A few sorta random things I recall about some of my past memorable, unorthodox relationships, part #3

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2015/09/16 13:50 +00:00, original URI: http://www.siao2.com/2015/09/16/8770668856267197252.aspx

Today's blog post, unlike the previous two blog posts, is not based on a specific romantic relationship. It is more based on an interesting career shift that led to several unique opportunities and the chance to play a small role in a movie that technically led to me having a Bacon Number of THREE.

I will start with some of the blogging and talking that I had been doing for a long time about accessibility, both within Microsoft and basically everywhere (by which I mean EVERYWHERE, by the way!).

It led to an interesting invitation to a conference happening in Las Vegas at the same time as CES (the Consumer Electronics Show), known as AEE (the Adult Entertainment Expo). It was basically a techie working for an adult movie company looking at the future needs related to accessibility standards for movies (both DVDs and online). He wanted to know if I could stop by the AEE when I was at CES anyway so I could talk about accessibility with him.

I broke the news to him that I hadn't been to CES in years. Although surprised, he quickly offered a trade show pass for AEE as well as hotel/travel/meal coverage, if I was willing to meet with him.

Now I should pause to explain the rules about moonlighting for Microsoft employees, since I clearly wouldn't be doing this on behalf of Microsoft. The rules are pretty simple:

• I should not be distracted from any of my work for Microsoft that would cause me to "lose focus", and

• I should not be in competition with any project or product or group within Microsoft, including MCS (Microsoft Consulting Services).

All of this was simple enough to do, and I had several great meetings every morning of the conference, after which I spent time meeting many different stars in the industry, as well as several production company owners and directors.

It culminated in my meeting Faye Reagan (originally her name was Faye Jillian Henning, something I learned from her before the pornwikileaks scandal told everyone), several tricks with her on my lap atop the iBOT 4000, a seat at the Girlfriends Films table on the floor of the AVN awards, and eventually a role as Faye Reagan's fiancé with KC Kelly as my mother who she has an affair with in a movie!

Now I've seen her several times since then and she has consistently introduced me as her "faux fiancé". ;-)

And I have worked with several different companies on ways to integrate subtitles, captions, and dubbing into DVD and online content, always using open source technologies that have nothing to do with any of the work that I have ever done for Microsoft....

My "relationship" with Faye Reagan wasn't technically a real one, although I will always remember that time of my life fondly....

Please say hi to Faye for me... I am a huge fan. So back in March 2008, in a post titled Conventional wisdom is retarded, you made some rather bold statements: 1) That the earth isn't flat, and 2) that it is possible to send unicode to the console. It is the latter of these claims that I have the biggest problem with. Back when everyone still knew the earth was flat, anyone who dared say otherwise was promptly silenced, ie executed. These days it seems that the preferred method of silencing people is to close the comments on a blog post, which is why I have to post here in this unrelated post about Faye. (I am using a pseudonym though, just to be safe.) So about sending unicode to the console... Visual Studio has this thing called a "Custom Build Step". You write a console application that gets executed by Visual Studio at the appropriate time during a build; the output of this console application is redirected and captured by Visual Studio and displayed within the Visual Studio output window. The problem is that there seems to be no way to get Visual Studio to interpret this output as unicode. No matter what you throw at it, UTF-8, UTF-16, nothing works. Not even throwing a BOM at it makes any difference. From what I can gather Microsoft gets around this problem by using a secret backdoor named pipe - something related to an environment variable called "VS_UNICODE_OUTPUT". Any ideas how I can get this to work in my own custom build step?