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Last year, I published a widely unread set of what I thought were humorous predictions for the technology world in 2007.  One of those items titled “AJAX 2.0” stated that Google would create a technology that makes it possible for web applications to access the local resources on the user computer, thereby recreating ActiveX.  This was an attempt at a joke aimed at the fervor with which the development industry jumped on the AJAX bandwagon after the technology had been around for years.

However, I just read a blog post about Google’s latest attempt claw its way out of the Internet and onto your desktop called Google “Gears” and sure enough its remarkably similar to what I described, in concept if not in implementation.  Hopefully, and given that this was released months ago and I’m just now hearing about it, the developer community will think twice before jumping on this technology and sending us back into the bad old days of browser based infectious diseases in the form of executable scripts.

In my prevous life as Editor for TheServerSide.NET, one of my favorite duties was to come up with ideas for .NET humor.  This took the form of several cartoons, "Top 10" lists, and one April Fool's news post that got MASSIVE linkage.  Unfortunately though, when a new humor item came out it tended to replace what was there and so prior cartoons where gone forever. 

But now TheServerSide.NET has re-released those cartoons and top 10 lists at http://www.theserverside.net/tt/cartoons/TalesFromTheServerSide.tss.  Here are the ones that I can personally take some amount of credit for.

1. Top 10 Things to be Thankful for in .NET
2. Web Services are Taking Over The World
3. The Joys of Test Driven Development 
4. Tragedy on the Information Superhighway 
5. SOAThe Only Tool You'll Ever Need
6. Unraveling the Mystery of the CTPs
7. High Anxiety
8. The Unusual SuspectsReformed
9. You Might Be A .NET Geek If…
10. Top 10 Names NOT Chosen For Windows Vista
11. MSDN Subscription PricingDecisions, Decisions
12. BizTalk Server 2006 Blasts Off… Sorta

 The actual cartoons were drawn by Chris Moujaes and the flash for the Top 10 Lists were created by webmaster extraordinaire Nuno Teixeira.

Many of you may have seen the recent game of blog tag going on called "5 Things…".  I got tagged by David Walker from Tulsa and so here are some things about me that you probaby don't already know.

1. I was born in Xenia, OH.  Weather fans may remember this as the site of the worst tornado disaster in history.  More than 30 people died, over 1100 people were injured, and over 1000 homes were destroyed by an F5 tornado on April 3 of 1974.  My family however had moved from our home there to the suburbs of Tampa, FL only 2 months before.  The high school my brother attended, the stores my father had owned, and even our house were all flattened.  Talk about dodging a bullet!
2. Along with my various Microsoft certifications, I have a few other that are considerably more interesting.  For example, I have a US Sailing Keelboat certification for up to 44' yachts and have sailed 30'-40' yachts on the Chesapeake Bay, Tampa Bay, San Diego Bay, and Lake Michigan.  Now that I live in Texas, I don't get much of a chance to sail but I still love it and dream of sailing the Caribbean when I retire (or sooner).  I also have a PADI Open Water diver certification.  I haven't done a lot of diving though, but I do have a picture of me getting an underwater kiss face-mashing from a dolphin in Cozumel.
3. I am a graduate of numerous programs from Landmark Education, including the Landmark Forum.  For those of you who haven't heard of Landmark Education, they offer an amazing educational series that opens your eyes to new possibilities for your life.  My current career as a .NET nerd is a direct result of what I learned about myself in these programs. 
4. I met my current wife Susan in a chat room on Match.com.  She mistook me for somebody else she was talking to and started up a conversation.  I read her profile where she listed one of her favorite activities was sailing.  I immediately went back to the chat screen and typed "You like sailing?  Will you marry me?"  The rest as they say, is history.
5. While I travel extensively for conferences and work, I don't like to fly.  What this means is that I have traveled on every major route that Amtrak has, from Boston to Seattle and everywhere in between.  In June of last year, I put 3500 miles on my car in less than seven days.  I live in Dallas and can be in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Orlando, Chicago, and even as far as Seattle and New York in a weekend.  I will admit, I have been known to exceed the highway speed limit. 

So that's it for me.  I'll tag some others when I have more time to investigate who has and has not already gotten bit.

While I was editor for TheServerSide.NET, one of the more fun things I got to do was to write up humorous (hopefully) articles and cartoons.  I've been missing that lately so I've decided to cut loose here in blogland.  So here now are my predictions for 2007.  Read and be amazed. 

This is a Feature?
The new data visualization features in Excel 2007 will enable household budgets all over the country to highlight in vivid gradients and cute little icons that the amount of money we're paying for online services like NetFlix, iTunes, etc. is quickly surpassing the amount of our mortgage payment.

