I'm hearing from around the industry that computer sales are very slow so far this month. Anyone have any evidence to counterdict this? I sure don't. Keep in mind, my opinions here are my own and have nothing to do with my employers (I work at NEC).

I wish I had good news. I think the entire industry is looking forward to Microsoft's new Tablet PC OS which will be launched in early November. Sounds like this year's Comdex might actually be interesting.

Everyone knows Charles Simonyi has left Microsoft, but did you know that his new company has already put up a Web site?

You know Charles, don't you? He's the guy who wrote Microsoft Word.

We can learn a lot by looking at his Web site. It's pretty clear that he doesn't love the Web.

If he did, the first thing he'd do is put a doc type statement in his HTML.

The second thing he'd do is learn how Google works. After all, he wants people to find his site, right? Well, if that's the case, why does he have such a lame title tag? You do realize that putting your company name as the only thing in your title tag is a big no-no if you want Google to rank you highly, right? Instead he should think of the keywords that people will use to find his new company's site. But I'll let him hire someone who knows more about this stuff like Barbara Coll or Danny Sullivan.

Yuch, what's this, a splash screen? Dude, those went out in the 1990s. The Web isn't an Office application.

Frames? Didn't we outlaw those on new sites? Oh wait, these aren't frames, but rather some newfangled code meant to look like them. Oh, that's what the world needs. Heheh. Let's make a bad idea better. Not. :-)

Yeah, now we know why Microsoft Word isn't friendly to the Web. If Simonyi really cared about the Web, new apps like TopStyle wouldn't be necessary. Microsoft Word should have become the premier Web design and development app, but its founders don't love the Web. The evidence is clear.

Hey, isn't Microsoft a key member of the W3C? If one of Microsoft's biggest (now former) executives can't bother to make a W3C standards-based site (yeah, I know, the W3C doesn't make standards) why should the rest of us care? Zeldman says Simonyi's site is obsolete. But, then, so are mine. But at least I'm trying and I'm not a multi-billionaire who could hire a Webmaster that should know better. I guess Intentional Programming won't be to help make better Web sites, huh?

My love is in Orlando -- she's the conference planner for the VSLive shindig. She sent me this link which includes some video reports from the show. Glad to see they are getting some use out of those dual-Pentium Winnov-produced video capture machines I purchased when I worked at Fawcette.

Clemens Vasters says I'm wrong about runtimes. Heh. Yeah, I'm arguing the statically-linked libraries are superior for shareware and small applications. Did anyone miss that Nick's entire application is less than 4MB while a .NET app will be 20MB if you include the libraries/runtimes (which you'll need to do since not many people have .NET runtimes loaded). Clemens missed my point. Delphi builds apps that are easier to distribute than .NET apps are. Yeah, if you need to write your app in 30 different languages then .NET is better.

What's hillarious is that I argued with hundreds of people in just the way Clemens did. Runtimes are great if your customer base already has them. I always assumed that Microsoft would figure out how to get them on everyone's computer. I was wrong. Probably won't be the last time.

It's time to stop and smell the flowers.

Folks in the Nikon Digital Photo forum are having a little contest to see who could take the best picture of a flower in the past week.

Well, I've spent about as much time as I can getting this to be standards-based. The HTML doesn't validate, but it's close enough for government work. The CSS does validate now. And the site is a bit faster than it used to be (due to much cleaner HTML -- did you realize that taking out indents out of code makes your pages 20% lighter weight? Yikes).

What I like is that I can change one file now and change the fonts and other things about the layout without forcing Radio to republish. Cool stuff!

I also have to work on the CSS style sheet that Bryan did. Bryan Bell does awesome work, but I don't think he ran the style sheet through a validator. For instance, he didn't apply a background color so if you aren't using white the site looks weird. Just little things to fix here and there.