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I can has breaths?
Well, that's done. The last few weeks have definitely been "interesting".
I've been involved in the launch of two new sites for MSDN: Oslo and Azure (and the WCF REST Starter Kit, but that's just a few pages). It's meant a lot of meetings (remotely), converting numerous documents using various internal tools (each with their own quirks), re-encoding videos, and loads of email. Hopefully the sites will be helpful and informative. Let me know if not.
Chris has the welcome message, but I figured I'd take some time to point out a few of the highlights (at least in my view) of...
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So true
So true... sadly, so true:
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Well, that didn't hurt a bit
Nothing dramatically different at your end (the new admin stuff looks gorgeous though), but I've just upgraded this blog to Subtext 2.0.
Congrats to Phil, Tim, Simone and everyone else who worked so hard to get this out, and thank you from this lazy one
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What I learned on my summer vacation
There are (at least) two truisms when you work for yourself:
You either have too much work, or almost none. and You can take a vacation anytime you want, as long as you're willing to spend just as much time apologizing to customers and struggling to catch up, and you're willing to not be paid for that time.
With those two in mind, we[1] decided to take a week off and head over to Yoho National Park. I decided to document this trip using this 21st century equivalent of the old elementary school teacher's favourite, "What I did on my summer vacation."...
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Wolverine Frogs and Greek Gods
(non-technical, non-whiny post)
Like many geeks, I was a big fan of "the new" X-Men growing up (Back before The Beast went shaggy for you children. Now get off my lawn.). So, seeing this opened up some scary possibilities. It seems there are a group of frogs in Cameroon that - when threatened - drives bones through it's flesh to cut up the attackers. No mention if they hang out with toads that control the weather, or salamanders with laser eyes.
On another front, if you're looking for a nice, amusing, light summer read, take a gander at Gods behaving badly. It's...
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A little Wi-Fi sob story
I was in a hotel this weekend, and decided to quickly pop into WoW to manage my auctions. Fortunately, like many hotels, this one had wireless. 15 minutes, and I was out. The rest of the weekend was unconnected, until Sunday morning, where I saw this in my Inbox:
World of Warcraft - 5/25/2008 Character Transfer Complete!
Sure enough, when I tried to log in, the password had been changed. I changed my password, and sent off an email to Blizzard, and hit the armory to see to my characters. The character that had been moved (to Bladefist, for the curious) was...
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Farewell, and thank you
A lot of blogs are reporting that Gary Gygax has passed. While we all must go eventually, it is still a sad event. His work started me along a many year gaming lifestyle, lead to me meeting a great many good friends, and helped me develop to the person I am.
For that, I thank him. Rest in peace, good sir.
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Bearable lightness of bandwidth
I decided to work off-site on Friday -- partly (I admit) to get away from the usual distractions at work (Miss Simon, and the three cats), but also to get off a network for the day.
The network gives me a "convenient" distraction most days: waiting for a Web project to start up? Check a few blogs. Need to grab a few graphics? Well, I'll just go to this Web site.... Ooo, shiny, I should look at this article. Finish a task? Well, I'll just check the Auction House to see how things are selling. Etc, etc. Just disconnecting for a...
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Misc links: reading and (losing) lunch
WikiSource seems to be another great source for "old tyme" reading (along with Project Gutenberg, of course). I was looking around the intarwebs for some Lovecraft works, and they seem to have pretty much everything he wrote (including his will, it seems). Dang, now I'll never get anything done...
And now, after filling your eyes with wonder, I'll empty your stomach. My mind quakes with the terrible knowledge there is such a product as this. I fear I may go mad...
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That's two
I was busy through the week, so I couldn't commemorate my "second anniversary". Last Thursday (the 8th) marked the second year since, "My second biggest mistake" - aka my leaving Microsoft. So, what have we/I learned in those 24 months?
Work/Life balance. I feel that for the most part (i.e. excluding crunch time on projects), I have it. My commute is about 15s. The coffee in the office is fine (although not as frequent as I'd like). I am fairly strict about stopping work at the end of the day (excluding email and the newsletter of course)....
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Leopard - one weekend in
Well, I've had an entire weekend to play with Leopard, so it's initial review time.
So far, the migration has seemed both painless and pointless. OK, maybe pointless would be the wrong word - perhaps "without any compelling need" would be better. I have to admit, I've turned on cover flow for my documents, and I flipped through them. Dazzling, and I suppose it could be useful were I still generating a lot of PowerPoint. I like the new dock, although I'm a little sad that I can't use Fan view because I keep my dock on the left hand side....
