a serious note though, this really does kick ass. I'm so going to be using Whidbey for editing all sorts of files that I used to use other editors for. Hmm, maybe I'll even dump Notepad now. Maybe I'll even use it for SVG... BTW, we've finally got collapseable XML in VS! Woohoo

Sitting here at the MVP Regional Summit in LA. One of the slides Sean O'Driscoll just showed for the MVP Program has a crop circle. Fancy that... That's the same exact idea we used on Project Hurricane. It's an uncanny resemblance!

  

I'll be leaving in a couple hours for the PDC but I figured I should switch the PDC image on the left in advance. I guess I'll switch it again to "I'm here" once I'm actually there. If anyone else wants to use the images I made here's the original post.

According to CNN and the NOAA, there is going to be a pretty massive solar flare tomorrow which means some not so nice magnetic interference that'll probably scramble cell phone and TV signals. Without knowing the technical workings of GPS, other than the fact it triangulates your position using a couple satellites, I could imagine someone checking their unit to only find themselves in Siple, Antarctica. Besides these effects we should also see the Northern Lights pretty far south too. So if you live up there (softies), be sure to get those digital cameras ready to take some amazing shots. Oh and if you're flying out tomorrow night for the PDC make sure you've got a digital camera ready on the flight as well. I'd bet that if you were on a transatlantic flight going over Greenland and Canada that you'd probably be able to capture some amazing photos of the auroras. In any case, if you do snap any, be sure to blog about it or email them!

Well I printed some cards before but they just blew, big time. So I finally got around to printing some that don't . The clean edge Avery cards are pretty nice too. Yeah I know, I grabbed the eHome logo but what the heck, the MCE MVP's are a part of the eHome Division and I couldn't find a good MCE logo. In any case, I'm happy, but WMP is making me mad.

I was just heading into bed right now when I noticed that Scoble was still on MSN Messenger. He's now taken the lead away from Mark Pendergrast of the MCE team for my little list of contacts late night workings at the campus. I was even more impressed by the fact that he's actually at work and not networking in from home. But apparently Lutz Roeder is also currently online as well so it's okay, he's not alone . Totally hardcore is what I call that!

If anyone out there has beaten a go of 76 hours I'm in total awe... By the time I hit 24 hours I started feeling a bit weird, 36 hours and I started hearing things, 48 hours and I struggled to maintain focus, after 52 hours I started seeing things, and by the time I started falling asleep to Dark Side at 76 hours I was definitely hallucinating. Of course when I finally woke up (not sure what day it was at this point) I immediately remembered this amazing dream I had about a mind blowing design I was going to come up with, in any case I guess it was all worth it in the end. Anyway enough rambling, I'm off to bed... and I'll let Robert get back to the latenight tanning

I received an email from Kim Peterson over at the Seattle Times yesterday since she's going to the conference and was writing a story about it all. She "was hoping to get a sense of how excited the developer community was about Longhorn and about the upcoming glimpse of Longhorn that everyone's going to get". So I replied back and today got a phone call from her. She was really easy to talk to and to be interviewed by. I might have not sounded so stupid as I normally do in interviews since I actually got some sleep the night before (unlike my infamous MVS, err MSP interview... Mark you still need to get me that ). In any case it was cool.

She asked me if I thought it was a bit odd that even though a lot of what Microsoft is showing won't be coming around for quite some time in Longhorn that MS was still showing everything off. I basically said that it's probably the most important thing MS could do with these upcoming products because it will allow developers and the public to provide more input at this pre-beta stage of Longhorn which is really the only time we as outsiders can make a drastic difference in the final product. Besides Aero and Avalon I'm really interested in WinFS, Whidbey and ASP.NET 2.0 so I talked a little bit about those. But in general the chat was mainly about the cool things behind this entire event and the community that is forming around these new products.

Maybe it's just because I've been talking to loads of softies since I've put up my blog and the PDC countdown but I genuinely feel like something huge is going on lately.

I was just thinking about the first survey we've got going on Project Hurricane and how it's not really had any major number of results. Not to mention this Student Survey that was put up on the MS UK Academia site. I'm not sure how many results that's had but the original survey that the MS one is based on, which I did using UMIST students only got about 150 and took a couple months to even achieve that.

What if that could be changed, what if there was a way we could conduct surveys and simple polls through blogs? The idea I have is pretty simply, the technical solution, most likely, a little more complex.

