Brandon Live!

And home sweet new home!

Yesterday I experienced the first early Alaska Airlines flight of my life.  In fact, we were a whopping 35 minutes early when we landed at SeaTac.  Less than 2 hours later, my friend Jon arrived from New York.  He graduated from college last weekend, rented a van, and drove across the country with his father.  Last night the two of us signed a lease on a house in Kirkland, and will hopefully begin moving in as soon as tomorrow.  Good timing, given that Monday is a holiday.

My trip to New York was great.  I spent Friday night at my mom’s place in Jersey, then drove up to Albany on Saturday and spent two nights there with some of my closest friends from high school and college.  Several of them graduated that same Saturday, so naturally some celebration was in order.

Monday I drove back to NY, checked into my hotel, and met up with the rest of the MS gang.  We took care of the necessary preparations at our ESS booth before meeting up with some of the local MS representation for dinner at a nice little Argentinian-Italian restaurant.  The conference took place on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Our own Paul and Michelle gave a presentation during the Microsoft-sponsored luncheon on Tuesday.  We had a great number of inquiries about both SharePoint 2007 and our upcoming Windows Live Search client.  We also had someone giving a very compelling demo of the Knowledge Network add-on for SharePoint 2007.  The demonstration generated a lot of buzz from those who saw it, which drew more and more inquiries.

Check back, as I’ll be posting some more details about the Enterprise Search Summit 2006.

I’m in my seat on my alaska airlines flight out to NY for the next week or so. They just told us to turn off our phones… oops.

Anyway, I’m going to spend the weekend in Albany with some friends that are graduating, then I’ll be attending the Enterprise Search Summit in NY. If you’re there, make sure you stop by our booth!

So yesterday I stumbled upon this piece by Scott M. Fulton covering our Windows Live Search client annoncement.  Seeing so many blatant inaccuracies compelled me to send feedback (since the site lacks comments) correcting them.  Blogging has gotten me into this habit, as blogs by their nature give me the opportunity to post comments and point out something that the original poster got wrong or simply missed.

A few things I pointed out were:
-Windows Desktop Search is not in beta (as he claimed)
-WDS is a free Windows component (something he questioned)
-WDS is NOT an Office 2007 product (don’t know where he got that idea)
-The Windows Live Search web and client teams do in fact know about each other and are quite close, not seperated by vast organization divides as Fulton erroneously suggested.

My suggestion to Fulton was that he correct the more obvious errors (like calling WDS a Beta when it was released over a year ago), and that he talk to Microsoft PR before posting erroneous information about MS products.

Instead, he posted a follow-up that takes pieces of my private feedback message (without my consent) and blog entries and makes it sound like I granted him an interview or something.

It’s not so much that I mind anything he posted, as everything I said was true as far as I know and all publicly available information.  What bothers me is that he posted this without my consent or even awareness.

So what’s the lesson for today?  Journalists aren’t bloggers.  The bloggers I know would have asked before they posted anything mentioning my name or quoting my private e-mail or feedback message.  That’s because bloggers are real people.  They have principles.  They have souls.  Journalists, well… that’s another story.

It figures.  Not 3 days after I posted about my car being relatively free of incidents lately, someone comes along and bumps into my car while it’s parked… again.  This time it was parked in my little carport stall thing outside my apartment.  And of course the culprit wasn’t kind enough to leave a note.  Oh well, I’m dropping it off at the body shop tonight before I fly out to NY for the next week or so (to fix the damage from the last two people that hit my car while parked) and hopefully they’ll be able to buff/sand it out without me needing new paint (again).

It’s almost unreal how unlucky my car has been since moving out here.  However, if this is life’s way of balancing out all the other amazing things in my life, I think I’m making out pretty well in this bargain.

So StatTraq tells me what search terms bring people to this site (which is only ever from MSN or Yahoo since Google still refuses to index this site).  Anyway, I’ll let a screenshot do the talking:

Today we made our first public announcement about the project I’m currently working on.  It’s a Windows Live Search client application, currently without any finalized branding.

And we have a blog!  - It’s pretty basic right now.  Expect to see a lot more about our team and what we’re doing very soon.

The announcement came this morning as Dane Glasgow demoed the application during Bill Gates’ keynote presentation at the annual CEO Summit. 

Many on our team spent long hours working to get ready for the demo and we’re happy that it went very well.  We have gotten a lot of bad press about the name (or lack thereof), and a lot of people not understanding our goals.  But hopefully that will change with time.  I think when our beta release gets out to the public things will start to make a lot more sense!

• The Spring weather in Seattle
• Weighing in at 170.4 lbs this morning
• Windows Vista running on my Mac
• Going back to NY for the first time in nearly a year
• Seeing all my friends back home graduating
• Only one of them going to work for the enemy
• A girl that looks over my video collection and chooses a Mystery Science Theater 3000 DVD
• then kicks my butt in Dead Or Alive
• Nobody has hit my car in like at least a week

Bungie has a great page up for the Halo 3 announcement, including the trailer from E3.

Nobody saw it coming. Halo 3! Who knew? For the last year or two, people have speculated about what our next project was and surprisingly, in all that time, not a single person guessed that it would be Halo 3. Not one.

 

We declare it the best kept secret ever.

Damn, do these guys know how to make an entrance.

Some updates from the Microsoft E3 Press Conference:

-HALO 3 announced, trailer up on Xbox Live
-GRAND THEFT AUTO 4 will be on the 360 the first day.
-Exclusive deal for espisodic content for GTA4 on Xbox Live Marketplace
-Forza 2 and Fable 2 announced, trailers on Live
-Test Drive Unlimited and Lost Planet demos are up on Xbox Live
-Xbox Live Anywhere - On Vista, and on Windows Mobile phones.
-Splinter Cell:  Double Agent in September.
-Buy Zuma on the 360, play it on Vista or your phone with the same gamertag
-Design custom decals on your PC, and apparently upload to Live and use them in your Xbox 360 games.

Or might as well have.

Today they announced that they’ve cut major features from the PS3 including the ridiculous “dual HDMI” feature they’d previously hyped to kingdom come.  They also annouced a $500 price point for the base model of the Playstation 3.  This model lacks countless features like built-in wireless, HDMI support, and memory stick + SD slots and includes a 20GB not upgradeable hard drive.

Keep in mind that with no HDMI, this is no longer a $500 BluRay player in any true sense.  Because of Sony’s “content protection” schemes - you’ll need the $600 player to watch movies in full resolution.

It looks like Sony is content to hand this round to Nintendo and Microsoft on a silver platter.

More at IGN.