Brandon Live!

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.