The world is anxiously waiting the next release of Visual Studio 2005 with Team System. I haven't heard any news lately as to what the hold up is. There must be some major bug that has to get fixed before it can get out the door.

Anyways, as I may have mentioned before, I have a version of Team System installed and it has been working great. I'm slowly chugging along at a Team System book I am writing, so this is forcing me to get into all the cool new parts of the system. I am seeing some cool things.

Anyways, I have to get back to writing. But I just thought I should stop and say thanks to all the great people at Microsoft who have worked on this incredible product. All the belly-aching over pricing and licensing is for nothing - this thing is really worth it.

Some people are able to keep the same computer for 4 or 5 years before buying a new one. I am not one of those people. I have a desktop-style computer at home that I call my “server”. I opened the cover a few years back, and have never got around to putting it fully back on. I am always in there, tweaking stuff.

You see, prices keep falling. A 200GB hard drive now retails for about $120 CDN. That's ridiculously low. You can get 512MB of memory for $50. How can you not buy that if you could use it? I see these prices fall - week after week - and sometimes I can't help myself but buy something cheap.

Yesterday I bought a 19 inch LCD monitor (BenQ T903, $450 CDN) and a new video card (GeForce FX 5500, $199 CDN) to match. The 19 inch LCD is a monster - huge screen real estate like I've never seen before. I run the thing in 1280 x 1024 mode. Web pages that used to scroll now take up only half the screen. I run a dual-monitor setup - but now I wonder if I need too. With a screen that large, you can realistically do a couple of things on the same screen.

I'm not a big “gamer”, so the video card I bought was chosen because (a) it supports dual-monitor and (b) it wasn't too expensive. I wouldn't buy the cheapest card I could find, but somewhere in the middle between the low and high end. I ran some 3DMark 2001 tests on the old and new cards, and it looks like just over twice as fast as my old card.

The downside to all this upgrading I do is that I now have computer parts lying all over my home office. I have three extra video cards, two extra CD-RW drives, one extra hard drive, 4 extra SDRAM memory cards, 1 extra laserjet printer, 1 extra scanner, 1 extra 17 inch monitor... I mean, I can open a second hand computer store.

I am hesistant to throw this stuff out - as it still has “some” value. 128MB RAM used to be worth a lot of money - and is still $50 new in Best Buy.

Anyways, the one thing I can't upgrade (and that I might need to soon) is the CPU. 1GHz Pentium 3 is just not cutting it any more. It's probably holding back the performance more than anything at this point.

I have been trying very hard to stay away from controversial issues on this blog. I often find, looking back a few months later, that my opinion on the matter has softened. It's actually a bit embarassing to see what I once considered important ended up meaning so little.

So it is with caution that I write something about the current hot topic of the month: the Terri Schiavo case.

The case is doubly-sad. First, there is the deep sympathy I feel for the woman at the center of it all: Terri Schiavo. 15 years ago, she was a normal, healthy woman. Then she suffered a heart attack that caused severe brain damage. She has been somewhere between comatose and barely conscious ever since. Court-appointed doctors have said she is in a “persistent vegetative state“.

The other sad aspect of this case is how this case has become a lightening-rod dividing people all across the United States. In fact, this case has attracted such a odd assortment of characters and issues, that you need a scorecard to figure out who's who.

What this whole case smacks of is hypocracy. Don't worry, there's plenty to go around for all sides.

Maybe I'm cynical, but when all those Senators flew into Washington two weekends ago to pass a special bill to give her parents standing in federal court, and then the President was woken at 1am to sign it into law, it seemed to be a publicity stunt. It's been almost two weeks, and we have not heard one peep out of the vacationing President on the issue. I bet he wishes it would just go away - one way or another.

At the time he signed the bill, the President made a statement like, “All life is precious“, or something like that. But while Bush was governor of Texas, there were 131 executions in 5 years. Many of those cases had serious legal questions about guilt - including 40 cases where the defence lawyer presented no evidence. There seems to be something odd about passing laws in the middle of the night to save the life of someone who is almost comatose, and letting 131 people, some of which COULD be innocent, die without blinking.

You can't even blame traditional Democrat versus Republican bickering. Politicians of all parties are using this to push their agendas, whatever they may be. But when it got too hot, like it is now, they are nowhere to be found.

The parents seem to be stuck in some type of legal infinite loop. I feel sad for them, because what they are doing is fighting for their daughter's life, but they have appealed this case at least 10 times (6 times to the Supreme Court), and been rejected each time. They should probably just drop the legal appeals of this case, and focus on getting the public on their side. It's probably their only hope.

Jesse Jackson annoys me to no end. “Jesse, come on down to Florida and help us with this case.” “Will the media be there?” If I thought he was the least bit sincere, I wouldn't mind so much. But with Rev. Jackson, it's all about the publicity value. I do appreciate a comment he made a couple of weeks ago, before got involved with the case, about how he opposed the way congress sped through a law in 24 hours to save one life, while they blindly ignore the millions of other people starving in America. Of course, now he's fighting for the camera time, oops I mean fighting for Terri, alongside those same politicians.

Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, is in a tough spot. He's sort of thrust himself out there, to lead the political fight in Florida. But now, everyone has sort of abandoned him - including his brother - so now he fights alone. Activists are calling on him to do something, and will no doubt blame him when Terri dies. So there's a kick in the pants for you - the one guy who I think really genuinely tried, and still tries, to help becomes the biggest goat in all this. Poor Jeb.

Lastly, there is an interesting contradiction here. Apparently, most states currently would allow what Florida allows - for a hospital to remove a feeding tube at the request of a legal guardian. But that causes the person to be starved to death - what a horrible way to die. Since most states clearly allow people to be starved to death in this way, shouldn't there be an option for a more compassionate way to die? This is the contradiction - every day people watch their loved ones travel a long and painful road to death (ie: the last weeks of cancer), with nothing but morphine to ease the pain. There should be some other compassionate options, if doctors, patient and family members all agree.

Also, it should be noted that Terri Schiavo, thankfully, feels no pain. According to an article on CNN.com, people in a persistant vegetative state are not conscious, and thus neither suffer nor feel pain. I really, really hope this is true.

I'm watching a program called Everest, on Outdoor Life Network, and one of the oddest things they show is that there is a team of climbers near the top of the mountain, waiting to do the “final push” towards the summit. They wake up, to discover their oxygen tanks have been stolen...

Excuse me? You are camping at the top of Mount Everest, and in the middle of the night there's a theft? I wonder how frequently that happens. Maybe a full oxygen tank is worth more than gold up there?

A guy who just found out he won the $27 million jackpot in a German lottery responded to the news by saying, “I don't have time to chat right now. I'm late for work.”

Although it comes off sounding odd, I can understand what he means. If I won a lottery, no matter how big, I would still go into work that day (and for the next little while) because I like the people I work with, and I would feel bad for them if my sudden departure causes them undue stress. 

No doubt, I would give my “two weeks notice“ that I intended to leave and would leave sooner than that if I could, but I wouldn't just “not show up” again. There's no excuse for doing that to people you consider friends.

When I first got into blogs and blogging 2 years ago, I used to read Robert Scoble religiously. He was interesting, sometimes funny, fairly informative, and casual. It definitely seemed like he was just a normal guy - who happened to work for Microsoft.

I especially liked some of the stories he used to tell. Like how he was on a plane the other day, and wouldn't you know it he was sitting next to the CEO of WhateverTech and they're really doing some cool stuff over there. Or how he stopped some guy in the airport because he was wearing a jacket with a Cisco logo on it. Perhaps I even admired his ability to just go anywhere and meet people, and come away with a name, an email address, and an interesting story...

Over the last year or so, something changed. I found myself spending less time reading what he was writing. I would immediately skip over topics that didn't interest me. The tone of his writing changed. I don't want to jump to conclusions over what exactly happened, but once he developed a “link blog“, I guess he had more space in his main radio blog to express his opinions on things.

Many of the things he expressed passionate opinions about, I just didn't care one way or another. He would simply lambaste a company repeatedly (like Google) for something completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. He became like my uncle, who writes letters to the government, outraged over the 30 minutes he had to wait to get his drivers license renewed every 5 years. Save your anger and indignation for something important, I say.

Several months ago, I just stopped reading. I still sometimes stumble upon his blog - once per month maybe - in my RSS reader. I can't bring myself to delete the subscription just yet. But almost.

Maybe the worst thing I am noticing is that many of his entries are about him. Like this example from today, with all of the self-congratulations. “Google did something good today. Hey I work for Microsoft? Why do I talk about the competition? Because we all win. Yay!” Ugh. Scoble, please, stop congratulating yourself for being different. It makes you look like the only reason you link to non-Microsoft blogs is so that someone will notice how you link to non-Microsoft blogs.

When he's not telling everyone what a great example he makes of corporate blogging, he's talking about how he fits in to important stories. He'll start talking about web standards, but then the real story he's telling becomes about how the commitee asked him for his help, and he was able to introduce them to someone on the IE team, and more people should come to him because he knows people. He actually questions the motives of standard commitees that don't come to him for help, because that proves they're not genuine...

“Call me. Here's my cell number. I am the only person who publishes their cell number on the Internet. This person linked to me. This person hates me, but I am linking to him anyways. I was intereviewed for the New York Times. I'm taking a 5-minute blogging holiday. I read 2,000 blogs a day.”

Don't get me wrong. I don't dislike him. I don't even know him. Maybe once I admired him, but now the annoyance factor has gotten really high. Scoble and I have grown apart. If he ever gets back to talking about interesting stuff that he reads, hears about, or even things happening in his personal life, AND can figure out how to tell these stories without it sounding “all about him“, I may come back.

I'm prepared to wait a long time though.

Here is a really helpful post on customizing process templates. The author links to a download on the Microsoft site called “Team System Extensibility Kit”. This kit contains XML schema, documentation and utilities to help in the customization of process methodology templates.