My newfound "hobby " in WPF/E effortlessly landed me to Charles Petzold's website. Notice the hobby is in italics so don't expect me to know a great deal about it, the highlight on hobby is to reflect that it would see me months before I am any good at it. I got really excited to learn about Charles Petzold's Applications = Code + Markup. Although it says Pro Developers in the title, it's definitely in my must read books list (which is very very short ).

While I was lurking at Charles' website, I encountered "It Just Works" in his blog. This has to be the funniest thing he has posted in his blog.

Here are the funny bits -

Perhaps if my mother used lots of various Mac applications and stuck in lots of external devices, the machine would "just work" quite well. But she basically only uses email, so perhaps that's the problem.

On Apple's home page, the most important information they deemed necessary to convey to me was that I needed QuickTime 7 to view even more of those insufferable TV ads where that smug goateed glazy-eyed dork tries to make closed architecture and a complete disregard for backward compatibility seem cool.

To a longtime Windows user, an upgrade from OS X 10.2 to OS X 10.4 seems the equivalent of a free downloadable Service Pack. In the Apple world, however, upgrading from 10.2 to 10.4 costs $129, which is actually more money than we spent for the printer we were trying to install, and would involve a DVD sent through the mails.

I then went to the HP site to see if they had any helpful information — I think I wanted something that said "Don't mind our obsessive-compulsive listing of various OS X versions. Of course, OS X 10.2 will 'just work' just fine" — but once again I discovered a site that shouts a big "Screw You, You Pathetic Loser" to anybody who accesses it with a dial-up.

The HP site actually crashed the iMac. The pointed-finger cursor remained pointed no matter what I pointed it at, nothing on the keyboard worked, the on-off switch didn't work, and we had to resort to turning it off by the power strip.

Here is a fine example of what I mean when I say tech journalists in mainstream media need to know what they are really saying. You can have the greatest security in the world but it is no match against human stupidity.

Oh! The dreadful day of February 3rd, 2007. I'll never forget it. In the past 10 years that I have been suffering from Migraine, there have only been 2 occassions that I've had a repeat occurence within 24 hours. But I never imagined I would have to see the dreaded Migraine Aura 4 times in the same calendar day.

Jim Allchin finally retired from Microsoft on Jan, 30th 2007 following the public release of Windows Vista, after almost 17 years with Microsoft. I have tremendous respect for him. He has been among the pioneers who shaped 2 of the most popular client versions of Windows today. His leadership on Windows Vista has been commendable. It took great courage and forethought to abort midway into the development and start again from scratch. I wish him good luck into his post-retirement life.