One of the myths about Seattle is that it’s always cold and raining. I think secretly we just keep repeating this to keep everyone else out.

First-ever Seattle heat warning issued (Associated Press)

“As former Prime Minister Alain Juppé said on his blog on Tuesday…”

Rory Blyth has found the best tv program to watch tonight:

Four big time nerds in [Las Vegas] for a computer programmer's convention decide to take a break from boring seminars and try to pick-up a woman they meet at the bar.Are they up to the challenge?

Having been to Vegas more times than I care to remember for “computer programmer conventions”, this is a subject near and dear to my heart…

(And it’s on A&E, so repeats are guaranteed through February 8th! The episode title to watch for is “The Games People Play”)

This was one of those “if a tree falls in the woods and there’s no-one around to hear it, does it really make a sound?” moments.

I use saved Feedster searches to track what’s being said about our marketplace, and lately these searches are picking up false positives from “spam blogs” – blogs full of keywords that a spammer hopes you’ll find in a search. As you might expect, this stuff makes for thrilling reading:

Snmpwalk answer sentences last across linux certification thin client backbone linux courses node server training, pnni learning computer packeteer snmpwalk multihomed pair gain 4006 certification services computer course node.

But if you’re setting yourself up as a spam-blogger, you really should learn to turn off comments. Otherwise you might end up being comment-spammed yourself:

Cool blog and cool message. Don't forget to visit me on Thanatox's Averno

That made my afternoon.

My conference hotel for the last three days was “Paris, Las Vegas”, which competes with the pyramids, pirate ships, etc along the Las Vegas Strip by creating a little slice of fake France. Since this happens to sit in the middle of the most American city on earth, things can get a little… incongruous.

Most of it you can laugh off. How all the hotel staff have to greet you with “Bonjour”, for example. And the Eiffel Tower 2 – I mean, they get the scale wrong, but the shape of the thing is still its main attraction, and it’s hard to fuck that up.

No, what will really mess with your head is the restaurants on the main indoor shopping/dining street, I mean boulevard. See, some of them have “indoor” seating sections, where you pretend you’re in a little French eaterie with a ceiling 20’ above your head, and “outdoor” seating sections, where you pretend you’re at a table outside a French eaterie, taking in the air, watching all the beautiful people promenade by, and that the ceiling 20’ above your head – yes, the one that’s painted with a fake blue sky and little white painted clouds and some forced perspective from the upper stories of buildings – that that’s the REAL THING. And that you’re not breathing exactly the same air-conditioned indoor air as the rest of the poor heaving mob of humanity crammed into the place.

If cognitive dissonance has an LD50 dose, I think I exceeded it right there.

So, I’m at another conference, and people keep making the same mistakes over and over again. I know that psu has whined about kids being taught presentation skills these days, but ye gods, if they can just teach them to stop doing these things I say it’s time well spent:

1.      If you say "the picture is a little small, but I hope you can see…"
No, we can't. Why did you think we could?

2.      If you say "unfortunately the green doesn't show up very well…"
It never does. Why did you use it?

3.      If you move your hands around in mid-air to trace out what's happening in a diagram…
How are we supposed to watch your hands and the screen at the same time?

I always forget that my Exchange server is “special”, in that under the covers it reports me as being “@windows.microsoft.com” instead of just “@microsoft.com”. I forget because most of the time all the layers of email addressing goop that sit above it hide that nasty reality. And because I forget, I always get bitten when something actually demands that I really am who I say I am. Like, say, the MSN Spaces email-to-blog authentication service.

Thanks to Mark Patterson for figuring this out. Now all is well again, and I don’t need a Hotmail workaround

Mark Patterson and I have been trying to figure out why I can’t post to this blog from my email account at work. It looks like we’ve narrowed it down to the particular dogfood Exchange server that I’m on. Thankfully, there’s an easy work-around: I can post to it from my Hotmail account instead! I don’t even have to use Hotmail’s web interface, since Outlook can send this email via the Hotmail servers:

I'm not sure why Amazon chose to highlight just one of my technical reports, but it's definitely amusing to see it listed as "Out of print - limited availability" (thanks to Stewart for finding this).

Posting from an  client just seems so... wrong...