If there’s not already a medal for stating the obvious, I should start a foundation to present one. Why should the Darwin Awards have all the fun?

There is "something new and interesting going on in the universe," said Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected (space.com)

I’ll admit it’s cool that’s there a loud “roaring” sound in the radio band. I want to know how a radio signal can be equated with a roaring sound, but I’ll bet it’s the subatomic monkeys!

Duh. This is like flipping through the channels and stopping on a channel that you’ve never watched before and being surprised by its programming. “d00d, wow. Check out the weird stuff on this channel! I’ve never seen nuthin’ like that before.” Seriously, NASA?

Or like psychics’ predictions (including all the talking heads on financial news networks)... If they are so psychic and/or so good at picking stocks, why are they hosting TV shows and/or working pay-per-minute telephone lines instead of on the beach in Cabo?

Unless Alan Kogut is the same age as my 4-year-old nephew or my 9-year-old oldest son (to both of whom everything is still new and exciting), he wins the Captain Obvious Award this week.

Davide describes it best in his own words: What is DTLoggedExec?

If I were a full-time ETL developer or an operations DBA, this is definitely a tool I’d be using every day.

Grab yours today from CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/DTLoggedExec/

When we moved from Redmond to Kirkland in December, it put me outside the “reasonable commute distance” for the Mongoose mountain bike... which may or may not have been all a part of my nefarious plan to “convince” Mrs. Reed to “permit” me to buy a motorcycle. Muwahahaha. Er-ehem. Nevermind.

But upgrade from the Mongoose, I did. Ultimately, I want something more of an “adventure bike” like a V-Strom or a BMW, but the little Dave Ramsey that sits on my shoulder these days reminded me to only buy what I could pay cash for. And the previously enjoyed motorcycle I picked was definitely a sexy red color! Gotta love that “magma pearl red”!! Vrrrooom!!!

(The bike above is the same year-model and color as mine, but I don’t have any pix of me on it yet. My 2005 doesn’t have all the decals on it that a ZX-6R normally does for some reason. I meant to ask the previous owner why he pulled ‘em off, but I forgot. Have to save some pennies and put ‘em back on myself someday soon.)

Now that the global warming has returned to the Seattle area and melted the past month of ice and snow, I finally got to ride it to work this morning for the first time. A lot less exercise than the Mongoose, but also a LOT more fun to ride!! Filling up the tank with premium for $7 was also a big plus. (The Sequoia still costs me $60+ to fill up the tank. Will definitely feel like riding in a cage from now on.)

The riding community inside Microsoft has been great, very welcoming and informative. (Read: answering my stupid n00b13 questions with a modicum of patience and sympathy.) Any other riders out there in the broader SQL Server community? I’m sure there are. What’re you riding?

My tax dollars at work. Trust the military to "document" something that's already available from any reputable PR agent. Heh. I guess not everybody gets to be an astronaut, fighter pilot or superhacker in the Air Force.

The Air Force’s Rules of Engagement for Blogging (GlobalNerdy.com)

In all seriousness, though, I've learned enough PR by osmosis (and mandatory company training) that I'm going to keep my complaints about the Zune leap year bug to myself. I hate running to the so-called "music" that they pipe into the ProClub. It burns us, it does! I'm going to have to find somebody on the Zune team to challenge to a chess boxing match.

In other news, we've been using Netflix's Watch Instantly feature on the Xbox and the TiVo HD (mostly to compare them) to discover Really Bad Shows That We've Never Heard Of™ this week. Pretty entertaining stuff, if you like bad TV and movies, that is. We'd never heard of "Space Rangers" or Disney's "American Dragon" among others. I'd forgotten how bad the writing for Voltron was!

Merry New Year, y'all!

