When I was at SJSU 12 years ago, I worked for the IT department there. My boss was Steve Sloan. We setup many a Mac together. Now he has a weblog. I'm looking to seeing more from Steve since he still works at SJSU, which is one of the two most important educational institutions in Silicon Valley.

Funny quote: "You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, and Germany doesn't want to go to war." From Terry Farrell in a newsgroup I frequent.

John Dowell who works for Macromedia and keeps a nice blog on Macromedia's MX products follows up on my .NET explanation and says "I'm still not sure where that leaves non-Microsoft or non-Windows things which use SOAP and other common protocols to connect machines."

That's a real interesting question. Are you ".NET compatible?" if you have a Webservice/component/application that uses SOAP, but doesn't run on top of any Microsoft software (say you build a Web service on Apache on Linux that's SOAP compatible). Is there a logo you can use? Are you even allowed to say "compatible with Microsoft .NET?" Is there a certification system? Will there be? (Shh, I know that there are a few SOAP validators around, but I'm talking about ones that Microsoft will run and maintain, since we're talking about Microsoft's brand names here).

Personally, if I were Microsoft, I'd only let you say "compatible with .NET" if your app runs on top of the .NET Framework and the .NET Common Language Runtime running on Windows.

Now, the problem is, there's Miguel's MONO project, which will run some .NET apps. I doubt it'll run all of them. So, will we have a "runs on all .NET platforms" logo too? That way you can tell whether the code you're about to buy/download will run on only the .NET system on Windows, or will it run on all .NET systems, including those on Linux and Unix and elsewhere?

Interesting questions to ponder this weekend while watching CNN.

I don't know which site it was, but some site put some ad software on my computer that'd pop up random ads while I was surfing. I got rid of the crud by running "AdAware" from LavaSoft. I'm so grateful to companies who make great tools like this available for free. I'm going to buy a copy just to encourage this kind of behavior. Don't have "AdAware?" Get it. You'd be suprised by the crud it'll find that's spying on you. If you already have it, make sure you get the latest definition file.

My day job is handling all POs for the Mobile Solutions division. I'm sensing that the tech economy is getting better. I wish I could say more, but it definitely is better than last year. Too bad it's not in time. The guys across the street (Applied Materials) are laying off 2000 more employees. (I work at NEC Solutions America's Mobile Solutions building, which is at the corner of Scott and Central in Santa Clara.

Not all of NEC's neighbors are doing bad, though. I drove by NVidia's parking lot a lot and notice it's always packed, even late at night. They are working hard on something, that's for sure.

While I'm on NVidia, they have the coolest looking building in Silicon Valley. I should take pictures of it and post them here.

Welcome to the first day of spring. I was just walking outside in NEC's garden here in Santa Clara. Wow, is the weather here spectacular or what? I can't imagine anywhere in the world that the weather would be any better.