A couple of tech authors, two evangelists from Microsoft and I went to dinner the other night. As the conversation strayed from topic to topic through the night, someone would say, "Oh, you've got to send me a link to that."
So, for those of you who were there: here are all those links.
For those of you who weren't there: These are the kinds of things that geeks talk about when Microsoft treats them to a nice meal.
- EAV: Why do the big SaaS providers' databases follow the Entity-Attribute-Value model instead of using a relational database structure? The Entity-Attribute-Value model entry at Wikipedia describes the justification for EAV. "But what about relational constraints?" You can find a good discussion here.
- Doctor Who: The Ten Doctors web comic is a must-read for old-time Doctor Who fans. (Of the four people at the table at that time, how many were old-time Doctor Who fans? Four.) The two current (official) Doctor Who spin-offs are Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Finally, that friend who named her dogs Tegan and Nyssa was obviously a Peter Davison fan.
- ZED451: According to a press announcement for the ZED451 restaurant:
The name ZED451 was derived from a combination of last letter of the English alphabet and the degrees Fahrenheit at which fire starts. “ZED” represents the culmination of the owners’ restaurant experiences, and “451” symbolizes how the dining experience begins.
And yeah, ignition temperature depends on the substance to be ignited and on several other factors. But that food was delicious! - TV time: Americans watch an average of 3 hours of TV a day.
- Music and the basal ganglia: I discuss the topic at Banjo versus TV at Touhy Toastmasters, especially on this slide. Dr. Richard Restak is the author who discusses how practice burns circuits into your brain.
- Hugh Jackman: Yes, he's Wolverine, but he also starred on Broadway in The Boy from Oz, Sunset Boulevard, Oklahoma! and Beauty and the Beast.
- Film: The film Primer was made with a $7000 budget and it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004. And, again, if you really want to enjoy the film don't read anything about it before you watch it, including the cover of the DVD. It'll be even more fun that way.
- More film: The list of films that my cousinnephew and I watched is here; the film notes are under the label film.
- Comic books: Some of the comics discussed: DMZ, Y the Last Man, many Joss Whedon comics (Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Angel: After the Fall and X-Men [ReLoad and Decimation]) and Fables. Also, Bully the Little Stuffed Bull is a terrific comic book blog and I'm not just saying that because we're pals. And Alan Moore's disputes over his work have their own section on his Wikipedia page.
- Evergreen: There's a good description of the newspaper term "evergreen" at Slate's Today's Papers Glossary.
- Working with Microsoft: That book is Partnering with Microsoft and it hasn't been updated since 2005. That newsletter, which does sound like a good idea, is Directions on Microsoft.
- Multimedia technologies: We talked about Curl, JavaFX, Mozilla Prism, AIR, Flash, Thermo, Flex, Silverlight and Expression (including Blend). I'm still not sure which TIBCO technology we were talking about; TIBCO General Interface, maybe?
- Cool office supplies: Levenger makes those cool notebooks. On the cheap: The Hipster PDA.
- Design guides: Before & After magazine, Web Pages That Suck and Jennifer Fleming's Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience.
- Sharing presentations: SlideShare
- Hinsdale, Illinois: It's affluent.
- Other technologies: Mesh
- Misc blogs and sites:
Thanks for the great night out! I think we had as much fun as our NDAs would allow!
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