Farewell George Budabin
George Budabin, father of Andru Edwards (of GearLive and Seattle MindCamp fame) recently passed away. In memorial, Andru has asked friends to link George’s name to this post, so I’ve happily obliged. I also wanted to take this opportunity to offer my condolences to Andru for his loss. I didn’t even know that Andru was adopted, but I was moved nearly to tears by his account of their relationship. What touched me the most was the happiness they were able to bring to each other right til the end. Farewell George, and god speed.
New WDS Add-ins! (for XP and Vista!)
Today we released updated Add-ins for Windows Desktop Search. Most notable among the changes is that they now support Windows Vista. This includes the UNC Protocol Handler which allows you to index remote network shares (without using Offline Files).
Add-in for Files on Microsoft Networks (UNC and mapped drives)
Back online!
Brandon on Channel 9
Not quite sure if this is my first appearance on there… it very well might be. Anyway, a fellow named Rory was at the XNA Launch Event last week with a camera, and caught my friend Paolo and issued him some sort of challenge related to footwear. I’m still not quite sure what happened, but Rory then did a quick segment with us that ended up in his video, which is really interesting all around.
Check it out. – Paolo and I show up about 10 minutes in.
Brandon Offline
If you live in the Pacific North West or know somebody who does, you probably heard that last Thursday some wind came and knocked down all our trees. We will soon reach the 4-day mark for not having power at my house. Fortunately, the Starbucks down the street from me regained electricity late Saturday night, so coffee and WiFi has eased the wait.
On Friday morning we awoke to find a great deal of what can only be called “tree remains” throughout our yard, driveway, and street. Fortunately nothing of significance hit out house – except for the large fence that faced our southern neighbor. The wind decided it looked suspiciously like a sail – though fortunately our house (specifically, the outside wall of my bedroom) prevented it from getting very far. This led to our neighbors dogs escaping their usual confines and into our backyard, where they managed to trap themselves (awaking my housemate and me to the sound of their whimpering). Overall we made out very well, faring far better than some unfortunate others. If any of my readers or their loved ones are in the PNW, I hope they too made it out unscathed.
Update on “Casino”
It took a little longer than I’d hoped to get it up, but I have posted on the Shell Blog an update concerning the project I’ve been working on for much of the last year which was previously known by the codename “Casino.”
Index PDF files in WDS 3.0 or Vista
Adobe has finally made available a beta release of Adobe Reader 8.0 – including an updated IFilter which fixes the bug the prevented it from working with WDS 3.0 / Windows Vista.
Congrats to Mr. and Mrs. Pirillo!
Check out the photos on Flickr!
Last night Chris Pirillo and Latthana “Ponzi” Indharasophang were wed at a beautiful ceremony in Bellevue. The wedding even had some very “Chris & Ponzi” touches – featuring automated blogging of their vows as they were reading them. Better yet, in a feat of unmatched geek-ery, they read their vows from “origami” UMPCs!
Photo Credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
Niall Kennedy – unsubscribed
I just unsubscribed from Naill Kennedy’s blog. Why? Because it turns out he’s a petty, thoughtless punk. He admits he never made any attempt to contact the blogger or anyone at Microsoft about the post – despite having countless avenues to do so (a comment, an e-mail, the feedback form on the site, etc). Instead he perpetrated a childish and disgusting prank.
As a commenter on Niall’s blog pointed out, Niall is also most likely on the wrong side of the copyright issue he’s using to justify his actions. He hasn’t responded to the question of whether he received permission from the person in the photo (Dean Hachamovitch of the IE team) or the owner of several trademarks that appear in the background of the image (Microsoft), especially considering Niall’s claim that he wants to charge a royalty for use of the photo under a Creative Commons license.
Furthermore, I wonder if Niall received permission from the originator of the photo he replaced his photo on Flickr with (the infamous “goatse” picture) that then appeared on the RSS Team’s blog for a short time. I’m betting he didn’t, and that this is nothing more than an immature prank he’s trying to justify and not an earnest “defense of copyrighted material” as Niall claims. If it were, he would have contacted the blogger, his employer, or his host. And not stooped to such perverted means of retribution.
What do you think?
Snow is nearly gone
Sadly the New York weather that visited Seattle earlier this week seems to be all but gone. In fact it looks like the last remnants are gathering in my backyard for one last party before being washed away by the Seattle rain (you didn’t think the Sun would have anything to do with it – did you?)
It was fun while it lasted, though. My friend Jon (who went to school with me in Rochester) and I drove around on Tuesday enjoying the white-covered trees and blasting Christmas carols through my car’s XM radio. This violated my no-christmas-music-until-december rule, but it was an opportunity that likely won’t present itself again. Without snow, it never feels like Christmas.
So now that I’ve managed to bring snow and ice to Seattle, my next trick will be to replace the word “pop” with the proper term, “soda.” If I succeed there, who knows what ambitious feat I could set my sights on. Maybe I could even teach the people of Seattle how to drive.