While at the 2nd annual MSN Butterfly Tour the topic came up of using search to look up the definition of words.  I mentioned to the testers that it can be done by using the "define" keyword. 

For example, say I want to look up the definition of the word "sibilance" to make sure I'm using it correctly.  Typing "define sibilance" into the MSN tool bar or the MSN search page will return your typical search results, but at the top of the page you'll find a definition of the word from Encarta.

MSN search supports a variety of phrases to tell it you want specific information.  You can get the same results as "define" by using the phrases "what is [word]" or "what is the definition of [word]?" (but typing "define" is, of course, fastest).

Here are some other cool searches:

• Health: "calories in spinach" or "protein in chicken"
• Math: "5+1/sqrt 4"
• Conversions: "80 meters in feet"
• Algebra: "4x=19"

Why waste time going to the bookshelf for a dictionary or encyclopedia?

I appreciate the enthusiasm folks have for becoming part of the mail beta, but I don't, unfortunately, have any invites to give out at this time.  When I do have some invites to give out I'll be sure to make an announcement here.

Thanks,
Reeves

On the way back in from taking the dog out I was bending over Nala trying to get her to sit and Paula looked up at our dove family and found them looking back at us.  The trio was looking down at the dog and me trying hard to figure what the heck was going on. 

Their curious expressions made my night.

I'm getting close to finishing my hard drive upgrade for my desktop at home (ran out of space for ripping CDs) and the amount of storage I now have made me start thinking back to the computers I've had over my lifetime and how the storage specs have progressed

• Apple IIe - No hard drive, just a 360 kB floppy drive (...720 kB thanks to a hole punch)
• Mac LC - 40 MB (I have picture files large than that)
• Power Mac 8100 - 250 MB (The drive was huge!  For a while, at least)
• Mac PPC G3 - 4 GB (OS X has a system requirement of 3 GB, I think I can upgrade)
• Home-built dual Celeron - 40 GB (Now that's huge... right?)
• Home-built P3 server - 120 GB (That is huge, I'm never going to run out of room now)
• Home-built MCE - .8 TB (Actually it's 1.6 TB of drives mirrored for data protection)

It's kind of wild, just a couple of years ago that amount of storage seemed obscene... now it's just necessary.

Care to take any bets on how long it takes me to be cramped for space?

Last night I pulled up some of the Internet humor files I used to have on my site and moved them into a directory on this site.  In the process I came across the All your base are belong to us flash movie I saved.  I reminisced a bit with coworkers and Steve pointed out that there is an excellent article on wikipedia about the phenom.

Ah... good times.

By Internet time-scale this is very old news: the Hotmail team is working on a new product, some people have already gotten a glimpse via the mail beta. 

"Mail beta," you say, "what's that?"

It’s quite simple… it’s a beta of a new mail product.  True to Microsoft form we’ve given our new baby a name that tells exactly what it is (think: "Word", "Project" or "Streets & Trips").  We leave it to those renegades on the Mac team to come up with names like “Entourage”.

A while ago (Imran can tell you just how big of a while) we decided we needed to start fresh.  Hotmail was built to scale to hundreds of millions of two megabyte e-mail accounts, and it does that very, very well.  Hotmail is also built to work with web browsers most geeks would consider dinosaurs.  We realized the landscape was changing and we decided to do something about it. 

For the past year my job has been primarily one of a project manager.  I attended meetings, tracked dependencies and watched documents grow and shrink.  While this is a simplification of what I did (and in no way a slam on the role) it wasn’t what I enjoy most: working on the application interface.  Starting in mid-July Omar took over the project management duties (working with dev and others he’s put together a pretty slick combination of SCRUM and traditional processes… he’s putting us into overdrive) and I got the chance to return to the customer-facing side of the world.

That brings me back to the start of this post: the mail beta.  To go along with this mail beta we created a team space to keep interested parties abreast of our goings-on.  Hop on over there and check it out. 

For those of you who came to my blog from the team space… perhaps you weren’t looking for my blog… you were looking for my space.