This is kinda cool: “Search Google for sites added today, yesterday, within the last seven days, or last 30 days.”

http://www.freshgoo.com/

Sidebar cool thing: If you refresh that page, you'll see a bunch of funny modified Google logos. Kept me busy for a little while!

KC Lemson, who works on the Exchange team at Microsoft, asks if there are any IT bloggers out there who are actually blogging about IT. She's soliciting links from anyone who does, or from people who know of good ones, to see if it would be worthwhile to put together a list.

I think that's a great idea. There are tons of blogs by developers and about specific products, etc., but not that many that are about IT operations and management. I hope this takes off, and it's already made me think a bit about some things that I could be blogging that I have thus far ignored.

From the logs of the original computer geeks, the actual description of the first computer bug. So, that's where the terms “bug” and “debug” come from.

Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".

In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia.

“You can start a very long and pointless discussion by wondering about this topic on the net.”

Yeah, no kidding. Nothing says lame quite like “THAT'S NOT HOW YOU PRONOUNCE THAT!”

Gimmee a break...

Read here: http://www.eeng.brad.ac.uk/help/.faq/.unix/.pronun.html

I was going to be on an airplane about now, landing in sounthern California, but plans changed and so I won't be flying there for a few more weeks. But that's okay, it means I have a four-day weekend that I can spend getting things done around home. I am rather looking forward to that. Not quite as much fun as visiting a friend in California, but that's okay - It will just be more fun when I do get to head that way.

So this, I think, will be lawn and garden weekend at my place. Last weekend, the neighbors and I went to the home-improvement box store across the river over there in Warshington and got materials to build a whole slew of raised garden beds. So, I have a lot of cedar planks, stakes and other stuff just waiting for me to get my act together and start building. I'll go into town and arrange for a truckload of good garden soil to be brought in (the soil here in the hills is rocky and kind of clayish, so ammending is important). Then I can throw my back out moving soil into the raised bed frames. Woo hoo!

The other thing I need to get done is preparing a temporary pad for my new spa/hot tub to sit on. Not sure when it's going to be delivered, but I made the purchase recently and am looking forward to it - and so is my back, let me tell you. I say “temporary pad” because I am hoping in the future to add a deck to the house and move the spa up onto that. Big dreams, but hey - gotta start somewhere, right?

With the weather as nice as it's supposed to be, I am also thinking a trip to Brown's Camp with the 4-wheeler might be in order. Maybe - if not, plenty more weekends ahead.

Mostly I am just looking forward to doing a lot of whatever I want and not worrying about anything else. The blackberry is set to not receive emails, my desk phone is set to go straight to voice mail rather than ringing my cell phone llike it usually does, and I'm ready to disconnect for a few days. I need it.

Wow.

http://www.kartoo.com/

That's cool stuff. Enter a search term/phrase and see the relationships and relative validity of each result. Uses flash, which (for once) is cool (yes, I think flash is entirely over-used).

Bookmarked. Should be fun to watch this grow.

Gonna be a busy week. I'll be in San Diego visiting a family friend starting on Thursday, and won't be coming back til Monday night. Looking forward to it - he joined the US Navy a while back, and he's stationed on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier (the USS John C. Stennis), so I will get to see what a floating city looks like on the inside. That will be fun. 5,000 crew on one ship - amazing!

I also have lots of planning to get done at work on a pretty big project we are trying to get wrapped up. Need to get that one done before the next ones start. Luckily, the next few won't be quite as monstrous, but one thing is for sure: There's more than enough on the horizon to keep all of us very busy for the foreseeable future. It will be nice to (hopefully) turn some of it down a notch, though. I'm ready for a bit of a break.

On top of that I am working on plans to extend a deck off my porch at home and to get a garden planted. My neighbors and I are going to work on the gardens together, it looks like, which will be fun. Gardens are certainly a lot of work, but that's the kind of work I don't mind doing - the kind that yields results you can actually (literally) get your hands around. the biggest risk is the deer that roam around here, so I am thinking some sort of fence is in order. I thought I might even try the human hair trick, although I have heard mixed reviews about whether it really works, and now I am doubtful. There's always technology to do the trick if need be. Apparently that one also works on Moose. Well, in that case I guess I need me one of those eh? Nothing like electricity to solve a problem. Or you can just spray.

Anyhow, I am looking forward to the trip to California, both because it will be good to see a friend and because I can certainly use the break in my hectic routine, which these days pretty much consists of work and church stuff and then more work. So - it will be nice.

Hmm. That was pretty random.

Ok, so this is stupid and lame. I can accept that. But it's interesting.

Well, I suppose it should be comforting to know that my site (an thus me in turn?) is more good than evil. The results of this highly-scientific study are:

Bike? CHECK!!  Video Camera? CHECK!!  Sheer Cliff? CHECK!!  Parachute??? Uhhh...

Oh my my my my my.. It hurts sooo bad just to watch. Can't say I didn't warn you.

Note to self: Make sure parachute's properly rigged before riding off cliff.