First you put a survey component on your blog. Then some random reader decides "yeah, that's a good survey I wouldn't mind finding out the results of it" or maybe "I wouldn't mind helping that guy out in conducting the survey". So then he takes the blogvey (blog survey) component and puts it on his blog. Effectively now the survey has my original set of readers and now has his set of readers. The survey could appear on any number of blogs but all the results get tracked back to the original blogvey source. When the readers go to view the results it could appear in the same sort of way trackback URL's appear on each of my blog entries for example. In any case, those are just minor details.

Potentially, this one blogvey could have thousands of results rather than a few hundred from the original posting of it. Does something like this exist already? Is this idea stupid? Hmm, maybe we should conduct a survey .

So we left off with my MSDN shipment still somewhere in the United States (we hope) after 2 weeks from the original ship date. In all likelihood it's lost somewhere in the postal system or maybe it was stolen or maybe they found some traces of anthrax, who knows. In any case, I called up the MSDN customer service center and within 5 minutes the nice lady had sent out my last two shipments for October in one go via Airborne Express. They'll probably get here tomorrow or the next day before 12:30 . I'm a happy developer!

I haven't the slightest clue why MS uses the USPS so much to send out MSDN. Sure I didn't pay the $2799 for the Universal subscription since I got mine through the MVP Award but if I was paying for it I wouldn't be expecting it to take 2 weeks to get here each month because the USPS is so slow. The October shipment was done on the 3rd and it's still not here, what I find funny is that the status page shows the November shipment already in manufacturing. A third shipment which appears to be for my renewal that I got from my second MVP award shipped on October 9th, but that's not here either. According to FedEx tracking the new Wireless Optical Desktop Pro (talk about long name) and MS Rubiks cube I ordered the the MSeCompanyStore left Atlanta on Wednesday but it should be here Monday thanks to FedEx's ground service. Maybe USPS should be turned into a private company so that their service might improve, who knows, the USPS sucks though that's for darn sure.

A while back I received an email that was supposedly from PayPal, it wasn't of course, and it was pretty easy to discern the fact that it was an identity thief trying to take advantage of unsuspecting users. The methods used can still be seen today if you just look in your Inbox or browse many newsgroups. Those messages that masquerade around as helpful MS Support emails. But what about the laymen, what about my Mom? To the average user, there's no easy way to tell these are fake. With these PayPal, eBay, and Amazon emails they often ask for a persons full name, address, social security number, credit card, and even PIN number. That is a dead giveaway right there isn't it? Well sure, but what about your grandfather who just happens to be going a little senile. They may not realize a company would never ask for your PIN but then again they may just enter it anyway. Then when they go to submit to submit the info they may not realize it goes to some obfuscated URL, maybe because at least one part of it includes ebay in plain text? Something has to be done to protect the innocent users from these sort of emails. Microsoft has posted the page about "How to tell if it's authentic". Yet even though I've sent the three other emails to PayPal, eBay, and Amazon, I have yet to see any major warning on their site, that's just plain despicable. In any case, here's a copy of the email I received on Wednesday at 12:01PM, Outlook 2003 automatically dropped it in Junk E-mail which is nice. The image was attached but Outlook displayed it in the contents like a normal plain text email. It also pretended to be from eBay [supportdep21@eBay.com]; on behalf of; eBay [supportdep71@eBay.com], requesting the user "Please update your e-Bay account information".

Oh yeah, please copy the shortcut rather than directly clicking on the image, I prefer not to show up as a big referrer in this guys logs:



In case you want to check out the original message, here's a link. I just hope that I've got at least one reader at eBay, PayPal, and Amazon that will make sure some notice is put up on their site to help notify users of this problem.

Jeff sent me a really cool gift compliments of the Longhorn Evangelism Team (mooo!). I promised that I wouldn't blog and speculate about what it might possibly be till after it arrived so I didn't but it came via Airborne (DHL) today and it kicks ass . Here's two pics I took of it with my Intel CS-430 webcam:

  

When I first looked at the back it was weird, I could've swore they used the "I was there" image that I made a couple days ago. But that couldn't be since he mailed the shirt before I made them. Oh well, I guess the idea was shared . Great shirt, thanks Jeff!

Found the link to the guy who hates weblogs from Scoble's page really hilarious and I realized that I have to post about my wonderful lunch that I just consumed. Yes I made it especially for that guy who hates weblogs, just to make him happy .

