Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Following Scott Hanselman's, Steve Richards and Bill Gates lead, I have decided to share my office and workspace setup.

This isn't meant to be a gloat about the technology I use rather an explanation of the tools that I use in my job. Plumbers and electricians have cool vans full of all their gear and they probably spend more on that than I have on this.

My office is around 4 metres square, though one corner is chamfered off. In order to maximise the space available and still create enough room for my staff to work I have a real mixture of furniture. My desk is a curved reception desk I picked up second hand from the gym when they remodelled. It has nice deep drawers on both sides and the 90 degree curving space is an excellent fit for the 4 monitors I work on - 2 x 22" and 2 x 19" wide screens. It also holds current files and data, pens, blank cds, odds and ends and all the cables to connect my mobile phone, camera, video camera and creative zen. On top at each end I store things that I don't need to look at but need to access. In the middle I have a photo frame of my 4 kids and a Lego Bionicle I was given when leaving a client.

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Great line up today.

We had a chap from Qantm speaking up the semantic web, virtualisation technologies, mashups and more. He was followed by the Faraday Media guys talking about APML, but more generally talking about some of the issues surrounding a Web 2.0 startup in Queensland. We had a great presentation by Nick Hodge on Mashups using PopFly, I have created some already - watch out for them on here soon. Silverlight got a background explanation and also some cool demos - mind you PopFly uses Silverlight also. We also had lunch hosted by Microsoft, and I scored a cool shirt. In the morning there were 2 web development companies presenting some information for graduates who may be looking for developer roles. Clearly Speedwell were a cutting edge design company  while JSA was far more of a design company, firmly ensconced  in flash technology.

Awesome. Nick Hodge has taken the stage to talk about PopFly. Simultaneously the red bull girls came round handing out cans. As Nick was demonstrating the Live Messenger plugin on his side bar I sent him a quick message saying hi -I was drinking red bull up the back. As his site was live at the time on the screen and he was logged into msn, he answered my comment and waved to me. Next thing I know a Microsoft person handed me a cool Microsoft dress shirt!

Popfly is a cool free mashup application.

The Windows Help (WinHlp32.exe) program that has been included in Microsoft since Microsoft Windows 3.1. WinHlp32.exe is a requirement for users who want to view 32-bit Help files that have the .hlp file name extension. Unfortunately because the Help Program hasn't had a major update for awhile it no longer meets standards, because of this Microsoft has decided to no longer include this Help program as a part of Windows. For those more advanced readers who want to, download WinHlp32 here.