But this time it has nothing to do with ink or pen at all. I’m finding myself wanting to have a conversation with Outlook about things. I started digging into the SAPI framework (which Tablet PC guru, Arin Goldberg also contributed to — what can’t this guy do?) and found that it’s not all that hard to get a reliable conversation going between you and your PC. Even with the crappy mic in my Electrovaya.
Expect to see some demos of voice enhancements to TEO at Microsoft Windows Anywhere.
For a guy that hates to fly, I’ve sure got a lot of it coming up. Microsoft is being kind enough to accommodate me at Microsoft Windows Anywhere, a conference for Tablet PC developers and enthusiasts which is located in San Francisco, CA. I of course live outside of Philadelphia so I have about a 6 hour trip. The conference is Feb 6-10 but you’ll need a lot more than Tablet PC’s and fellow geeks to pry me away from the Superbowl. Especially since I’m sure the Eagles are going.
Once that’s done, I will be representing Einstein Technologies as an attendee for VON the VoIP conference in San Jose, CA March 7-10. Another 6 hour trip, only this time with a stop. Twice as many takeoff’s and landings. Sigh.
I have a completely irrational fear of flying. I hate it. Scared to death of it. All I can think of are engines falling off, failing during takeoff, landing gear not coming down, etc. Terrorists don’t scare me. We know now how to deal with terrorists. Human error and mechanical failure scares me. After all, I want to make it long enough to get to Mars, don’t I?
I actually held out on this desktop search thing for a long time. I’m a programmer so organization means everything to me. If you asked me where something was on my hard disk, I knew exactly and it was DEEP within a highly organized folder hierarchy.
Well since adopting desktop search, I have not given up that method of organization. I’m still meticulous about where things are stored. I don’t see search as a replacement for that, but it’s a great enhancement.
I actually started out with Lookout for Outlook and I loved it. In fact, I wouldn’t have switched to MSN if I didn’t know that the author was involved in writing it (and it’s very similar to Lookout.) But since I switched to MSN Desktop Search, I found that my favorite use for it has nothing to do with documents, emails, contacts, etc. It’s actually MUSIC!
I love music but I hate listening to an album all the way through. I’m more of a pick and choose songs — whatever pops into my head — type of guy. So if I think of a Bob Dylan song I just type it in my desktop bar and it finds it instantly and I’m playing.
So in short, finding and playing music instantly is why I love desktop search.
I get so frustrated every time I read a MSDN article that warns developers not to deploy the Office 2003 PIAs. I am frustrated because the PIA problem in Office is a major pain in the ass and so far, nothing has been done to rectify it. Just to recap what myself and others have bitched about, here are the problems:
These are big problems and make developing Office 2003 add ins very unattractive. It’s very rare that developing for Microsoft technologies gets more difficult with newer versions but that is what has happened.
Developers have found that they can solve many of these problems by ignoring Microsoft’s advice. Careless developers (like me when I wrote TEO 1.x) will cause additional problems by ignoring this advice, but they get around all of the above by either 1) deploying Office 2003 PIA’s or 2) using Office XP PIA’s with both versions.
Anyway if you’re going to do this, you should have the common courtesy to other developers to create an unmanaged shim and host your add-in in its own AppDomain. Then you won’t fuck with other add-ins that may be installed on your customer’s systems.
Omar’s got a great blog that deals frequently with Office add-ins.
(Feels good to be blogging in the style I used to do back in the mid 90′s… Yes I know we didn’t call it blogging back then.)
I’ve always been very optimistic when it comes to my future. I’ve always pretty much assumed that eventually I would get a big break and make big money. So far that hasn’t happened yet, but I’m still 25 years old. I’ve got about 3/4 of my life left (assuming life expectancy continues to grow the way it has in the past).
So alright lets assume that I sell enough copies of TEO, or TCS, or DotOffice, or whatever and I find myself sitting on a couple hundred million dollars. Is my life complete? Well sort of. What I am about to talk about is pretty shocking and some people might take it the wrong way. Hear me out.
Once I make that kind of money and I am sure that my family is properly taken care of and my responsibilities have been handled, I am going to kill myself. Yes that’s right I am going to commit suicide.
Now before you go running to the telephones to dial the suicide prevention hotline, continue reading the rest of the entry.
All my life I have been fascinated by outer space. When I was a young kid in the elementary school at which my father taught, I used to sit in the library after school waiting for him to finish his work and I would read through volumes of encyclopedias about the planets, comets, the sun, galaxies, etc. This was back in the mid to late 80s and we (as humans) have really come a long way since then. We have a permanent home in space, we have launched a probe that continues to travel far outside our solar system toward uncharted territory, we have landed surveyors on planets and moons millions of miles away.
The thing I have been most fascinated by lately is the work we’ve done on Mars. I want you to sit and think for a minute about just what this means. We have two robots driving around on a completely different planet sending back data and they’ve been doing it for a year. That is really amazing. It really goes to show just how unlimited the potential of the human race is.
However if you step back and look at it from a broader perspective, you’d probably agree that back in the 1960s-1980s space exploration accomplished much more in a shorter period of time. Unfortunately, most of that was fueled by the fact that we were struggling with another country for the capability of blowing each other to smithereens if the need arose. But it’s interesting nonetheless that human kind’s greatest flaw drove human kind’s greatest accomplishments.
So as it seemed, when the Cold War ended and we were no longer in competition for global supremacy, we slowed down a bit on the space exploration. It really makes me wonder where we’d be today if there was as much public and government interest in space as there used to be.
Anyway I am starting to get off topic. I’m sure you want to know why and how I plan to kill myself.
I am extremely frustrated by the fact that Mars is so close yet so far away. It’s right within our grasp but numerous technical and political problems make it highly unlikely that I will ever experience the feeling of being so far from home as the surface of Mars.
That is why I have decided that the day that I have enough money to do so, I am going to complete my life by ending it — on the surface of the red planet. Sounds crazy right? It’s really not. We’ve already proven that we can land equipment safely on the surface. In fact we’ve done it several times. It’s getting to be old hat.
Most of the problems regarding a human mission to Mars are in the fact that we currently don’t have any good ideas for getting back. Carrying as much fuel as required to escape Mars would be too heavy to carry. Also food and the water shield (for radiation protection) required for such a mission make it a very heavy ship. There are plans underway for a lunar base or space elevator that would greatly assist in such a task, but these are long term plans and I’ll never get to take part in any of that.
So by spending my own money on a privately funded one way trip to Mars, I could be the first person to visit (and die) on the red planet. As morbid as it sounds, I think it would be the greatest thing in the world. I’d probably not last more than a few hours or days on the surface depending on how I prepared, but that’s ok. I would be able to write down my experience, my thoughts, etc and upload them to Earth (from my Tablet PC of course :) ) and I would finally be able to leave my mark on the pages of history books everywhere.
Of course I need the money first so if you want to help fund a human trip to Mars, better go buy TEO.