Philip Richardson

Hi there - if you are reading this then you might not have noticed that my blog has moved to: http://www.philiprichardson.org/blog.

 

RSS: http://www.philiprichardson.org/blog/rss.

I'm still getting some RSS hits on the old site (the site you are currently reading).

 

All new content is now up on my new blog: http://www.philiprichardson.org/blog.

 

Please update your RSS readers to point at: http://www.philiprichardson.org/blog/rss.

 

My blog URL has now moved!

 

Please update your links:

Blog: http://www.philiprichardson.org/blog

Feed: http://www.philiprichardson.org/blog/rss

Charles Eliot has just started a blog on msdn.com! Charles is our 'slave driver' on Titan.....

Last night we drank the last of the Ivanhoe Premium Reserver Shiraz 2001. A couple years back I found this powerful Hunter Valley Shiraz (very different from the South Australia Shiraz which most Americans are used to drinking). The original 'punch' of the wine had receded to be replaced by a sophisticated 'Hunter' taste which went perfectly with my nice rare BBQ'd steak.

 

When I'm back in the Hunter next I'll be sure to drop in to Ivanhoe and try their latest vintage.

Today the CRM Program Management (PM) team launched our blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/crm. Our aim to is publish a healthy stream of CRM content for customers, partners and prospects to consume. Feel free to post comments on the site with feedback and suggestions.

I've dumped bloglines (too many crazy bugs) and gone back to RSS Bandit. It's been a while since I used it and I'm really pleased with it's progress since then.

So I completed my thinkweek paper thing (well it's not a 'whole' paper just 8 pages to 'drop into' my bosses one) - which should be interesting considering they are only supposed to be 10-12 pages :). To be honest I wasn't as productive as I could have been: thanks to Elder Scrolls IV.

 

Last night Ellie and I went to Coho for dinner. It was good - probably one of the better meals I've had there. Spotted Jason Hunt at the table next to me of Invoke Systems fame and our friends Shelly & Chris were also a few tables away. I avoided contact - since I was in one of those 'don't talk to people outside the relationship moods'.

 

Just made a nice margarita (Sauza Hornitos, Grand-M and Lemon Juice). My appreciation for tequila is developing and I think I can actually 'taste the difference' in quality. Tonight the BBQ season begins and the trusty Australian BBQ (shipped all the way from Sydney) has been cleaned up from its winter hibernation. We also have the Ivanhoe Shiraz from the Hunter Valley (I'll report on it's condition tomorrow).

 

New blog site will go live soon - still ironing out some environmental bugs.

I just got tapped to help my boss out with a thinkweek paper. Originally I was going to write my own - but I decided to defer until December (as my radical idea needed a little more germination). My bosses paper is cool though and it's about something I'm pretty passionate about.

If you aren't a Microsoft FTE you can ignore this post.

 

I recently posted on our Fantasy-RPG's public folder:

Our wednesday night game is looking for an extra player. We play pretty much every Wednesday in building 'x' from 6:00pm to 9:30pm. We plan to spend the next 2-3 weeks trying out Dogs in the Vineyard (with a Jedi/Samurai focus) and then it's back to D&D for 6 month campaign in a custom setting. The last two months we spend playing/developing a custom setting.

 

Email me for info and I can put you in contact with our GMs.

Tonight we will play the 6th session in my custom designed game system. We have been building the system and setting iteratively each week. It's an fun and interesting process. In the end we will have a custom system 'on the shelf' designed for people to run 'quick one off games'.

 

One piece of wisdom: don't develop an RPG while in the middle of spec crunch. After working on specs all day the last thing you want to do is work on an RPG (which is pretty much: a spec).

My new blog site is still delayed. I can't complain since the price of free hosting is unplanned downtime.

 

The URL will be http://www.philiprichardson.org/blog and the RSS Feed's URL will be http://www.philiprichardson.org/blog/rss.

