Wel­come To my Ex­peri­men­tal Web-Log
    -Henry Burgess

I can recommend "Naked in Baghdad" by Anne Garrels.   We had dinner with Anne a few weeks ago at a NPR "event" and she was as charming in person as on the air.  It's a quick 219 pages that brought back memories of her reports for NPR as well as insights not reported.

SNOW!   Today we had snow, and it was not predicted by the weather people.   I may have found a "remnant" of Giallo Vicenza granite for our powder room remodel.  We will see tomorrow.   The APS battery backup kicked in a few times, again proving it's worth the cost, I  guess.  I think "wet" snow is falling on power lines...now there is a book title "Wet Snow Falling on Power Lines" :-)

Rain, rain, rain!  Went to Fry's for the first time (at least for the first time in Seattle) with my good friend Daryl.  I was greatly disappointed.  The prices were not great.  I did but a battery I was looking for.   But they had sold out of the camera I was going to look at.

We are having some very cold weather.  We hastily put up a temporary greenhouse for some plants.  Even so it got below freezing in there last night.   The dog house is finished, I'll post pictures at some point.  I have not had a chance to get serious with the programming, but soon.  I also hope to post some examples of using Microsoft Office Document Imaging.   I think most people don't realize how much like PDF and acrobat the features are.  The components are all accessible as well, so I'll demo that with some code fragments.  TTFN

After some time off from this blog, I am back.  I have started a two projects (in addition to redecorating which is taking forever).

1. I am building a dog house, I'll take some pictures in the next few days.

2. I am fooling around with C# and my first project is to build a GUI front end for robocopy.  So far this is about 1/2 done.  I have learned how to deal with running robocopy as a process and collecting the output from stdout and stderr.  I also 'discovered' that c# did not provide me with a way to defer updating of a editbox, I got around that by using peek, when I see that there is nothing more to read I then update the edit box.   I'll put the experimental source code up here soon, just before I re-write it to clean things up and properly comment the code.   I just want to fool with keeping the last few directories in the registry so that frequent copies don't have to be re-typed.  I also want to look for a better directory finder.

We had a raccoon visit the pond last night.  It turned over the recently repotted water plants.  In search of goldfish, no doubt.

With all the good weather I have been to busy to add to my blog.   I decided to give Scoble some advice (via e-mail).  A while back Dave Winer was saying that he could tell Robert had not gone one-on-one with Bill Gates; I gave Robert the same advice I give everyone on the subject:  Know what you know and don't know and when to say "I will find out".  After a speech Bill gave, long ago, I approached him afterwards to say: "I don't know how these CD-ROMS work, but I am going to figure out how to make one and use it".  A few days later I was reporting directly to Bill and he was sending me e-mail asking when I would buy a 600 megabyte hard drive.  At the time 600 megabyte hard drives were the size of washing machines (ok, a small washing machine) and we didn't know where we would come up with that much data to fill it!

My latest idea for getting rid of spam is to provide a service that positively identifies people and organizations.  In this way mail can be traced to a actual sender and mail agents can take appropriate action on e-mail that is from people or organizations that are not identified.   I can then arrange for my mail box to only be filled with mail from people I know and can identify.  I have figured out how tro bootstrap the system on top of the existing internet.

With all the good weather I have been to busy to add to my blog.  We have a number of bunnies living in the yard and one died the other day.  The mother of the dead bunny was defending the lifeless body from crows.  I burred the little fellow.   The bunnies like to eat the clover that is growing in our yard because I have not bothered to give the lawn weed-and-feed.  We rather like the bunnies which appear in the morning and evening hours.  As long as they stay away from the garden they are welcome.

The baby birds are gone!  That was quick.  We hope that the neighbors cat did not finally discover them.  So, sorry, no pictures.

Today is Flag Day.  It is also our 23 wedding anniversary.  I always say, "if you can go 23 years, you can go 46", so we are just beginning.

The history of flag day is here.  having your wedding on a "day" is helpful, especially to someone with a failing memory...

Mom bird did not like me near the nest so I quickly shot this blurred picture of what we think are three sleeping babies at 9am:

This bird's nest:

is on our back porch in a planting pot:

We had planed on replanting that pot, but now we will wait to see if we can see new baby birds.  If we do, I will include pictures.

I found this interesting audio card from with multiple channel output (4in 10 out).  Today is a drywall day, I am going to patch all the holes in the wall in my wiring closet because the wiring closet is also the broom closet and my wife is right in saying it looks "un-finished".

Movie Recommendations: Bend It Like Beckham and Down with Love.  Renée Zellweger proves quite the actress after that very near-pornographic film Chicago.  Down is full of laughs and very enjoyable - 3.5 stars from me.  Bend is excellent.  Maybe it is a bit to "Disney" in it's sweetness and lack of evil or kung-fu or special effects, just darn fine movie making and worth the price of admission.  I recommend it - 3.5 stars from me.

Car Repair: My Mercedes looks like new, thanks to Bellevue Auto Rebuild and the insurance company for the young woman that rear-ended me.  Next I have to take the beast in for it's 60k.

Software Patents: I am running over to Microsoft today to sign some more patent applications and see the guys for lunch.

I have been “on leave” from Microsoft now for over a year.  Being on leave means you don’t get pay and don’t get insurance and you don’t vest stock.  But I did get to keep my badge and e-mail so I can keep in contact with people and projects and occasionally send a remark to the Chief Architect.  Today I ran over to Microsoft Security to get a new card-key because the smart-card software has changed and I want to download some software that MS Research has been working on.  My good friend, Mike, encouraged me to update so that I can RAS in.  I haven’t had a need to do that until now.  But, every time I visit the corporate campus I am hit with some of the reasons I can’t return to work.  Chief among these is my memory.  After getting the new card from the Security folks I needed to “activate” which required me to log on to a workstation in the lobby of the Security offices.  I forgot my password.  Sigh, the memory is going!  Before I left on leave I was forgetting the names of people that work for me in staff meetings.  Then there are the people, great people at Microsoft, but so young!

One of the things I have been doing is serving as maintenance engineer for all our home computers.  This past week the computer I use most often has blue-screened at power-up with something about IRQ greater then something.  This is worrisome.  I realize that I don’t have any software from Dell that will run diagnostics on my system.  It needs a stress test.  You would think that in the 21^st century I could contact Dell over the internet and they should see some log files that would say to them, this computer has a bad XYZ chip or something.  Maybe Dell does have this capability.  I don’t know.

While driving back from my bad-memory experience at Microsoft I was thinking about how egregious the recent Passport flaw really was.  It says to me that people are not thinking about how their systems can fail, or at least not hard enough.   I don’t believe that there is any reward for creating software and systems that don’t exhibit these design flaws.  I don’t think there are enough negative consequences.  Oh, it was quickly patched, I know.  But was the process that allowed such a defect to go unnoticed patched as well?

Well, I have been doing a poor job of keeping this journal.  The Chicken and chips have been spread all about and now I find that I must fix the sprinkler system that has a slow leak.  I have been putting ball valves just below all the quick-connects because they are prone to leaks.   But I grow tired of this process and may have to get professional help.

The exchange student has come and gone.  She spent most of her time with the other students.  We had a few conversations but I blew it on our initial meeting by shaking hands rather than the kiss on the cheek ritual.