Rob Howard's company, Telligent Systems, is looking for a professional services automation solution.

Scratch one vendor from the list.

Darwin in the business world... the response from the vendor is condescending, spelling/grammar errors, and vehemently anti-Microsoft. The latter point may not be a big deal by itself, but you'd think a Director of Sales would look up a prospect's web site... and maybe look at the "About" page. The first sentence:

Telligent is a solutions company with unique expertise and knowledge of the Microsoft Platform.

I've been subscribed to some Netflix RSS feeds for about a week now. Overall, it's not bad but I had to scale back what I was pulling into FeedDemon. I started with my queue, my recommendations, the Top 100, and the New Releases. The latter two are public feeds for everyone, while the two former feeds are specific to my account. My feelings on them have been:

Queue -- I've found this to be pointless and removed it from FD. RSS is great when I want to be notified that some content somewhere has changed. But when Michelle and I are the only ones changing that content (the queue itself), I don't see much point. Ditto for the "Recent Rental Activity" feed.

Recommendations -- This one is useful in that it puts some titles in front of me that I might no otherwise find. Overall, I find Netflix's recommendations engine to not be as accurate for me as Amazon's or the Suggestions engine in Tivo. I'm not sure why that is, but it seems that Netflix often recommends films that simply have the same actors/actresses as movies I've recently rated. If I'm a DeNiro or Coppola fan, chances are pretty good I already know about their movies...

Top 100 -- This one isn't bad either. It hasn't changed much and I'm not sure how often they recalculate their Top 100, but it's interesting to know what's getting a lot of requests.

New Releases -- I had to unsubscribe from this feed. Amazon's "New Releases" for DVDs (and Music, for that matter) highlights the new stuff that's likely to be of interest to many people. You can then drill down further to see the more obscure releases. The problem with this feed is that it's just a firehose of new releases. Bizarre documentaries, how-to and self-improvement titles, etc. Don't get me wrong, I like independent movies and some of the non-mainstream stuff... but when I'm reading my news in FD, I don't want to sift through 50-60 new titles every day on the off chance that I'll find one or two that seem interesting.

I've listened in on parts of the new Windows Forms series of webcasts, called "Soup to Nuts". They're well presented and the whole webcast deliver They've been fairly basic so far, but the sessions are organized to get more advanced as the series progresses. It seems that the .NET world was initially so focused on ASP.NET and web services, while good Winforms resources were relatively scarce. That's definitely changed, but a strong tutorial series like this is a welcome addition to the resource pool.

As an aside, the whole "webcast" experience has really improved over the last year or two. With the current MSFT webcasts, the streaming seems very stable and it's becoming less of a one-way experience -- you can respond to questions/polls from the presenter, submit questions for the presenter, send requests to speed up/slow down, and so on. Pretty cool.

I've had XM Radio for nearly a year and a half... and have been hooked since Day 1. Rarely do I hear a commercial and there's always something interesting. They've announced a bunch of changes recently, one of which is a new online music service. They're going to charge $8/mo for the service, or $4/mo if you already have an XM subscription for a hardware radio. It's a cool idea, but the press releases makes it sound like you're only going to get a subset of the full channel lineup. I suppose if you've got XM in your car already, this is a good way to pay just a few dollars more and get it at home/work. I went with the Delphi radio, though, which I like because I use it in the car, at home, and in the office.

They also added XPR - XM Public Radio. I listened briefly to it earlier and can't quite tell what (if any) relationship it has to NPR (aside from a few familiar names).

Now if they'd add a weather/traffic channel for Denver/Boulder, I'd be shouting from the rooftops.

I've decided that Justin Rogers is a .NET rock star. His blog posts are math-intensive, but he gets the fact that not all developers interested in math and physics are already proficient at a PhD level. He explains things so well and demonstrates the points with code. Highlights for me were the first "physics installment" (covering collisions) and first "math installment" (on image layouts)... but the poker series is what first got me turned on to his blog.

I had originally started bookmarking the poker entries under a .NET->Poker folder... but when the math/physics started coming, I just renamed the Poker folder to "Justin Rogers" - making him the first blogger to qualify as a category of his own in my bookmarks.

Thanks, Justin, for the time you spend on those articles.

All the troops must be set... I posted some invites to http://gmailforthetroops.com/ and never heard back. C'est la vie... first five to send a request to jdonnici -at- gmail dot com get them. I'll still put a request coming from a .mil address to the top first.

I took Friday and today off to make the Labor Day weekend even longer. After some chaotic times at work, I figure five days at home just hanging out with my family would be great... and it has been. But I'm now halfway through day five and can't believe how quickly it's gone by. But... but... I'm not ready to go back...