You know, yesterday's thread proves there's no topic like religion to get your comment rate up. Heh. Here's an interesting article about the political and religious upheavals going on inside Iran (from Thomas Freidman of the New York Times). Thanks to my dad for sending that along.

I'm mad I missed the Santa Train this year. Thanks to Chris for capturing the event.

I wish I was going to the Supernova Conference -- sounds like a lot of the "A Team" bloggers are coming into town. Hey, anyone wanna have dinner?

Here's the truth about how SOAP was conceived.

The .NET Guy says it's not appropriate to have religious symbols at work. Hmm, I can't go that far unless you work in a government building and then putting up religious symbols could be seen as state sponsorship of said religion. Personally, I'm more in favor of free speech. Now, should the company be hanging them up? No. I hate it when the boss tells me what I should or shouldn't believe. In America corporations have become the powerful entities that we were scared about the government becoming. Individual action is OK. Corporate action is not.

Not to mention that Microsoft still can't make Plain Text secure, so why are we giving hackers HTML so they can send scripts to everyone? Does your mother know what a script is and how to stop from getting viruses? I didn't think so. Most people would be quite happy with Plain Text (and those of you who send emails with purple backgrounds shouldn't be allowed to use a computer anyway).

My technology pet peeve of the day: why in the heck did Microsoft make HTML the default in Outlook? If you send your email via Plain Text it'll be much smaller in size. Now, multiply that by hundreds of millions of users. I get and send hundreds of emails every day. I've only had a couple of reasons lately to send HTML email. It just isn't needed in most daily email communications. Most people don't know how to change Outlook to send as Plain Text (and nearly no one other than hard-core geeks know the difference anyway). Why does Microsoft make choices that cost corporations millions of dollars every year (imagine a world that had plain text by default -- we'd need 1/3 less bandwidth and 1/3 the storage space). I'm not saying to get rid of HTML email, just don't make it the default!

Thomas Wagner says he doesn't believe what I do, and that's what makes America great. Amen!

Scott Johnson is doing weblog disco. Hmmm.

Yeah, Dave, let's go to New York for New Years! I'll be there. Hey, imagine touring the Met with a bunch of webloggers. After drinking good whiskey. New York is my favorite place to visit. I've never been there in the Wintertime. I can't wait.