I ex­per­i­ment­ed with Google’s new service, Google Transit.

It suggested this route for traveling from my home to my work:

Begin by walking
1   Start at 4XXX 13th Ave S
2   Go to Airport Way S & S Industrial Way (takes about 7 mins)

Take the King County Metro 131 (Direction: NORTH)
3   7:17pm leave from Airport Way S & S Industrial Way
4   7:24pm arrive at 4th Ave S & S Jackson St

End by walking
5   Go to 315 5th Ave S (takes about 2 mins)

This fails badly in two respects.

First, four bus routes run along 15th Avenue S, two blocks east …continue.

In the past few weeks, I’ve received not one but two letters from Christine Gregoire, the governor of Washington State, looking for support in re-electing her. The thing is, is that she’s running in 2008, not 2006.

I threw away the first one. On the second one, I wrote something like this and mailed it back:

If this had come in December, I have been willing to support you. But not six weeks from a high-stakes election. What the hell are you thinking? Don’t bother me again before 2008.

Sheer idiocy. Why would anyone send her money at the moment, instead of making donations towards the mid-term elections?

I just sent the following letter to my senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, as well as to the Seattle Post-In­tel­li­gencer’s Letter Page:

How has America come to this? Is the United States of America truly about to repudiate the Geneva Convention? Is the Senate about to let the President decide when and whom to torture?

This is foul. This is wholly un-American. This is deeply immoral. Every civilized society abhors torture.

How can we claim to be spreading Democracy in the Middle East at the same time that we commit torture? Are we to lose all of our moral standing in the eyes of the world under this wretched Ad­min­is­tra­tion?

Tell me that we’re better …continue.

Via Amer­i­ca­Blog, an amusing video of a cockroach taking on a weatherman. Twice.

I ran into a problem installing some COM+ components today. The installer was using Regsvcs.exe to register each COM+ component. I noticed after a while that the installer wasn’t making any progress and that my dual-proc system was stuck at 50% CPU uti­liza­tion. I attached a debugger to the offending process, regsvcs, and found that it was stuck in the following infinite loop (dis­as­sem­bly courtesy of Reflector):

internal void System.EnterpriseServices.CatalogSync.Wait()
{
  if (this._set)
  {
    RegistryKey key1
      = Registry.LocalMachine.OpenSubKey(@"SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID");
    while (true)
    {
      int num1 = (int) key1.GetValue("CLBVersion", 0);
 

As I mentioned last month, I par­tic­i­pat­ed in this year’s AIDS Walk on Saturday.

I raised over $1300 online, handily exceeding my goal of $1,000. I also raised another $300 in cash and checks at the fundrais­ing barbecue that we threw on September 1st.

I’ve lost count, but I believe that in the last 15 years, I’ve raised about $10,000 for charity. Most of it has been for the Northwest AIDS Walk. The last few years that I was at Microsoft, I raised $2,000-$3,000 each year, thanks to the power of Microsoft matching, which doubled the amount of money that I raised. I’ve also raised money two years running for Ugandan orphans sponsored by Vim: Microsoft Vim …continue.

Nine-Eleven. The date burned into everyone’s brain. One of those dates where everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. Emma and I awoke to the radio telling us that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center. We went downstairs and watched the TV in horror.

For a time, an all-too-brief time, the country pulled together in a show of unity and grief. The world joined us in an outpouring of support.

There are many reasons why history will condemn George Bush, but one of the most serious is his squan­der­ing that good will for quick partisan advantage. A better man could have built a bipartisan consensus …continue.

Mon­ey­Cen­tral is reporting that our Video On Demand product is running a major pilot:

Cable television operator Sunflower Broadband and MTV Networks today announced that they are launching a market-leading campaign to dy­nam­i­cal­ly insert national ad­ver­tise­ments into on-demand cable television. Sunflower will begin dy­nam­i­cal­ly placing ads into MTV Networks on-demand pro­gram­ming this week. The first campaign, created and managed by the agency Mediaedge:cia, promotes the theatrical release of Paramount Pictures’ and MTV Films’ major motion picture "jackass number two", in theaters nationwide on September 22. Ads for the movie will be inserted into Comedy Central On Demand programs at the moment that viewers request the free on-demand shows.

more …

My colleague, Greg, and I spent all day debugging a build break in some unit tests that exercise a webservice interface in legacy .NET 1.1 code. Last night, the tests stopped working on our CruiseC­on­trol.NET build server. We couldn’t understand it. The tests had been working for months. Now we were getting timeouts in SOAP. The tests es­sen­tial­ly mock a SOAP service using the soap.inproc transport and a stub im­ple­men­ta­tion that signaled an event to ac­knowl­edge a method being called.

The only thing that had changed in the code tree was that another colleague, Pavel, had discovered that two of our .csproj files somehow shared the same GUID, and had repaired that. …continue.

In mid-July, most of the Atlas Solutions developer teams moved from our old offices at Fifth and Jackson in the In­ter­na­tion­al District four blocks west to swanky offices in Pioneer Square. The new offices are at the State building on the corner of Occidental and Main, the pedes­tri­an­ized block with the antique stores and art galleries. Occidental Park across the street has been re­fur­bished. There are three coffee shops within two blocks, and Elliott Bay Books is one block west of us. It’s all very pleasant, with the exception of the large number of homeless people.

The only thing that I miss from the old offices is that we’re further from the large number of Asian …continue.