Seattle played a road game today and beat Tuscon with an all-time best temperature of 103 degrees Fahrenheit (39 C).  Regional temperatures soared, with official readings topping out around 108 in Bellevue, and unofficial reports as high as 120 degrees!  Now, if only the Mariners and Seahawks could beat the Diamondbacks and Cardinals!

The extraordinary news of the "win" made both local and national news.  Here's a round-up of some of the coverage:

Local Coverage

• Seattle Post Intelligencer
• Seattle Times
• KOMO 4 (ABC)
• KING 5 (NBC)
• KIRO 7 (CBS)
• KCPQ 13 (FOX)
• Metro Transit Travel Advisory (only 30% of bus fleet has AC)

National Coverage

• Associated Press
• ABC News
• NBC News (MSNBC)
• CBS News
• FOX News (most relevant article I could find on the site)

Oh, and, apparently, the entire state is on fire!

I'm going back to work!  I accepted a position with Symetra Financial last week.  My first day in the office will be this Wednesday.  I'll be a senior developer and agilist working on their web development efforts.  

I can't wait to get back in the groove!

I left Microsoft back in April to stay at home with Jill and the twins. As Hunter and Gracie's six month birthday approached, Jill and I agreed - it was time for me to go back to work!

So, I have spent the last three weeks talking to recruiters and interviewing all over the Seattle area. I talked to companies small, medium and large; start-ups and well established firms. After approximately ten interviews, I have received five offers - all of them quite generous. (Not a bad ratio of interviews to offers, if I do say so myself!)

Jill and I are now weighing the options. We will make a decision this week, possibly as early as tomorrow. Stay tuned to hear how it turns out...

Ever since purchasing my iMac several months ago, I've been searching for decent OS X desktop blogging software.  After test driving several of the products on the market, including both MarsEdit and ecto, I have yet to find anything that I like as much as good old Windows Live Writer.  So, I'm going to keep using WLW.  I just got it running in "Unity" mode under VMware Fusion on my iMac.  So, now, it appears on my dock right next to all my other favorite programs.  Yeah!

If you're out there, watching, lurking, viewing this site, take a minute to post a comment to let me know you care.  It's starting to feel like I'm talking to a wall.

After a couple of full days of using Flock, I've come up with a couple of niggles:

1. Flock seems to prefer it's formatting to the formatting on my blog.  I wish it didn't.  I don't want to have to use my control panel to "fix" every post I write.
2. Flock seems to prefer Technorati tags to the tags built into my blog engine.  I like the idea.  I just wish it would use both.

On the plus side, the blog editor did correctly handle the Categories used by Graffiti.  I wasn't expecting it to.  But, as it stands, these issues will probably prevent me from using the Flock blog editor for any serious blogging.  But, the rest of the browser is pretty darn cool.  I especially like the "my world" view for the sheer volume of information it presents.

Flock is a very cool new browser based on the same Mozilla bits as the more familiar Firefox browser.  Why should you care?  Flock integrates the Web 2.0 experience of sites like Facebook, Flickr and YouTube directly into the browser in an incredibly intuitive way.  I've only been playing with Flock for about 30 minutes, but it has already earned a spot on my dock.  In fact, I'm writing this blog post using Flock's integrated blog post editor.  This after importing my feeds from NewsFire and scanning them in about 15 minutes - unheard of, for me.

Tags: technology

About once a year, or so, I redo the family web site.  It gives me a chance to pretend I still write web code.  And, it keeps me off of World of Warcraft, of which Jill is not so fond.

Now that we're at home with the twins, I thought this would be a perfect time to update the family site.  But, frankly, I wasn't looking forward to it.  I'd been using Telligent's Community Server.  And, while it worked.  It sure seemed like overkill.  And, skinning the site wasn't exactly easy.  To get the look and feel I wanted, I was about to make the switch to Wordpress. 

So, I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled on Telligent's new GraffitiCMS - a product built for small sites with a focus on blogging.  And, now that the transformation is nearly complete, I can heartily recommend Graffiti.  It does everything I need out of a content management / blogging engine.  And, it's extremely simple to setup and use.  Graffiti's mix of ASP.NET, simplicity, and the very cool Chalk templating language kept me from having to learn everything from the ground up.  Kudos to the Graffiti team for an excellent product!

In 40+ years on this planet, I can probably count on one hand the number of cashiers, telemarketers, and sales associates who pronounced my name correctly without hearing it first.  Quite a few still miss pronounce it even after hearing me say it.  So, once and for all, the correct pronunciation is:

[al-uhn]

And, for those who must know, it is Celtic for "harmony."

Oh, you thought I was going to talk about my last name?  Well, yeah.  How come "title" is never pronounced "tittle," but "ridle" is so often incorrectly pronounced "riddle?"  Seriously.

[rahyd-l-hoo-ver]

Not sure what it means, or even what the origin of the name is.  We think it is either Dutch.  But, it could also be northern German.  We're certain it has not survived the centuries in tact.