Weekend Update

It's been an intellectually stimulating weekend. Spent a good 15 hours working with Jill on our Ping project. We posted a couple of teaser screenshots. Everything we had mocked up is now living on my phone in the form of working code. This Wednesday we're doing another usability test (on my neighbor Christina who is baking me cupcakes as I type.. mmm...). Jeff, also of the Ping/Mates crew, just proclaimed over IM that he is staying up all night to crank out more server code. Some new server hardware is due into Ann Arbor tomorrow, courtesy of the University of Michigan, and with any luck we'll have Ping on our phones talking to Mates on our new server by next Sunday!

Hell of a way to spend a weekend after an insanely intense week at the office, but certainly supportive of my New Years resolution to defeat complacency. Two other New Years resolutions were to increase gym frequency from 2-3/week to 3-4/week, and to stop eating unhealthy meals (i.e. burger, fries, and a Guinness) immediately after working out. The former has held, while the latter has been broken at least 3 times so far.

In other news, I had a great time at Microsoft's informal Town Hall meeting Friday morning listening to Bill and Steve field questions from anyone with something on their mind. I snapped a picture with my phone. It is so cool to allow yourself to be put on the spot, in person and on video, in front of your entire company. And the lack of self-restraint, among both employees asking questions and Bill/Steve answering, was pretty friggin' cool.

I've amassed quite the list of Bloglines clippings over the last couple of weeks, so let's quickly unload a few that I think are cool/interesting here:

Windows Mobile 5.0 Developer Resource Kit - I thought it was incredibly lame that the trial version of Visual Studio 2005 didn't include mobile development resources, so I was incredibly pleased to see this released. If you're a software developer, and have ever been interested in developing software for mobile phones, this is all you need, and it's free to play around with for 90 days.

The Creative Zen Vision:M and the iRiver U10 have grabbed my attention recently. They seem like awesome gadgets. If I wasn't saving up for an Xbox 360, I'd probably pick one up for kicks.

I love the WiFi/Flickr enabled picture frame that ThinkGeek is stocking. Not sure I'm ready to drop $250 on a picture frame, but still, this looks quite slick.

Hmm. Wow. Actually, the rest of my clippings are on location awareness in software, so I'll save them for Location X. I've been slacking on posting to that blog bigtime. Not sure yet if I have the passion to keep it going really. We'll see.

I suppose that's it for now. Gonna go see how Christina's cupcakes are coming along. Have a great week! ;-)