I’m sure this has made the rounds, but VPC 2004 SP1 is available. Among other updates, it has a new version of the VM Additions, which significantly improves the performance of XP SP2.

I said I wasn’t going to blog any political reasoning (for now), but there is one quasi-political subject that I want to address – the media. Not to steal Bill Maher’s shtick, but we need a new rule: Members of the media can’t talk about the media as if they aren’t a part of it. I occasonally listen to as much talk radio as I can without throwing up (usually about five minutes). But beyond the obvious partisanship, the spewing hatred and the outright lying that goes on, there’s this thin veil of bullshit that somehow these radio shows are telling you “truth” that “the media” won’t. When Rush Limbaugh says something along the lines of “Here’s something the media won’t tell you” he is outright lying because he’s part of the media:

Media: A means of mass communication, such as newpapers, magazines, radio, or television.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Note the use of the word “radio” in the definition? Radio is, in fact, part of the media – go figure.

There’s this myth in this country that the media is liberal. Maybe it was back before consolidation, national syndication and 24-hour cable news networks, but it sure ain’t now. Rush and his cronies distance themselves from the concept of “the media” in order to keep that myth alive. The reality is that most of what passes for news and opinion in the media these days is more like carefully scripted partisan theatre intended to further their host’s own agenda rather than tell any of the actual truth.

Major kudos to Jon Stewart for pointing this out to the staff of CNN’s Crossfire.

Update: In the second to last paragraph above, I changed “host’s own conservative agenda” to simply “host’s own agenda”. I was momentarily guilty of the same type of partisan manipulation that I am accusing others of. It isn’t only conservatives that have an agenda. For example, Michael Moore has a pretty obvious liberal agenda and, as a filmmaker, is also a part of the media. Of course, Michael’s media efforts aren’t masquerading as the supposedly unbiased evening news.

My father recommended I not blog politics, under the mistaken assumption that this is a “technical blog”. For the record, this isn’t a technical blog, it’s my personal blog and I blog about what I’m interested in. Usually, it’s technology, development and/or architecture. Sometimes it’s hockey. Sometimes it’s movies. Right now, I’m abnormally interested in politics – go figure. I’m a week behind on tech blog reading, but I’m currently reading over a dozen political blogs every day.

This political “season” has had a significant effect on me. Call me a slow learner, but I’m beginning to figure out that politics isn’t just something to think about once a year at election time – or worse, once every four years when at presidential election time. I’m sure regular readers can guess who I support for president, but I haven’t quite figured out how my new-found-interest in politics will effect my day-to-day life after Election Day. I won’t bother you with any political reasoning (yet) since you’ve either made up your mind, in which case nothing I say will make a difference either way, or you haven’t, in which case you’re getting bombarded on all sides to make a decision and anything I say will be lost in the cacophony. But I do want to share one quote with you, which I found doing a little research:

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

• George Washington

Regardless of who wins in November, I will never turn my back on this troublesome servant and fearful master again.

Two new architect bloggers to note. Jim Clark is a business architect on the Architecture Strategy Team. Jim spends a lot of time with what he calls “Red River” – identification and definition of business architectures, ontologies and environments that promote trusted business solutions. His first post is about Familiarity and Trust. Steve Cook is a contributor to Software Factories and works for Keith. Steve is looking forward to OOPSLA. So am I.

I sat through four session yesterday – two keynotes and two informational presentations. My favorite of the four was the session on Business Architecture by Jack Calhoun, CEO of Accelare. I can’t summarize it effectively, so I won’t try. However, one of the key points I took from the presentation is that the architecture of the business is evolving away from an organizational-based model towards a capability-based model. That’s fascinating because business capabilities are a natural match to technology services. Jack made a point that SOA isn’t going to be successful if it’s just as new technology mechanism – it also needs to enable to business models. He also introduced a term I had never heard before – “chaordic“. The term chaordic is a combination of chaotic and ordered and is used to describe the dynamic organization of complex systems (like enterprises). It was coined (I believe) by Dee Hock, former CEO of Visa who wrote a book on the subject called Birth of the Chaordic Age. Yet another book to add to the tall stack that I’m still working through.

This morning, I ran a breakout on Refactoring Your Best Practices. I didn’t bring much presentation material to this session since I’m not sure we do a great job of this. Actually, we (i.e. Microsoft) do a pretty good job capturing best practices, but we’re less effective at reusing those practices. One of the reasons we’re not great at using these practices is because it’s very hard to capture the context of the best practice. The breakout session was awesome. We had a variety of experiences represented, from a company where best practices have become rigid rules that must be followed blindly, even when they stop making sense, to a company that has a “Chief Methodologist” who runs a group of architects who build best practices the way that other groups build products. I thought that the project-esque approach was fascinating. One of the implications is that we need to capture baseline information about the practices, so we can tell if we’ve improved as we refactor. All in all, it was a great discussion. I think everyone got value from it as we decided to “keep the conversation going” on email after the event.

The second morning session was a Q&A with Bill Gates and Eric Rudder. This is one of the high points of this event for the attendees. He was asked about a variety of topics, but the one that caught my attention was Bill’s opinion of blogs and if he is planning to start his own soon. Not surprisingly, he was very positive about blogging but made no commitment to starting a blog anytime soon. He’s said he didn’t want to start a blog unless he had the time to make a commitment to blog regularly. Of course, that’s exactly what has happened with Eric’s blog. However, in his defense, Eric made a great point – one of the reasons he started his blog to encourage the employees in his division (Servers & Tools) to blog. I’d love to see Bill and Eric blog, but I think it’s the rank-and-file Microsoft bloggers that are really making a difference in the community.