::: {.Section1} [casey chesnut, who does things like integrate machine vision into videogames and writes neural nets that defeat CAPTCHAs, says that the PDC was the best conference he’s ever been to, so I guess I’m in the minority in thinking that it wasn’t hardcore enough. ]{style="font-size …

If "hurricane flooding New Orleans" is "utterly predictable disaster with shocking lack of preparation, especially regarding the poor," then how do we feel about the news that bird flu is breaking out in Jakarta's main zoo?

A little more than a year ago, I moved to the Kona side of the Big Island of Hawaii and moved into a house that, among other things, has coffee plants growing like weeds. I was too late to the game to do anything last year, but for the past …

::: {.Section1} [First, I tried in a VPC. That didn't work because it wouldn't accept the activation code. ]{style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"}

[Second, I used PartitionMagic to add a new 20GB partitition on my boot drive. Still wouldn't accept the activation code. [Solved]{style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold"}: Realized that I was …

::: {.Section1} [I loved the first day of PDC, felt a little antsy by the second, and by the time my flight climbed into the early-morning smog of LA yesterday, I was positively muddled. Speaking in a darkened room to a crowd of strangers is the most inefficient means of communication …

::: {.Section1} [Talk about burying the lede! Chris Pratley is beginning to reveal the capabilities of OneNote 12. He starts with import of printed and scanned documents, which they’ll OCR, and only then does he reveal that OneNote will do phonetic [voice-search!]{style="font-weight:bold"}[ ]{style="font-weight:bold"}]{style="font-size …

::: {.Section1} [I can't tell you who got it to work, but in the hallways I saw one of these tiny touchscreen tablets not only running Vista , but running with the "glass" UI effects. Awesome! ]{style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"}

[ ]{style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"} :::

::: {.Section1} [Scoble is saying that the phone deal at the PDC (a super-high-end phone for \$149) was a real screw-up and not the trickle-feed that I was sure it was. At JavaOne, they always play the same game of saying on the first day “Oh, we ran out!” and then …

::: {.Section1} [They have these special presentations in the press room in which certain topics are presented to a group vastly smaller than the general sessions. Generally, these are pretty mellow. At one this afternoon, though, the press made it clear that they are very skeptical that the Avalon / Windows Presentation …

::: {.Section1} [It’s my understanding that this is the RC of VS2005, but Sam Gentile is the first place I actually saw someone else use the phrase…]{style="font-size: 10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy"} :::