Well, Peter wants to develop his spying abilities, so I thought I'd brush up on my own as well.

I think that before the fighting, shooting, skydiving occurs, it's important for a spy to be able to gather background information on enemies or assets.  So I decided to do some digging.  Let's just say I uncovered some rather disturbing things.  I'll be posting some more of my results in the coming days.

More info from PDC.  This has been a subject of particular interest to me lately.  Looks like they're looking to provide a nice framework for it.

Check it out

Check it out!

Well, my monitor appears to be failing.  Even as we speak, I'm being wowed with a beautiful assortment of flashing colors.  Unfortunately, this time the cable is not the culprit.  I fear the worst...

Looks like I'm gonna need a new monitor sooner than I had hoped.  This is probably as good a time as any to jump headlong into the LCD flat panel world.  I went to Fry's to check some out this evening to check some out.  To keep me in my current feature set, I would need 1600x1200 resolution.  This doesn't appear to be possible for under $1000.  My LCD-related requirements are:

• At least 500:1 Contrast Ratio
• At least 400 cd/m² Brightness
• DVI AND Analog (VGA) inputs -  This way I don't have to upgrade my video card immediately
• At least 1280x1024 resolution

Fry's got a nice 19" Sony and a 19" Samsung that meet my requirements.  I'll have to figure out which one soon.

I'm going to try to explain this as concisely as possible.  For a long time now, I've wanted to do a video where a character does really dramatic slow motion things to the music from "The Natural" specifically the part where he hits the home run and the stadium lights explode.  Then, as the video progresses he does more and more mundane things until at the end he's doing something really stupid like dramatically eating cereal in slow motion.

I've never really had a good ending or any kind of real plot to it...until today.  He needs a partner, one who at first is completely obsessed with being as dramatic as he is, but whever he tries it, he fails miserably, falling on his face or running into something, or dropping/breaking something.

Then, as the dramatic character does more and more mundane things dramatically, the roommate (or however he's related) gets more and more annoyed that he's not as dramatic as his roommate.  Then, during the one-upsmanship, the lesser roomate dies somehow, like leaps to catch a falling knife and gets stabbed.  Then, the final scene is of the dramatic guy reading the newspaper in slow motion with some stupid headline like, "Non-dramatic man dies".

So, what I need are some things that would be really funny in dramatic slow-motion with "The Natural" music, and some things that could go wrong if the not-dramatic guy tried to do them.

I've updated my PDC Wishlist.

I was recently asked by a friend of mine lucky enough to attend PDC this year, "What sessions would you go to?"  Well, this is an experimental entry which I will keep updated with my "PDC Wishlist"  What sessions I would attend and maybe even why.

• Chris Anderson's Avalon Talk -- Chris, whose weblog is the reason I blog today, is the original author of BlogX.  "What is Avalon?" you ask?
• Don Box's Indigo Talks -- I see Don Box's name everywhere.  He's had some great insights in his blog.  Click to talk link to get an overview of what Indigo is.
• Chris Sells if he's speaking -- He shows up on the speakers list, but doesn't appear to have a talk registered.  What's up with that?  Maybe I just haven't looked deep enough since I'm not actually going.  He's big on Longhorn, the next version of Windows.
• Anders Hejlsberg's C# language enhancements talk.  This will give us the goods on generics and the other goodies they're adding like anonymous delegates, iterators, etc.
• Anything else about Whidbey (next VS.NET/framework release).  I haven't found out who's doing sessions on this, but it should be a huge part of the PDC.  Generics will steal the show, but there's alot of other nifties in there as well
• I'm not that interested in Yukon (next SQL Server), but if I had leftover time, I'd make some sessions on that.
• I would definitely try to meet Miguel de Icaza.  He's head dude at Ximian which was recently aquired by Novell.  He wrote the Gnome desktop for Linux.  He's a fan of the CLR and heads the Mono project which is an open-source implementation of the CLR primarily targeted at Linux.  He's bound to be around somewhere.

I'll keep this list updated as I think/find more topics I'm interested in.  If anyone else has ideas on what's important to see, feel free to comment.

Check it out (if you interested in that sort of thing).  For those who don't know if they're interested, generics are like templates in C++, allowing you to define classes, methods, etc. in terms of a generic type rather than a specific type.  This article goes over the advantages of CLR generics as opposed to C++ templates or the proposed generics specification for Java.