David Thielen

Comparing the Nissan Leaf by the standards of the most perfect car ever created, the BMW M3 (E30 body style).

I've owned a BMW M3 for the last 22 years. It is the classic E30 body...

It was a Battle

And we're not talking figuratively here, we're talking literally. The top 12 Computer Science Universities in the world competed last Saturday in a code war. This was a battle for school pride. This was a battle for bragging rights. This was a battle to see...

Work Locally, Compete Globally

Up until now, for most competitions, you have local competitions, often spread out over several weekends. And then the winners of those competitions fly to meet for the national competition. But there's no reason to do this for a programming contest. And there are some very...

All the excitement of March Madness, without the sweat

This upcoming January will see the first intercollegiate programming code war, with multiple teams competing from most of the top computer science colleges in the country. We have invited

The Pure Joy of Learning

Day 1 of the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. The keynote was interesting both for what it said as well as what it did not say:

1. No mention of SharePoint and SQL Server was mentioned only in passing. This doesn't mean either is going away -- they are a key...

We face two giant problems in reforming our campaign finance system. First, the stakes are so high that money will find a way to affect the outcome. Second, it take many many years to pass any real change, and about four months to figure out a way around them.

Jobs, jobs, jobs! Every politician in Colorado is claiming they are totally focused on jobs. But then in so many (not all) cases, they fall back on the same tired proposals they present for any problem. So let's look as what's really needed.

First off, increasing the number of jobs...

Senator Udall was gracious enough to sit down with me for an interview this past Monday. In the spirit of bipartisanship, we talked at the same table in the same coffee shop where I interviewed Ken Buck a year ago. Mark Udall comes across with the gravitas most Senators have,...

The Doctor looked at the bump on my neck and said "it's nothing, but we'll do a biopsy just to be safe." And the result was - cancer. I had stage IV squamous cancer that had started in the tonsil and spread through part of my neck....

This was a very sad interview for me. Governor Ritter has done a superb job and I hate to see him go. We've been really lucky to have him as Governor. As always, he was very straightforward as he answered questions, both looking back at his term and looking forward...

Congressman Polis was kind enough to talk to me last night and explain what was going on behind the scenes on the tax compromise bill from the Democratic House perspective. It's a fascinating story with several parts posturing, several parts negotiating, and a sprinkling of making a point. It's not...

First off an apology, I forgot my recorder and so was not able to record the interview. So we're going by my memory and a couple of notes I made. Consider all "quotes" to be paraphrases.

We started off with Senator Johnston asking me about my idea to address...

The fundamental tenet of medicine is "first do no harm." We should expect the same from our Attorney General. I believe that Attorney General John Suthers violated this fundamental tenet of his job when he approved the early release of felon Scott Kimball, who then went on to murder four...

My initial plan was to blog each evening after the show and keynotes were over. But I had booth duty and by the end of that each day I was exhausted. Being "on" all day long in the booth, answering attendee's questions, showing them our software, etc. is exhausting. So...

I've never been to an Oracle Conference before so I wasn't sure what to expect. It definitely has its own style. The big difference from either a Sun or Microsoft Conference is Oracle is not developer centric as those both tend to be (at least the ones I've gone to)....

6:32 - Senator Bennet first - saying thank you to our troops. Now talking about the rough economy with middle income costs increasing but income has not. Next talking about 13 trillion dollars in debt with nothing to show for it. How we have not invested in our infrastructure.

I'll be blogging all next week from JavaOne (including hopefully an interview with Larry Ellison). And the number one question I think all of us have is - what's the future of Java? There are a ton of conference sessions and that's a really good sign. While the...

The Garnett for A.G. campaign has come up with a really clever video. What I love about this is it is clearly designed to become a viral video on the web, which shows a very good understanding of how the web can uniquely be used for advantage. Here's hoping other...

This was a surprising interview. I expected to mostly be discussing illegal immigration and why that was the key issue in the race. Instead I found Congressman Tancredo to be primarily concerned with the lack of integrity in Dan Maes and secondarily concerned with the state of our public schools....