The NHL in Outlook

Mark Schmidt from the WWF team built a nifty little app to import the NHL hockey schedule into Outlook. So I went to import the Caps schedule, only to find that the time zones don’t match up. All the game times are in east coast time and I am on the west coast. I was going to bug Mark for the code, but decided instead to change my current timezone to east coast, import the games into Outlook, and then change my timezone back. It’s a bit of a hack, but it was quicker than changing the code. Sometimes, simple is better.

Now, I just need Comcast to get HDNet.

Update: No word from Concast on getting HDNet. They hope to have more HD Channels “by the end of the year”. I found a petition online asking for HDNet on Comcast and a blog entry from Mark Cuban (co-owner of HDNet) that compares HDNet vs. InHD to “David vs. Goliath”. InHD is owned in part, I think, by Comcast. However, Comcast now owns the broadcast rights to the NHL via their OLN network. So I’m hoping we’ll eventually see HD NHL on Comcast, thought it sounds like I have to wait a few months. 😦

Ted on C# 3.0

I just discovered Ted Neward’s blog has moved. In catching up, I found this great post on the new features of C# 3.0. Even though I had read thru the C# 3.0 spec, Ted’s explanation was much easier to read.

FYI, speaking of Ted, I’ll be speaking at his No Fluff Just Stuff .NET software symposium. Still working w/ Ted on the abstracts, but basically I’m basically talking about patterns, GAT and DSLs.

MSR RSS

I hadn’t realized it, but Microsoft Research is RSS Enabled with seperate feeds for news, downloads and publications. As you would expect, there’s some cool stuff up there. The current headline caught my eye: Concurrent Programming Enters Atomic Age. We spent some time discussing this with the ARC MVPs, so it was fresh in my mind.

MVP Summit Wrap Up Thoughts

It’s hard to believe it October already. The last three weeks have been jam packed, starting with PDC 05, then a variety of meetings culminating with the company meeting the following week, then the 2005 MVP Global Summit last week. This was the first MVP Summit to include Architect MVPs so it was pretty stressful. Of course, there were things we could have done better, but all-in-all I was happy with the event. A year ago, we had just awarded our first 14 Architect MVPs. Now we’re 100 strong between our solution and infrastructure Architect MVPs and we had better than half of them in Redmond for the summit. I swear, it will take us the rest of the fiscal year to implement even half of their suggestions.

I’m sure each of the various groups that have MVPs think that their MVPs are the best, so I guess I’m no different in that regard. Our Architect MVPs are an amazing group and I am already looking forward to the next opportunity to get a bunch of them in a room together again.