In case you can't tell what the heck that thing is, it's two hot dogs (frankfurter) with ketchup, mustard, and relish on a slightly toasted flour tortilla. The hot dogs suffered from a bit of URE (Unintentional Radiation Exploitation). Make you go mmm ? To make things healthy I had a salad with it. Oh and for breakfast I had a nice stack of pancakes and fruit salad. As soon as my Mom gets in, I'll go out and get a Starbucks. Maybe I'll come up with something more creative for dinner. Yawn. Oh BTW, I think I might be a #1 or #4 from that guys rant. Yay me!

What in the world, please tell me this isn't for real?! Maybe if it was sheer a geek might get turned on by this, but I don't think Barry White or Marvin Gaye could even save that one, LOL.

Well in a couple hours time I'll have had my blog up for 14 days. I started out with dasBlog because I wanted something up at least a week before the PDC started. With 13 days left till that starts I think I've done that quite nicely. This site wasn't pretty to start out with and I still don't really like it all that much, it's just too limiting. I've been planning on redoing it from the start. In any case I've been really surprised by the response I've been getting. I've put up various sites like this before, I've had a plain HTML blog since 1996, and I put up a couple page sites but really only got traffic from a few friends. I'm still trying to get Analog to report the stats for the site a little more accurately and I've got to spend time analyzing the raw data I think a bit more. But despite the trouble in tracking the traffic I'm still excited about the first signs:

Successful requests: 174,544
Average successful requests per day: 12,737
Successful requests for pages: 1,663
Distinct hosts served: 582
Data transferred: 233,273,853 bytes

Now at first the requests seem impressive but in reality they're all coming from traffic to the PDC Countdown, and even then it's coming from 3! hosts, yes, only 3 that provided 136,390 requests in less than 7 days. They are:

68268 11.89% 239x101.filemaker.com
44854 7.81% user-vcauojc.dsl.mindspring.com
23268 5.35% microsoft.com

Now the third I can understand. From what I've been told the countdown has been going around Microsoft, which I think is awesome! I get the feeling people will be coming up to me saying "hey you're that guy that made the countdown aren't you?". But the first and second are a little more difficult to comprehend. Thanks to the Apple guy at FileMaker.com who just happens to be responsible for the most used browser stat (113169 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; MyIE2; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322) site requests have gone through the roof. Drew over at PDCBloggers.net and I think he's probably the guy requesting the countdown images every second. So we've got an Apple guy using a PC with MyIE2 and his cache off, great... I got around this surge in traffic from the guy by switching the countdown to another one that's plain JavaScript and no images done by Jon, I had to pop in a few bug fixes but it works great. The second high ranking user I assume is the same as the first, just someone that has his cache turned off. Who knows, but if either of you are reading this, thanks for the boost in traffic .

The stats don't reveal much other than that. SharpReader beats out NewsGator for number one feed reader. Even more than the 173 requests via Safari . Interestingly, Mac beats out Unix and Linux combined. Oh yeah I forgot to mention the host that made me laugh, proxy4ext2.disney.com, who at Disney has any interest in me? LOL. The PDC Countdown entry is the most popular read on the site, no surprise. And lastly there's the 1332 requests for the RSS feed.

Overall I'd say I'm happy with the first two weeks for this site. Hopefully after PDC I'll get all of my sites redone, get the then 17,000 photos up in a gallery, and get everything linked up. Thanks for reading!

I've been waiting for my October shipment of MSDN Universal to come for a while now, it was shipped on October 3rd, 2003... So obviously since it hasn't arrived yet they shipped it out via USPS! LOL, anyway, I'm really looking forward to getting this shipment since they finally updated the DVD color system and are shipping out the entire set all over again . It also looks like they've sent out the renewal kit for next year. I just hope it actually renews in May and not in December or something funky like that.

MSDN really does kick ass, it's got to be the best online resource that I know of. When you can actually find what you're looking for that is .

Instead of the MSDN I instead received my PDC registration kit which is just as cool. I couldn't be arsed to get the G2 out of the bag so I'm afraid it's only a webcam shot...

Mark Johnston says that I'm going to go "mental" if I don't have something more to do. I say bah to that. Although if he said that earlier while I was giving myself a small hair cut I might have agreed . I was just going to wait till I got it done by a professional, at my uncles salon. But no, it was annoying me so I took matters in to my own hands, quite literally. So behold, the results!

