Conspiracy Theories Wanted...

The Mass movement toward OpenDocument was a monumentally bad decision -- I have to believe it was essentially ideological. But I'll bet dollars to donuts this was no technical decision.

Massachusetts CIO Resigns Over OpenDocument
Ed Oswald, eWEEK

Peter Quinn, the man responsible for bringing OpenDocument to the state
of Massachusetts as CIO, will resign on January 9, 2006, citing the
controversy around the decision as well as personal attacks aimed at
him as reasons for his departure. Quinn did stress to employees of the
state's Information Technology Division (ITD) that just because he was
leaving, it did not mean that Massachusetts' progress towards ODF was
ending.  The move to standardize on the OpenDocument format for all
electronic documents in Massachusetts began on September 1, 2005 when
the proposal was first approved. The plan was quickly attacked by
Microsoft, which called it "inconsistent and discriminatory."  Microsoft
has since submitted its new Office Open XML formats to Ecma International
for standardization. In an interview with Groklaw, Quinn's prior boss
Eric Kriss said that Quinn was ill-prepared for the game of political
football that the ODF controversy had created.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1906107,00.asp
See also the MA decision: http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-09-26-a.html

Hello World

The kickoff post: this blog is an exercise in information sharing, mainly targeted at friends and acquaintances. I'm notoriously bad at keeping up ties, so this will be an attempt at keeping people up to date on my interests and activities. For work related info, please see the Pavlik blog at Oracle. I expect the work blog will remain much more active.