Here is this morning's Dilbert:

'nuff said.  And yes... Wally's description of an architect is amazingly accurate.

Count me among those who was absolutely terrified that Microsoft was going to buy out Yahoo!  Also count me as one of the ones who is breathing a sigh of relief at the news that Yahoo rejected the offer, for now.  Actually, I was a little nervous when Yahoo bought Flickr, and also del.icio.us, but as it tuns out, those fears were unfounded.  Flickr has changed very minimally, and del.icio.us hasn't changed at all.  In fact, both services have have changed so little as far as integration with Yahoo (Flickr only changed their login) that I really have to wonder why Yahoo bothered at all.  My only explanation is that Yahoo did it to prevent Google from buying either service.  Google had bought Picasa, which I found to be a very strange purchase, since at the time, Picasa didn't have a web presence.  Google also didn't have a bookmarking service.  Google ended up having to build Picasa's web album infrastructure, and they built their own bookmarking infrastructure.  Neither of which have taken off like Flickr and del.icio.us.  Windows Live services have tanked as well.

But where Yahoo was smart and left those services alone to excel as they had prior the purchase, I have absolutely no faith in Microsoft to do the same.  Flickr will first get wrapped up in Windows Live ID, and then have their content pulled in with Windows Live as fast as humanly possible.  They will also replace the very capable Flash engine with Silverlight.  Just wait and see.  I have no idea what would happen to del.icio.us.  They'd probably port all your bookmarks to Windows Live and then close up that shop.

Anyone disagree?

For anyone trying to get a hold of me, it seems as if my two domain email addresses are not forwarding properly at the moment.  So if you've been emailing me at nick-at-nickschweitzer-dot-net or nick-at-thecodingmonkey-dot-net and I haven't responded, please try me at schweitn-at-gmail-dot-com.  I have a support ticket into my hosting service, so hopefully it will be resolved soon.

Update:  Everything got resolved some time last night, and I even got an influx of emails from throughout the day.  Nice to not lose anything, even if they were delayed several hours.  I actually do prefer nick-at-nickschweitzer-dot-net however, since at some point, I may stop using gmail, and if everyone sends to that address, I don't have to worry about losing too much email in the switch.

Yes... someone actually asked me to do that at work today.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I generally prefer to read real books, rather than online books.  In fact, I've commented before about how I only own one truly "digital book".  It was a book written by Dean Koontz, and at the time I bought it, it was only available online.  I have since bought a signed author's copy, and lost the online version.  But now I'm reviewing a new book on Microsoft Silverlight which is only available online in PDF format.

Most of the time when I use PDF's, it's for relatively brief documents that only amount to one or two pages.  I read the document, and then close it.  But now I'm trying to read a nearly 200 page online book, and I have no idea how to bookmark where I left off in Adobe Reader.  The author of the book can add their own bookmarks when they create the PDF, but how does a reader add a bookmark... like... where I left off?  Adobe Reader is in version 8 now, and either they still don't have this feature, or it's so hidden that I can't find it.  Shouldn't that have been in version 1.0?

I have a new book review posted on BlogCritics.  It's on Programming WPF by Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths.  This is probably one of the best technical books I've read since doing book reviews.  If you're interested in learning the latest framework for doing GUI programming in Windows, then this ought to be the book you buy.

Don't be ashamed to admit that you aren't a good one.  Many people are not, and I'm definitely not as good as I should be, given my profession.  But then again, in my profession, most people are terrible estimators.  That's why I picked up the latest book from Steve McConnell, called Software Estimation - Demystifying the Black Art.  This is the same guy who wrote Code Complete, which is considered by many (including me) to be the ultimate manual on practical software engineering.  I have a review of his new book on BlogCritics.  Check it out.  This should be on your book shelf, right next to The Mythical Man Month.

I've gone from being Peter Gibbons, to being Bob Slydell.

God help me.