This post was composed using Windows Live Writer. 

Welcome to the Windows Live Writer team blog! We are excited to announce that the Beta version of Windows Live Writer is available for download today.

I’ve met J.J. and his team a number of times since they were aquired. To use a cliche, I’m super-excited by the work that they are doing - and so are they. And it shows!

Check out Writer* today. It makes writing blog entries 10000% easier and simpler.

(I’ve always known this app as Writer - I’m so glad we didn’t go with a name like Window Live Blog Editor Center” something. Phew!)

I distinctly remember this NY Times headline from about a year ago:  ‘Profits, Not Jobs, on the Rebound in Silicon Valley’. According to the WSJ, it looks like things are changing:

WSJ.com - Boomtown Redux: Job Market Heats Up In Silicon Valley
The nation’s technology capital lost 185,000 jobs, or one in five, between 2001 and 2005. This year, state economists expect a net inflow of people into the area for the first time in six years.

[snip]

“People keep saying Silicon Valley is dead, and it’s never true,” says Sean Randolph, president of the Bay Area Economic Forum, a San Francisco-based group that studies the region’s economy. “There’s an immense infrastructure for research and development here,” he says, that helps push Silicon Valley continually up the skills curve.

One of its big draws is money. Average annual pay for the region’s tech workers rose to $70,000 last year from around $64,000 in 2003, according to Joint Venture Silicon Valley, a nonprofit business group. Executive positions typically command six-figure packages. While stock options have come under fire amid cases of improper dating of grants, many tech companies, especially start-ups, are still doling them out heavily. That offers employees the chance to cash in big if their company goes public and its stock price rises.

[snip]

But in February 2005, fed up with Minnesota winters, Mr. Boos called two recruiters. He told them he wanted a job at a California start-up that was heading toward an initial public offering, which would offer him a chance to get rich. Mr. Boos quickly landed an interview with Good Technology, a fast-growing company that competes with BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd.

By April 2005, Mr. Boos was close to an offer from Good Technology. At the same time, he was in discussions for the job of chief information officer at Los Angeles-based MySpace, a social-networking Web site aimed at teenagers that has since been acquired by News Corp. With the competing offer looming, Mr. Boos, asked for — and got — a sizable chunk of stock options in Good Technology. He also received a salary matching that of his previous job. (He declined to reveal numbers.)

Mr. Boos paid nearly $1.4 million for a Silicon Valley home, according to public records, three times what he got for his Minnesota home last year. His wife, Rhonda, who had worked for Sun Microsystems in Minnesota for 17 years, transferred to Sun’s Silicon Valley headquarters from Minneapolis and received a 15% increase in total compensation.

“I came here for the future equity,” says Mr. Boos. “The ante to get into this game is very high, but so is the potential return.”

There are definitely some interesting factors in play right now…  for example, too much money chasing after money, the increased costs/hurdles of going public, the pace of aquisitions, the fluctuating housing market, possible stagflation… etc.
Interesting times ahead.

This was a fun weekend read:

ChangeThis :: Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap?
Management Advice: Which 90% is Crap?

Here’s a good quote from the piece:

My Stanford colleague, Tony Bryk, describes American educational policy as “The United States of Amnesia,” because the same bad ideas—like flunking lots kids (i.e., “ending social promotion”) and tying teachers’ pay to student scores—sweep through school systems every few years. There is a huge body of research that shows they are ineffective, yet no one seems to remember these policies have failed over and over in the past. And even when an idea, like “Hamel’s Law,” is supported by evidence, as I said, no progress can be made on ideas that are
constantly being rediscovered. That is why, after I read about Hamel’s “New Math,” I proposed Sutton’s Law: “If you think you have a new idea, you are wrong, Someone else probably already had it. This idea isn’t original either; I stole it from someone else.”

Classic.

Are we perpetually doomed to repeat our mistakes? How can we avoid being sold new ideas which are just bad ideas (barely) repackaged? I think the first step is to identify them - this piece provides some clues as to how.
Another great quote:

Sure, some business thought sales people are outright lying, but psychological research suggests that many others have actually convinced themselves to believe their own lousy logic and arguments. Human beings see what they believe, and disregard the rest.

