/bill's House O Insomnia : MVP Stuff

Renewed

William — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:03:00 GMT

Woke up this morning and found the good news. For 5 years running, I am a MVP award recipient. And yes, I *will* be at the Summit this year come h3ll or high water.

MVP Chat Tonight at Strong Coders

William — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 06:31:00 GMT

My homie Ryan Olshan and the team at Strong Coders is hosting a public MVP Chat 01.12.07 8:00PM EDT. Although I'll be be a small fish in a big pond over there, Ryan was kind enough to invite me to join in Would love to see you over there.

Another one down

William — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 04:10:00 GMT

I was quite fortunate and won the MVP award for this year. It appears my Uber Homie Chris Williams won too. I expect to see a lot more great folks getting renewed or inducted into the program.

A great guy makes MVP

William — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 22:56:00 GMT

Well, I've seen quite a few of my friends make MVP (Scott, Chris, Sahil , Tobin, Brian to name just a few) but now I can add one more.. Not only did Marshall get the Microsoft MVP Award, it appears they added a group for Speech Server which is awesome. I wonder if KC will get nominated for a 5th category ;-)

Another homie of mine just made MVP

William — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 04:41:00 GMT

Well, looks like another one of my homies just made MVP. Well done Brian!

Unofficial MVP Handbook now posted

William — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 14:27:00 GMT

Susan Bradley, who is the MSMVPS.com 'Mom' and kindly hosts this site out of the kindness of her heart has posted the Unofficial MVP Handbook. It's password protected but if you're interested you can get the password in the Coffeehouse or shoot me an email. I know this post is completely worthless to anyone outside of the program but there's a few things in there that you won't necessarily know if you don't read through all the intro package material when you get the award. Susan took the time to write it up and post so I figured I'd give it a shout out. Now if only I could find a way to make her rename our server from 'Yoda' to 'Cuckooz'...

Chris Tacke is the Man

William — Thu, 19 May 2005 18:00:00 GMT

Skicow just sent me this SPOT Link from Chris Tacke. I remember the first time I met Chris back at the MVP summit and he was discussing throwing the CLR on a PIC and possibly creating OpenNet.PIC which would be cool indeed. If there's a more impressive bunch of individuals sitting around than the OpenNetCf Team - I sure don't know who they are. At the moment, I'm in over my head on a few other projects and when I get out from under it, my speech server is going to get down with Media Center and X10 (yes, i'm mentioning it again in a effort to pressure myself into getting it done in a reasonable amount of time), but when I get some free time, I would definitely like to get down doing some SPOT stuff.

Speech Server, Book Writing, Code Camps and Pimped out rides

William — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 06:42:00 GMT

For the last week, things have gotten kind of weird in my life. And by most standards, I'm pretty friggin weird to begin with. I stared working with Wally McClure on writing a book and so far, things have been going really well. But so far I've only encountered the easy part. This week, I am going to get 'busy'. Busy in the sense that in 21 days, I'll have 3 code camps, a web cast, and two books due. I know, I keep writing about this but I'm trying to get myself pysched for it because falling on my face, isn't really an option.

Lately, I've been mobile within the apartment and for some really dumb reason, I moved from my office and bedroom to my living room to work. In my living room is the TV, which is almost never on. This week, I've been watching it while working. I CAN'T Believe it, BUT I'M Actually starting to really get hooked on Pimp my ride. Watching complete morons get their cars worked over, and get stuff like a Tablet PC that's configured to recognize their rhymes, well, it's interesting. I used to really hate bling bling vehicles, but the high tech nature of Pimp My Ride is intriguing even if I know damned good and well that those Tablet PC's live about 3 hours before mmoving to the Pawn shops.

-----

Speech Server. Well, I've got 2 presentations on it next weekend. Of the people presenting at Charlotte, I'm probably the least impressive of the bunch. However, I honestly think I'm going to have most compelling presentation. I have many shortcomings in life, but being a braggart isn't one of them. Nonetheless, I'm absolutely convinced that I'm going to steal the show Saturday. Not because I'm the man or any crap like that, I just have a topic that by the mere virtue of what I'm doing, is just too cool.

Ok, so what am I going to do specifically? For starters, I decided that I'm going to simulate a conversation between a dude and virtual wife. Just take all the typical stereotypes of a wife, and build her into a grammar. Nothing to fancy there to be honest, but it's something that will probably get a few chuckles. So where did I get the data for the wife being that I'm not married? Well, you might be thinking Kim right? Wrong. I'm not suicidal. Actually, I'm using Peggy and Marcy from Married with Children. All in all, the hardest part of this so far has been accomodating preambles. What is a preamble? Well, in the rest of the country you probalby have no concept of them, but here in the South, preambles are a friggin fine art. Let's say that you want me to fix X as my manager. So we built a speech server to expect X as an input, check it against a Bug Database and make the determination from there. A preamble would be something like this:

Goddamit Bill, you told me you fixed [X]
Hi Bill, how's it going today? I heard you got a new tablet? How do you like it? Did you have fun this weekend? Well, when you have a chance can you take a look at [X], it appears not to be working
Howdy Bill. How You Do? Waaayaaaah, I wuz wundrin if you might kuld take a look at [X] when you have a moment.

