Give it a look.

But as I was writing it, I had this persistent itch at the back of my mind: memories of some of the things I was involved in when I was in the computer trade press where the Chinese Wall between editorial and advertising bled over. 

The first occurred when I was working on a review of a class of desktop software. I’m going to leave it pretty vague since many of the people involved are still in the business. This was well over a decade ago, so don’t try to go figuring out which magazine or what the companies were. We did the testing in our lab based on a set of criteria (speed, ease of use, and so on) and I wrote up the article. Company A won the review, mostly based on the fact that it supported a fairly complete implementation of the relevant standards and was fast. I can still recall being called into an editor’s office and having him help me with my conclusions until company B won based on ease of use. Post facto, I found out that there was some strange advertising thing linked to the conclusion that helped guide the result. Nothing too obviously nefarious, but it was my first experience with the idea that sometimes the product I felt really was the best doesn’t necessarily win. Perhaps I’d lead a sheltered life until then.

The second occurred when I was asked to review UPSes. This was fascinating because we weren’t reviewing those little UPSes that you have in your basement at home: we were reviewing UPSes that could deliver 10+ kVA – enough to power a dozen or more computers for quite some time. The memories of this review stand out because it wasn’t about the software that they ran or anything that I had any expertise in: we called in a commercial electrician to set up a test bed with a mixture of resistive (light bulbs) and variable loads (power supplies) and a variety of volt meters and so on, then we practiced cutting the power over and over, watching how long it took for the units to switch over, how long they could run, how quickly they recharged to full capacity and so on. After years of reviewing shrink-wrapped software and laptops, it was refreshing to work with something that I could walk up to and kick without worrying about doing significant damage. Since this review, by the way, I’ve always bought APC UPSes. Post facto, I found out that we’d done the review because UPS vendors were good advertisers and we never wrote about them.

All of which is to say that when the reader isn’t the one paying for the content (which is the case with most newspapers and magazines), there always exists the opportunity for the insertion of other interests and biases.

"But, she said, Gidget had been the victim of typecasting, which limited her career choices..."

The mental image of a chihuahua meeting with groups of Hollywood execs, pitch men, and agents, and browsing a pile of scripts brought one final smile to my face.

As you’ve probably read by now, we’ve made the call to shut Popfly down on August 24.

But that’s not what this post is about. It’s about passionate response and kind words we got from our users when we announced we were shutting down the beta. I’ve tried to reply individually to everyone who wrote asking questions or saying how sorry they were and am sorry if I missed anyone.

Some of the most common questions were:

• Why are you shutting Popfly down? The economic situation today isn’t anything like what it was when we started Popfly. You’ve probably read about Microsoft’s layoffs and how every business group has been asked to pare back and focus. Popfly, though it was interesting, entertaining, and different, was hard to justify even for me (one of the people to started it) to management at a time when we were freezing salaries and laying people off.
• Can’t you open source Popfly? We’d love to, and spent many weeks looking at what it would take to do it. But  the source code to Popfly is pretty heavily enmeshed with Microsoft-internal services and source code that we cannot open source. If we figure out a way to release some elements of the source, we will, but no guarantees.
• Can’t I save my game/mashup and run it myself? The way games and mashups work, they need a lot of the Popfly services to be running for them to load. For example, mashups call into the Popfly service to request all their data (Popfly is basically a proxy server for them), and games require our game engine to be running. For games, Ben and Adam did come up with a tool that will help you run games offline, but you don't get the game creator itself.
• So are you guys out of jobs? What are you doing? Everyone on the Popfly team found a new position in Microsoft. A bunch of us stayed together to take our learnings from building Popfly to work on the next generation JavaScript engine and tools and you’ll be hearing more about that as we can talk about it.

Yesterday we moved from the alpha release of the game creator to beta in time for the PAX conference here in Seattle. Ben Anderson from our team will be at PAX giving demos, so if you're there drop by and harass him. Or just post on his Popfly profile page.

By the way, the title of this post is an allusion to two movies and the fact that Popfly now supports achievement badges -- for example, if you play a game late at night, you get the Night Owl badge.

Except this one was with chocolate. And they were giving out free samples.

So Amy and I worked our way around the room. It was surprisingly hard work -- the room was over 90 degrees in places, which meant not only that everyone was sweating, but that the chocolate was mostly the texture of mousse. Of course, mousse is good, too.

We tasted, I think, everything there. Four stood out for us:

• Claudio Corallo Chocolate. A single origin chocolate and cacao producer -- they make raw chocolate. The flavors were unlike anything I'd experienced before. I know it was meant to be used as an ingredient for other confections, but I could have eaten it raw. They have a store in Ballard.
• Kekau. A range of interesting flavors, including things like black truffle honey and Thai curry made these folks stand out -- they'd really done some interesting things. I've had many chocolate flavors before (curry chocolate, lavender chocolate, etc.) but they'd done them really well, including -- get this -- olive oil chocolate. Sounds awful, tastes great.
• Intrigue Chocolates. Truffles were the order of the day from Intrigue. Again, they had the standard flavors, but the ones that stood out for me were basil, and tequila-lime.
• Fiori Chocolatiers. These folks truffles also, but with an Mediterranean twist -- olive oil, fig liqueur, lavender and raspberry blossom. If you want a chocolate that you won't get elsewhere, try them.

By the end of the couple of hours we spent there I was thirsty, dehydrated, and tired. Oh, and buzzed on sugar.