I was excited about Al Franken’s new show – “The O’Franken Factor” – which launched Air America Radio today. I got to the office a bit early so I could listen online (they don’t have a Seattle station yet). Apparently, even though Al was on the cover of the NYTimes magazine a few weeks ago, they were surprised by the volume of listeners and the experience has been pretty bad. I couldn’t even connect for the first 45 minutes. Now, either they’ve added more servers or enought people have given up that I can at least listen. However, I can only listen for about a few minutes at a time before the connection drops and I have to manually press play to (hopefully) reconnect. I hope Air America Radio and their hosting partner get this fixed so I can enjoy the shows until it comes to Seattle.

Update: I was able to listen to most of the last hour without constant interuption, though I’m guessing that was primarily due to people dropping off more than anything Air America or their hosting partner did. Also, Franken’s show replays from 8pm-11pm pacific time so I have it on as I type this and apparently they had a ton of technical issues to start the show – basically the first fifteen minutes has been background noise, concurrent playback of multiple audio streams and multiple news casts. I’m not even sure if what I’m listening to now is previously recorded or live – I just heard someone tell someone else to “have a good night”. Hopefully, they’ll get these issues worked out shortly.

Good pal Tony Goodhew just started blogging this past Sunday. He’s already posted 15 times. Even though he’s a Product Manager in the developer division and has been involved in J#, he hasn’t posted much on technology yet but he sure has several opinions on the NFL.

We’ve added a session to the Architecture Strategy Series. The Technology Roadmap has proven to be a popular session at our architecture forums. I delivered it twice two weeks ago and I’m delivering it for a customer later today. The version of the presentation up on Architecture Center was delivered by Norman Judah, VP of Business Development for the Platforms, Technology and Strategy Group.

What’s nice about the Technology Roadmap is that it isn’t a product roadmap (mostly). We talk about the value of technologies themselves, rather than a list of features each product will have. It also talks about the market forces at work that are leading us to build the technologies in the first place. Well worth the watch.