Category Archives: Uncategorized

A few months ago a I happened to glance over at a co-worker’s laptop during a meeting. He had some app running that was showing a wild looking spider like diagram that I had never seen before. I asked him what the app was and he said “MindManager. I use it for keeping track of my thoughts and ideas. You can download a trial from www.mindjet.com”. I followed his advice and my life changed as …Continue reading →

Adi Oltean talks about one of my favorite Windows technologies: VSS in Shadow copies – a peek under the hood. Amazingly powerful stuff. He also talks about the command line interface for VSS and bunches of other really good Windows internals stuff on his blog. Such good stuff that I’ve added him to my blog roll.

Today we (Microsoft) released the release candidate 1 (RC1) of Windows Server 2003 SP1, which you can download here. Being in the Windows Server group I’ve been runing interim builds of W2K3 SP1 for a looong time. I even have it running on all of my servers at home. In addition my main workstation at work is an AMD Athlon 64 machine running Windows XP Pro x64 Edition which is derived from the same code tree. …Continue reading →

Mike Hall posted probably the best optical illusion I’ve ever seen. Wow. In the same spirit of ridiculous humor he says I used to be one of his heros  (although I think he was being serious).

Nothing’s free. Ain’t it true. A while back I wrote that I had received a free Epox 8KDA3+ mobo and Athlon 3700+ CPU and that I was building a new workstation at home around it. Well I built it, and it was working fine. Mostly. I had a few weird crashes that I thought I had resolved by going to the latest GeForce video drivers. Some problems were resolved, but I still had some odd …Continue reading →

Community Server (formerly .Text) Beta One has finally been released. I’m downloading and installing it now at work to use as an internal team blog. I love .Text and can’t wait to see how Scott has improved things in this new version.

Furrygoat asks how many gadgets people carry. Seems like his model is similar to mine. I carry a SmartPhone (I have the new Audiovox SMT 5600 which I just love), a 16MB USB keychain (hooked to my Microsoft card key), and when at work I carry my Acer C110TCi Tablet PC to and from meetings. In my car I hava a Jabra Bluetooth wireless headset. At the gym I use a Rio Cali Sport portable audio …Continue reading →

The girls did it! We won the LWYSA Girls U-11 championship today, beating the Cougars 2-1. We also beat the Cougars yesterday 3-1 (the Cougars then won the bottom bracket by beating the Shooting Stars this morning). In fine fashion the girls had prepared a jug of water and let me have it after the game. What a blast!

The Polar Bears won the sportsmanship award for U-11 Girls Division 1 Soccer!!!! We came out on top, BY A LARGE MARGIN. But the summary is the Polar Bears got 206 points and the next team got 174 (the Illusion). As a reward, LWYSA pays for a party at Illusionz. Even if we don’t win the Tournament, I view this as complete victory. When the season started I told the parents and the girls we …Continue reading →

I coach my daughter’s soccer team (11 year olds) in the Lake Washington Youth Soccer Association (LWYSA). The team name is the Polar Bears and these girls are amazing! I am blessed to have such a great bunch of girls on the team. They all have great attitudes, work hard, and more importantly play hard. This weekend we won all three of their games in the LWYSA Year End Tournament. They beat the Wind 4-1, …Continue reading →

We’re busy doing a bunch of prototyping on my double-super-secret project at work and I decide I need to chip in and help. I haven’t used Visual Studio 2005 (Whidbey) yet, so I figure I’d build a little app we need using it. I sat down Wednesday night and started hammering away… Not a complex app, basically a single winform app with about 30 controls used to create configuration files that another component the team …Continue reading →

I was driving the kids home tonight and we saw the Lunar Ecilpse. When we first saw it the Earth had cast a shadow across about 75% of the moon. We raced home so we could get out the binoculars and take a closer look before it was completely “red”. We got home in plenty of time and while we watched the Red Sox win the World Series saw it get really dark and then …Continue reading →

ExtremeTech has a great article full of advice on bulding a PC today that can be upgraded in the future. Their general advice is “don’t build yesterday’s PC but instead bet on the new standards like PCI Express”. Matches my opinion exactly. Of course, when I built the PC I’m typing this on about a month ago I ignored my own advice…with good reason: I really needed a new PC and the “next generation stuff” really wasn’t …Continue reading →

Via Furrygoat, I found a great USGS website with tons of really good pictures of Mount St. Helens. Definitely worth checking out. When I see these photos I’m reminded of two things: How gawd-awful the pictures of the 1980 eruption were and this amazing Earth that God created.

I don’t get to write much code anymore. When I do I get an amazing amount of joy out of it. Tonight I realized that my MCE Controller, which I hacked up to enable me to control my Windows Media Center machine via Ethernet from my Crestron system has simply “just worked” since I released version 1.0.1 in February. I’m struck with how easy it was to write using C# and the .NET Frameworks in …Continue reading →

ExtremeTech discusses “Doing the Multimon“. Great article. Too bad they don’t talk about the very cool Ultramon, which gives you great fine grained control over your multi-monitor setup including different desktop images, screen savers, and more.Even more agregious is the fact they don’t talk about MaxiVista which allows you to turn any other PC (particularly that ancient laptop you have lying around) into a second or third monitor.I wrote about both these great tools in …Continue reading →