The last few weeks have been absolutely crazy, both at work and in my personal life. Since I can’t talk about what’s going on at work, I’ll log the highlights of what has been happening on the social front. I seem to go crazy around Spring :-)

At first, it was a fantastic weekend with my friend Meredith in Vancouver. The Sanafir restaurant in downtown Vancouver was absolutely amazing. A wonderful experience… food, wine, service, and vibe! Beautiful. We also experienced some of Vancouver’s live jazz and partied. We even made it to a club-scene online magazine (the photo :-)

Then, I got really sick... bronchitis with the possibility of pneumonia. After some strong antibiotics, I got better but before I got 100% my friend Meropi arrived from Greece for few days. She’s amongst the few people I know with energy levels close to mine (but not the same :-), so we started exploring and going out immediately. This was my schedule for the last couple of weeks...

• Meropi arrived and we immediately went out for dinner and at a Seattle underground (literally) club :-)
• We got up at 5am to go to San Francisco for the weekend
• Walked around for two days. SFMOMA was amazing as always. The city is soooo beautiful. I love it.
• Back in Seattle for a night of square dancing at The Tractor.
• A night of karaoke at the Triple Door. Before the Triple Door, we were at Wild Ginger where the waiter asked for Meredith’s and Meropi’s ID but he said “no need to see yours sir” to me :-)
• A night of clubbing at the War Room with Daniel.
• Dinning experiences included: Flying Fish, Ray’s Boathouse, Roy’s Hawaiian Fusion in San Francisco, La Carta de Oaxaca (what a wonderful little place in Ballard).
• Another trip to Vancouver. More walking. Sushi and then blues at The Yale. At the Sanafir again and some live jazz at Capone’s, with my very dary friend Colette and her boyfriend. Then at the wonderful Theoni’s and Simran’s wedding.
• Immediately after the reception we drove back so I could take Meropi to the airport.
• A little bit of sleep at 6am and then to a Greek Easter gathering for more food.
• Then there was the “Thievery Corporation” concert with Tini.
• The following day “The Killers” concert again with Meredith. Dinner at “How to Cook a Wolf” beforehand (it was rushed because we were running late, so we didn’t really enjoy the entire experience).
• A gathering at my place to see Cristiane’s photographs from her 3-month trip and then Salsa at the Century Ballroom.
• Off to Vancouver to stay with Theoni and Simran and then go skiing to Whistler.
• Got injured (only just) but had a wonderful day.
• Drove back to Seattle after a day of skiing and went out with Sophie, David, Zoe, Pantelis, Ben, and Olga to Big Daddy’s. We danced all night to “The Retros”, an 80’s tribute band :-)
• Starting running as well after a long break due to the bronchitis.
• Monday went out for dinner at the Harvest Vine with Teresa.

Today was the first day, I think, that I managed to relax and stay in. Crazy eh? Phew!

I’m supposed to be tidying up now because my parents are visiting from Greece tomorrow. They are staying for 30 days. I am very very excited to have them around for a while. I am taking the opportunity to slow down for a bit. I think my body needs it :-)) I’ll take them to visit places though so I’ll still be on the road. The next 30 days are going to be very good for the Web book :-)

Here are some photo highlights from the last few weeks :-) (some of the photographs are from Meropi’s camera)

Meropi

SFMOMA
(the picture says “her absence filled the world”)

Karaoke (Meropi and I are syncing “Beds are burning” by Midnight Oil. I don’t remember the song that the girls “performed” :-)

War Room with Daniel and Meropi

The Yale

Random

The wedding (lovely photo of Dennis and his mom :-)

Skiing (I owe Simran $5 for taking his top off and skiing while we were waiting for Theoni :-)

Some Microsoft folks developed some new user experiences on top of Facebook’s newly announced stream API. Very cool.

On Friday I visited “The Commons”, Microsoft’s latest building complex. It includes restaurants, shops, a football (“soccer” for the Americans) field, basketball, tables and chairs outside. It’s beautiful. It’s like a shopping center inside the Microsoft campus but I am not sure about having a Microsoft-only collection of shops.

Photo source: “Microsoft opens The Commons for workers”

I had a file permissions problem with my hosting service provider (Bizhostnet) so I contacted them in an attempt to find a solution. Unfortunately, their solution was to make a change in the IIS7 application pool that completely disabled all the functionality that I’ve been implementing for my web site. Only the front page was working. Atom/RSS feeds, individual blog entries, the archive, the timeline, etc. all got disabled.

