A lot of people comment on the top of the my wife and my Wedding Cake.   It has myself (wire-rim glasses, goatee, traditional Scotish Kilt and Sporin) and my wife (with Traditional African Kente Cloth designs and a matching flower arrangement.)

They say, "How ever did you find a cake topper like that?" and I say "I googled for 'Scottish Interracial Cake Topper' and well, the rest is history."  What kills me is, they usually assume I'm kidding.

Convenience and portability -- usually touted as the key benefits of wireless technologies -- can also be the biggest drawbacks of wireless in a business environment. Before we rolled out wireless technologies at InfoWorld, meetings were focused on the particular agenda at hand, and although we had our share of boring meetings like everyone else, most people were engaged in the discussions. After all, meetings are only called when teams need to discuss issues face-to-face in an environment where everyone needs to contribute or be aware of other points of view. Now that we have 802.11 in conference rooms and BlackBerrys in use by a number of employees, the quality of the interaction sometimes declines as the people in the room check e-mail, and send and receive instant messages. In some cases, I have been to lunch with BlackBerry users who feel compelled to check and read e-mail while I'm talking to them (I can see your furtive glances under the tablecloth, and I can hear the telltale clicking a mile away). Although wireless technologies promise to link teams more efficiently than ever before, when managed improperly, they can erode the basic fabric of business: human interaction.
[Chad Dickerson]

Yeah, I'm as guilty of this as anyone...Wireless, Blackberries, all this just enables people who already have a high incidence of ADD to have even....ooo! Shiny!

http://msi2xml.sourceforge.net/

"The command line tool msi2xml converts Windows Installer Databases (.msi) to text based XML files. The complementary tool xml2msi reconstructs the .msi from the XML file."

Utterly brilliant. [Via Almost Perfect] [Via Joshua Allen.]

Ooooo....that is nice...

The command line tool msi2xml converts Windows Installer Databases (.msi) to text based XML files.
The complementary tool xml2msi reconstructs the .msi from the XML file.

There are several possible uses for msi2xml/xml2msi:

• Quality assurance: use the human readable XML file to compare changes between different versions of a .msi file.
• Version control: many version control systems are text based. Store the XML file instead of the .msi file.
• Automated build systems: using xml2msi, existing installations may be updated with new files, and automatically rebuilt.

Well, it's happened.  I've just hit the maximum number of contacts allowed in MSN Messenger - 150.  I hit it naturally, and without trying, and now I'm stuck trying to figure out who to yank.  Current 57 of my close, personal friends are logged in, and 93 are not.  These are real people that I REALLY talk to.  About 10 are non-technical friends, and the other 140 are people I work with (and talk to all the time), MSFTies, RDs, or people I just really like to have hanging around in my System Tray. 

I probably get 15 to 20 random "do you know how to..." chats a day, and I probably produce at least that many a week.  I don't chat idly, there's no time.  I do however revel in the convenience of asking, or being asked, a directed question.  I prefer IM to the phone since IM affords me the luxury of lag time...I can't chat with someone on the phone and pause for 3 minutes after I've been asked a Question..."Oh, I wasn't paying attention to you anymore...could you read back the transcript?" 

How can I stay 3 or even 6 degrees away from the rest of the Connected World if I can't even keep 151 people at my fingertips?  Please, 250 at LEAST. 

It's a sad day for instant messengers everywhere...