My street sign, Harpster,  has been missing for many many months.  A couple weeks ago the city finally replaced it, and I guess they decided to take part in talk like a pirate day.

So this is what some bored people on my team spent last weekend doing.  I gotta say that tying the wall to a fund raising drive is a stroke of genius. 

The latest version of Windows Live Hotmail is rolling out over the next few weeks, you can see the team blog for all the details. Here's a little more information on one of the features I've been working on, cleaning up duplicate contacts from you address book.

On the options page, there is a link for "Clean up duplicate contacts." This will walk you through all the duplicates we can identify and let you merge them as you see fit.  There's even an option to automatically merge all identical contacts to save you time. 

In addition, on the contacts page you can select entries by hand and click the "merge" button on the toolbar. This allows you to quickly combine multiple contacts without having to copy and paste information between browser windows.

And finally, after cleaning up your address book it would be a shame to let duplicates back in, wouldn't it?  When you click "add contact" while reading or after sending a message, WL Hotmail will notify you if someone by that name already exists in your address book and let you merge the new e-mail address to that record.

There you have it.  Not the sexiest feature we've ever rolled out, but hopefully one that is very useful.

I went to get a passport for my 3 month old baby this morning. They took his picture and I had to put his height, eye color, and hair color on the application.  Since it take 3-4 months for them to process the application by the time we actually fly the picture won't look like him, the height will be wrong, his eye color might change, and he might have hair.  Plus the passport is good for 5 years, so I'm sure customs will have no problem identifying a 5 year old from his infant photo.

A bridge on a major highway in Minneapolis/St. Paul collapsed into the Mississippi today. Something like this happens and it really puts your day into perspective.  All my friends and family are ok (as far as I know so far), but those early moments when the phone lines were jammed were nerve wracking.  Not really sure why I'm writing this, but it makes me feel a little better.

Silicon Alley Insider had a soft launch today, the site is still in beta.  In their own words

Welcome! Silicon Alley Insider is a new business site, produced by and for the New York digital business community. We started publishing for real on Friday, July 19.  We're currently in beta, so we're grateful for your patience and feedback. 

We cover the intersection of the technology, media, and communications industries, with a focus on companies and people making waves in New York.  Specifically, we provide news, commentary, and discussion about digital publishing, entertainment, news, music, social networking, mobile, and gaming.

This is my brother's new project (I believe he's employee #4 after the founders: 2 DoubleClick guys and Henry Blodget), wish him luck!

Pete gets his own story on Gawker today. 

It's been a long road, but Windows Live Hotmail is officially out of beta. I joined the Hotmail team before the mail competitions heated up and have been working this latest versions for close to 3 years now.  Leaving beta is actually a bit anti-climatic. We've worked so hard to make sure the final release is ready for primetime,  I think the thrill of opening up to that first small set of beta testers 2 years ago was a bigger rush.  But it is still a great feeling to be open to the world.  It's amazing to think that a beta population of 25 million is less than 10% of our customers, but there are very few things that run at our scale.

We've been working on the next round of features already, but we are taking a couple hours this afternoon to celebrate and look back at how far "Kahuna" has come.  Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback, keep it coming, we're always listening.  Can't wait to let everyone know what my group is working on now ;)

The M9 release of WL Mail is being tested right now - see the team blog for more information. I'm sure there will also be a full list of new features there soon (or the liveside crew, who seem to know everything ;), but in the meantime I thought I'd highlight  some features for contacts.

The M9 release was focused on the "classic" experience and the contacts team was no different. We added group support, search, sort, and a way to quickly narrow down your contacts by letter. But what probably has people more excited is that we added more ways to import contacts and the ability to export your contacts. Check out the options page where you can now import contacts in a number of different CSV file formats (including Yahoo! Mail and Gmail). You'll also see an option to export your contacts to a CSV file so you can add your WL Mail contacts to Outlook, your phone, or whatever you want. After all, they're your contacts.

This feature was just released fairly quietly a few weeks ago:

You can now listen to sound files from within WL Mail without having to launch a separate application.  This only works for IE (although if you have a Firefox plugin to use ActiveX controls, it might work).  Our dogfooders at Microsoft who are using a VoIP service for their home phone love being able to listen to their voicemails without opening the attachment.

So my wife and I spent a nice day with friends in San Francisco yesterday, including some time at the SFMOMA. When we got back to my friend's apartment I found my car window had been smashed in.  At first we couldn't understand why anyone had done it as they hadn't rifled through the car looking for anything, and come on, why would you break into a 1998 Toyota Carolla?  Then my wife remembered she had taken off her jacket since it was such a nice day and left it on the front seat.  Unfortunately her cell phone was in the pocket as well.  I always try to put electronics and laptop bags out of site or in the trunk, but it never would have occurred to me to hide a jacket. Overall, not such a big deal.  Windows aren't too expensive and it was the freebie Nokia phone, but it's still unsettling to have that happen.

I've been trying to bike to work as frequently as possible but I always seem to find an excuse:  it's too dark after work, the roads might be wet and I'll get splattered, my bike isn't comfortable, I need to carry something bulky to work that day.  Well, I'm going to try to get rid of my excuses and start riding consistently.  I've got a powerful light (one of those beefy ones with a separate NiMH battery pack) and a new bike.  I've got fenders on order to keep the splatter down on wet days and a rack as well so I won't have to carry everything on my back.  My goal is to bike to work 4 days a week.  We'll see how I do.  Despite the heavy fog this morning, I'm one for one this week.