Section: Blogs

Chatting today amongst the EvNet team

Aug 30, 2008 2 min.

Aug 29 10:20 AM Duncan M. source code formatting checked in Duncan M. http://localhost/posts/Sampy/PAX-Day-3-In-… Aug 29 10:25 AM Duncan M. Duncan M. Duncan M. I started out with overflow-x:auto … which would add a scroll bar (at least in FF3), but then I went with white-space:pre-wrap; … but IE doesn’t like that 🙂 Aug 29 10:55 AM Duncan M. Nathan, can you send me the link to those pre-wrap alternates?

Best description of twitter I’ve seen

Jul 2, 2008 1 min.

From Dave Winer: The flow there is pointless. It’s like trying to make a baby by having sex with a rock. First, it’s hard to get excited. And second, no baby.

Marvel Digital Comics, not perfect, but worth the money!

Jun 21, 2008 3 min.

A month or so ago, I went looking to see if there was any way to read back issues of Marvel Comics online… and discovered a complete site around providing exactly that service. With a subscription to the digital comics section, you can view any issue of any series that is available on their online catalog; I sat down a couple of nights ago and read through issues 1 to 100 of Ultimate Spiderman for example.

Three Cups of Tea is a great book…

Jun 13, 2008 1 min.

One positive side to being stuck at home for two weeks is that I was able to do a fair bit more reading. For the most part, I read magazines and watched movies, but my wife also brought me the book “Three Cups of Tea” about Greg Mortenson’s work in Pakistan building schools for the children of poor rural areas. Mr. Mortenson, an avid mountain climber, ended up spending time in a small village near the base of K2 in Pakistan, barely making it down alive after a failed attempt to reach the summit.

The new and improved Channel 9 has shipped!

Jun 12, 2008 3 min.

When I joined my current team, it was called the Channel 9 dev team, because Channel 9 was the big site that they had built and was the center of all of their efforts. You certainly wouldn’t have known that from how we spent the last two years though 🙂 We built a whole new code base for a video blog site and launched a new site (Channel 10) on that code, bringing some of the video style of Channel 9 to a new audience.

At home, recovering from surgery

Jun 8, 2008 3 min.

It has been a crazy past few months for my health, or at least the appearance of my health. For about 30-something years now, I’ve had problems with my tonsils. This has included one or more bouts per year of tonsillitis, quite a few cases of strep throat and a ton of colds that just seem to end up hitting me as sore throats and lasting way longer than it seems like they should.

Sunburned at a Chess Tournament

Apr 14, 2008 1 min.

Well, this certainly isn’t something that happens all that often, but after spending all day at a chess tournament (at Wellington Elementary in Woodinville) on Saturday, I ended up with a sunburn on my face and arms! It turned out to be a really nice day, which was good, since the waiting area for parents and kids (where the parents spend up about 6 to 7 hours, and the kids spend all the time between matches) was outside.

Another chess tournament this weekend, last one before the state championship

Apr 12, 2008 1 min.

A new father-son activity for Connor and me has been to go to chess tournaments, spending a few Saturdays throughout the year in some school gym. Starting last year, we started to play chess at home and he enjoyed it so much that we decided to enter into the Shelton View Elementary school’s chess tournament in the Kindergarten category. He did well and had a lot of fun, so it has become the hobby of choice around our house.

Sidebar Gadgets for Channel 9, Channel 8 and more

Apr 5, 2008 1 min.

We recently had Donovan West (LiveGadgets.net) build us a set of sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista. These gadgets use the RSS feeds from each site and let you see all of our new content as it gets posted, then (using Silverlight) you can even play our videos right there on your desktop. You can check out the gadgets (for Channel 9, Mix, C8, Edge, and on10.net) by clicking on the appropriate image below:

Using my Xbox Live data service?

Apr 4, 2008 1 min.

If you’ve written an app, private or public, using my data feed of Xbox live info I’d really appreciate it if you’d let me know. This isn’t a required ‘sign-up’, but I want to start to keep track so that I could possibly create a page listing all the sites using it, and it may also be useful to be able to contact folks if I need to make a change or take the service down for an hour or so.