I've been wondering exactly what happened to the Mars Spirit rover's computer when it crashed on Mars (the computer that is, not the rover). Now I know. Cool read (especially for geeks), and if you think about how they fixed it - and how far away that thing is... I'd have killed to have seen the pocket protectors flying out of the mister-random-computer-troubleshooter-guy's shirt just as he realized what the problem was and as he flew down the hall to tell his fellow scientists.

Realizing you can fix a radiation-hardened R6000 CPU from Lockheed-Martin Federal Systems with 120 Mbytes of RAM and 256 Mbytes of flash, mounted in a 6U VME chassis, with custom cards that interface to systems on the rover, running Wind River Systems' Vx-Works version 5.3.1 operating system, used with its flash file system extension? And all from 35 million miles away?

Priceless.

I decided I should set up a stats program and see who's visiting this web site, what's being read, stuff like that. Granted, one day's worth of stats are not much to go on, but there are some interesting things that came out of the first day or so of statistics gathering.

First is the search phrases that people typed into their favorite search engine (Google is by far the most common one used to link to my site in the stats) and then clicked through to find this site:

created with microsoft office onenote	28	63.6 %
greg hughes	4	9 %
xml office 2003 bill coan	2	4.5 %
word documents have no teeth	1	2.2 %
twins portland oregon	1	2.2 %
how did the united states get oregon	1	2.2 %
spinning tires ice hill blog	1	2.2 %
onenote tab .net control	1	2.2 %
acer c300 problems	1	2.2 %
houses sold on deer island oregon	1	2.2 %
onenote blog	1	2.2 %
ie toolbar visual studio	1	2.2 %
open in new window ms04-004	1	2.2 %

“twins portland oregon????” Hmmmmmm....

Keywords list:

office	30	14.8 %
onenote	30	14.8 %
with	28	13.8 %
microsoft	28	13.8 %
created	28	13.8 %
greg	4	1.9 %
hughes	4	1.9 %
oregon	3	1.4 %
xml	2	0.9 %
coan	2	0.9 %
blog	2	0.9 %
bill	2	0.9 %
2003	2	0.9 %

Fascinating stuff, really. Other interesting figures that amaze me (not):

• 14% of the people who viewed the site added the page to their favorites (I have no idea how this gets logged, but I guess it does). 
• I'm indexed by a whole bunch of search engines - many of which I never heard of.
• A lot of people who view my site content do so via the RSS feed. Only one or two people appear to be syndicating the site via the Atom feed.
• My OneNote blogging entries are popular, and people are also clicking on the OneNote .one and .wma audio files.
• I am nowhere close to reaching my bandwidth usage limit, so if you need a site hosted and you happen to know me personally, feel free to ask - I have a reseller account and so far I don't charge my friends. Oh, and you can use your own domain name or piggyback on one of several I have registered. And if you want to register one, you can do so here for only $10, and the customer service is at least ten times better than [cough cough] Verisign/Netsol [cough hack cough].

If you do - time to clean up and rake in the prizes. Microsoft has a contest running for businesses that can tell a great story about how Windows Server 2003 addresses challenges and makes a difference in the real world. It's the Windows Server 2003 Challenge, and the prizes are pretty sweet, so if you have a story, give it a shot! I'd enter, but they already wrote a case study about ours, so we're not elligible. Be sure to read the complete rules, too.

... To be eligible for judging in Round Two, online entries must be received no later than 11:59 PM PT on March 28, 2004 (07:59 GMT March 29). Multiple entries from the same person will be disqualified. By entering the Contest, you agree to allow a Microsoft representative to contact you regarding potential Solution Brief/Case Study development and reference opportunities.

Okay, I have been asked this a zillion times now - each time by people who for some reason that escapes me think that *I* would know anything about .NET, what it is, how it works, etc.

I'm not completely ignorant on the matter - I do understand the concepts, architecture, how it all fits together. But I am definfitely not a programmer, and beyond the basics of describing what it is, I can't help much.

In fact, I was at a conference earlier this week along with a bunch of other corporate IT-leader types, and one thing that surprised me was how few knew what .NET is (other than the fact that its something their systems are built on and their developers talk about in gobbledygook secret code language all day long). I suppose the fact that the crowd at the conference was all upper-level and executive management types allowed the people there to come out of their shells a little bit, and to openly ask the people around them what the heck this .NET thing is, anyhow (without fear of some developer rolling eyes, I guess ).

Now, I always figured it's good to know these things ahead of time, but when some of the Microsofties I know started bringing people over to me so I could explain .NET ... Well, you get the picture.

Of course, what people need is a good, clean, concise explanation of the technology in layman's terms, not programmer-speak, and not more than a couple of minutes. As I recently noted when I wrote about “What is XML?” it's not always what you know, it's more often than not what resources you can find and how you use them.

Anyhow, point is that these days, when I am asked “What the heck is .NET anyhow?” I like to point people to a web page that Microsoft recently put together which - for the first time - provides a very brief, concise and easy to understand overview of the basics of the “What is .NET?” question. Check it out here.

There's more to it than what's on that page, but the links get you to the next level of detail (and they keep it simple at that level, as well, which is good).