I've spent so much time this week focusing on things that are only of marginal interest to me that I completely forgot to mention all the good things that have happened between last Monday and this very moment.

I'm finally making a trip to Microsoft - On my birthday, no less (the 19th).

I'll be arriving just in time for lunch, a small tour, a trip to the company store where I plan to buy a greatly discounted Crimson Skies, and then home.

I don't know if anybody else gets excited about this sort of thing, but I love to visit the places where things "happen."

The first place like this that I ever went to was the Frito-Lay company when I was about eight years old. I saw billions of chips pouring down enormous ramps that led to who-knows-where. The lame bit was that they wouldn't let any of us walk up to the conveyor belts and grab handfuls of chips because they were worried about this thing they kept talking about called "injury or death." I think the real reason they didn't want me touching the chips was that I had been hardcore picking my nose since our arrival, and they didn't want me to be mixing any of "that" in with their stuff.

The next trip I made was to Symantec. It was about nine years ago, and a big time Unix nerd I knew took me down. He was working on all sorts of mumbo-jumbo, but the thing that made the trip matter was getting to see, for the first time in my life, the graphical web. He was pleased as punch when he showed me how he could pull images from various sites. It was pretty cool to see - I had been interneting for a while, poking around gopher, IRC, FTP, and FSP (anybody remember FSP?), but I had never seen an image that I didn't have to manually decode myself after grabbing it from a newsgroup (um - pictures of people's dogs, wedding photos, and things like that, of course).

The next trip I made was several months after going to Symantec. It was to one of Intel's buildings where I got to see all sorts of cool things. I held a "Pentium Pro" long before the things went into production, got to see some of Intel's early attempts at web cams, and so on. Pretty sweet stuff.

Needless to say, I'm pretty excited about seeing MS from the inside, and I have Shawn Morrissey to thank for getting me in.

That's a pretty sweet birthday present.

This week's .NET user nerd meeting went over really well.

My homies Scott Hanselman and Jim Blizzard gave a great tour of Longhorn. It was an informal, by the seat of the pants thing, and they pulled it off quite well.

You know things are pretty loosey-goosey at a presentation when someone (in this case, Scott) starts writing code like this:

    using System;
    using MSAvalon.Windows;
    using Xanax;

Maybe I'm really immature, but the "using Xanax" bit elicited quite the chuckle from my meager frame.

After the meeting, we headed over to a restaurant to grab some chicken wings, nachos, and other food items that are responsible for early death.

I got to sit next to Jason Olsen, a PDX blogger, who totally cracked me up with his story about iTunes.

We were discussing Comcast tech support, at which point I brought up Apple tech support, at which point we started talking about various Apple-produced bits of software.

I was going on my usual rant about how it drives me nuts that Apple doesn't include manuals with anything, and how it seems like a rather arrogant move on their behalf, making the assumption that their software is so easy and intuitive that they don't have to tell you a damn thing about it.

Here, in poor replication from memory, is what Jason told me he does when confronted with Apple software that seems a bit wacky:

I look at the application and I think, "What would I do if my IQ were half of what it is?" That helps me figure it out.

If that doesn't work, then I sit my dog at the computer, put his paw on the mouse, and wait to see what he does.

There's something to this.

Anyway, I think I howled for about five minutes after hearing this. The image of a guy using his dog to figure out how iTunes is supposed to work quite nearly paralyzed me.

And that, my friends, is the end of the Good Things. I'm going to go eat some sugary garbage for breakfast now...