Alex Pooley's Blog

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I’m back from my wedding and honeymoon in New Zealand. What an an incredible ride! Everything went really well. I have lots of stuff to catch up on now but my blogging should be back to normal shortly. I’ll upload some photos within a week or so.

Until then, here’s me walking on the Franz Joseph Glacier.

I’m getting married tomorrow. Eek!

It’s been quite amazing so far. Some of the family has flown in from England and Thailand and I’m finally getting to know these people after all this time! The last time I saw my Aunt and Uncle I was about 11 or 12 and they didn’t have any children. Now 13+ years on, they have two children aged 10 and 12!

Am I nervous? sort of. I’m not concerned about my speech, but I am worried that I’ll stuff up reciting the vows because the grammer is so unnatural. The weather looks like it will be in our favour. It’s been terribly hot the last couple of weeks and I’m thankful I wont have to stand uncomfortably in the heat with my long sleeve shirt, waist coat, tie, and jacket!

I’ll be blogless for a couple of weeks starting from after this post. I get married tomorrow, recuperate on Sunday, and then set off for New Zealand on early Monday morning. I’ll be back about the 24 March or so.

See you then!

Following on from “my dreamy post from yesterday”:http://alexpooley.com/articles/2006/03/07/a-new-world about a purely web based OS, I stumbled across an article detailing “Microsoft’s latest search plans”:http://theage.com.au/articles/2006/03/08/1141701550573.html . It turns out that these plans are a bit dreamy themselves!

This new search ability will be added to Windows Live, Microsoft’s attempt at putting your frequently used Internet services on one page. “More detail here”:http://ideas.live.com/.

Here’s a couple of the plans:

* A “smart scroll” function that displays all search results at once rather than on separate pages [I imagine like Google Reader's scroll ability].

* A search slider bar that offers previews of data in various forms, perhaps just the Internet address of a Web site, or maybe a snippet of text. As the slider is adjusted, more or less information appears.

Firstly, with their “smart scroll”, Microsoft appear to be pushing rich interfaces on the Internet. Good!

But you can also draw some assumptions that Microsoft are making by supplying these types of features:

* Internet connectivity is fast enough to support such features.

* Internet connectivity is reliable enough to support such features.

Those assumptions may not warrant a fully fledged web OS, but they do allow for much more than we have right now. Could Windows Live fail in the same way that Windows Passport failed for identification? Will the AJAX desktop crowd standardise and blow Live out of the Internet waters? I think eventually, yes.

Of course, MS own your desktop (for now) and obviously have a massive advantage because of this.