One of the nice things about the new job is I get to walk round and bump into people I haven't spoken to for ages. Sharon left Microsoft a few months ago, and was sitting in the coffee bar when I walked by on Thursday. Her web-site is called "joining dots" because she brings ideas together to "make sense of emerging trends and understand their potential.". She has an interesting blog too - this piece on instant messaging is a must read - partly because of the way it brings ideas together. I like to weave themes together as well, this post is an example of that.

My daughter's school is trying to encourage people NOT to drive right up to the gates, and instead park in a pub car park 400 yards away "to be kind to the environment". If I driving 3/4 mile to the pub, drop my daughter at school and then drive 40 miles to the office, it makes very little difference if we walking 400 yards or not. It's walk the full mile from home to school or park at the gates. So on Friday we did the walk, and enjoyed it.

Microsoft is about to build another building here in the UK - part of the information that has been circulated internally  was an energy assessment done on the existing buildings by the Carbon Trust. Although the details of the report are confidential, what amazed me was the heating bill per unit area for these modern buildings is much higher than my house - which was built about 150 years earlier.
I forgot all about it until I read something on Sharon's site which said 50% of carbon emissions come from the work place, 23% from travel (20% from cars and 3% flights) and the rest from homes.

Wouldn't it be better to use less office space by working from home more ? It's good to see the people you work with, but seeing them on 5 days of a week is NOT 25% better than seeing them on 4, or 66% better than seeing them on 3. Having only a proportion of people in the office - and sharing the space among them with compact "Hot desks" is environmentally good, even though I've said hot-desking is the only thing I dislike about the working environment at Microsoft. Still, I'm sure that it's postponed the need for a new building. 
I can save a lot of travel too: my car is 50% more efficient than the one I had 6 years ago but even so, saving one trip per week to the office will save roughly a ton of C02 over a year (and about 2 working weeks worth of time spent in the car).

So I'm, going to try to have a car free day per week - Mondays preferred. I'll walk my daughter to school, and work from home, and today is the first of these days.
I'll try to collect ideas together about how technology helps (or hinders), and post them here. Things like the use of Outlook or Communicator without VPNs, Groove and so on. It doesn't matter where we are if we have good collaboration software. And collaboration software was Sharon's interest when she worked here. That's joined a few dots of my own.

I know - platfrom folks shouldn't do code. But yesterday I wrote my first "proper" program in nearly 2 years. My university lecturers would hate me to call VB "proper" programming: but although I've done a some scripting I haven't written anything with a user interface since writing a little Smartphone App back in '04. Not only do I feel rusty, but I thought I'd try VB Express  for the first time

After reading the RSS team Blog I wanted to see how easy it was to use the API for RSS,  that is enabled by IE7. How difficult would it be to code with an updated language, and programming environment, and a new API ?  Astonishingly easy as it turned out. After 3 hours work I had a tool which will

• Show your feeds and downloaded items in a tree view with unread items in bold (22 lines)
• Shows item selected in the tree with its image, time stamp, and links to it and its feed (20 lines)
• Let you mark the selected item as read or delete it (35 lines)
• Resize properly (5 lines)

So anyone who writes RSS software or wants to - leave the subscribing and downloading to IE, and get on and write something great on top of it. Newsgator's CTO already gets this

You may have heard claims about how Vista can help you save electricity. It has 3 features which play a role in this.
Firstly it's "Sleep" and Hibernate modes work better than their equivalents in XP - various things have lost their veto over Hibernation.
Secondly the machine can "wake" from it's sleep state to run a scheduled task, so you don't need to leave PCs on overnight for software updates, disk de-frags, virus scans and the like.
And Thirdly we've added power to the set of things which can be centrally managed with group policy, so PCs which are left on 24/7 and spend most of their time running screen savers can now be powered down.

The numbers go like this,
There are 8760 hours in a year, and a PC only needs to be on 10 hours per day 5 days a week = 2600 hours a year. So those 24/7 PCs could be in sleep mode for 6160 hours per year. [That's the basis we use, and I think the savings are bigger - a PC isn't used from 8AM till 6PM in most offices, it can power down when we're away in meetings or at lunch, and we don’t come into the office 260 days a year... you might have a further 1000 hours of sleep. Those PC produce heat - reduced it, and you reduce air conditioning requirement too]
A PC and monitor use about 125 Watts when running and 5 Watts when on standby a saving of 0.12KW. Multiplied by 6160 hours per year that’s 740 KWh per year. The national energy foundation have a useful "calculate your CO2 emissions" page which says 1 KWh of electricity makes 0.43 Kg of C02, so 740 KWh is about 1/3 of a tonne of C02. Multiply by the number of PCs you have and it's quite a big saving.

