Web Services DevCon
I’m currently doing final preparations for my leave to the biggest .NET weblogger gathering. [Ingo Rammer’s DotNetCentric]
This is so true…talk about a critical mass of webloggers. :-) I just yesterday managed to adjust my schedule a bit to make it to this, and I think it’s going to be a great time! I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of you fellow webloggers.
Physicists working in Europe have passed through nature’s looking glass and have created atoms made of antimatter, or antiatoms, opening up the possibility of experiments in a realm once reserved for science fiction writers. [news.com]
Cool!
Unless you do very little work online, the concept of weaving all of your activity into a single web page couldn’t be more misguided – from an efficiency and effectiveness standpoint.
I don’t agree. First, it doesn’t have to be a single web page – give me more integration into Outlook, or some other tool – that would be fine.
Ray likes the fact that email, IM, and other applications have their own UI’s, and says we don’t need a “digital dashboard”. I disagree. I generally have two modes of working:
The first mode is when I’m writing code, or writing a document, or some other specific task; in that case, I agree with Ray – I need and use the best-of-breed application for that job. Word for writing documents; VS.NET for writing code; Quickbooks for accounting.
But the other mode is when I’m doing what I call “administrative” stuff – reading/responding to email, IMing, listening to voicemail, reading RSS feeds, etc. In this situation, Outlook is the tool I use for email, calendar, contacts, etc. But I also use Messenger for IM, the phone for voicemail, Radio and Aggie for news, Outlook Expess for newsgroups, and I’m sure a few other tools. In this case, all of these separate tools are a pain. In every case, I’m looking for information, and in some cases responding to it. In all cases, conceptually similar. Why can’t I have all of my “administrative” tasks centralized into a single interface?
I think the problem is even worse for unsophisticated users. My mom uses Outlook Express to read her email, and Messenger to IM with her friends and family. I’m sure there are RSS-syndicated weblogs she might enjoy reading, but she would have to learn another tool to read these each day. Why wouldn’t she want a single interface, showing her the day’s email, new syndication items, and maybe a list of her friends that are currently online?
Ray says later in his article that the Universal Inbox concept has failed, and that people don’t want their voicemail and email in the same place. I couldn’t disagree more. Why shouldn’t I be able to see my voicemail show up in my inbox? Then I could either listen to it on the phone, or listen to it via my email reader. I could forward an email notification of the message to my cell phone via Outlook. As it is now, I have to check two places for messages – Outlook, and my phone (actually more if you count my cell phone and home phone also). Why? [Ray’s example of a Universal Inbox probably hasn’t made a huge dent in the market, because it requires a new email address and voicemail number. I want to use my existing address, and my existing numbers – then we’re talking about a compelling story.]
All that said, I have yet to see a great dashboard pulled off in practice. I think it could certainly be done, though. If I were to build one, I’d start with Outlook and build from there.
Well, it had to happen sometime. The free Wi-Fi access at Denver International Airport (as reported here) is no longer free. It’s now being sold on a per-day basis by AT&T Wireless. I don’t remember the cost, but I think it was somewhere around $12 for 24 hours.
I’ve also seen a lot of newsgroup and forum posts denouncing Starbucks and T-Mobile for the high cost to use their system. Well, I had an opportunity on this recent trip to use their service, and I think it’s not so bad for business use. Compared to the modem in the hotel, this really saved me a lot of time, and more than paid for itself. Now, at those prices, I won’t be surfing the net and cruising chat rooms from Starbucks, but for e-mail and other essential business items, it worked out fine.
I also found service in the Seattle-Tacoma airport, for, I believe, $7/day. Seems expensive, but worth it when I had an hour to wait and was able to catch up on some things.
Catching up on news from the last couple of weeks, I found this from Justin:
How do you challenge yourself?
That is a question that I’ve been asking people lately. It is an open ended question because I like to see what people say. [News from the Forest]
Ok, I know I just said a few minutes ago that I was going to get back to tech-talk, but I wanted to post something related to this first. When I started racing, I found it to be an amazing experience. Richard Shelquist managed to put it into words, better than I could:
“Sports car racing has taught me a couple of very important lessons that apply not only to racing, but to other aspects of life as well:
First, you must participate totally, not as an observer chatting with yourself and analyzing your performance, but participating with focus and concentration solely on the task at hand, literally becoming one with the activity and completely forgetting about yourself.
Second, you must push yourself beyond comfort, into the region of challenge, staying within your limits of competent performance, but pushing the envelope as far as it will go, as far beyond comfort as you can withstand without recklessness.
If there is something that you want to do better, then work diligently with those two ideas and you will be rewarded.”
Well said, Richard.
Well, it’s over. I started 5th, and finished 7th. In some ways disappointing; for example, I was in 6th, about to make a move for 5th, and I went into a corner a little too hot and looped it. Stupid mistake, which cost me 2 spots on the track. But in other ways, it was a great week – and really, I suppose finishing in the top 10 in the national championship isn’t so bad! And I think I won $1000 as well; and even though this will only pay for 1.5 of the 5 sets of tires I used, I always say that money won is twice as sweet as money earned! (I usually say this in Vegas ;-)
I also learned a lot these past couple of weeks. Some of these guys are amazingly good drivers – very consistent, no mistakes to speak of. And I found that I can, for the most part, hang with them. There were sessions when I had faster times than nearly all of them. It’s the consistency thing that I need to work on…
I’m thinking about doing the Pro Spec Racer series next year. We’ll have to see how that goes; without funding, it would be a pretty expensive proposition.
So that’s it for this year’s runoffs. If any of you are still reading after these last could of weeks, rest assured – I’ll get back to technical stuff now! But this has been fun…so I think I’ll keep posting random racing updates. Hopefully no one will mind…
Well, qualifying is now complete (final grid is here). I ran faster today and moved ahead of one of the guys previously ahead of me, but someone else ran a hundredth faster than me and moved up. So all in all, I’m still qualified 5th. Inside of row 3. Not too bad for the national championship, I figure!
My original goal for the week was to qualify in the top half (of 29 cars), and to finish in the top 10. Well, qualifying has certainly gone better than expected…hopefully the race will too! I’ve revised my goal, but I don’t want to jinx anything by writing it down. :-)
“Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports … all others are games.” – Ernest Hemingway
What a great quote! :-)
Our second day of qualifying was today. I woke up this morning with a clear vision of what I had to do to make up a couple of tenths. We went out on the track at 11:40am; the sun had been shining for a while, the temperature was getting warmer, and the track temperature was rising. All in all, the track was slower this session; everyone in the top 7 went slower. So, while I had the 3rd fastest time for the day, it doesn’t matter since many of us went faster yesterday. So all in all, the top 7 positions on the provisional grid did not change today.
I did have a minor screw-up…turn 1 at Mid-Ohio is a very fast left-hander, where I normally lightly brush the brakes and go back to throttle shortly after turn-in. Well, I tried to do it today without braking, just a quick lift; however, I turned in a bit too early, had to tighten in the middle of the turn, and ended up driving off the outside at the exit of the turn. Bounced around in the grass a little, but no major damage other than a broken bolt holding the alternator bracket. I know it’s possible; I just need to be a little smoother. Maybe tomorrow!
Tomorrow should be a very fast session – we go out at 9:15am. As long as the track is dry, we’re all expecting it to be very fast.
So all in all, an uneventful day; but I gained quite a bit of confidence, turning a faster time than many of the cars ahead of me. And I was only 0.138 seconds slower than the provisional pole-sitter.
Quick update – the 2nd place qualifier had his times disallowed for illegal fuel composition; so that moves me up one more spot. So we’re in 5th for now…