Doug Tidwell works for IBM's Software Group Strategy organization, where he's responsible for evangelizing technologies such as Service Component Architecture (SCA), Service Data Objects (SDO) and XForms. Despite his useful appearance, he has been with IBM since 1989. A speaker at the first XML conference in 1997, he is the author of O'Reilly's XSLT, the second edition of which is now flying off the shelves at a bookstore near you. (Procrastinators who begin their holiday shopping on the late side are encouraged to order a few copies now, the better to avoid the last-minute rush.) He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina with his wife, cooking teacher Sheri Castle, their thirteen-year old daughter Lily and their dog, Domino the Wonder Hound.

Today is the first day of the rest of the year

I'm just pretending that I'm a regular blogger here...the usual pathetic excuses for my radio silence apply.

I was at the Rational Software Developers Conference a few weeks ago, it was good to see my literary and spiritual advisor Willy Farrell there. Unfortunately, Chris Nelson, my other literary and spiritual advisor, wasn't there this year. Music Director Paul (Pablo) Coates was the track chair for the Open Computing Track this year, and I was there when SW Strategy's own Rob Wunderlich got the news that the Red Wings had won the Stanley Cup. I see all these great people I know and wonder why I don't do a better job of keeping in touch with them. (I sometimes blog and wonder why I don't do a better job of that, either.)

There are some pictures floating around of all of us towards the end of the evening at Universal Studios, we're in the process of tracking those down and destroying them.

We tell the kids it stands for:

• Where's the fire?
• What's that flavor?
• Who told Fanny? [Not really useful unless the kids know someone named Fanny.]
• Who's the freak?
• Why the fracas?

I bring this up because last year the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles offered to replace license plates that started with the TLA alluded to here. (Some snickering kids told their Grandmother maybe her license plate said more than she wanted it to.) Unfortunately, until last week the graphic the NCDMV used as a sample license plate was "WTF-5505." You can read the story in the News & Observer if you want.

From the Tonsorial Tragedies Dept.: One of the most consistently entertaining sites on the Web is Bill "The Sports Guy" Simmons' column at ESPN.com. I didn't watch the NBA Draft this year, but his Draft Diary is a blast. For those of you who don't care about basketball, here's the most important excerpt:

There's comedy, there's high comedy, there's transcendent comedy, and then there's Robin Lopez giving an interview with an undersized Suns hat stuffed on top of his Anderson Varejao-esque permfro.

You must click on this link. You'll thank me for brightening your day, just as I thanked Mr. Simmons for brightening mine.

Finally, I'm blogging on the first day of our vacation. I'm sitting in Heathrow Terminal 5, typing on a Bluetooth keyboard linked to a Nokia N810 (Warning: Annoyingly Flash-intensive site). I'll say more about the Nokia soon, it's very cool. A little underpowered, but it's a Linux-powered palmtop that lets me do everything except work-related email while we're on the road. (I'm running Emacs with my favorite Lisp libraries installed. And the crowd goes wild.) We're finally moving back towards the PDA form factor that all but disappeared.