I found a paper from the UK parliament which makes that about 3% of the average C02 emissions per person here - France emits less Co2 than us - because their electricity is mostly nuclear, so their Co2 saving will be less. US emits twice as much (4.6% of the worlds population contributes 23.8% of green house gasses) so they need all the savings they can find.

It's hard to estimate the number of "Sleep hours" we can get (how many PCs run 24/7 ? What can it be reduced to ?), and I don't have a world wide average for C02 emissions per KWh, and I can't predict how much power an average PC will consume in the future ... but with hundreds of millions of PCs, saving hundreds of Kilowatt hours, that makes tens of millions of tons of C02 - equivalent to whole output of a small country. Doing something about global warming means both big changes (like electricity generation) and small ones (in its consumption). This is a small change, but as the Chinese proverb has it, "The Journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"

I guess people who worked for Microsoft a few years ago must have some idea what it's like to be Google right now. A huge market share means people want to criticize you, you seek solace by  watching your stock price, but that only makes you worry that the whole thing is built on sand and someone could sweep it away at any moment. 

A few days ago,  I mentioned the search box in IE7, and it seems Google is worried about it (the search box, not my blog post.) And Robert Scoble points out that lots of people are blogging about that.

According to a piece in the New York Times,
Google, which only recently began beefing up its lobbying efforts in Washington, says it expressed concerns about competition in the Web search business in recent talks with the Justice Department and the European Commission, both of which have brought previous antitrust actions against Microsoft. 
You have to wonder if Google is aware of its the extent of its dominance in the web search business - because this would colour the views of the regulators. Since they are sponsoring the adoption of Firefox - which has search for highlighted text hard coded to Google - there are tough questions which they could be asked: one of the bloggers has a few And if Google's search is so good, another wonders what they are worrying about.
This complaint also says a lot about Google's confidence in its customer/brand loyalty -- if Google is worried about people dumping it for MSN Search because it's not worth the extra effort to click twice in IE7 to change the default search setting, perhaps Google fears it really does have a one-click brand loyalty problem

Maybe they've compared the Windows Live powered search on A9.Com  and think that (unlike today's MSN search) no-one will switch to them from the new search…. Whatever, the IE team have been at pains to point out that "the search box in IE7 is not Microsoft’s. It belongs to the user". The search box is managed with   Opensearch XML descriptions of how search engines accept queries: here's an example.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 
<OpenSearchDescription xmlns=http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<ShortName>Google</ShortName> 
<Description>Google Web Search</Description> 
<Url type="text/html"
    template="http://www.google.com/search?q={searchTerms}
      &rls=com.microsoft:{language}
      &ie={inputEncoding}&oe={outputEncoding}
      &startIndex={startIndex?}&startPage={startPage}" /> 
</OpenSearchDescription>

<a Href="#" onClick="window.external.AddSearchProvider(&quot;URL of XML file &quot;);">
Click to here add our search
</a>

Here are the clicks to open the Microsoft providers library and make Google your default search engine. (I copied XML and the code from there).

Google could put this on their home page in 5 minutes flat. 
 
But there is a second thing which OpenSearch enables, which I found in Erik Porter's blog : If you put a link tag into a page  - like you would for a style sheet, icon, or RSS feed - then you can have a page specific search. Instead of users hunting for "search this site", it's on the same pull down as search this page and search the web. Wouldn't it be great of users had a consistent way to find a site's search ? Of course some people would be bound to complain about that too.

I want an Xbox 360. Someone gave me an original Xbox and the games still impresses me. When I got the Xbox I already had a cable TV decoder, VCR, and DVD player lashed into the back of the TV. I gave the DVD player to my Dad because the Xbox did that job. But it's not a pretty piece of furniture and it's noisy. The 360 is better in that regard, wireless controllers are tidier, and it's ability to display photos, play music and so on makes gives it greater "lounge appeal".

Part of the 360's advantage is high definition pictures - so a few weeks ago I replaced my 16-year old TV with a widescreen TFT one. The new TV supports DVB-T - "Freeview" to anyone in Britain, which means farewell cable decoder (and £20 a month saved). But I can't tape digital stations; and my 16-year old VCR isn't widescreen either, I need to play my old tapes, but it's time to find a new recording solution

Windows Vista does away with a Media Centre edition, "Ultimate" and "Home Premium"  include Windows Media Centre as an application. The Xbox 360 can act as a media extender, so you don't need a PC under the TV. I think that's ideal: with a TV decoder and Vista on the PC in my study, it can be a big store for music, photos and recorded videos.  Except: that PC is old and underspecified for the job. So I need a new PC, maybe even a 64-bit one, and no doubt the monitor will be replaced at the same time. I learnt about backup the hard way, and with more storage my backup system will need a re-think too.

