After blogging that I use a Nomad IIc for digital music, Sean Alexander blogs on Notmad by Red Chair Software. They even have a version specially for the Nomad II Series. I need to check this out.

My old teammate Rick Culpepper has started a blog. He wanted to use my code for his site, but it’s such a complete mess at this point that he wisely chose to go the .Text route instead. He may not think he’s got anything interesting to blog about, but he’s one of the more interesting guys I know. Interesting enough that I wish he was still a borg and a teammate. Subscribed.

I was on IM with a friend from LA a couple of days ago. He asked what I was listening to. So I thought I’d give a quick rundown on the albums loaded in my Nomad. I know everyone is all ga-ga over the iPod but I really like my Nomad IIc. It’s got 256MB of storage, giving me enough for about 6 albums in 96kbit WMA format. I actually like the fact that I don’t bring my whole music collection with me. It gives me a chance to proactively choose some music that I haven’t listened to in a while.

The Uninvited – Teenage Dance Party

While I’m on record as hating LA now, it was a great place to be twenty and single. I made friends with a bunch of bands that had great music, but never really made it big. This is one of those bands. They’re broken up now (and frankly, only two members of the original band were still with it at the end) but they wrote some of my favorite songs ever. Granted, they might have been my favorites because I heard them live about 100 times. This album is a series of rarities and versions of songs that never got released anywhere else. It ranges from silly (“Let’s Drive a Wooden Stake Thru the Evil Heart of Garth Brooks”) to serious (“Shed My Skin”) to eerily timely given the current state of the world (“Armageddon Blues”). Favorite Song: “Everybody Is A Whore”.

Pat McGee Band – Shine

This is a friend by family band. My brother introduced me to these guys. Sorta Dave Mathews-ish, but better IMO. Like Dave, Pat Mcgee Band encourages their fans to tape and trade live shows, which is pretty cool. Shine is their latest and their first label album (Giant/Warner Bros.). Favorite Song: Minute.

Reel Big Fish – Cheer Up

I’m a sucker for horns, so I love ska. This album isn’t as good as their previous two, but it’s not bad. I haven’t listened to it in a while which is why it made in onto my Nomad. Favorite Song: Suckers.

Uncle Kracker – No Stranger To Shame

While I don’t like straight up rap, I do tend to like cross over stuff. Uncle Kracker got his start off Kid Rock’s fame, but then hit on his own with Follow Me. While the first track of Shame (and hidden last track) are rap crossover, the rest of the album is pretty bluesy, obviously trying to capture the sound of Follow Me. They have a good cover of Drift Away, but my Favorite Song: I Do (as I said, sucker for horns)

David Lee Roth – A Little Ain’t Enough

Overshadowed by the release of Van Halen’s For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge the same year, this is a great, if underrated, album. With the exception of Right Now, every song on Knowledge is entirely forgettable. But I dig pretty much everything on A Little Ain’t Enough.. Need to check out his latest: Diamond Dave. Favorite Song: Hammerhead Shark.

Linkin Park – Meteora

I haven’t given this one enough listens yet. I liked Hybrid Theory and so far I like what I hear of Meteora. Favorite Song (so far): Somewhere I Belong.

I was mucking around with Mark’s RESTful interface to the Microsoft.com web service when I noticed the most recent available download was the Red vs. Blue PDC Video. Well worth the download!

One of the things that makes ASP.NET great is it’s “no black box” approach. Rob Howard describes the approach this way: “Provide customers with the ability to replace/customize/extend the core product” [ASP.NET Overview, Slide 25]. You can see this approach all over ASP.NET. For example, ASP.NET ships with three built-in authentication modules: Windows, Forms and Passport. Don’t like those? Want something custom? Fine, write a module that handles the AuthenticateRequest event and handle authentication however you want. Heck, if you’re doing a one-off solution, you can even skip the module and stick the code in Global.asax.

As is probably apparent to anyone reading this weblog, I’ve been playing around with Windows SharePoint Services quite a bit recently. WSS seems to be made up of three distinct layers:

• Low-level services for DB management of pages and lists
• Web Part Pages Infrastructure
• Site templates, List templates and web parts that ship with WSS by default

You would think these would be mostly independent, but they’re not. For example, the WSS docs describe how you can add a new field type to the default templates that ship with WSS. However, there’s a field type enumeration that’s part of the WSS object model. Obviously, adding a custom field to the template does not change the enumeration. What’s interesting is that if you follow the instructions to add a new field type and then add that field to a list template, you can create a list instance from that template that features the field type you defined. But if you want to modify the column with the custom field type, the WSS site admin pages (i.e. under the _layout vdir) has no idea about the new field type. Likewise, you can’t add your new field type to an existing or custom list since the WSS site admin pages are coded against the object model and the default enumeration of field types. This makes it very hard to black box replace/customize/extend the core WSS product due to it’s tightly coupled nature.

Of course, one of the reasons that ASP.NET has been more successful at extensibility is because it is a tool and WSS is a product. There is no out-of-the-box experience with ASP.NET for end users the way that WSS has. Is shipping a product harder that shipping a tool? Is targeting end users harder than targeting developers? I would think the answer to both of these questions is yes. In the end, the WSS team had to ship something that works OOB, even if that means building something that’s more tightly coupled and thus harder to extend. I hope that over future releases, WSS continues to improve (certainly v2 is a huge improvement over v1) and that it becomes easier to replace/customize/extend the core product.

UPDATE – Of course, it’s Rob Howard not Ron Howard. Rob – Great job on ASP.NET. Ron – Great job on Apollo 13.