Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

This morning started with the girls waking me to say my parrot had escaped while they were feeding it. After a look around the yard I went inside to print flyers while they went to the park to look. Jadeen came running back 2 minutes later to say they found him in a tree in the park. 15 Minutes of climbing a tree that had branches that couldn't support my weight and kept breaking I was at the top of the tree where the reluctant escapee was clinging on. I snapped the top of the tree and drew him down toward me. Getting him inside my shirt I then climbed / fell because branches broke back down to the bottom. I have cuts and scrapes all over me and bird is safely locked away once more.

Jude then said – clear this mess away. When the wife says that you need to listen. So I stared clearing away all the boxes I had stacked in the school room where I had temporarily camped while building hers and my new PCs. My new super duper computer is mostly running OK now, the odd lock up is an issue. While clearing away boxes I got distracted into sorting out motherboard driver and other cds I had on my desk return. Then I found an old CD with NASA space images on it, so I handed this to Miranda to copy to our wallpaper archive. While doing that I noticed the filing boxes that are stacked beside her desk hadn’t been pushed back from the other day when I was chasing a wild mouse and that there was a very large very dead blue crayfish down there. It had escaped from my large fish tank. Seeing as the camera batteries were charging we bagged it and put it in the freezer for some macro photography another day.

I have just been informed that I have baby fish. The convicts in the tank the crayfish escaped from have lots of fry.

Oh and last night we had baby dragons hatch out as well as more laid. You can order and buy dragons (if you are in Australia) from Jude’s website www.rasita.biz.

I might get some work done today.

Before this spider was sacrificed to the fish, I took the opportunity to do some close up macro photos. I love the way you can see the hairs on its legs so clearly. This spider was in our bathroom and around 120 mm across. More shots up on Flickr

I went to the Microsoft Innovate day for ISV (independent software vendors) yesterday.

We had a great look at a number of key new technologies in the web and application space.

Specifically, Silverlight, Azure, Expression Blend, Windows 7 and the whole concept of cloud computing.

One of the awesome new things in Windows 7 is the ability to add a VHD as a volume, and make it bootable. It will boot with only a very tiny overhead, making VHDs that require lots of RAM accessible on machines that couldn’t previously handle them. Awesome! That’s the killer app for me, but there’s also lots of eye candy – and very useful eye  candy too, the use of vector graphics makes scrolling and zooming way faster and much better. Search goes another notch higher from the already awesome offering inside Vista. Search is one of the killer apps for Vista over XP by the way.

I was able to network with the boys from Microsoft afterwards, having a drink and a chat with these fine people, Christian Longstaff, Michael Kordahi, Andrew Coates, and Doug, Joel, Bronwen and John. Was a great day – full of learning, humour and general passion for the technology and software being developed with one great purpose, to help people. And I scored 2 free t-shirts!

Here’s some pics.

And Angus Logan poked his head in but went and hid in a cubicle.

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