Category Archives: Uncategorized

From the this is just plain cool department: eMachineShop allows you to design any physical “part” you want using a CAD program you download and then submit the plans to them. They will machine the part using any number of processes and ship it to you. You can do quantity one or 1000s. You can use just about any material you can think of. Now I gotta think of some project that would require me to …Continue reading →

I typically just use .Text’s standard edit form for creating my posts, but it does not deal with images well (see my posts from Asia and you’ll know what I mean. I’ve tried both BlogJet (in fact I’m typing this in BlogJet) and w.Bloggar, but they don’t do what I want either. What I want is to be able to point to a picture on my local machine and have the following happen: A low …Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking a lot about technical enthusaists lately. And I’m really struggling with it. The problem is I’m a super-hard-core technical enthusiast. Probably close to as hard core as you can get. And I know many, many people just like me. This makes me biased. Add to that the fact that I work for Microsoft and live technology. I should get it out front that I believe “geek“ is synonymous for “technical enthusiast”. Some …Continue reading →

I arrived at the Narita Airport about 2 hours ago after a 2 hour flight from Shanghai. We then took a train (the “Narita Express”) to downtown Tokyo, about 1 mile from the hotel. The train took about 90 minutes.   However, the REAL train story happened yesterday! In Shanghai they have the world’s only MagLev train (Magnetic Levitation). It goes from the Shanghai airport for about kilometers. The best part is that this train …Continue reading →

Last night our hosts took us out to dinner at a Peking Duck restraunt here in Beijing where we had some amazing Chinese fare, including Peking duck. I sampled duck tongue (yuk), duck liver pâté (yum), an amazing orange peel cod dish, and more. The first picture is the disgusting duck tongue. Makes me ill just looking at the picture! 🙂 I will pretty much try anything. Once. And there are not many foods I …Continue reading →

Last night at about 10pm local time I arrived in Beijing China. We flew from Seattle to Narita/Tokyo and then to Beijing. This morning I woke up at about 6am, walked 3 mintues out the front door of my hotel (the Kerry Centre) and got a triple-grande-latte from Starbucks. Tastes just like home! I’ll be in Asia for about 10 days. We start here in Beijing, then go to Shanghai, and then a few days …Continue reading →

First, it should be obvious that I consider myself a geek. I think I’m a pretty big geek. My sister Laurie is constantly calling me a geek; the funny thing is she thinks she’s insulting me! But I don’t hold a candle to Phillip Torrone who runs www.flashenabled.com. Wow. This is now one of my favorite sites for blowing time on. Regarding the term “Geek”, last week there was a thread on channel9 about arrogance. …Continue reading →

I’m still an absolute n00b when it comes to regex. Even after reading Mastering Regular Expressions. But man, is it powerful. Tonight my wife asked me to help her create name badge labels for an org she’s in. All she had was an email that had a list of names like this: DI- PAID IN FULLLynn Melton 2Judy Pake 3EO-PAID IN FULLPeggy Ponto 9ES – PAID IN FULLJanice Norman 2Janice Benson 3… Where the first …Continue reading →

As I mentioned before I use DFS on my home network to help manage my storage resources. Almost all of my machines at home are domain joined. You get a lot of management benefits from doing this. You can make Windows Software Update Services (SUS) automatically apply patches to all machines, you can apply Group Policy across machines (e.g. to enforce password complexity requirements, re-directed My Documents, etc…) However, in one case I have choosen …Continue reading →

http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail.html Strong Bad is my hero.

Good ‘ole Don Box has written a very clear description of HTTP.SYS and it’s relationship to IIS and Indigo. I have to admit that even I was confused (and I worked on HTTP.SYS way back when it was called “Duct Tape”)!

A few weeks back Scott posted about MaxiVista. I had just multi-mon at work with 2 DELL 20” LCDs using DVI and was loving it. I also had a 19” LCD on my desk I used for my server machines via a KVM switch. I thought it would be cool to somehow use the 3rd monitor in my multi-mon setup, but adding another video card to my main machine was questionable. MaxiVista to the rescue! …Continue reading →

It’s the time of year again for the sun to start showing here again. That means fun yard projects! Man, do I have a list of things to do this year: Get the sprinkler system up and running again. I started this today. I fired it up (my in-lake pump got bumped around during a storm in November so I was a bit nervous about it’s condition…it worked!), and replaced a few broken heads and …Continue reading →

I had my Crestron system talking to Media Center just fine. I had written an MD5 implementation required by the Girder iserver component, and although the solution was a bit of a hack, it worked. And well. But noooo. I have to make it work right. So I set about writing my own app that listens on a TCP socket and controls the ehshell.exe app (MCE Controller). “It will be a great excuse to do …Continue reading →