My buddy, one of the Steves, has gotten nostalgic for his girlish figure of yore... for reasons inexplicable to me. Round is a shape, right? He's very much in shape now! Come to think of it, so am I. *sigh*

But, because he likes to lose at contests, he has challenged me to a fitness duel:

Seriously, I used to be in Shape. (bigfatbeep.blogspot.com)

All right, Walrus-boy. You're on. Heh.

One way or another, Steve's going down. He might lose weight in 2009, but I'll smoke him at the run and at the Marine Corps fitness test... and I can already touch my toes. Ongoing martial arts training gives me an edge. Hee-hee. Oh, wait a second... How far is half a marathon? Can't we race motorcycles or something?

I'll even up the ante: the man with the biggest reduction in BMI (without surgery) wins. As I calculate it now, mine's... No, really? 34.21? Almost Class 2 obesity. Doh. Round indeed.

FotR, I hate New Year's resolutions.

Over the holidays, the SQL Server community & samples test team in China has been migrating all of our open product samples bugs out of our internal VSTS bug tracking database and into the VSTS database which backs the CodePlex TFS system. There are some non-bug work items which will be migrated (mostly related to the AdventureWorksKilimanjaro improvement) after the 1st of the year.

If you want to see new stuff from the community & samples team (create a work item on CodePlex!) or increase the likelihood that we’ll fix your pet bug with one of the samples, vote on the one(s) that you want fixed most and help us prioritize.

In other news, we will be migrating all of the product samples discussion forums to the new MSDN forums platform in January in a single consolidated place to chat about SQL Server community and samples projects.

I’ll be in use-it-or-lose vacation territory this afternoon, hence you may or may not hear from me again until after New Year’s. If not, I wish y’all a merry New Year!!

I bump into people now and then, even up here in the near orbit of Redmond, who either don’t have an email address or don’t check it regularly. Being a hyper-connected person (my man-portable gadgets radiate enough EM to keep me warm in the winter), these people always remind me that I don’t live on the same planet with most people. [Do you know how hard it is to buy a motorcycle via craigslist from somebody who only checks email once a week?!]

However, these lies, damn lies and statistics from a Harris Interactive survey (sponsored by Intel) boggle the mind:

People would forgo sex and television watching for two weeks rather than lose a week's worth of access to the Internet. Not Tonight Honey, I've Got the Internet (InternetNews.com)

Um. No.

If you’d rather give up sex for two weeks than a week without lolcats, wasted hours WoWing, playing Solitaire Online and watching stupid BlewTube videos... well, please get out of the gene pool. If  you’ve already got kids, put them up for adoption before you corrupt them further. Really. Also, you’re doing it wrong.

If natural disasters, meteors, super-volcanoes, gamma ray bursts, space aliens, zombies, climate change or bloody unicorns don’t wipe us out, we’re still doomed as a species... because Algore invented the webbernetz.

I’ll be over here in the corner weeping for all the kids in the “third world” that we’re going to be giving free laptops and Internet access. It’s only a matter of time for them, too. *cry*

A long time ago, in a life far, far away, I was a deputy constable and I had to physically locate people and hand them court documents (or haul them off to jail). As much fun as it was to run around with a badge and a gun, it would’ve made life much easier if I could’ve just sent them an email! I guess I’m old: “You’ve been served... via Facebook!” just seems odd.

This case took place in Oz, but I suspect that it’s not too far off from becoming the order of the day in other parts of the world, too. Email is pretty common already, and I think SMS (aka text) messages aren’t used only because they can’t carry attachments. As a database-oriented person, I have to wonder whether I could testify to the reliability of Facebook or Myspace as a delivery mechanism. Since the process server got permission from the judge in advance, I guess it’s a moot point.

The court decided Facebook was a legally viable way to communicate.

But, in granting permission to use the social networking site, the judge stipulated that the papers be sent via a private email so that other people visiting the page could not read their contents.

Courts have previously allowed judgements to be delivered by email, but it is not known if Facebook or other social networking sites have been used in the same way.