AJAX 2.0
Following in the footsteps of Google Suggest (a website for people who know they want to search for something but are so stupid they need suggestions about what), Google Corporation releases GoogleDrive.com, a web site that will download a small executable and run it inside any browser to show you how much disk space you have available.  This new site, while as completely useless as GoogleSuggest will usher in a new rush to develop executables that can be embedded into the browser thereby further enhancing the Web 2.0 user experience.  Not wanting to be left behind, Microsoft will re-release ActiveX under a new name and software development everywhere will take another giant step backwards.

iAngst
Looking to tap into the mental pysche of today's youth, Microsoft releases a Zune that wirelessly seeks out other Zunes and removes any songs that don't involve whining about parents, unprotected sex with "da biotches", and those not using the word "delicious" at least once.  Sadly, this Zune won't work with Vista either.

Sure it's easier, but I miss Clippy
Power Office users, unhappy with the new Ribbon interface, create a complex petition document asking Microsoft to remove the Ribbon.  Ironically, the document includes 3-dimensional smart art, XML data visualizations, and SharePoint sychronization and takes only 20 minues to create.

Now turn your head and cough
Digital Rights Management goes to new extremes as Media Center 12 is released requiring biometric DNA verification before it will play a single track from your 20 year old "Men at Work" CD.  Fortunately internet porn downloaders see the DNA requirement as a "non-issue".

Data, Data Everywhere…And Not A Stop To Think
As Language Integrated Query, and it's DLINQ and XLINQ cousins become a reality, the line between code and data blurs into invisibility allowing Microsoft to acheive Ultimate Demoware Nirvana. Now developers can more easily inject both data and query logic directly to the user interface of any .NET Application.  VB.NET is renamed Access.NET.

Just Add A Really Hot Cup of Tea
As Intel and AMD release quad core processors, creating multithreaded applications finally goes mainstream.  Later in the year, an enterprise developer for a Fortune 1000 company, working on a quad core system with 4 Gigs of RAM and a physics coprocessor inadvertantly develops a cold fusion reactor while trying to write a VB.NET application using the BackgroundWorker component.

Express This!
Microsoft's attempts to move into the more creative side of software development with it's Expression line of applications backfires badly when loyal developers who were previously responsible for building attractive large scale web and Windows based applications refuse to purchase any Expression SKU, instead demanding that the products be included in their @$#%((@$$# MSDN subscription like all of the other Microsoft development tools.  Microsoft does however sell a half a dozen copies to some former Mac owners whose spouse forced them to buy a PC this time so they could use Office 2007.

I'm a PC Bitch!
Apple continues it's "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" line of commercials causing Microsoft to eventually retaliate with its own version.  In Microsoft's version, the smarmy Mac guy receives a vicious beat down by a stronger, better looking, more secure PC running Windows Vista!  Mac sales plummet back to the basement where they belong.

 So?  What do you see in our collective future?

Santa Claus, in the form of my beautiful wife, brought me a new Sandisk Sansa e270R for Christmas this year, and I must say that it truly rocks!

I’m a huge music fan with tastes ranging from early live recordings of Louis Armstrong to my latest favorite Panic! At the Disco’s CD ‘A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out”.  I have a decent CD collection but find that by the time I hear enough of a CD to decide to purchase it, that I am ready to move on to something else.  Hence I always seem to be looking for something new to listen to that I don’t own already.  That is why the Rhapsody music service is so great for me and why I love my new Sansa player.

Rhapsody lets me select the artists or albums I want to listen to just like any other online music store.  But the feature I use most is what they all “Channels”.  Based on their original radio station concept, you can now listen to Channels based on any number of criteria.  For example, while listening to Concrete Blonde’s “Mexican Moon”, I clicked the “Concrete Blonde Radio” button.  This queued up a playlist of Concrete Blonde songs as well as songs by several other groups who are in the same genre as Concrete Blonde.  Listening to this channel led me to discover Cowboy Junkies and another musical love affair was born.  I can also create channels from scratch by entering in 5-10 artists and letting it build the playlist with songs from those artists and others like them.  And of course if I don’t like the song that’s playing I can just skip right past it.

The Sansa Rhapsody (as denoted by the “r” in the model number) came with about 500 songs preloaded on its’ 6 Gigabyte drive.  Even better though it also came loaded with about 12 preloaded channels like “Classic Rock Vault” featuring CCR, Rolling Stones, and Boston.  Each channel contains about sixty songs with some being shared by multiple channels.  I can add and remove channels using the desktop application and when I sync up my player it will automatically sync those channels as well.  This way I can always have something new to listen to without having to buy the CD.  If I hear a song I really like, I can click the scroll wheel and add it to my personal library that way it’s always available to be played.  And all of this without ever actually buying the song which I can also do from the player.