Ah… good ol’ confirmation bias.

At first, when I saw this headline, I thought someone was quoting from The Onion.

But then I realized that it wasn’t:

September 11 — what year? 30 percent of Americans don’t know - Yahoo! News
Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York’s World Trade Center and the
Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.
While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper.

But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer.

Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.

This memory black hole is essentially the problem of the older crowd: 48 percent of those who did not know were between the ages of 55 and 64, and 47 percent were older than 65, according to the poll.

The Post telephone survey was carried out July 21-24 among 1,002 randomly selected adults. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

Well, on the upside, I guess it’s good that 95% were able to remember what day and year it was.

British police thwart aircraft bomb plot on Yahoo! News Photos

Some examples of the liquids and gels that are prohibited in carry on luggage are seen on display at a security check point at Logan International Airport in Boston, Thursday, Aug. 10, 2006. U.S. flyers endured heightened security Thursday, and some flights were canceled or delayed after the discovery of a terror plot aimed at airlines traveling from Britain to the United States.

My coworkers are telling me that today wasn’t a good day to be at the airport.

Schwieb » Blog Archive » Saying goodbye to Visual Basic
Well, its been less than two days since the MacBU announced that Visual Basic is being removed from the next version of Mac Office. The news has created quite a firestorm on many Mac forums (I’ve been scanning MacNN, Ars Technica, and a few others) and I received some very strongly expressed opinions about it in comments on yesterday’s post. I’d like to take some time to express my own views and experiences on the removal of Mac VB.

If you care about Visual Basic on the Mac, you should read this very in depth post by Schwieb.

As I noted in an earlier post, I dropped by the Google Dance tonight having never been to one before. Google certainly did their best to keep people entertained - they had a dunking booth, photo op booths, product demos, robot wars, ice cream, make-your-own-music video, and… well… dancing.

Here are some pictures:

The green screen on the left allowed people to have their heads appear superimposed over the bodies of dancers so that you could make your own music video.

Product demos were offered. Unfortunately, there was no one there from the Google Toolbar team. I would’ve liked to have met my counterpart - that would’ve been interesting.

There were lots of people dancing.

I’ve come to realize that I’ll never be a fan of It’s It’s - no matter what branding. They’re simply too hard and too thick for my tastes (no pun intended). On the same topic, I’ve been to Google a number of times now for lunch, and I’m pretty sure that most attendees would agree with me when I note that the free food served at this event was not on par with the regular stuff.

(As an aside, have that many people really never seen yellow watermelons before?)
All in all, I had a good time. It was great to be able to spend some time with some of my friends from Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo.

On a related note, the schwag that Google was giving out at SES was a bit peculiar:

Aren’t these “signal strength” increasing stickers known to do nothing other than sucker you into spending money on something that doesn’t do anything and make you feel better because you tried to do something?

Finally, SES was definitely fun. In some ways, I miss attending WWDC (especially Stump The Experts), but this was a good change of scenery. It was also a great opportunity for me to learn about the progress of adCenter!

Update: Wow it looks like I scooped Google’s own blog on the ice cream bit.

I was at SES today and I randomly ended up having lunch with Ron Faith of Insightful. Ron works on this:

Text mining and fact discovery | Insightful InFact
In today’s data-driven world, the rising tide of information threatens to overwhelm our ability to make informed decisions. Faced with the exponential expansion of information and information sources-reports, research, emails, blogs, news stories, documents, and much more-how can anyone know with certainty that they have reviewed all available relevant information? Or uncovered the facts and relationships critical to sound decision-making?

It was a very interest conversation, covering topics such as cultural changes at Microsoft, to too much VC money chasing money (recurring meme!), to search algorithms that are not PageRank, to organic/dynamic taxonomies/ontologies. Very fascinating stuff. What struck me the most was how excited he was about the work that Insightful is doing. Indeed - this is a very interesting problem space and the strategies they are using have a very good moat. Check out the link above to learn more.

I’ll have to keep my eye out on this firm. If only I had a data mining tool to do so.