Speaking of Carl Franklin. This is funny: the Windows Vista song. Ted Pattison wrote most of it. I read about it in eWeek.

One of my favorite experiences is when I planned a bus trip for a bunch of Visual Basic programmers back in the mid 1990s and Carl sang “My Darling Clementine” for hours. There’s a wikipedia entry for that song. Turns out Carl wasn’t alone in singing those lyrics to a number of different melodies (he did everything from AC/DC, the Who, Beattles, Cher, to a ton of others). You can get a sense of what that bus ride was like by listening to Best of Clementine.

One of my favorite podcasts is .NET Rocks which is done by Carl Franklin and friends. I just saw that they analyzed a bunch of hardware and found a kit that works great for less than $500.

PodTech uses some $1,500 specialized recorders but our folks are doing a lot of recording (and they get banged around a lot) plus we donate them to good events so they can record their sessions. I’ll cover those in a future video.

How about you, what do you use to podcast?

I’ve been pretty harsh on Microsoft lately. Hey, that’s normal, I guess, after you leave a job. Sort of a “jump on the man” impulse. Anyway, there are some killer things happening at Microsoft. Catching my eye is the hobbyist renaissance that’s happening there.

Another is the Made in Express Contest. I agreed to be a judge for free cause I believe in this kind of contest which encourages normal people to try their hand at software development. Anyway, like American Idol there’s an audience part to the judging and that’s open now.