Having read reviews and raves about the Zune, I have to say the only feature I’m at all envious of is the ability to share a song wirelessly.  But unless you happen to work at Microsoft, how likely are you to run into somebody else with a Zune on a regular basis?  The size of the Zune make it considerably less desirable as the Sansa is about as big as two Nano set on top of each other.  It has a nice clear color screen that while I probably wouldn’t watch a video on it, is more than sufficient for the music menuing system.  It also has an FM receiver with the ability to record as well as a built in voice recorder.

All-in-all, it’s a great little gizmo and a wonderful Christmas present!  Thanks Susan!!

I tend not to "syndicate" another blogger's work but this blog post from S. Somasegar is such a dead-on anology of the gap between Business and IT thinking that I had to pass it along to my readers… both of you.

Check out the Hot Air Balloon story on S. Somasegar's blog.

My brother has decided that he wants to learn about .NET programming and asked if I could help him learn about VB.NET. Now the last time I taught him anything it was how to play chess when we were teenagers and after just three months he was routinely kicking my butt. I wanted to make sure he got started off on the right foot and went to the local bookstore to get him a book on learning VB.NET.

While parusing the books though, I realized that in an entire shelf of books specific to VB.NET, published by companies like Wrox, Microsoft Press, and Sams, not ONE SINGLE BOOK contained even a chapter on object oriented programming. Not one!

Thinking this must be an oversight I checked the C# books and sure enough, the books I checked all had chapters on object oriented programming. Why then don’t VB.NET books contain at least a mention of OO? If not the publishers then surely the authors should understand the importance of laying the proper foundation before diving into the WinForms designer or ADO.NET. Don’t they?

That’s not to say that books on OO with VB.NET don’t exist. My buddy Dan Clark wrote a good one and I know that there are others. But in one of the biggest stores of the second largest bookstore chain in the country in the 4th largest city in the country, I couldn’t find a single book on VB.NET that included object oriented programming. If there is a message in there somewhere, I really don’t like it.

While doing a bit of reading in preparation for a rather lengthy blog post I’m working on I found this hilarious site that lets you generate your own VC friendly company name and product.  I’m pretty sure this is what the Vonage guys used to come up with their spiffy new name.

http://andrewwooldridge.com/myapps/webtwopointoh.html

Let’s say that against your better judgement and the urging of your closest family members you do the unthinkable and actually purchase a retail computer from HP.  Make absolutely sure that you take any driver CDs or files from hidden partitions and burn them onto 10 different CDs.  Put one in a bank deposit box, send 5 of them to your closest friends, and bury the rest in your yard!  Because if you ever lose them,  you’re going to pay!

I recently rebuilt my shiny HP MediaCenter.  I was able to find drivers for most things but the sound card was a problem.  It’s an OEM Audigy 2 ZS card.  So I did like any good nerd and went to HPs site to download the drivers.  But they weren’t there.  I then went to the ultimate Internet authority Google only to find dozens and dozens of comments from other people like me in the same situation.  The drivers are not available online.  Feeling annoyed already I decided to attempt to bridge cultural borders and call HP’s customer support.  Here is how that call went…

Me:  Hi, I’d like to get the drivers for my Media Center’s sound card.  Can you tell me where to download them?

HP:  If you’d like to order a Recovery CD, I can forward you to our parts department.

Me:  I don’t need to recover my PC, I just want to install the drivers.

HP:  It appears that your computer is out of warranty.  If you’d like, a technician can help you install the drivers but there will be a fee.

Me:  I don’t need help installing them, I just need to know where they are.

HP:  I’m sorry sir, you’ll have to order a Recovery CD or pay for a technician to help you install them.

At this point the conversation devolved into something not appropriate for publication even in a blog.  Angry but not stopped, I decided to go to my local retailer where I bought the PC and ask them if they have a copy, since they also do repair work.  They said even they would have to order the drivers.  So my last recourse, while a bit sneaky, was to take a USB key to the media center PCs they have on display and look for one with the Audigy sound card.  But alas, the new PCs don’t use the same sound card.

Why, after I’ve already purchased the hardware should I have to pay for the software to make it work?  Software I already own a legal right to use?  Why would any company intentionally hinder their customers use of their product by hiding away the drivers?  Because they can.

While at Tech-Ed 2005, I had the occasion to wander into Pat O’Brien’s at Universal Citywalk for some sing-along piano and Hurricanes.  Just after we got there an amazing thing happened.  Two new piano players donned the stange, one of them looking strangely familiar.  

So the question is, is it man-about-town Rory Blyth or did I have too many Rum drinks?

Sorry for the poor image quality, these were taken from a Treo 650 in the dark while singing along…