I've been on holiday for the last 2 weeks. Whilst away (and trying not to think about work), we took a boat trip where 12 people went off on a catamaran for the day, 6 of us from the same hotel. During the chit-chat that goes on in such a scenario, we got to talking about the hotel and how its location was surprisingly good for getting around - and one thing struck me: all 3 couples who stayed at this hotel (it was a Hilton, not normally my 1st choice of a vacation hotel, really) had used www.TripAdvisor.com to select where to stay.

Now for the last couple of years, I've used TripAdvisor to research places for holidaying, and it's always come up trumps... sometimes leading us to hotels or locations that we'd not normally have known about, or giving tips on what to do when we get there. I love the fact that it's constantly being updated and that you can take or leave some of the more positive and negative comments based on the style of writing and after forming an opinion about how experienced the author really is (eg. if someone thinks everything is brilliant, maybe they don't have much to compare it with).

There are plenty of web sites I'd use routinely, but there are relatively few that the "general public" might have cottoned onto and not see as a nice (eg. Microsoft Technet isn't going to be on the radar of your average PC user).

Obviously, news sites like news.bbc.co.uk have a general appeal but they're straightforward replacements for other sources of news. Sites like Amazon and any number of other shopping sites can replace the physical shopping in a store, and using their reader reviews might give you more context on what to/not to buy. Shopping comparisons like PriceGrabber or PriceRunner help the user find where the cheapest items are, so replace the need to shop around by going from store to store.

TripAdvisor, on the other hand, is like taking traditional holiday guidebooks and turbocharging them. I've already started researching the next 2 holidays :)

I mentioned a few other travel sites in a previous blog post - all part of the clued-up traveller's kit bag.

I don't make a great secret of the fact that I'm not much of an Apple fan - I can appreciate the great design in the products but I've just never had a desire or need to actually buy any (apart from the iPod sock, and that was actually a freebie from Jason) - and the whole religious fervour thing that tends to attach itself to Apple stuff has a tendency to put me off.

Just before going on holiday, though, I was book-shopping on Amazon (it's the only time I'll ever plough through a series of books without taking weeks & weeks), and decided to grab the unathorised biography of Steve Jobs, iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business.

Having read the first few pages, I was half expecting the book to be a sycophant's 360 page eulogy as to how wonderful Jobs is, but was pleasingly set straight after a chapter or two. The picture that the whole book paints is that, like many successful and distinctive people, Jobs is a flawed diamond - undeniably talented and possessing of an ability to energise teams of people to do things they wouldn't do for anyone else (characterised by the now-famous "Reality Distortion Field" said to surround him).

Like other successful IT folk (Bill Gates maybe the most well known example), Steve combined a mixture of foresight (which could be seen as equally gifted and delusional for the time) which good luck (being in the right place at the right time), and managed to hang on for the ride enough to make it very successful.

It's interesting to note that when Jobs was essentially kicked out of Apple, he went on to a series of other ventures which very nearly went badly wrong - NeXT was a hardware flop but the OS that they built paved the way for his return to Apple, and Pixar (which he picked up as an already-going concern) was seen by him as a way to sell high-end graphics computers (without apparently cottoning on to the potential of the animations they were producing, which went on to make the company billions).

One thing that characterises Jobs however, and I think is also true of Microsoft in general, is that failure is accepted as an occupational hazard and as long as some lesson is taken from the failure, it isn't the end of the world. Steve proved this by coming back to Apple and turning the company around - though Gil Amelio might have some words to say about how the recovery in Apple's fortunes had a lot to do with the groundwork that he had done beforehand, and that Steve happened to come back at the right time. Whatever, it's hard to deny that had Apple without Steve might not have survived at all, and it's a more interesting world with companies like Apple still flourishing in it.

