Zune is out I am very excited about it, unfortunately I committed $100 to a 1 Gig Sandia c140 MP3 player just a few weeks ago. I knew I should have waited I just could not resist.

Zune allows you to share songs temporarily with friends so that they can try them out. Great concept! I would pay for every song on every CD that I have ever borrowed as long as it was easy to try and decide.

ps. The Sandia makes a strange clicking sound when you skip tracks, which is really noticeable. Apparently this is a known problem to which there is no solution.

pps. Microsoft took a really different approach to the marketing of Zune, no one knew what it was at first, but I think it paid off. I still think there is no chance of knocking iPods from the top spot, though, the potential to connect Xbox 360, Media Center and regular PCs is too much to bear.

I have used Excel for years, for things like totals, creating graphs, even organizing projects. I am just not seeing why that would be useful on the web. So I ask myself (and I will ask Google if they are listening) Why Google Spreadsheets?

When no one appears interested in shared calendars that should have surely been signal enough that not every single popular application for the desktop will need a Web 2.0 counterpart. I am curious just how much money Google has to waste, but considering the share price right now It is a lot more than I have ;)

It may be that they really have identified a space on the web that needed filling. However, I think it is more accurate to suggest that they are the first big player to take a shot at Microsoft's money maker. Is Microsoft scared? Is MS now shaking in their Office boots? Not yet ... but soon ... I think the quicker Microsoft starts to push it Office Live offerings the better.

Microsoft sat on its heals with IE6 and firefox is slowly, very very slowly, gaining ground. Asides from the programming object model what really improved between Excel 97 and 2003? I do not remember? Do you?

"The wise man does at once what the fool does finally." - Machiavelli

I think I may be the last person with any "tech sense" to use IE 6 for personal use. I have stuck with it mainly because of some twisted sense of allegiance. However, I have come to the conclusion that unless IE gives the ability to do inline searches I will have to assiduously (I have been trying to use this word for weeks) avoid it.

Firefox has the page search feature perfected. As soon as you hit CTRL-F it brings up a Toolbar at the bottom of the page that does not disturb the natural flow of your work. As soon as I begin to type, it begins to highlight the first instance of the search or goes red to indicate that the search has no hits.

It just makes sense. Does IE7 have this, I doubt it ... I just doubt it.

This just up on Scott Gu's Blog ... AJAX is getting full support in ASP.NET\Visual Studio 2005. While there have been various plugins available for some time now, this represents a great commitment to the ground swell of AJAX wannabe's (me included). Microsoft's implementation of AJAX aka ATLAS has represented the Holy Grail of Web Development. It seeks to fill the gap between Postbacks and the Windows Programming model that we all would prefer.

There are many inconsistent explanations on the use and nature of ViewState in ASP.NET. Don found this rather detailed explanation of its existence ... the why's and the wherefore's. ViewState seems to be a staple question for ASP.NET interviews and understanding its nature is fundamental of the discipline!

"The wise man does at once what the fool does finally." - Machiavelli

Hand held games really started to boom in the 1980's and I was on the band wagon early and often. One of my favorite games was FireFox-F7 (1983), apparently not related to the Clint Eastwood film of the same era. I thought it was great at the time, looking back I cannot see the fascination, but I am now brave enough to say that back then I was a game-aholic ... there was also a version repackaged as Galager.

The Irishm'n found one of his favorites at the Hand-held museum, an [American] Football game that required more imagination than skill. The player with the ball was apparently a flashing led. When lights collided it constituted a tackle! Wow!

Kids today are so spoiled!