Your Strategy Is What You Ship. I was reminded of this quote today, taught to me when I was a snot-nosed inexperienced consulting brat in the strategy practice of Booz-Allen & Hamilton. One of the more experienced consultants in the operations practice sneered at some inane observation I made one day and said “Your strategy is what you ship”.

Today’s strategy lesson – Microsoft’s developer tools and platform sdks. I am an MSDN subscriber and I get absolutely pounds of CDs from Microsoft and gigabytes of articles, tools, libraries, etc. It is a dizzying and confusing array of tools – and relatively pricey too. The imputed strategy here is “Microsoft only cares about enterprise developers – if you are a young, starving, novice programmer, there is no entry path to the Microsoft platform. You should go use PHP and Perl and Python and other environments that are cheap and easy to start with.” I doubt this is what any slidedeck at Microsoft says but that is sure how it feels.

Wildseed – Best of CES Finalist. Congrats to the Wildseed team.

The New SAT. A bunch of changes – The College Board-The New SAT

The Best Software License Ever – Spybot S&D. An excerpt: Spybot-S&D is dedicated to the most wonderful girl on earth :)

100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900. Not a bad way to expand my reading list – NPR: 100 Best Fictional Characters Since 1900. Not a new list but a good one. (I got here googling for “fictional characters named john” in my never-ending quest to find new and interesting IM handles for myself)

Invisible UV Paint available at clearneon and wildfirefx

Gigabit Ethernet NTK - Part 1 : Small Net Builder : Real Help for Your Small Network from Tim Higgins. Rich turned me onto this, a good primer on starter hardware for gbit ethernet. I am going to move to gbenet sometime in the next two months – copying 25G vidcap files around the lan is no fun. I think tho that I will still have problems as i think my NAS box is based on samba code with a 2G filesize limit – that is what I get for buying a cheapo NAS.

Quattrone Has Left the Building. From Fool.com: February 3, 2003

Finance Sector embraces blogging. Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: Headlines

Acid Pro and Minnetonka are sources. The primary use in the Halloween groups is to drive 4-5 props in unison, not really to create a surround sound effect.

National Driver’s License Database. Wow I didn’t know this existed – Welcome to the National Drivers License Database – kind of frightening.

Spybot S&D. I’ve seen several good reviews of Spybot - Search & Destroy by PepiMK Software. I just tried it out, it found a lot of garbage on my machine, mostly installed by games. Worth trying.

PhotoMeister. PhotoMeister - This Software helps you to manage, edit and publish photos from your digital camera. Publish to HTML, EMail, Screensaver, Slideshow or CD-ROM

Bush: “Our entire nation grieves’ for astronauts”. Too down to post yesterday – CNN.com - Bush: ‘Our entire nation grieves’ for astronauts - Feb. 1, 2003. Flag at our house it at half mast.

A good summary of trackback thinking. tima thinking outloud. : The Next Generation of TrackBack: A Proposal