I’ll be away until next Monday, so expect light (or perhaps no) blogging till then.

Sean Alexander tells the story of a poor devil who went to Dixies BBQ in Bellevue and ate an entire fork full of “The Man.” For the uninitiated, “The Man” is Dixie’s legendary sauce. Gene wanders the tables carrying a small saucepan and asks you if you’ve met “The Man.” A smidgen the size of your little fingernail is enough to set off a small nuclear chain reaction in your mouth. An entire fork full of that lethal sauce? Nonstop hilarity if you’re in the audience.

If you’re ever in the Seattle area, make the pilgrimage.

I have to admit, I was surprised.

I’ll be on the Chris Pirillo Show tonight (sometime around 6PM Pacific).

Anyone want to guess what we’ll be talking about?

… is expletive. Note that some people spell it “explitive.” They are wrong. One could even call them “ignorant.”

Tomorrow’s word of the day will actually be a phrase: ad hominem.

Not sure what I did to set Mr. Thurrott off this way, but we’ll just have to consider the source, I guess.

Too bad I won’t be at WinHEC next week. It might have been amusing to talk to Paul directly and ask, WTF? (Oh, wait. Is that an expletive?)

Oh, and Paul…

This is an expletive. Pot. Kettle. You know.

Dwight Silverman passes along the agenda for the monthly Technology Bytes Geek Gathering in Houston. Now, I’m sure it will be extra-geeky fun (free WiFi too), but my favorite part of the announcement is the location.

It’s at Tropioca. A coffee/tapioca bar.

Coffee and tapioca. Together. Coffee is my favorite non-alcoholic beverage. Tapioca has been one of my favorite desserts since I was about this high. Now, if Dwight tells me there’s a joint that serves good barbeque ribs brisket [thanks, Brad!] within walking distance, I’d say they’ve hit the trifecta.

The turnstile on this site just clicked its 800,000th visitor – all the way from Vastra Gotaland, Sweden. At this rate, visitor #1,000,000 will stop by sometime around August 1st.

Thanks!

Well, this is good news.

I do worry occasionally about excessive caffeine intake. I’ll stop before I start having pallets of fresh roasted beans delivered quarterly.

Over the weekend, Dwight Silverman paid me an enormous compliment, placing this site in his list of six favorite tech sites. In his write-up, he said, “The only thing wrong with Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise site is that he doesn’t post often enough.”

I plead guilty, but with an explanation. I try very hard to avoid posting anything here until I’m confident it’s right. That means I don’t idly pass along links to the latest hot news, because more often than not that news turns out to be, well, wrong. And I sometimes take a while to digest the news, because I think people who visit this site expect an in-depth analysis, not just a snap judgment.

Two cases in point:

Over the past few days, I could have picked up and passed along any of several seemingly authoritative reports from various Windows rumor sites that a new interim build of Windows Vista was going to be released to beta testers today. (No links necessary. If you follow this stuff, you already know who I’m talking about.) One site went so far as to post the exact time when build 5365 was due to be released – 1:00 PM EST – along with a list of the changes included in it.

They were wrong. In fact, I think they were pulling this stuff out of their … Sorry, let me start over. I think they were just guessing, and if a new build had appeared today within a few hours of their prediction, they could find a good excuse for the discrepancy in timing and claim a scoop. Instead, they just look silly. As do the many sites that reprinted that bogus prediction. If I had followed the herd and posted a link to one of those sites, I would have been guilty of passing along suspect information without checking it out, and you would have had every right to drop your estimation of how trustworthy and reliable I am. Glad I passed.

Now, I am reasonably certain that a new build of Windows Vista will be available for technical beta testers in the next couple of days. In fact, I’ve been cleaning out partitions and rearranging data files for the past three days in preparation for that new build. I’ll let you know when it’s here, and I’ll pass along some screen shots.

Example #2: Remember that Windows Vista Product Guide that briefly appeared on a Microsoft-affiliated website last week before being unceremoniously yanked? I was able to download it in the brief window during which it was available. Over the weekend, I picked some interesting details out of the product matrix at the front of the document, details I haven’t seen published anywhere else.

You can read the first of two parts summarizing my findings at Ed Bott’s Microsoft Report over at ZDNet. (I should have the second part ready tomorrow.)

And as soon as I can whip the HTML into shape, I’ll have a few tables summarizing the differences between different Windows versions, which will be posted right here.

Sometimes the technical press and blogosphere have a short attention span. They swarm over a story when it’s hot, and then move on to the next hot topic within a few hours or days. Sometimes it pays to wait a week or two and see what the real story is.

This reads like something out of Catch-22:

Me: This is the fourth day my firm hasn’t had dial tone.

Customer Service: Yes sir, because of the urgency we’ve elevated it to Business Class Support.

Me: What does that mean?

Customer Service: The Business Class Support tech will handle your trouble ticket. Unfortunately, he’s out today, however he’ll get to it first thing tomorrow morning.

Me: Wait, because you’ve elevated it, you can’t get to it today?

Customer Service: No sir.

Me: Can you lower its urgency, so you can get to it sooner?

Customer Service: Sir?

Me: Never mind.

I’ve had similar conversations, but usually not until I’ve been transferred to a dozen different departments and disconnected once or twice.

(via Discourse.net)