Dustin the Turkey has entered the Eurovision Song Contest. If you’re not from Europe, you won’t fully grasp the notion of the Eurovision Song contest. It’s a song contest, held once a year across Europe, simulcast live. Most nations (with the budget) will have a song entry and the goal presumably is to see who’s the best singer and song writing country. Of course most countries will enter in their native language and represent their country’s heritage somehow, so it’s a great cultural swap-meet.
Europeans sit glued to the television …

Woodgrove is a sample application that was developed by a few folks at Microsoft for Mix 2007 to show off the capabilities of WPF in a meaningful business scenario.
This week I was given a presentation by a leading consulting firm (who shall remain nameless). This deck enumerated the firms’ expertise in java centric presentation tier technology, e.g. Adobe Air, Flex, Flash and so on. Sure enough, the backdrop to one of the slides was a screenshot of Woodgrove!
Even more interestingly, the name "Woodgrove" had been REMOVED from the screenshot!!!
I …

There’s a great quote by Pierre Boutroux who said
"Logic is invincible because in order to combat logic it is necessary to use logic."

Makes sense right? Unfortunately there are a few corollaries to this.

Logic can battled by Stupidity
You cannot combat Stupidity with Logic.
Only Stupidity can battle Stupidity.

Which brings me to another quote, this time I don’t know the author:
"Never argue with a fool, they will lower you to their level and then beat you with experience."

On a recent trip to London I was amused by the differences in infomercials between the US and England. If you stay up late enough or get up early enough you’ll find the US runs infomercials primarily related to being overweight and ways to combat obesity. Case in point, Tony Little [LINK]. And you might say that is in some ways representative of the cultural stereotypes around being American.
So what then would be representative of the English culture? What product best represents the plight of the Englishman in today’s …

If you like Excel like Dan [LINK] and you like Trigonometry and you like Robotics, then you’ll get a kick out of this thing. Oh yeah, if you like Spiders as well as those other things you’ll really like Excel powered Robotic Spider. [LINK]

It’s too bad they didn’t add in a Baby as they could’ve had an Excel Powered Robotic Spider Baby.

I really feel the stress is getting to me.
This morning I was driving to work and stopped at a traffic light. The song on my MP3 was a live version of "Star Star" by The Frames.
I took note of the license plate of the car in front, it was "WEE 92R". At the traffic-light a little person (whom you NEVER see in Jersey City) crossed the road. This was coincidence number one, that the license plate read WEE and a little person crossed at the same time.
At …

After all the show-biz broadway-esque performances at last night’s Oscars, it was great to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win for "Falling Slowly" from the movie "Once".

Glen is a fellow dubliner (hard not to notice based on his acceptance speech) that you may remember from "The Commitments" (another good movie).
I haven’t seen "Once" but I’ve heard the soundtrack and can honestly say "Falling Slowly" is not the only great song here. Checkout "When Your Mind’s Made Up" [LINK] and "Leave" also.
Glen is also the lead …

Superbowl XLII was a thriller no doubt with a tremendous twist in the tale. I can’t take anything away from it. What irks me no end though is when the winning team declares themselves "World Champions".
YES, you’ve won the National Football Conference and YES you’ve beaten the team that won the American Football Conference but you could hardly call yourselves World Champions. There are 32 teams in the NFL, all of them from a single country, the USA [LINK]. To me, in order to be called "world champions" you …

Oh the irony of twittering. Today I noticed in my Facebook feed someone (who shall remain nameless) had updated their status to "Person X has only 3 hours to prepare an important presentation".
If you’ve only 3 hours, why in the world waste time "Twit"-tering your status?

The other day, whilst watching an episode of Ninja Warrior, I made mention that the entire commentary is in Japanese, except for a few English words thrown in. Typically the name of the obstacle the contestant is on, e.g. "Spider Walk" or "Pipe Slider". My brother commented that in Japan, they don’t have a lot of Japanese words for newly invented things, e.g. the word for "Computer" is Computer.
This made no sense as I think Spiders have been around for a while, and I’m fairly certain folks can Walk …