Garrett Fitzgerald for inviting me and Maryam to see your play on Sunday (Garrett plays clarinet in the band). It was great! Thanks for the tickets. Ignore what those critics say. I hear the play was an all volunteer effort. I'll definitely be attending future things at the Kirkland Performance Center.

I've been an Internet guy since 1994. Haven't done really much else other than conferences and stuff on the Internet since then.

So, it's with trepidation that I go back in time and start using Visual Studio to design user interfaces instead of FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

First reaction? Wow, do I miss the level of pixel-control that GUI designers have in Visual Studio. You mean I can make a label appear on a precise location on your screen?

All the developers among you, I'm sure, are saying "yawn" to yourselves, but it's quite an eye-opener when you see what a rich-client app can be made to do.

Of course, our "customers" are developers who'll be attending the PDC, so we don't need to worry about what kind of operating system they'll have.

I had another experience. I just signed into Microsoft Web Outlook via a dialup modem. Boy is that a painful experience. Once it loads it's a work of art. But, it makes me realize that some things just aren't gonna get to be nice over a slow dialup line. Note, however, if I sign into the "real" Outlook, my experience is just fine over a dialup modem.

So, where am I going with this? Well, I'm starting to agree with Don Box. I'm using the browser less and less. Today I got NewsGator (new version was released today) and plugged it into my Outlook. Now I can publish to my weblog directly from Outlook. This is freaking awesome. It'll make my internal weblog much more interesting since I can share what's going on outside of Microsoft with those who are inside much easier now.