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Quote of the day
G got me started reading Heather Mallick's essays on the CBC Web site. She's usually amusing, enlightening and whatnot, even if I'm nowhere near as literate as she. I had to pull this out of today's though so that I can come back to it in the future:
People should consider talking to the last person they would ever consider.
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Mental note: VMWare Fusion and encryption
Just a mental note: don't encrypt your home folder after creating one or more VMWare Fusion VMs. It seems to corrupt the vmx file, leaving the VM unusable, and forcing you to reinstall, re-apply Windows Update and re-install *everything* again.
/grumble
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Things I learned while driving halfway across two countries
M and I just got back from my "vacation", aka endless days of helping her stay awake while she drives us to and from Winnipeg (I don't drive). So, I felt it necessary to share the boredom with all of you, with a few lessons learned during the trip:
Don't drive through Calgary during construction season. It actually makes the place worse.
The legend of the "one hill" in Saskatchewan is true (with the exception of the Southwest corner, which is kind of cool). As an example of Saskatchewan's arch-flatness: for radio (no CD...
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/congrats brianjo!
When I first heard the job title, "Enthusiast Evangelist", only one name came to mind. Fortunately, Brian (Mr. Gadget when I worked with him, and co-author of "Xbox 360 for Dummies" and "Zune for Dummies") got the job.
Congratulations, Brian! Remember where to throw your castoffs!
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Wow - Klaus Nomi
How could it have been that I never heard of Klaus Nomi before today? Oh, mymymy...
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Lessons learned while teaching
Well, I finished providing my first training session since 2000 (or so). As always, I learned a lot of things (hopefully not as much as the students). The course was a custom, "Upgrading to .NET with VB" that I wrote for the customer.
Right now, I'm a little conflicted about the session. Personally, I think it was awful, but they seemed to be more or less happy with it. Most of my conflict is around the act of training in general. Before I had joined that company, training was the way I made most of my living: I travelled, teaching the...
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I'm leaving on a jet airliner
I was booking a flight today, so this seemed even more appropriate. Lovely example of data visualization as art.
Oh, and there is the original also for resolution fans.
(via Stranger Fruit via Pharyngula)
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Placeholder
Just a placeholder, you can ignore this. I finally unsubscribed from the main feed at blogs.msdn.com. There was just too much noise. So I will now add feeds as appropriate from said MSDN Blogs. This is here so that I'll be able to compare my old subscription trends with my new ones, in about a month's time.
From your 190 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 21,545 items, starred 131 items, and shared 2 items.
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Plane pr0n
The Snowbirds have been based in Comox for the last little while, and have been practising daily - which means at 10:30am and a few other times during the day, the cats have to hide under the bed. (I've been hiding under there as well, but for different reasons. Honest.
They haven't done anything too fancy yet. I guess it's either simple stuff for now, more later (they're here for another week). Or perhaps they do all the fancy stuff over the Strait.
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Professional Wilfing (for Dummies)
I love neologisms, and I saw from my feeds yesterday that there is a new one making the rounds: wilfing (from "What was I Looking For?"). As this has become both a pastime and age-related hazard, I've decided to take some time to help people better wilf.
Exercise 1: Wikipedia
Wikis are an excellent way to wilf, and Wikipedia best of all. Pick a page, any page. Note the time. Now, find an interesting link on that page and follow it (no external links, please). Repeat for 10 pages. How long did that take you? You could easily do another round before...
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What has been occupying my time
It's been about a nice round 17 months (give or take) since I left Microsoft. Since then, Microsoft shipped some software, people have argued, and the world continues its revolution, rotation and other movements.
I know all of you were wondering, "What's Kent up to?", so here is some of what I've been up to since I left.
I do a daily newsletter for Code Project, the Insider. It's a daily email of news on the industry, developer stuff and more. Oh, and sorry, no RSS feed.
I helped Bill Evjen (aka Writing Monster II) create a couple more books.
I did four...
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Back (for now at least)
I killed my blog and online existence a while back. It wasn't the first time, and likely won't be the last. Since then, I've started to feel like I actually missed it. It seemed almost like I had lost my voice. Certainly it meant I lost contact with a lot of people, as I "fell off the face of the Earth."
So, I've decided to try again. This time, I will care less that I have little to say, and say it anyway. The resulting catharsis will help, I think. In addition, it will definitely help towards "that goal" I have...