For those interested in the details... I make use of new functionality in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 that allows for URI-based request routing*, effectively building an MVC-pattern for handling incoming requests. For the functionality to be enabled, the Web Application needs to run inside IIS 7 in “integrated mode” (the default behavior). My hosting provider uses “classic mode” (simulating the IIS6 behavior effectively) by default. Before I made the switch to http://savas.me I was evaluating their hosting capabilities and had requested them to move me to “integrated mode”, which they did. However, a problem that surfaced just a couple of days ago (I couldn’t save new images in the filesystem from within the Web service that accepts the new entries I sent) made me contact them again. I asked them to look into the issue. Unfortunately, their solution was to move the application pool back to “classic mode”, without asking me first and without having a look at the previous support tickets explicitly requesting “integrated mode” :-( I only noticed the problem this morning (Sunday) so I don’t know for how long my Web application has been down.

My sincere apologies. It all works now.

* We are discussing this pattern in our upcoming Web book, which is going great!

One of the main reasons I went through the pain of rewriting the blog engine and restructuring my entire web site was the ease/flexibility of development. I wanted to be able to add new features easily so I could experiment with some ideas around data aggregation and integration/combination, especially making use of semantics. Indeed, the “timeline” page was a step towards that direction. The next feature to come up very soon is “location history”. My cell phone will be pinging a service with the longitude/latitude of my location and will record it over time. After that, I’ll try to combine the information with other information from the Web (e.g. “oh… there was a concert at that particular day-time-location… savas was probably there”).

Google introduced Google Latitude along similar lines but I just discovered Glympse as well. It seems like a great execution on the “location awareness” concept. I am sure there are others doing similar things.

I am going to continue with my experiments so stay tuned.

Well, instead of putting daily notes of what’s going on, I created a “timeline” page that gives access to the history of what I’ve been up to. At the moment, it only gives access to my tweets but over time it would probably have more information (links to my blog entries, music, movies, concerts, favorites, etc.). I am still experimenting with all this so things might still change.

There was a bug, which surfaced only on the hosting service*, resulting in multiple “daily notes” being submitted. I didn’t notice it until after >30 of them were added. I have now deleted them and disabled the new feature until I figure out what’s going on. Apologies for spamming your feed readers.

* Ah… the good old “works on my computer” developer syndrome :-)

I was in Vancouver for few days with my friend Meropi. On Saturday, we attended the wedding of my friends Theoni and Simran. It was a beautiful (Indian/Greek wedding)… an all-day event and the party at the end was fantastic. Lots of color and lots of positive energy, characteristic of the couple!

Dennis (Theonis’ brother) just pointed me to some photographs from the wedding. I am sure more will emerge; I’ll point to them.

Credit: SDJPhotography

The services I use on a daily basis seem to take control of my data. They decide what I can access and what gets hidden/archived. In an attempt to get control of my data maintained by such services on the Web, I decided to start adding extensions to my blog engine. Starting today, a “daily notes” blog entry will be added automatically. To begin with, the post will only contain a day’s Twitter entries but, over time, I hope to aggregate other information as well (e.g. favorite links, visited pages, etc.).

With this change, my blog database becomes the archive of my Web-related activity (or, at least that’s the plan). I am starting with the archival of my tweets so I don’t lose them if anything happens to twitter. The next data island to attack is Facebook but that’s a huge beast! I don’t know how to do it yet. I am still monitoring the data portability effort to see if anything comes out of it.

I got the idea after talking with Jim Downing some time ago. I know that others put summary entries as well. Expect problems with the new feature. I am still developing as I get coding break from book-related writing.

So, to start with, here are the last 20 tweets (there are no dates in this initial list)…

