There is a great service called DailyLit that will email you small parts of a book every day. For those of us who don't have time to sit down and read a book, having 3-4 paragraphs show up in your email makes it easy to fit it into your day. After all, some of us spend 2-3 hours a day in email... why not spend 5-10 minutes reading something truly useful.

http://www.dailylit.com/index

Right now I am reading P.T. Barnum's book, "The Art of Money Getting". The title alone makes it worth reading, and the fact its by Mr. "There's a sucker born every minute" P.T. Barnum.

This may or may not be new, but VMWare has a product that can turn a physical PC into a virtual machine:

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

What this means is that I can take my old PC that I've had for 5 years or more, and turn it into a virtual machine. Then install that onto my brand new machine and get rid of the old one.

The major thing stopping me from switching 100% to my new PC is all of the little applications and data I have accumulated over the years. For instance, I do my taxes using QuickTax or similar computer programs. I have 7 or 8 years of this tax software installed (1 per year). To switch to a new machine, should I bother reinstalling all past years of tax software? Can I even find the CD's and the license keys?

I'd like to start over. But I'd like to have the old PC on standby, in case I have a need for some little used application. This is perfect.

Rented the Al Gore documentary, An Inconvenient Truth last night, PVR'd it, and watched it today. Overall its a well done movie showing Gore's myth-busting presentation on the environment, interspersed with a candid interview with him on the subject.

First, I think everyone in the industrialized world should be required to watch this movie once.

Now since Gore was at one time the Vice President of the United States, and by some counts should have been President in 2000, there is obviously some reference to politics in the movie. He of course has to point out the fact that Bush at one time appointed a former oil-lobbyist to head the Environmental Protection Agency. And when that man was caught hand-editing a press release before it was sent out, removing a lot of the scariest facts from it... he was forced to resign and went right back working for the oil industry the next day.

But the political aspects can be easily ignored whatever your political stripe. The meatiest parts of this movie involve startling facts that lead the viewer to an unarguable conclusion --- we need to reduce our CO2 emissions dramatically. We must - the consequences of inaction would be disasterous.

Perhaps you think that is not the type of movie for you. You'd rather see some great action movie, or a light-hearted comedy. I urge you to see it regardless. My wife started watching it with me, and got really into it as well. This movie is that riveting.

Gore has given this presentation "well over 1000 times" he says. So the presentation itself is extremely well polished. The graphs, pictures, film clips and animations all do an excellent job at getting the point across. A short clip on green house gases done by the folks from Futurama was funny yet disturbing. I cannot say enough good things about this movie - rent it. Buy it. However you can get it, get it and watch it.

The hardest hitting part for me, was when he showed 750,000 years of CO2 levels and Earth temperatures. The graph was cyclical, going up and down, sometimes straight up in a dramatic fashion. Over 750,000 years though, the highs and the lows were mostly uniform. I was all ready to shout at the TV screen - "You see, we're just in another period of Earth warming! It happens every 20,000 years or so!"

After showing the graph and describing its history, Gore added the 2005 numbers to it. Whoa! The CO2 number was double the previous high. The 2005 number hit the top of the projection screen. And then Gore said, here's what the number will probably be in 2055, 50 years from now. He picked the "low number", not even the medium or high. And oh. my. god. it was double still! He used a self-operated crane to lift himself to way above the projection screen. That for me hit the point home solid. There is no debating now. Humans are destroying the planet with reckless CO2 use.

This is a similar graph, with today's figure on it. 50 years from now, the number is expected to be in the 700 range.

Whether you celebrate Christmas, or Hannukah, or don't celebrate either... I wish you all a Happy Holidays. Don't drink to much, be extra nice to everybody (even strangers) for the next week or so, and get some rest!

We ended up converting an entire ASP.NET 1.1 web site to 2.0 in under a week. It turned out to be easier than I imagined - I estimated 2 people for 2 weeks, and it looks like it will be 1 person for 2 weeks.

I don't want to understate how many problems there were. In the project as a whole, there were THOUSANDS of warning and error messages after the conversion wizard that done its work. But because of the duplicate nature of these problems, it was usually a search and replace job to fix them. One search and replace could fix 50 warnings at once. And even the ones that had to be fixed manually, I could usually just F3 from occurrance to occurance and paste in the corrected code.

The site is now up and working. There is still a lot of testing to do obviously, but I am extremely happy that it has turned out so well.

I am a software developer. I make my living working with businesses to help them automate and improve their business processes. To tell you the honest truth, I make a decent living at it, paid more than the national average wage.

Outsourcing is now standard practice in my industry. In fact, other industries such as call centres, and even television animation have gotten into the act. I heard that the television show The Simpsons is drawn by several teams in India. American artists don't even work on that show any more.

So why am I not scared of outsourcing?

Well first, I do believe the practice has had some impact on my income. My hourly rate could be a lot higher if my talents were scarcer. There is a competition between the amount I make ($X) and the amount an Indian programmer will charge ($X/10 sometimes).

In order to justify the difference, I have to prove my value. Am I worth more than 5 to 10 Indian programmers? In terms of pure code output, no, of course not. 10 programmers can outcode me.

My value comes in the things I can do that a offshore programmer cannot. Is an offshore programmer going to understand every facet of a company's operations (technical and business)? No, generally you give them one task to perform and they do it. Work has to be packaged up.

Is an offshore programmer going to take vague requirements ("I need a daily report on yesterday's activities...") and turn it into exactly what the client needs? No, generally they need specific and very detailed requirements. Work has to be thought out in advance and documented.

And most importantly, can a client ask their Indian programmer to run a project for them, interacting with key employees and making sure the job gets done? No, generally they take the entire job, and don't integrate into an existing team well. They can only work on things independently.

So I feel secure. There will always be a need for me. And I've even worked with overseas programmers, supervising them. So I bring value, and my clients obvious see that too.

There needs to be a major retraining of our society as a whole. Well, maybe.

I was leaving a restaurant today, and saw a woman outside with a young child and a fully loaded stroller. Being the nice guy that I am, I went out of my way and held open the door for her. Waited for her as she was approaching.

No eye contact, no thank you, no nothing. Walked right on in without saying a word.

Seriously - I saved her some grief and she can't even open her mouth? Or smile?

(rant over)

Microsoft or Dell or one of Apple's competitors should do the following...

Hire that annoying "Hi, I'm a Mac" guy from the Apple commercials. Have him talking a-mile-a-minute about how great Windows now runs on the Apple Mac. Using Parallels, you can't tell the difference. Now you can run all your Windows software inside your Mac.  On and on about how, now that Mac users have access to Windows, they will never need anything else.

And after all that, have the poor "Hi, I'm a PC" guy say, "So why don't you just get a Windows PC then?"

Seriously, I just listened to a podcast on Parallels by Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte (Security Now), and they went on and on about how fast Windows now runs on a Mac.... but didn't spend any time discussing the downsides to such a setup. "So if you need a fast version of Windows so badly, why don't you just get a Windows PC?" was all I could think at the end.