Unthinkability

I have not felt this ignorant since 1991.  Right now, I feel like a beginner, a novice, an incompetent loser.  My new custom South Park avatar accurately represents my current mental condition.

Before today (before Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation – a.k.a. WPF), I was a brilliant software designer, grunting out ingenious systems daily for my benevolent overlords.  Now, I am a babe in the woods and I’m grumpy.  Such is the terrible and mighty power of Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation and the Expression Toolset.

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I stumbled upon a very important initiative from Microsoft: HealthVault.  Here’s their blurb:

When it’s your job to protect your family’s health, you need every advantage. Imagine if you had a way to collect, store, and share the health information critical to your family’s well-being.  HealthVault is the new and FREE way to do just that.

They officially opened the site in October ‘07, and I only found out about it through Jon Udell’s blog.  Not that Jon isn’t a media giant, but I would have thought I would have heard about it through one of my other Microsoft information channels.  So, with a few hours to ponder the project, here is what I know:

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The long-awaited Zune software and firmware update hit the Internet last night, and I have upgraded my system. 

I have been waiting for this integrated podcast support, and I like much of what I see in that area of the application.  It needs more work, but its a great start.  I also like the updated firmware on the Zune device itself.  It seems peppier/faster, and it drives a bit better than the original firmware.  In general, I like the Zune for its functionality and design, and the platform has a ton of potential.  I will likely buy another Zune for my wife for Christmas.  (I hope she doesn’t read this!)

With those glowing words of praise, I will now unleash my river of discontent with the general direction of the new Zune desktop software user interface. 

The only way for me to like the new Zune desktop software is to:

1. Be glad for the new [mysterious and magical] podcast support, and
2. Learn to enjoy scrolling through lists, and
3. Pretend that I am a 75 year-old grandmother that has only 8 things that she listens to, doesn’t care how things work or when things will be finished downloading. UPDATE: I found the active download list… in the Marketplace tab.

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This is an incredibly simple and powerful idea: Test your vocabulary, and advertisers donate 10 grains of rice for each word you get correct.  Here are some snippets of explanation from the FreeRice Project:

[FreeRice helps you and the sponsors donate rice] 10 grains at a time. Here is how it works. When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people.

FreeRice automatically adjusts to your level of vocabulary. It starts by giving you words at different levels of difficulty and then, based on how you do, assigns you an approximate starting level.

There are 50 levels in all, but it is rare for people to get above level 48.

The rice is paid for by the advertisers whose names you see on the bottom of your vocabulary screen.

The rice is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP).

This is a stellar example of geeks at work for the betterment of humanity.  The technology is on par with a high school computer programming class, but the business execution obviously required some expertise. 

I  donated 330 grains of rice and hovered around level 40.  How well will you and your friends do? 

Craig Shoemaker, fellow developer and father and producer of PolymorphicPodcast.com, announced that he is now working for Infragistics as a technical evangelist. 

Check out his job title: “New Media Evangelist“  Nice work, Craig!

Craig’s humble and easy-going style sucks you into his podcasts.  His sincerity is genuine, and I find him instantly likable.  Also, I get the feeling that he is horrible at lying, so that makes me trust him even more.  Now that he works for Infragistics, I trust him to differentiate between “the marketing” and “the message,” and I hope the folks at Infragistics really grok this whole new media thing.

You might know that I have some history in the podcasting world, and that I am a militant advocate of ‘new media.’  This is a brilliant move by Infragistics because smart companies hire domain experts, create conversations, and keep themselves in the middle of those conversations.  It’s interesting that these conversations do not need to be (and should never be) about overt product evangelism;  The conversations should be about customer evangelism!

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A friend/customer of mine pointed out that I use some odd words in one of my e-mails.  I had sent him an e-mail about some firmware updates for his devices, and I said that one of the updates was ‘an attractive candidate’ for a problem that he was having. I was really thinking in terms of “an attractive target patch to kill a bug,” but he got an amorous vibe from the phrase and asked if my wife ever got jealous of my attraction to firmware updates.

That got me thinking about the phrase “target patch to kill a bug.”  Our terminology is quite violent.

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I recently “harshed on” the new Zune 2.2 desktop software. It is interesting just how “close” they came to getting it perfect.  As predicted, I have now grown completely comfortable with the new software and now find it quite neato.  It is BETTER than the old Zune 1.0 desktop software by leaps and bounds.  Here are the things that I love about the v2.2 update:

• Duh.  Podcast Subscriptions.  The subscription process is solid, and the downloading logic is equally well-baked.  Bravo.
• The Zune device syncs back to desktop software to report “what has played” and will automatically mark the track(s) as “played” in the desktop software.  As such, it will automatically load the next item(s) onto your Zune.
• If you don’t finish listening to a podcast, the Zune device places a bookmark where you left off in a long podcast.  When you come back to it after sync’ing or listening to something else, the device prompts you to resume.  Finally.  Wicked awesome.
• I can watch video podcasts.  Yes, we all know that it was an obvious “missing feature” in version 1.  Still, VH1 Best Week Ever is the best thing ever… ever.

Still, the very small gap between “perfect” and the new version 2.1 software felt bigger when I first tried it.  That’s the irony of software. 

Making software is much like a movie; A great movie is only 2% better than a crappy movie.  If you can overlook the “dingers” in an otherwise-good movie, you might grow to love it for its good moments.  When I see a crappy movie created by a group of talented actors and directors, I ask myself “could that have been fixed with some pickups and some editing?”  The answer is usually “yes.”

An important advantage to writing software vs. making movies: With software, you can release updates!