The nice thing about working in high tech, as the caption for the photo above says, “mod styles are an accepted way of life”. I have got to grow me some serious muttonchops like the gentleman pictured above!
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In Transit
Pictured above is an Embraer 190, the exact type of plane I’m flying today from Seattle back home to Accordion City this morning. Air Canada’s seat layout for their Embraer 190s is two on the left side of the aisle and two on the right, each seat has its own entertainment unit and each pair of seats has a power outlet. I expect to be far more comfortable than I was in United’s “Economy Minus” section, where I sat on the way here.
Regular posting should resume this evening.
The following photos explain why I probably shouldn’t ever be allowed free roam of the Microsoft Campus. Click any photo to see it at full size.
(For the background story of the gnu, see my entry titled Winning the Gnu.)
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HackLabTO’s Lisp Machine Keyboard
After years of sitting in storage, my deadbeat ex-housemate’s old Symbolics XL1200 Lisp Machine has found a new home: HackLabTO, located in Accordion City’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of its keyboard, which is a little different from the ones we see every day.
The keyboard is bristling with modifier keys. Yes, we’ve all got shift and control, but most of us don’t have hyper, super, and meta keys. I have a guess as to what the network and local keys do.
Well before the Sony Playstation, Lisp machines had square”, “circle” and “triangle” keys:
And here’s a look at the right side of the keyboard. Today’s keyboards have an auto-repeat feature, which made the repeat key obsolete:
White collar conservative flashin’ down the street
Pointin’ their plastic finger at me, ha!
They’re hopin’ soon my kind will drop and die but uh
I’m gonna wave my freak flag high, high!— lyrics from If 6 Was 9 by Jimi Hendrix
Yeah, C# is pretty decent, but if you really want to hold the freak flag up high, the Dynamic Language Runtime and IronPython and IronRuby are where it’s at, baby!
I’m 5’11” (180cm) tall, and here’s what the legroom in United Airlines’ economy class is like once the guy in front of you has reclined his seat. He’d originally reclined his seat all the way, but I was able to talk him into doing it only halfway:
As you can see, my knees are touching the seat in front of me. If you’re 6 feet or taller, you’ll probably want to get upgraded to what United calls “Economy Plus”, where you get a little more legroom – about as much as other airlines’ economy class seats.
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We’ll be in Seattle This Week!
This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.
Starting tonight (Pacific Coast Time), John Bristowe, I, and a few other folks from Microsoft Canada’s De veloper & Platform Evangelism team, will be in Seattle all next week to attend Microsoft’s 8th TechReady conference. TechReady is a Microsoft internal conference where ‘Softies from all over the world gather to get briefed on upcoming releases. The coming months promise a bumper crop of Microsoft goodies – Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8, Visual Studio 2010 and Azure to name a few – so the sessions should be very interesting. (I think I’ll actually be taking a lot of notes during the presentations rather than checking my mail or looking at that video of kittens riding a Roomba.)
We’re going to try to take advantage of this gathering to get some interviews with some of the big brains at Microsoft from Redmond and all over the world, as well as show you some of the sights and sounds of Seattle. Watch this blog for updates!
Are you in Seattle? Want to catch up? Talk about Microsoft, software development, accordions. Zardoz or anything else? Drop me a line or give me a ring (416-948-6447)!
[Seattle photo by Andrew “papalars” Larsen and licenced under Creative Commons. Click here to see the original.]