The geek that I am, I couldn't resist touching it up in Photoshop. No I didn't touch up anything to do with the hair or something like that. I adjusted the two screens, yep, the screens... In order to get enough light without a flash I had to leave the shutter open for a quarter of a second but that made the LCD and CRT too bright. So I adjusted the coloring and curves on that. Maybe you and Styx are right Mark, I do have too much time on my hands.

So we've still got more than two weeks left till the PDC even begins. But hey, who cares, we might as well get these spreaded around before the event so people can update their sites right before they leave home or during the event while on the wonderful WiFi which better be working for the public at the event .

I was talking to Galan Bridgman about quickly doing a couple new takes on the "there" image when pointed me to his modified "I'll be there" suggesting I use it instead of the "royal we" as he put it. So I decided yeah that's cool, was going to do one myself tbh, lol. Then I figure okay I've got to do some others as well for during and after the event. So here they are:

   

Galan and I were thinking that the future, err. passed tense versions can be used after as a way of showing attendance at previous events or maybe just for fun, who knows. In any case they all only took about 10 minutes in Photoshop. The healing tool does wonders . I couldn't match the original font of the "there" but hey, Arial with a slight touch up seems to do the trick.
Enjoy!

Robert Scoble mentions that Napster is coming back... From what I've seen on the MCE 2004 with Napster added into the Online Spotlight, I think it's pretty cool. I wonder how the "You will need to provide your credit card information to redeem your tracks." and the general need for a credit card affect the service for people just a tad younger than me (I'm 20, yikes almost said 19).

I tend to agree with the point of view given by Chris in your IM chat. I like him, also don't care about having CD's, in fact I've sold off every CD I've ever bought. On the other hand we have my Mom, I have pretty eclectic tastes so luckily she just copies the music off me (which is actually just on my server anyway. While she listens to music on the computer, she'll still burn a copy for the car and will still buy the used CD's from a local record store.

The RIAA only have themselves to blame, the blatant price fixing of CD's, the rigidity of their distribution practices, and also what I think is another key factor; is the way the major music companies ride their artists like it was high tide in San Clemente. While the latter can't be said for the MPAA since they don't have to give out a dividend of sales to their artists. The two main issues hold true for them as well. For me, the only reason why I should buy a CD or DVD through retail distribution is if I truly love the work, or in the case of a movie really want the special features and own a good physical copy. I really hope that both industries adopt WM as a new standard (without getting into quality debates, etc) but because it's already a proven DRM method, and can quickly be implemented in the wild.

I can't really say if I'd consider these ads to be cool or not. But I'd definitely say they are a nice step in the right direction. I like the fact that they aren't marketing any particular product other than a slight hint of being geared towards small and medium businesses in some of them. The "Boys & Girls Club of America" advert is good at showing Microsoft's contributions to the community too, "Creativity" is a good general image shifter ad that probably needs more air time I think. It's a shame that there aren't some TV ads done about the great contributions given out by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While they wouldn't be Microsoft ads, I bet most people will put the two together and that'll help change public opinion. Overall I like this latest set of TV advertising for Microsoft. I'm a little curious which ad agency Microsoft used this time around? They should be used again imho.

I get the feeling a lot of people will be downloading the video again so in addition to my poor bandwidth here's three more URL's to download from that I googled:
Here's one...
Two...
and Three...

Hey Lee, my awesome girl just told me on MSN Messenger that doing a nice F1 in Word for "Keyboard shortcuts for international characters" reveals what we were looking for. How über l33t is that?

Okay so I know this has been debated before and I know both sides of it. But I still can't help but wonder. Apparently Microsoft can't help but wonder as well.

Why don't we see cooler Microsoft TV spots?

I ask this because Apple has always had semi-cool plugs (for some tech firms they practically set the standard on what is considered "cool"). Personally, I've found their ads more annoying than anything else. Partly due to the fact that they know they set the standard and take advantage of the fact they've got this massive following of style driven Apple nerds that will think they're cool no matter what. No offense to Apple nerds... They do make great stuff...

HP recently has had some adverts that, while not necessarily marketing any particular product, are very cool and very good adverts. In some ways they help transform my opinion of the company (even though I already thought they weren't half bad ). They do give the idea of HP's invent catch-word too. TV Campaigns like "you" and "