Week 749

I missed week 748, which works out because there wasn't much I would have written in the weeknote anyway. This week, 749, was a busy one, so I'm going to do the weeknotes in pictures...

On TUESDAY, we had our weekly developer conference. Above, from left, are Mike, Steve, and Jim—who joined us via Google Video Chat from our Providence office—offscreen are Dave and I. We spent some time reviewing everyone's current projects and workload and then discussed a chapter of The Pragmattic Programmer, the book the group is currently reading through.

On WEDNESDAY, I saw this car parked near our office and laughed. The owner must be pretty enthusiastic about the internet. No, this is not my car.

THURSDAY was Mike Boulet's 10 year anniversary! I put up this banner to celebrate him in traditional Rhode Island dialect.

But seriously, decade-long tenures at companies like ours are truly remarkable today for a couple of reasons. The first is that most companies like ours just aren't that old! We've been around since 1995—a very long time by web standards. The other is that it's not as common these days for employees to remain at a company that long. But we have Dave, Jim, Steve Brock, Mike, Justin and Mark, who have all been with Newfangled for a decade this year. That's just amazing to me (I can't believe I'll have been here for six years in September...). Days like Thursday remind me how thankful I am for these guys and the years of service they've offered to our company.

SATURDAY: Yes, I bought an iPad! Several of us 'Fangleders went down to Best Buy early on Saturday morning, expecting a long line after being tipped off by Brian's contacts at the store. It turned out that the line was almost nonexistant until about 9:30—a half-hour before they opened. But, thanks to Brian, we were first in line and able to get one of the 15 iPads the store had.

I'm very impressed with it. For starters, I got over 48 hours of use out of it before I needed to charge the battery. I didn't run constant video or anything like that, just what I anticipate will be normal use for me. Very cool. By the way, I don't have an iPhone or iPod touch, so the touch and apps experience is entirely new to me. Everything looks amazing on it—video, iTunes, web pages, books, etc. The experience I'm most impressed by is the iBooks application. I had low expectations/interest in it, but after using it quite a bit already it has quickly become the aspect of the iPad I find most compelling—ease of use, aesthetic experience, quality, etc. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it in the coming weeks, but for now, I think it's great, am sure it will be very popular, and otherwise agree with everything Walter Mossberg said about it in his review for the Wall Street Journal.