According to my math, it'd take 24 minutes to get to work on a Segway, compared to about 12 in my car (the Segway goes 13 miles an hour at top speed). Sounds pretty liveable. I wonder if we could make do with one car like Phillip is?

You know, a guy I respect (Phillip Torrone, Flash Developer) has a Segway, and I'm totally jealous -- he writes "the Book of Seg." I'm seriously considering buying one for commuting to work (my work is five miles away). How long will it take to travel five miles on a Segway? Here's Phillip's Weblog.

It's been a while since I've read Joel's stuff, but he has an interesting essay on just how hard programming is. It's a good read. I was talking to Dan Appleman a while ago (he's the cofounder of APress books) and he was saying the same thing. He wishes that Microsoft would throw its resources into making programming easier. He remembers the day he saw Visual Basic. That made programming Windows applications dramatically easier. He says we need another breakthrough. It's a theme I've heard from others too who say that .NET was done to make Microsoft's runtime-based languages as powerful as Visual C++ (VB, for instance, now has multithreading and is object oriented) but .NET didn't make most programmer's lives simpler. Most programmers are folks who play around here and there. Not guys like Dave Winer or Joel. Anyway, the industry is due for a new programming approach -- where's the innovation? Something totally new like Hypercard was back in 1984.

Meg's mom is in Newsweek spreading a new meme: GoogleCooking. Hey, I gotta try that! As long as the ingredients never vary from spaghetti or Belgian Waffles, I'll be OK. Hey, I make a killer waffle.

While we're talking about Google, here's an article about some of the other things they turned on this week. Interesting stuff.

Google gets a little Froogle (site for people who want to buy products). Interesting that Google is continuing to expand its suite of services.

I'm getting a few visits lately from Brian Graf's weblog. But, not cause he wrote about me, but because he has an awesome blogroll of .NET webloggers.

Interesting to see that Blogger is already adjusting its APIs in response to feedback from folks like that from Ben Trott (one of the folks who wrote Moveable Type).

NEC is looking for applications to put on its Tablet. If you have something you'd like to put on the Tablet, let us know. Personally, I'd like to see a weblogging tool on it. The NEC Tablet is gonna be the hot toy at conferences next year.

Oh, and congrats to Jim Fawcette for hosting the VSLIVE conference for 10 years in a row. As we're learning in this economy, putting on major conferences for 10 years in a row is no easy feat.

I'm so proud of my wife. She planned the upcoming VSLive conference (February 9-14, 2002). You know, for seven years I did a bus/photo trip at that conference. I wonder if the .NET Webloggers would like to get together the Saturday before the conference for something fun? Yeah, you can rib her for stealing my job and my heart.

You know, I'm not a programmer, but I watch how well companies build APIs that programmers use. Why? Because that tells me how likely an industry is to survive a competitive threat and/or how likely we are to get rich tools quickly in that industry. For instance, Microsoft put a set of APIs into Visual Basic that made it possible for a whole new set of component vendors to pop up (the API was VBXs). Today I'm watching the Blogger 2.0 set of APIs and I'm interested in comments like Sam Ruby's. Why did Blogger ignore the already-existing MetaWeblog API's? That seems to be the question of the moment. It certainly doesn't make me think that there'll be rich tools for all blogging tools (look at what Mark Canter is trying to do). On the surface it doesn't seem like a good move for Blogger to make. I guess the industry will answer that over the next year.

You know, the Dog News is funny (yeah, I linked to it the other day, but it's just caught my eye again and it has me laughing -- I love this guy's style. We all take ourselves too seriously and he doesn't. We need more of that in the world). I wanna meet the dog who writes it. I gotta add that to my blogroll.

AOL attitude=on. I agree with Dave. Read Tim O'Reilly's essay on piracy. AOL attitude=off.

Are there any other webloggers who write from within big companies (I write from within the belly of NEC, which has more than 100,000 employees)? I'd like to start reading more "Enterprise Weblogs." It seems that people who work at big companies are scared of writing Weblogs. I know I face that fear every day (but, my weblog helped me get hired, so I know my boss and coworkers already read it every day). Not to mention my wife. Whew. So much pressure to perform!

One question on my comment code: I'm a JavaScript newbie. How do I get a status bar on the comment window? Also, any way to make the comment window bigger so that I don't need to scroll as much to read the comments?

You know what I like about webloggers? They can insult you and help you in the same paragraph. Just like Phil Ringnalda did today (he helped me make my HaloScan-based comments better here). Thanks Phil!