 

Myself, Ellie and another couple (Shelly & Chris) went to Mixtura on Saturday night. It was our second time and the first time for Shelly & Chris. I went with a couple of tapas followed by the lamb shank main and the chocolate cake thing for dessert (all washed down with pisco sours). Ellie opted for a very similar strategy (with the big south american steak and an eclectic mix of caipirhnas and martinis). Shelly & Chris went with the all out Tapas approach as we did at our first outing to Mixtura.

 

Overall: Mixtura continues to excel - providing extremely good value food and service. It is clearly becoming the restaurant on the eastside. I'd love to invest $$ in it.

I was tempted to flag this post as 'Microsoft' - but that triggers cross syndication to Microsoft.com.

 

Rory's monkdom is coming to an end - get your free voucher.

I have a suspicion that there is a geocache next to my house ... at least a dozen times I've seen people with hand held GPS devices on weekends comb the empty paddock behind the house. Their intense demeanour and their little gadgets remind of a bad star trek episode where they go back in time.

I just unsubscribed from Paul Greenberg's blog. The dancing spidermen pushed me over the edge.

 

So I've pretty much completed my new blog software for philiprichardson.org/blog. My hoster is down at the moment while they fix a nasty storage problem (they are free - so I don't expect five nines) so it will go up for pre-production testing next week.

For those interested here is the feature list:

Blog Homepage + Posts etc

Admin Stats

Blog History Page

Create, Update, Delete Posts

RSS Feed

Bloglines OPML integration (seamlessly republishes the bloglines OPML)

Inbound Trackbacks

Outbound Technorati Ping

 

In the end I was too lazy to use the new ASP.NET master pages and their membership provider. I'll probably add this stuff later on. I also need to wire up a decent editor (maybe InfoPath 12) at some point.

I received an email this moring inviting me to join a private Microsoft CRM mailing list. This invitation provoked some interesting thoughts and sparked an interesting mail thread within the team.

 

In the end I decided not to join the private community (they were looking for MVPs, product team people etc). My #1 goal is to work on Titan. Unfortunately anything else is secondary (I'm a Feature PM not an Evangelist): therefore any time spent in a private community would be time not spent in a public one.

 

In the end one simply has to ask themself: what would Robert Scoble do?

I managed to get most of my new website working. The only thing left is the forms security for administration. I was hoping to use NTLM but the config on my web host is causing problems. I enjoyed the new set of controls in ASP.NET 2.0 and I really love the new set of tools around strongly typed datasets. My hoster suffer a massive disk failure this week (can't complain since I host for free) so the site will go up for testing next week and then probably go live the week after.

 

I still need to write the technorati ping and the incoming trackback code.

Today I had lunch on the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train with Ellie and another couple (Ben & Caroline). Let's get straight down to business:

 

What is it: A converted passenger train that runs from Renton to Woodinville and back. It is not a steam train and therefore lacks any sense of antiquated charm. It stops at Columbia Winery in Woodinville where you can sample some of region's less charming vintages.

Service: Amusingly pleasant. The manual bill calculation (POS anyone?!?!) and the strange pre-calculated tip was tolerable only for it's quaint obsolescence.

Presentation: The cutlery was filthy. Caroline's plate had a tomato sauce stain (hopefully it was sauce). The martinis were served in a small old fashioned glass (barbarians).

Price: $50/head for food & train ride + we spent another + $17.50 each on drinks. Drink markup was pretty reasonable.

Experience: Shitty. Boring train ride with all the scenic wonder of a drive up the 405. Oh wait - it pretty much followed the 405 the whole freaking way.

Verdict: Not even worth it for tourists.

I was asked yesterday (Friday 14th) by another Australian (at the pub) if it felt strange working on Good Friday (as it is a public holiday in Australia). My response was: "Oh... it's Good Friday today?". It's hard to decide what is more pathetic: the concern over the loss of a public holday (the other Australian does work for the Australian Government - so his concern is understandable) or my lack of religious/cultural awareness.

America has many things wrong with it (all countries have many things wrong with them). There two small things which could revolutionise life in America:

Aaron Elder (Invoke Systems) informs us that we can specify the GUID of records when we create them. As Aaron points out this is an awesome integration feature if the native system uses the uniqueidentifier data type.