Author Archives: Scott Blomquist

Craig’s List, meet OpenID

I finally got around to posting a listing on Craig’s List about a week ago. It had one of the simplest identity mechanisms I’ve ever seen. Instead of having to create an account, all I had to do before Craig’s List considered me fully introduced was to provide an email address. A magic link was [...]

Re-discovered a bug from a previous project

My current project (http://myvidoop.com) had a bug earlier where the user agent string from IE on my home computer is extremely long and causes the web site to behave incorrectly. I had the same problem when I was working on Live Image Search. In the case of Image Search, the long connection string would trigger [...]

Amazing mouse

Absolutely incredible new mouse: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=085

One tiny little letter

"unbeatable" and "unbearable" differ by one tiny little letter lexicographically, and by a whole lot more semantically. Sad that Outlook can’t notice the difference…

The other Channel 9

Most of you have probably heard me rave about Microsoft’s video blog for developers called Channel 9. It’s named after my favorite feature of United Airlines—namely the ability to plug a headset into your armrest and listen in on the cockpit’s radio by tuning to channel 9. As I was flying back for a visit [...]

In Seattle this weekend

Hey, everybody. I’ll be back in Seattle this weekend (January 27 & 28). Anything fun going on?

A typical day in Tulsa

I can’t believe I’m coming up on the end of my second month at my new job in Tulsa. Here’s a picture of a normal day for me. I wake up around 7:20am to an NPR station. I love the little fanfare that Morning Edition uses to introduce their business section. One of these days, [...]

Settling in to my new gig

I’m settling in to my new gig and having an absolute blast. While I was at Microsoft, I had a couch that was blue with each of a green, a yellow, and a red pillow on top. That color scheme worked fine for there, but not so well at Vidoop, whose logo is red and [...]

Stupid then smart: Xbox 360 headset connector broke

I got an Xbox 360 message from a friend the other day telling me that my attempt at sending him a voice message sounded like 5 seconds of silence. I did some troubleshooting only to find that the tip of the headset’s connector had broken off inside one of my controllers. That really pissed me [...]

The return of fun flash crap

Attn: Maloney–you’ll like this. Only sort of a puzzle, but pretty fun: http://www.gamegecko.com/idiottest.php.