People not only speak differently in respect to pronunciation, but in sentence constructs as well. No one north of the Mason Dixon line ever “Might Could” have done anything. No one south of Pennsylvania ever Warshed anything. But this is the crap that encompasses preambles. This is a key concept because you really don't want to waste any of your Speech Server's resources trying to figure out what the hell Warsh means, when most people wouldn't want to know if they could.

I'm thinking about doing the later presentation to a South Park Dialog btw. For instance, I'm watching Extreme Martial Arts on TV right now. For those that know me, the fact I even have a TV on shojuld come as a shock. But I am. I've also been eating Vicodin by the boat load all week, so maybe that's contributing to it. Here's my plan for a Show Stealer:

I'm going to break everyone into one of two groups
Group A gets to be Kyle's mom
Group B gets to be Cartmen
One by one, each group gets to select their response.

When they are all done, I'll implement them via two different programs. Now, if I can get both programs to talk to each other based on the audience's responses, and the dialog goes as planned, then I got it right.

Currently, to bookmakers favor the fat goofy guy on Vicodin.

I have one other idea as the Coup de gras but I think it's sucking compared to the last one. I'm going to set up a dialog between my laptop and my cell phone. For instance, have the laptop ask the PDA for Steve Ballmer's cell phone number. Then when it gets the reply, go ahead and call Steve. He doesn't usually pick up, but I figure if he takes a call an it's a Speech Server talking to him - he'll be cool with it.

Any ideas Suggestions?

Throwing a bone to the VB6ers

William — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 17:01:00 GMT

Who said Microsoft doesn't listen to it's customers.

This years summit is going to rock!

William — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 17:27:00 GMT

The MVP Summit last year was a total blast and this year it looks like it will again. I haven't been through the entire blog roll so I'm no doubt missing more than a few friends in this list, but first Sahil made it, Frans got renewed and although he's in a different product group Casey, got renewed as well. To be perfectly honest, I had little doubt of any of these (although one of them, and i won't say who, was a wee bit neurotic there for a few days). There are so many cool people I've met in the program that I couldn't really write about them all - but suffice to say there's some really excellent folks - the three I mention above are perfect examples!

Couldn't have happened to a better guy.

William — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 15:15:00 GMT

Sahil got the MVP Award - Congratulations my Friend!

Telling the Internet Bad Guys to F-Off

William — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 23:33:00 GMT

This is hardly hot off of the press news, but I figured it's useful and I'd post it. One way to keep yourself 'safe' while on the net is via your Hosts file. This won't guarantee your safety, but at a minimum it will make your browsing a little less annoying (Plus you can look through the file for an interesting list of sites). So I guess the next step is to store all of these in a database and write a program that lets you edit your own entries (or ideally, build an internal browsing site that lets you and people you trust, add entries and then write to this file). [Another great service provided by the MVP Community]

The full link is here

Violating NDA and Misc other subjects

William — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 20:29:00 GMT

This monday marks the third or fourth week I quit drinking (I just remember it was a Monday) and I was hoping that drama in my life would decrease. For the most part, it has (my a-hole moments increase exponentially when i drink). But not really. I posted something about the VB6 controversy and a little spat insued. So again I find myself right square in the middle of drama - albeit this time it has very little to do with me . I don't want to name names, let's just say that this is a spat between, umm, guys named Hans and Will, one of them from a country with Gay Necrophiliac Ducks and the other from a place where the really funny Koala Bear Joke came from. Will decided that he was going to take the dispute semi-public by posting details about it in a private forum, a forum so private that I'm not allowed to even think about it in public because one of those dudes from Minority Report might read my mind and blog about it or something. The problem is that Will pulled a New York Times and for one reason or another, seriously misrepresented Hans' position I like Will a lot, but if Will did to me what he did to Hans, I would probably attempt the throw him out of a window the next time I ran into him [You have to forgive me, I'm listening to “In my Hood“ on The Massacre by Fifty Cent - which BTW is a phenomenal album]. At a minimum I would have some of my soljaz run up on him and bust a few caps - assuming of course that I had soljaz and that they would go out bustin caps if I so asked them to. And then after I threw him out of the window, I'd pull the ice off of my neck, whip up my AK and rat tat tat. Ok, maybe I don't have any ice on my neck or an AK either, but well, my supposed response bears as much similarity to how I'd actually respond as Will's post beared to what Hans really said.