Australian couple served with legal documents via Facebook - Telegraph

I do feel for people who are having their homes taken away for non-payment of their mortgages. A lot of people are having a rough time out there. One of the hardest things a constable ever has to do is an eviction, especially if there are children involved.

This story would be funnier if the property being foreclosed was in Second Life or WoW. Heh.

Everybody has heroes. Bjarne is one of mine. If I have to explain why to you, then you wouldn’t understand even if I did try to ‘splain it. Heh. (That comment will be funnier later in this post, if you like irony.)

I’ve done some recruiting events for Microsoft at my alma mater (the University of Houston) and I’ve done my best to influence lots of younger folks to get into computer science, and my experience tracks very closely to what Bjarne describes in this great interview:

[James:] In this interview he speaks frankly about the challenges and problems – and improvements being made – in computer science programs. Among issues like perceptions of offshoring and the need to balance the theoretical with the practical, he addresses complaints by tech companies about the lack of fully qualified CS graduates.

...

[Bjarne:] The US industry could absorb more good developers than there are currently students enrolled in IT-related programs – but not all of those programs and all of those students would qualify as “good” in this context.

Bjarne Stroustrup on Educating Software Developers

Personally, I think “we” (culturally, IT-oriented companies, etc) are going to have to staff jobs with less-than-ideal candidates and train them up rather than count on young kids to bet their futures and careers on computer science education. I was involved with a tax-incented project to provide technical support services back in the ‘90s; it was a project much like the one that I’m proposing, except that more training would be required for my program to turn non-geeks into coders, programmers and someday developers. Interesting. Have I changed my position on fungibility?

The outcome of the project/company (which shall remain nameless) wasn’t any better or worse than the other classic “professional” IT projects/companies that I’ve been involved with, and more successful than most in the long run.

I realize that risk averse companies aren’t likely to try out my rural sourcing ideas (management just thinks I want an excuse to work from a mountain top in Wyoming), so when I’ve accumulated enough capital, I guess I’ll have to try it out myself. The potential upside is good, both tangible and intangible. I especially enjoy seeing people succeed at tasks that they didn’t believe that they could accomplish… all it usually takes is a little encouragement and an opportunity!

In the meantime, I’m glad that smart people like Bjarne are out there working on changing the nature of the self-fulfilling prophecy so that it’s a prophecy that we actually want to come true!

It seems like aeons ago (not even a decade yet) when I was @ a little start-up that was assimilating real estate data to further our digital business model and making sales to web-savvy home buyers at a discount. So many funny stories, so little time...

The data from every MLS system we assimilated had its own little quirks. It seems that REALTOR®s aren’t the best data entry clerks (who would’ve imagined that there are 71 different ways to spell Chicago?), but maybe it’s not just REALTOR®s. It could be that humans aren’t very good at reliable data entry.

New York City takes this to a whole new level of insanity, though. Allowing for a trivial paper crime to “steal” an entire skyscraper??

The massive ripoff [the theft of the Empire State Building] illustrates a gaping loophole in the city's system for recording deeds, mortgages and other transactions. It took 90 minutes for Daily News to 'steal' the Empire State Building (nydailynews.com)

Since everybody’s hyper-aware these days of the fragility of our mortgage system, how is it that the largest city in the county allows this to continue in the 21st century?

If you’re doing business based on somebody else’s data... how certain are you that you’re making the right decisions? I’m not going to call “business intelligence” an oxymoron like many people do “military intelligence”, but they do sound the same... don’t they? What risk mitigation are you doing to prevent executive decisions from being made @ your compnay based on the equivalent of a Ouija board (data from somebody else’s system)?

Maybe Skynet has a point about humans...? Er, wait a sec-!

I can think of three or four realistic first-person shooters that might already fill this niche. There are probably more...

