From The Raw Feed - Apparently they've finally found a way to completely eliminate the Blue Screen of Death in Windows Longhorn:

Make it red.

Now, why didn't someone think of that earlier?

Microsoft just announced that Office 12 files will all be XML-based.

XML: It's not just for InfoPath anymore... From Microsoft Watch:

The new Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats will be designated as .docx, .xlsx and .pptx , respectively. Microsoft is referring to the family of new formats as "Microsoft Office Open XML Formats."

Microsoft is committing to publish the forthcoming XML formats and make them available under the same royalty-free license under which the current Office 2003 file formats are. Licensees will be able to integrate these formats into their servers, applications and business processes "without financial consideration to Microsoft," according to the Redmond software vendor.

Awesome - this is big news, and while some will undoubtedly scoff, this is a great move in a good direction. Integration, integration, integration - EXCELLENT!

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! has posted his company's new corporate employee blogging guidelines. There's a PDF file linked from his post, along with his comments.

Blogging policies are (I think) a good thing for companies to have. Why? Because they set the stage with the proper expectations right up front, before a problem can begin. People often benefit from having the context predefined, so they know what's cool and what's not.

In other words, having a good policy enables people much more than it restricts them. That's why I'm glad my company has a blogging policy, anyhow.

More and more companies are going beyond allowing their employees to blog, and are enabling and encouraging it. What's your company doing?

Just in time to finish off the month of May, the wild irises are coming out in full force all over the place on my property...

click on the image for a 1024x768 copy/desktop wallpaper
click here for a 1600x1063 copy/desktop wallpaper

You have to actually see it to understand what's so cool about this unique music video. Eric Rice pointed to this, and I can't keep myself from doing the same:

The Sad Song by Fredo Viola: "This is a video I made for my song entitled "The Sad Song". The video was created entirely using 15 second jpg movies from my little Nikon Coolpix 775 still camera, reconstructed in AfterEffects."

Andy and Angie have a cool weblog where some of their great pictures are displayed. They also have an online photo gallery that you can check out. There's real talent here: great use of light and digital editing for enhancement purposes (as opposed to completely altering a scene to be something it's not). There are also some cool macro insect pictures, nice landscapes and original desktop wallpapers available.

In one post, Andy explains how he edits an original digital image to get from this:

to this:

Same original image, but a very different end result. How did he do it? Go read his weblog to find out.

Note that the images are all copyrighted under a Creative Commons non-commercial use license by Andy Purviance.