I am just proud of one of my best friend’s first music video. He was sending me shorts as he was making it. I am sooo happy to see it finished.

Kostas is a famous fashion/art photographer in Greece and now he’s taking his first steps as a director.

Second time I get the “red ring of death” :-( As before, no access to my music from my living room for a month :-(

Funny thing... I called tech support to arrange the console’s repair. They asked me to use my “own box” for sending the console. I told them that it was not a problem at all since I had the original box. To my surprise they said “no, you can’t use the original”. Apparently consoles get stolen on the way. Hmmm... why is this my or Microsoft’s problem? Surely it’s the courier’s responsibility.

After talking with the supervisor on call, I was assured that I can use the original box but couldn’t negotiate a replacement console to arrive before I send this one back :-(

Time for a new console me thinks.

Update: Just got the email with the instructions on how to package my console. This makes more sense. The reason they don’t want customer using their original box is because they are not going to use it for the return.

It was Jan 12th, 2004, when I posted the first entry on this blog. The blog engine I built back then has served both my and Jim’s blogs very very very well. However, it has really been showing its age. Some design decisions back in 2003 and inexperience with ASP.NET means that our generated pages are not great Web citizens when it comes to caching. Also, there is a monolithic pipeline for managing every incoming request. Not a good thing for folks who are writing a Web-related book :-)

So, I’ve started working on a new version of “pblog”. The option of moving to a hosted solution crossed my mind but where’d be the fun in that, right? Also, new technologies have emerged since then that make it much easier to build a new engine.

In the process, we are also going to change hosting providers. We are absolutely grateful to the fine folks of the School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, for hosting our server all this time. I was taking advantage of my status as a “Visiting Researcher”, which is about to end, to have a server machine at a corner in their data center. Irrespective of that, however, it’s really time to move to a proper hosting provider.

If all goes according to plan, you shouldn’t experience any problems at all. There’d even be HTTP 301s (“moved permanently”) for all the permalinks that will go out of date. This way the search engines will be informed and the incoming links from the blogosphere will not break. That’s if all goes according to plan :-)

I am also going to move http://savas.parastatidis.name to http://savas.me in order to make it easier for people to remember/type my URI. Both will work though. My personal email and Live ID will remain savas@parastatidis.name. I’ll deal with the long email (nightmare to spell over the phone every time I need to give it, especially given my “great” accent :-) at a later point.

There is going to be a new look/design for my web site. The test versions are already MUCH faster than the current layout and more standards compliant (I hope). The new layout makes extensive use of CSS (no more tables, woo hoo!) and should render well on all browsers. I am aiming for a beta deployment for next weekend.

Finally, I’ve set my mind to a name change for this blog and I am open to suggestions! Here are a couple I am considering:

• savas written backwards
• savas in the sky with diamonds

Comment or email me with your suggestion.

My pal Panos Periorellis, who recently joined Microsoft from the University of Newcastle, pointed me to this fantastic presentation by Dick Hardt on Identity 2.0. The delivery style is really cool. Worth watching.

Remember that post about me missing a flight even though I was at the airport 7 hours before take off? I had entitled that post “This must be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done”. Now, what title do you use when you repeat the same mistake? :-(

This time it came very close to being amongst the stupidest AND most expensive things I’ve ever done. Here’s what happened...

I came to London for the Dev8D conference to present Famulus. My flight out of London (Heathrow Terminal 5) was scheduled for Sunday afternoon... 2.20pm (NOT 2.50pm as, somehow, was in my head).

I arrived at the airport around 3 1/2 hours before the flight. There were no queues so I went straight into the waiting lounge area. I had some breakfast and then headed to the BA lounge to do some work.

I immersed myself into cleaning up my mailbox, replying to messages, and catching up with work. Suddenly, I hear a request for “Mr. Parastitis” (close enough I guess) to go say “hi” to the front desk (well, not exactly like that but you get the idea). There, I am told that I really needed to run to the gate because my flight was about to close. I obliged and run as fast as I could but when I got there, the British Airways ground stewardess told me this...

- “Oh sir, I am afraid you can’t board the plane. The gates close at 2 and it’s now...”, stops and looks at the time on the computer, “... 2!”.

- Me: “Erm... can’t you get the bus to come back or get a small car to drive me there?”. (I know, stupid request but it was desperate times).

Unfortunately, that was it. There was nothing that could be done. Totally my fault of course. When they asked me what happened, I told them that I was at the BA executive lounge and waiting for the announcement. It was then that I found out that Terminal 5, which I was visiting for the first time, applied a new policy of not calling out the boarding times at the executive lounges. Apparently they are now “quiet lounges” :-( This was different to what I’ve been used to but still no excuse for being so absentminded.

British Airways wouldn’t book me on another flight so I’d have had to buy a new return flight to Seattle. Given that this was totally my mistake, I wasn’t expecting for Microsoft to pay of course. If it wasn’t for a lovely lady from American Express Travel, that’s what I would have had to do. Fortunately, I am only paying for the hotel 10mins from Terminal 5, in the middle of nowhere.

Jim offered to host me but his place is too far from Heathrow, involving a number of trains. He also called me for what I really am for missing my flight in this way (and he’s totally right), but the word is not blogable :-)

The Dev8D event is now over. As always, David did an excellent job at organizing a developer-oriented event that doesn’t follow the traditional, academic-style workshops/conferences. It was fun. It was also great talking with the other geeks in the repository space. There are many clever folks there!

BTW… the “8D” in “Dev8D” is a smilie, in case it’s not obvious; it wasn’t to me :-)

Few folks were briefly interviewed. Here are Alex’s and my 5 mins (my conversation with the journalist was longer than 5 mins so I don’t think my answers matched the questions… sorry :-(

I am going to prepare few follow up blogs related to the “Famulus” session. Stay tuned.

Update: I forgot to mention... Yes, I do know I look rounder, as Steve observed :-) Working on it. Lee Dirks and I have committed to running the Vancouver half marathon this year.

I saw a demo internally today of a new feature in Live Search that I liked. Apparently you can now start searching in IE8’s search bar and you might get an “instant answer” as a suggestion immediately.

It’ll even do things like arithmetic :-)

BTW… in case you didn’t know, the “search suggestion” feature is implemented using OpenSearch, so it’s not specific to Internet Explorer. Here’s the “suggestion” feature on Firefox. It works with Google as well. However, the “instant answers” seems to have been implemented only by IE8 as far as I am aware (but it’s open to others).

Update: Apparently the feature is available only in the US at this stage :-(

Two weeks ago, on the way back from skiing with Jim and his wife, we encountered this amazing landscape. A cloud at sea level and blue sky. Absolutely gorgeous. My photos don’t really do it justice.

It’s been a lazy day so far. It’s really sunny and wonderful outside. I got the chance to relax, have coffee with Santosh, roam between coffee places, late lunch at the Hilltop, and also work on that Web-related book that Jim, Ian, and I are writing. Great!

Here’s a link to a nice short film, “What is that?”, by a very young Greek director, Konstantinos Pilavios. I also had the chance to browse through some of his other work. I particularly liked “the series”, a collection of shorts based on various blog entries.