Vista is going to solve another problem for me. I have something like 15,000 digital photos, and little by little I'm digitizing my way through 20 years of film. No filing system I've found works. Back in 2002 when I was a Sharepoint Portal Server Guru, I summarized what I had learnt amount managing thousands of documents in "The Taxonomy ten commandments", the last of which was: Readers will find documents by browsing categories or by searching. If readers are exposed to your folder hierarchy you are doing it wrong! The things that applied to documents in Sharepoint then apply to photographs on my hard disk now. Category driven search folders in SPS have given way to Tag driven ones in Vista - and Vista's are much easier to use.
For example: I have hundreds of photos of my daughter and her friends. If I tag pictures with the names of people in them, then two clicks "stacks" my pictures by tags, each tag becomes a search folder - all the pictures of a particular friend are in one place.. two more clicks burns those pictures to CD. Further, the tags are  EXIF fields just like technical details of a TIFF or JPEG. If someone looks at the CD in 20 years time, they can see who else is the picture and when it was taken: I wish I had that for all my old negatives.

Trying to get control over all this content, causes some other headaches. My wife's music is in Apple's AAC format for her ipod - mine is in WMA for everything else. It seems we need to stick to MP3 as the only common denominator. Formats are a nuisance, even without DRM, or   Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection as  zdnet calls it http://news.zdnet.com/2036-2_22-6035707.html . DRM'd files either work on Windows media player (including mobile), or on the ipod, but not both, plug the iPOD into the Xbox 360 and it will play

 [Rhetorical question] Our server folks think about the customer who has some Unix/Linux as well as Windows.  For Vista I wonder if our media folks have considered households like mine with both an iPod and a Windows mobile device ? Media sync is broken in the interim build of Vista I have at the moment, so I can't check.

I hope to avoid wiring a TV aerial connection for the PC - it is difficult  to wire anything in the old house where I live. For that reason, I use 802.11b to provide internet connections to laptops, desktop, and Xbox. I've had it since the summer of 2000, when I imported my own Linksys box from the US. I noticed that Linksys's free-standing Media extender supports only 802.11A or G variants, so my 11Mbit/sec network may be too slow and need upgrading.

I can't help feeling something's gone wrong here.  I wanted a new HDTV games console. So I've upgraded to an HD TV screen, which caused me to change my digital TV provider, which in turn has made look at changing how I record TV, to do that I'll be replacing my OS, which means changing the PC hardware. To make it all work may mean reformatting all stored music, going back and tagging photos and revamping my wireless networking. And the one thing that's staying ? the 16 year old VCR because I still need to play old tapes. Maybe with Vista I will finally digitize them.

Back in the 1990s when I was working for a Microsoft partner I read Douglas Coupland's novel "Microserfs"  The story starts inside Microsoft, and the narrator talks about hanging with the cool guys at Nintendo on the other side of I520 from his building. When I visited Microsoft campus for the first time, I was surprised when our approach into campus brought us past Nintendo.

I was thinking of Microserfs when reading  a recent article of Robert Scoble's.   In passing he mentioned his frustration with product names.
why do we make cool names like "Sparkle" lame by changing that to "Expression Interactive Designer?")
And UMPCs [are] another lame name for "Origami's"

Code names are usually cool, release names less frequently so. "Tahoe" was cooler than "Sharepoint Portal Server", Hotmail is a better name than "Windows Live Mail", "Exchange" is a decent name "Live communications server" isn't. Vista breaks a tradition of Windows versions having lame names. Sadly no one told Redmond that in British English you can't call a product "One care"… any more than Mr and Mrs Kerr would name a son "Wayne". Mitsubishi had the same problem when they called an SUV the Pajero - it means the same thing in Spanish (although the similar and more widely told story of the "Nova" is an urban legend.) Joining the list of strange name choices we have the once cool Nintendo, whose new console is called the Wii. Ok, Ok: "Oui !" in French is "Yes!", "We" is a nice inclusive "all of us", "Wee", especially in Scots English is cute or small. "Weeeee" is the kind of thing we shout whizzing down slides. All good stuff, but did they miss its more lavatorial connotation. I mean:

"Did you go for an X-box or a Playstation ? "
"Neither, I went for a Wii"

"OK your friend can come round and play"
"Thanks mum, can he bring his wii ? "

"What would you like to purchase sir ?"
"Can I have a Wii please" ? 

"Stock levels are too high in the games section"
"Yes we have a lot of wii on our hands"

And before anyone from Ninteno asks, no, I'm not a one-care evangelist.