chriskelley.org

Went to the local wine festival this evening. Was a pretty good time. Had some good new wines, but really had a hard time obeying the rule about avoiding the wines you already know you like.
What impressed me the most this time (having been once before) is the vatiety of people that really seem to be into wine. There were those there dressed to the nines that could obviously afford any wine they chose and those in t-shirts and jeans, who if not for the setting, would definately be picked out as beer drinkers (not that there’s anything wrong with that ;-).
It’s good to see that such a wide variety of people can all be interested in the same thing. Makes you appreciate the similarities in the different.

I hate buying new cars, but I LOVE new car shopping! Its been a couple years since I was last in the market for a new car, but my wife’s car of the last 5 years is starting to give out. Not to the point that I need to buy something right away, but it’s still got me looking. The question is what to buy?

With the increased competition in the car market, all of the car makers seem to have taken on this idea of segmentation seriously. There seems to be cars designed specifically for 40-42 year old single moms who date regularly, 18-21 year old males with vision problems and 26-31 year old families with 6 kids and 2 pets.

This is great, until you try to figure out what category you’re in. If you pick the wrong car, someone might think you’re in a catefory you’re not (like that dating single mom category that I don’t want anyone thinking my wife is in!). This diversity of choice, while mostly a good thing, causes me (just a little bit) to wish for the days when you could have it in any color you wanted as long as it was black. At least then, there wasn’t so much worl to do to buy a new car.

Thanks to tomster.org and google I was able to add the blogroll you now see on the right hand side of my site. Tomster wrote the original hack, but then his site went down, so I had to google it to find a cached version.

Moral of the story: nothing goes away out there.

Sitting around at work today trying to figure out how to work better with Microsoft. A long time ago I said that it’s the aspiration of every software company to either become the next Microsoft or to be acquired by Microsoft. While we’re not exactly in that state, we are trying to figure out how to dance with the elephant. The classic question we’re facing is how to do it without being crushed.

Don’t get me wrong, there are tremendous opportunities to work with Microsoft and do great things. >$6B in R&D is a good thing for software vendors. The trick is to figure out how to keep ahead of that investment and find something that you can make money at that they aren’t going to include in the OS or apps in their next release.

Will we do it? Probably…but if not, expect the resume section of my website to get alot more attention!

This is easy so far…installed well and up and running in about 15 minutes. Only wish was that it integrated with the plone site I have better, but maybe later.