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A Face Made For Email

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A few weeks ago, Charles Torre and The Scobelizer showed up in my office with a hand-held camera, asked me a bunch of random questions for a couple hours, edited the video into bite-sized chunks and slapped it up on the web.

It's a blog, it’s a wiki, it’s a forum, it's a bunch of videos of geeks geeking out -- frankly, I'm not sure what exactly this whole Channel 9 thing is. I'm not sure that Charles and Robert know either, but I'm sure that we'll find out as the experiment continues!

Anyway, if you ever wanted (for some perverse reason) to know what people like me, Mike Howard, and the rest of us look and sound like, now you can find out why we mostly rely upon written forms of communication to get our points across. This was my first time ever being interviewed on video, and it was Charles' and Robert's first time doing the interviews -- I was their guinea pig. I've never had any media training, and it shows. Good heavens, you should see the uncut video! I'm constantly fidgeting and going off into non sequiturs. I had no idea that my hands were actually in shot. Live and learn I suppose.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2004
    Nice interview. However, can't Microsoft afford to buy a tripod for the camera? Got kinda dizzy from the cinema verite style. ;-)

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2004
    You did great man :-) But should we ask you questions on your interview here on your blog or as part of the discussions on Channel 9 (Of course, as you're probably very, very busy, you do not HAVE to respond at all). But which would you prefer in any case?

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2004
    I enjoyed your interviews the most amongst the ones on channel 9. This is probably because I've been interested in those issues on the linux side of programming and it's fun seeing it discussed from a microsoft insider.
    Don't hesitate on repeating the exercise.

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2004
    There are people who still use MPG? You're old school, man.

    :-)

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2004
    Dude, you're like 13 or something.

    (And lots of people "still" use MPG. It's supported by just about every platform under the sun... You and your wily Microsoft ways!)

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2004
    Dude!

    > lots of people "still" use MPG

    For future reference, Mr. Smiley Face indicates that Eric is indulging in humourous japery.

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2004
    > which would you prefer in any case

    Makes no difference to me.

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2004
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2004
    I agree that there are scarcer resources out there than memory. Two things:

    1) You can always explicitly Dispose objects if you want to deterministically finalize objects that are holding onto unmanaged resources like handles, etc.

    2) I'm hopeful that the Longhorn extensions to the framework will mitigate some of this worry.

    Case in point: right now I'm working on some managed code that must do some fairly serious work on an unmanaged IStorage*. Getting the storage and stream lifetimes right is nightmarish -- I ended up writing all the storage management in a C++ object which then implements an interface which is pleasant to use from managed code. When structured storages are added to WinFX, that becomes someone else's problem and I can abandon my silly wrapper.

    Long story short: coding is still hard, tools have pros and cons, and no language or framework is a panacea.

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2004
    Eric:

    Darn right I'm old school. ;) You can just go ahead and visualize me in my plaid flannel shirt, long grey-streaked beard (that I've had since I was 4) and Birkenstocks on stockinged feet trying to figure out how to convert MPG to ASCII to play on my terminal window. Maybe I'll videotape that and send it off to Channel 9, too!

    </joke>

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2004
    > You can always explicitly Dispose objects if
    > you want to deterministically finalize
    > objects that are holding onto unmanaged
    > resources like handles, etc.

    Obviously, but that is exactly my point: in C# it's up to the client to invoke the determinate finalization while C++ makes it possible for the service provider to invoke it automatically. C# does do a better job than Java with IDisposable and the using keyword. But still, putting the onus on the client means that some clients will forget to implement the invocation, thus effectively introducing a resource leak in an environment that supposedly banishes resource leaks.

    All this is not to say that I think GC is a bad thing. Indeed, I think it is generally a good thing. It's just that, like everything else, it's not perfect. It may be that MC++ represents the best of both worlds, but I haven't gotten around to use it yet.

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2004
    > can't Microsoft afford to buy a tripod for the camera? Got kinda dizzy from the cinema verite style

    I was the first interview, and Scoble was still trying out some experiments to get the hang of it. You'll see that in some of the other interviews, the camera work is even goofier! In later ones he did end up using a tripod.

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2004
    Scoble explains why they chose windows media:

    http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/04/07.html#a7181

    It's true -- we're a bunch of cheapskates. :-)

  • Anonymous
    November 17, 2006
    Yes, it has happened again . This time, our fabulous C# Community Program Manager Charlie Calvert was

  • Anonymous
    February 14, 2007
    This link to the video is broken.