So, in a move of solidarity with Hans, I'm going to commit the same crime he did. You see, I'm blogging publicly about something that happened privately in a Microsoft private NG. There's absolutely no way you can know what the hell I'm talking about specifically if you weren't there. So how could I have possible violated NDA. But lets say I just did. Oh well, I'm really really really sorry. Would that give someone the right to go into a private newsgroup and misstate my comments? Attribute things to me that are so out of context that they bear virtually no semblance to reality. Now the f~~ked up part is that there is so much buzz about this. I stopped counting posts when I got to 2 billion - well, not really but it seemed like it. It was the longest thread I think I've EVER EVER READ.

Since this whole stupid thing came about on my blog, I chimed in and posted the material in question. If it was shown, it's inconceivable that the thread would have ever gotten that much attention. But I guess the part that REALLY F~~king pissed me off was that for the first time since I've known Hans, I saw him get a little emotional in a post, that it got to him a little. I've never seen this guy even come close to losing his cool. Don't get me wrong, if I was the subject of a post that misstated something I said and I saw 45 trillion responses to it, I'd be pissed off too.

Will - you're too good of a guy to continue with this - it's time to apologize to him and just end this nonsense. I've ran my big stupid mouth many times and made an a33 out of myself - since I couldn't change what I did - I just said I was wrong and apologized. I humbly sumbit that the same is probably the only cool course of action here. Trust me, I'm not being self-righteous here or preaching, but there was nothing cool or fair about that post and IMHO - you owe someone an apology.

http://www.everythingado.net

William — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 08:45:00 GMT

Well, I finally bit the bullet and purchased my site from Brinkster. I'm going to be hosting blogs for a few of my disaffected DNJ friends - but well, due to the nature of the site - I'm not handing them out to everyone - If I know you, or you can convince me your not a dork, or if you're a dork and can convince me you have some technical content - drop me a line or if you're a regular contributor to a newsgroup that begins with microsoft.public.dotnet.framework - if it ends with compactframework or adonet then you're automatically invited. I'm also going to have a Uncensored portion or which is going to be cool - Bridgette Kerkove, Jenna Jameson, Janine & TS type of cool. I'm debating about how to host the “Unrelated Cool“ content - probably make it restricted access. And on the off chance you're wondering - no, I'm not moving my blog over there. I really dig it here. But I want to do a few things. Sahil already found a good place but it seems DNJ is going to crap these days - I see more Exception messages than I do content since 2005 began. I also want to host a few web services that are public, a few private ones that I can dish out the tokens to if people are interested... etc etc.Part of the reason I want to host my own Text stuff is b/c I want to mod it out - and I can't create skinz and stuff without being an pain in the a33 to the wonderful patron of this site. basically I just want a playground - ADO.NET and Compact Framework oriented - where I and other people that don't write me STUPID hate mail all the time can use.

But the real rub is that it looks like they are going to let me install the 2.0 framework to run some ASP.NET 2.0 and Yukon samples on. Still gotta check with MS and make sure this is ok but I think it will be. If it is, then there's Lot's o Potential. Can't get too into the details now - but using Yukon - there's potentially a much cooler way to send out notifications that articles have been posted, blogs updated, or Bridgette has another movie available. Also, Sonny & EDC the Coding Cuckooz are going to be active in development - and you know what sort of stuff they are interested in. Suffering at the moment from More ideas than ability to stay awake...............

Setting up .Text is a total pain in the a33 - at least so far it has been. It's mainly the web interface and all the f**** sql scripts that I have to run - ONE AT A TIME. Anyway, I'm screwing around with .NET Nuke and one of the starter kits. can't figure out which one I prefer. Feedback is welcome.

I'm also working w/ one of the starter kits but I'm leaning more toward .NET Nuke. Not sure if the hype is real but I hear it is - so sometime tomorrow hopefully I'll have made up my mind. I won't be doing anything other than sitting in my apartment wondering why this whole f~ck1ng city is shut down b/c of 1/2 an inch of snow - so I should get something done.

Requests for Content

William — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 04:40:00 GMT

I've finally started to get a little free time these days and I'm going to be doing some quality Travelling in the next few weeks - if you're interested in something in particular, I'm taking requests. Anything ADO.NET, Anything Compact Framework, (Not that I'm qualified on these two - but I'll give it a try).

Bill

Service-Oriented Architecture & Web Services Best Practices - Atlanta GA

William — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 14:24:00 GMT

I just got to meet Mark Dunn the other night and really enjoyed talking to him. Looks like he'll be on DNR later this month and he's hosting a Work Shop on SOA in early February

Eric Rudder - if you're reading this

William — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 02:45:00 GMT

You are without a Doubt 'The Man'. Yes, Mr. Gates has an infinitely cooler first name - but you rock. Thanks!