Twitter

• 4:44 PM: Back from 3 excellent days in Vancouver. Hyatt... what a rip off... $38/night for parking? Theoni and Simran are now married. Love you guys!
• 12:44 AM: Wow... I am discovering the wonders of Priceline's "name your price". $80/night for a 4star hotel in downtown Vancouver.
• 4:10 PM: Back home... 2am... House music. Dancing! Another fab night. MANY THANKS TO EVERYONE FOR THEIR WISHES. I am moved. Love you all!
• 10:32 PM: Ha ha ha! I did Karaoke... "Beds are burning" by Midnight Oil. It was fun. B4 that, we had an excellent dinner at Wild Ginger. Great night.
• 7:53 AM: Grrr! Another "overdraft fee" from Wells Fargo. This time I complained and it got reversed. It was not my fault. Time to change lender!
• 1:58 PM: Had fun square dancing tonight :-)))
• 11:00 PM: Weekend in SF was a lot of fun! Back to work now for few days before heading up north.
• 1:57 PM: Meropi is here and it's fun! In San Francisco tomorrow for the weekend.
• 7:48 AM: @jimwebber I didn't have the CD and a new special edition came out. BTW... We must resync our libraries. Must set up rsync on my storage!
• 6:06 AM: New CDs in my collection: U2 (new), Chemical Brothers (Brotherhood), Prodigy (invaders must die), Fat Boy Slim (a rare mix), Pearl Jam (ten)
• 11:48 PM: hey @jimwebber.... am i to blame for endnote as well? :-) Interesting that your wife uses papers. @ldirks should pay attention :-)
• 9:10 AM: so.... brochitis with a possibility of pneumonia. Nice! There goes the plan for the half marathon in Vancouver :-(
• 12:59 PM: This is going to be interesting... I m hallucinating due to the effects of my bad cold but still... just filed my tax return form :-)))
• 11:28 AM: hmmm.... end of the wknd. Not feeling so great again. I was almost fine at lunchtime. Going to the doctor tomorrow.
• 6:33 AM: 48 hours in bed; 6lbs lost; no voice left... but I feel better today :-))) the fever is gone; the sun is out; taking it easy this wknd :-)
• 9:26 AM: being sick sucks. This weekend was supposed to be all about skiing :-( At least I'll make lots of progess on the Web book.
• 7:29 AM: sick at home :-(
• 4:00 AM: welcome @ldirks to tweeting.
• 6:39 AM: doh! Stupid March with the 5 Mondays... resulted in 3 mortgage payments... $35 fee -( The automatic deposit was scheduled for one day late.
• 4:05 AM: thanks for the link @jimdowning

The Scholarly Communications team in Microsoft Research is organizing a workshop as part of the Open Repositories 09 conference. During the workshop we’ll demonstrate and discuss lots of the technologies we’ve been building over the last couple of years to help with the scholarly communications lifecycle. The entire team will be there: Lee Dirks, Alex Wade, Pablo Fernicola. I’ll be there as an ex-team member.

Tony Hey and Lee Dirks will also be keynoting at the conference and will announce, amongst other things, v1.0 of our repository platform (including its official name). Should be lots of fun!

Here’s the description of the workshop.

Tools for Repositories - Microsoft Research & the Scholarly Information Ecosystem
Microsoft External Research strongly supports the process of research and its role in the innovation ecosystem, including developing and supporting efforts in open access, open tools, open technology, and interoperability. We partner with universities, national libraries, publishers, and governmental organizations to help develop tools and services to evolve the scholarly information lifecycle. These projects demonstrate our ongoing work towards producing next-generation documents that increase productivity and empower authors to increase the discoverability and appropriate re-use of their work. This workshop will provide a deep dive into several freely available and open source tools from Microsoft External Research, and will demonstrate how these can help supplement and enhance current repository offerings.
Come learn more about how the Microsoft Research tools can help extend the reach and utility of your repository efforts. Each session during the day will include a hands-on component so that attendees can gain a deeper technical understanding of the available toolset, which includes the following resources:

• Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007
  • Structured document authoring (based on the NLM-DTD)
  • Ontology integration and markup
  • Repository search integration
  • ORE Resource Map authoring
  • Article repository submission workflow (via REST and SWORD interfaces)
• Microsoft eJournal Service - a hosted peer-review workflow system
• Zentity - A research-output repository platform
• Research Information Centre - a collaboration space for researchers
• Windows Live Machine Translation Service
• Document Conversion Service

More information on each of these tools can be found at: http://www.microsoft.com/scholarlycomm
For workshop registration and related questions, please e-mail the workshop convener at: scholar@microsoft.com

My Zune survived both a complete washing cycle and 2 hours in my dryer. Should I be worried about the state of my washing machine? :-)

... when you spend too much time at home being ill :-)

I’ve been in bed for the last 2 1/2 days. I don’t remember when it was the last time I was so sick, with high fever, constant coughing, and no energy at all. I am much better now but I have almost lost my voice from all the coughing. Good thing for my team on Monday I guess :-)

Staying at home and not having energy to do anything intellectual (like reading or writing), you get to watch stupid TV and notice little small things...

• You notice for example that the house is wayyy too interconnected when a syndicated new tweet message actually causes a glitch on TV :-) (or it could have been a coincidence)
• Basic cable is really really really bad. It’s mostly adverts. Between the ads, there might be some actual TV programs. Very irritating. Still... I just haven’t had the energy to concentrate on a single movie from Netflix streaming.
• You get easily moved even by a stupid movie like "The Pacifier”... it must be the fever! :-)
• You get to lose weight very fast when you are ill :-) (lost 6lbs in the last 2 1/2 days :-)
• You are reminded about how much fun it is to have full weekends. I missed my planned weekend at Whistler as a result of being ill :-(
• I thought that staying at home would be a good thing for the Web book but I haven’t made as much progress as I would have liked... it’s just difficult to concentrate; but there still Sunday.