Proximity doesn’t confer talent…

Today’s an interesting day. I’ve over on Microsoft Campus in Building 99 to help review Tech Ed dry runs for the IT Manager track. 99 is a new building, with a floor-to-ceiling atrium and large stairwell. It’s the new home of Microsoft Research, which is one of the largest (in terms of $$) pure research divisions of any company in the world. That may be, but today I didn’t see any human powered helicopters or levitating Segways or the like (jet belts are SO passé).

What I did see is the former president of India giving a speech and having a Q&A session, via webcast, on an enormous movie-theater-sized screen and projector in the atrium. So interesting here on Microsoft campus, with little Priuii shuttle cars flitting about providing transportation between the little city here of buildings.

RichCopy

Just saw that my friend Joe has commented on an article by  another friend Joshua about a killer file copy utility called RichCopy. It certainly looks like the successor to the ubiquitous RoboCopy, and far more.

One of my great failings in life – besides not investing in Starbucks in the early 90’s when I did understand the value of a latte – is I never got around to writing a GUI for Robocopy, which is a command line utility. Derk Benisch of Microsoft finally did, and Josh mentions that his article on it has been viewed more than 220,000 times. <sigh> Fame and fortune continue to elude me :). So it’s a pleasure to see this integrated, GUI-based, multithreaded utility available to us all. Tell your admin friends!

North Korea

I recently heard a devastatingly accurate (and funny) description of North Korea from a British journalist:

“North Korea is like a slightly autistic child at a family gathering, throwing toys out of its pram to get attention.”

I suppose one could argue it’s throwing Molotov cocktails out of it’s pram.