Our story so far... Michael Eaton started it and tagged Sarah Dutkiewicz who in turn tagged Jeff Blankenburg and he turned around and tagged Josh Holms who did the tag thing to Larry Clarkin who so totally tagged Dan Rigby who put the tag on Chad Campbell who played his tagster card on Pete Brown who taggerized Shawn Wildermuth and he tagulated Julie Lerman who tagified Camey Combs and she tagged me. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

How old were you when you first started programming? I was 12 years old and access to computers were damn hard to come by in 1972. There was a PDP-8e in the basement of the math department building at Oregon State University where my father was earning his PhD. As children of a grad student, my brother and then I were allowed to use it. There was also a student-built 60-bit glass storage computer down there, much larger and far less useful as far as I could see.

How did you get started in programming? I played around with both of those computers for a few months, poking my way around some basic concepts of assembly language. Then I got a used copy of the textbook for Basic programming, and a small student account for the CDC-6600 in the new computer center.

What was your first language? I dinked aroudn with the PDP-8e assembly language, but didn't master it, so that doesn't count. That means good old Basic was my first language. Dad finished his PhD and we moved to Bellevue, Washington. After some searching around, my brother and I got a Xerox educational grant for a study group of junior- and senior-high school students to buy Fortran textbooks and some time on Xerox Sigma 9s to hone our skills. Hey, man, don't horde all the Hollerith constants, okay?

What was the first real program you wrote? The first program that I got paid for, if that makes it real, was in college. I wrote a pretty large simulation of the effects of Saturn's moons on its rings for a physics professor. That was in C.

What languages have you used since you started programming? Basic, Fortran, C, Pascal, C++, Forth, IA (x86) assembler, C#, Visual Basic .NET, and XSLT. I've experimented with a dozen others, stuff like Cω, Haskell, and F#.

What was your first professional programming gig? I took a year off from college in 1979 and landed a job with a small time-sharing firm, doing custom programming as well as operating a few PDP-11/70s. I remember working on several small projects, one of them was tracking oil well shareholders and productions. Another was running statistics on horse races.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming? Absolutely yes. Without a moment's hesitation.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be? Cultivate a passion for learning. Everything in software development changes all the time. If you don't love learning new stuff all the time, you are in for a rough ride.

What's the most fun you've ever had... programming? Gosh, that is a tough one. Once I wrote a call-graph profiler for a language that didn't have one, and used it to analyze and boost performance about eight-fold. The combination of writing the tool and applying it was totally cool.

Who are you calling out?  Friends, please forgive me: Scott Hanselman, Sam Gentile, Adam Kinney, Jesus Rodriguez, and Pat Helland.

Whoops!  Here's a photo of the display in the elevator at my hotel at TechEd 2008. You know, the hotel across from the convention center filled with hundreds of developers and Microsoft employees. I guess it is running (or not) on Windows.

I couldn't figure out how to click the Send Error Report button. For all I know, it is still there waiting for input.

Here's a little C# quiz for your brain bones. What will happen when the following code is executed? Explain why.

Do not compile the code, just use your gray matter.

This came up during a conversation last week. I wouldn't want to bet on everyone getting the correct answer, and purely on that basis alone this should probably not be a recommended practice. It's still a gem of a thought problem.

<FunnyPages source="technorati.com">

They have created a monster!

Here's an error page from Technorati that tickled my funny bone. Looks like a server is unavailable.

And, yes, the page title really is "Technorati is borked right now!" On page refresh, they seem to have unborked the great Technorati, and all is once again well with the world.

</FunnyPages>

I grabbed a taxi in Seattle the other day, and asked my driver my customary question, "Where are you from?"

"Ah," he said, "now that is a very interesting question. Maybe you mean, 'where do I come from first?' is that it?" Well, sure, that's a good place to start. "Very well, how about if I answer your question with a question?" I didn't know there was going to be a test on this ride or I might have studied up. "What was the first country to recognize the sovereignty of the United States?" OMG, today's quiz subject is US history.

Thinking, thinking. I remembered that Benjamin Franklin was off in France somewhere around that time. Maybe he secured French recognition of the newly minted United States. "France," I confidently declared.

"Nope. I'll give you a hint. Do you want a hint from classical music or classic rock?"

Let's go for classic rock.

"Crosby, Stills and Nash sang a song called Marrakesh Express, so what country is Marrakech in?"

"Morocco." Whew! I know that by luck: there's a Moroccan restaurant in Portland named Marrakesh. "Really, Morocco?"

"Yes, in 1777!" Cool, I did not know that. I don't think that I even knew that once and then forgot it. But Morocco? Really?

Yes, Morocco really was the first country to recognize the independence of the United States of America, with references cited.

We arrived at my destination and I paid my driver and thanked him for the history lesson. And we didn't get to where else he was from.

Now I've got some reading to do.

Compensable, adjective: that which can be compensated. Yes, it really is a word. I was under the mistaken impression that I had to say compensatable, but that's not even a word. So WS-BusinessActivity describes compensable activities.

Wa— uh... —hoo. This blog started up with a Technorati rank of approximately alef-naught. Now in the world of competitive ranking, that leaves no where to go but down.

Today VisualStuart.net passed a milestone (no worries, it's less painful than passing a kidney stone) by breaking through the 1,000,000 rank barrier. Yes, VisualStuart.net is now among the 962,510 highest ranked blogs on Technorati. It boggles the mind. See the stats for yourself.

And how was this incredible feat achieved? Why, it was you, dear reader, nay, dear blogger, nay, indeed, dear linking blogger who linked to my blog from yours in the past six months, boosting my so-called authority, and thus improving my ranking. I am forever in your debt.

Okay, outta my way #962,509, I am busting through!

Microsoft Surface will be making its debut commercial appearance at AT&T stores in four trial cities starting 17 April 2008. Surface is a 30-inch table display that combines touch, gesture, and device recognition. I've seen Surface from a distance at various events — it has been impossible to get any closer than about 12 feet due to the crushing mass of geekdom it always attracts.

AT&T will conduct a trial of Surface at selected stores in New York, San Antonio, Atlanta, and San Francisco, and then evaluate deploying throughout its 2,200 US stores. The announcement was made at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas on 1 April 2008. Keep your finger on the pulse of the Surface at their team blog.

Don Box and Charles Torre interviewed She-Who-Watches-Microsoft in All About Mary Jo on Channel 9. The informal and slightly irreverent video was filmed backstage at the Lang.NET 2008 conference.

If you're not familiar with her prodigious body of work, Mary Jo Foley has been writing All About Microsoft for ZDNet since September 2006. And prior to that gig she wrote Microsoft Watch for eWeek for eleven years.

In the interview, Don's unrelenting pursuit of the truth and subtle sleuthing uncovers that Mary Jo has written a new book, Microsoft 2.0, due out later this spring. It purports to predict what Microsoft AB (After Bill) will look like.

Note to Don about your new career interests: you really do seem better suited for the sensitive architect role than investigative journalism. I am not saying don't follow your dream, but in the meantime keep your day job.