The book finishes up before Apple's move to Intel CPUs for the Mac lines, before the launch of the iPod Nano (which is surely the most innovative & successful of the iPods so far) and obviously before the announcement of the iPhone. It would be interesting to read a future edition of the book which looks back on the success (or otherwise?) of these strategies in years to come. All in, well worth a read, especially if you (like me) are interested in the history of our industry.

NB: Geek in Disguise, Steve Clayton, wrote about the "D Conference" this week, where Gates & Jobs will jointly appear for the first time in a long time. Now that'd be worth seeing...

Whatever happened to elaborate and amusing '.sig's? It used to be common practice to have a signature with some kind of witty/pithy quote appended at random to every email.

Nowadays, the autosignature that most email programs can insert (such as Outlook's ability to have multiple autosigs, which vary depending on which account is sending, or whether the mail is a new message or a reply), is typically informative with lots of contact information, job titles, disclaimers etc. I've seen some sigs which are twice as long as the message itself (though there may be a legal requirement in the UK to put company information in the sig, in the same way that letterhead paper would, but some people really go to town).

I've had a lot of people comment on my own sig (or steal it - you're welcome to, if you like), since I tried to make it as small as possible whilst still conveying the maximum information, and using hyper links for the different ways you can contact me:

Ewan Dalton
 | +44 118 909 3318 | ewand@microsoft.com
Solutions Architect – Microsoft UK
  Sent using Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007
Microsoft Limited | Registered in England | No 1624297 | Thames Valley Park, Reading RG6 1WG

or for replies (where real estate is even more important)...

Ewan Dalton |  | Microsoft UK | ewand@microsoft.com |+44 118 909 3318
Microsoft Limited | Registered in England | No 1624297 | Thames Valley Park, Reading RG6 1WG

Since we're using Office Communicator, if someone clicks on the first link (the sip: URL), they'll send me an IM. The 3rd pic (the tel: URL) will call me using Communicator (or whatever else they're using that can support a telURL, such as a Smartphone).

I kind of miss the days where interesting quotes were de rigeur - you know, the kind of thing about BillG saying 640k should be enough for anyone (I'm not actually sure he ever said that, but we'll leave it for now) or Thomas J Watson saying there should be a worldwide market for maybe 5 computers...

Speaking of Thos J Watson, if you have an idle few minutes, you really should check out the IBM Songbook - top marks for IBM to keeping it alive as historical curio in the IBM Archives. My own personal favourite is "To Thos J. Watson, President, I.B.M.", sung to the tune of "Happy Days are Here Again".

Anyway, last word on .sigs. David Harris, author of the now venerable Pegasus Mail (which had support for auto-insertion or random quotes from a .sig file, used to have a cracker or two. One that sticks in my mind (apparently taken from a real newspaper):

After the boat had been secured above the wrecked galleon, the diving apparatus was set in motion by the Captain's 18 year old daughter, Veronica. Within hours she was surrendering her treasure to the excited crew.

The secret project codenamed Milan was announced today, as "Microsoft Surface": there have been a few videos floating around from Microsoft Research open days and the like, but the announced technology has had a good deal of marketing gloss applied and it really looks fantastic.

Check out the videos on http://www.microsoft.com/surface - it's interesting to note that this is technology that's been developing for years, not just some great idea that's been annonced before it has any legs. The actual device is going to be relatively expensive ($1000s) and won't be available until late this year, but it has some interesting possible applications - particularly in face:face scenarios where having a screen/keyboard between two people could be divisive.

The scenarios in the several videos might seem a bit far fetched right now, but who knows where this technology could be in 5 or 10 years' time?

I only really started blogging "properly" when Windows Live Writer (WLW) beta first shipped... it's been a really user-friendly tool for blogging, for a whole load of reasons.

The WLW team has just shipped a new beta which has a nice UI polish, some great new features (like inline spell checking) and other interesting stuff like Sharepoint 2007 integration (since Sharepoint 2007 implements blogging).

Steve posted about this and other Live betas (Live Mail & Live Messenger).