Reportedly, the army has had a great need for virtual training aids and initially wanted to get videogame training materials out to units before the money was available. Though the army has a large interest in watching the gaming industry for useful technology that could be adapted for military training applications, it doesn't plan to be go toe-to-toe with game publishers.
The Escapist : News : U.S. Army To Invest $50 Million In Gaming

It seems like DARPA needs to connect up with MSR:

Mobile Augmented Reality Games and Visualization
Steve Feiner and Sean White of Columbia University demonstrate prototype mobile augmented reality applications. The goal is to merge virtual information with the real world, leveraging our skill in interacting with physical objects to interact with virtual ones. Demos include hand-held games, user interfaces for an electronic field guide for plants, and visualizations of site data for urban designers. Work being displayed is implemented using the Goblin XNA 3D platform, running on top of Microsoft XNA. Demofest 2008

I saw a demo of Goblin a year or so ago, and it was pretty cool!

For some reason, this all reminds me of the silly reports when I was a kid about how many hours of “combat training” that we all received from watching G.I. Joe cartoons. Heh.

If you’ve got data, there are probably people who want to use it, analyze it, do things with it... that you never imagined and possibly don’t want them to. “Those people” might even be government agents. Who can put you in jail. If you’re not careful with your data.

Do you have a plan for data governance and regulatory compliance?

We’d like to help.

Brent says: As somebody who’s gone through the whitepaper start to finish (with a lot of guidance from JC’s team) I can tell you that this is really good stuff.  If you work for a public company subject to regulations, if you work with sensitive financial data, or if you work with health care data, you need to read this doc. New SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guide

Are you the Gate Keeper? Are you the Key Master? Or is there only Zhoul?

p.s. SCAN and SQL PASS have been a great week so far. It’s good to meet a lot of you in person. Come by the product pavilion and the Ask-the-Experts table and say howdy. I’ll be one of the 300 people wearing a brown shirt. Heh.

Oh noes!!

"We're interested in seeing COBOL as a first-class citizen on .NET and on the Azure cloud," [chief technology officer of application modernization at Micro Focus] said. "Wherever cloud computing is going, we want COBOL to be running there." Taking COBOL into the Cloud? (eweek)

Modernization? Srsly?

I'm going to censor myself and not say anything further.

meh.

p.s. If you're @ SCAN or SQL PASS this week, come say howdy. I'm wandering around looking suspicious.

I’m not sure that I’m ready to smell my video games yet…

Researchers in Birmingham have been developing new technology to add smells to the virtual world of video games. Firm adds smell to video games (bbc.co.uk)

We’ve already got people getting nauseas from the visual input alone. I haven’t played the demo for Mirror’s Edge yet, but it sounds pretty cool even though Some People™ seem to have trouble keeping their lunches where they belong. I will admit that some of the game play in Prey made me a little queasy… and I’m a skydiver.

Although, I kind of wonder what Imulsion™ from the Gears universe smells like. Crude oil? Something more refined? Hrm. Makes you think of that sewer scene from the factory in the original Gears of War. I’ll pass.

Even though Mirror’s Edge is supposed to release on my birthday, it’ll have to wait. As soon as I’m done chasing achievements in Gears of War 2 and Dead Space, I’ll get there. Oh, wait. What do I do about Left for Dead? Talk about a game that I don’t want to smell!!

No, I’m positive that I’m not ready to smell my video games yet.

Well, that’s how the joke used to go about Vista voice command... Apparently somebody thought it would be fun to actually implement something similar in their mobile o/s. On purpose or not. Heh.

The bug can hardly be called a security problem, given it requires access to the handset, but the fact that until the fix was issued today any G1 user typing a text message containing the word "reboot" would see their phone resetting is truly stunning... Google fixes world's most stupid bug • The Register

It’s hard to imagine why one would use the same editor/parser for text messages that is used for phone commands, or have a text sink that hooks in at the system level and parses commands out of all input, but... it’s funny either way. I love the Law of Unintended Consequences™.

As often as I have to reboot my own mobile phone, a voice command for doing this would save me from having to pop the battery off so often. <envy />