Mobile Me

Ahh, the holidays and house projects. With the help of a step ladder and an improvised hook / hook installer made up of a broom handle with a deep saw cut in one end (also resulting in a shallow saw cut on me), I finally installed the Hotchkiss Tri-Lumen mobile I'd bought at the Art Institute of Chicago almost a year ago.

It had been sitting in my closet since last March, because I had to move our cheesy builder's foyer light out of the way and we have about an 18 foot ceiling there. The result is attached!

Microsoft reveals its plans for the next generation data center

...and it's way bigger than most of us are used to thinking. Have you ever stopped to consider the amount of computing power that goes behind these online search, blogging, and services that are becoming more and more of a part of our virtual landscape? I have, because I've been lucky enough to be working with Microsoft's Global Foundation Services Active Directory team. This sort of thing redefines the term "big". And not only big - highly flexible, with the ability very quickly add or remove hundreds or thousands of servers. What's not being talked about right now is how the software infrastructure (like Active Directory) must be designed to cope with this new way of "industrial scale IT". I hope to be able to shed a little light on this soon.

Here's a video about their Generation 4.0 data centers. Note in the European data center there isn't a roof!

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Microsoft Live Labs' Photosynth: 3D constructs from photos

I just stumbled across Photosynth, a very cool free product from Live Labs. You basically take a lot of photos of something - a car, a living  room, an interesting location - and Photosynth stitches it together as an explorable 3D view of that object. Think about it a little, and you can come up with great opportunities to convey a sense of what it's like to be in a place from photos. I just wish I knew it was available before I went to Asia. I can think of some places in Bali that would have been awesome! I think I'll try it out for family gathering over the holidays for family that can't make it.

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Dubya's New Digs

Oh good lord.

George is moving to town in January.

And not even in some isolated, walled-off enclave of homes. He's just off the Dallas North Tollway, west of a neighborhood we once (mistakenly) thought we'd be able to afford eventually.

On the one hand, I'm depressed.

On the other hand...it can't happen soon enough!

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