Duncan Mackenzie.NET

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It has been a crazy past few months for my health, or at least the appearance of my health. […]

So I have a file on disk, web.config in this case, and I right click and pick 'open with | Visual Studio 2008' ... and I get this: […]

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Just added this to my queue at Blockbuster: […]

I've been watching a few too many Futurama's lately....

Kent's blog is back online and in one of his recent posts he updates us on all the projects he's been working since he left Microsoft (where we were both working at MSDN as content strategists)... tons of cool stuff, definitely worth reading through and following some links. […]

If you have digital cable from Comcast, including HD service, then go up into the 600's and try to find the new Universal HD channel. Repeats of shows like Firefly, Battlestar Galatica (new series, not old), The Equalizer, Knight Rider... and tons more, all in HD. I watched an episode of Firefly […]

I send myself email... which sounds more pathetic than it is. I just use it as a way to hang onto links or notes to myself (do this, watch this, etc...). I do it all the time. Every once in awhile though, right after I send something to myself I see the 'new mail' pop up on my computer and I click o […]

Which isn't a big deal, but it is amazing to me that the same comic can sometimes make me produce some form of giggle/snort/outburst every single time I see it. After viewing this comic once, I was going back and forth between browsers and it ended up coming up a few different times. Maybe […]

This is crazy, I watch SciFi channel all the time and I never saw an ad for this! (of course, I skip all the commercials :( ) […]

Last year I managed to go from 205-ish down to around 175 … just by following the South Beach Diet and working out more consistently (shooting for 5 days a week, generally hit 4 at least)… but then I switched jobs to work on a new project (http://on10.net, a site that has featured Chris a few times) […]

I love this; […]

I just couldn't resist posting this picture...

A bit of an odd video on 10, sorry... but I couldn't help myself, I was (and continue to be) so excited about the arrival of the iCup :) 

Now, I'm not saying they are copying anything we are doing, and I get where the "9" comes from (they show 9 videos a week), but still... it is hard to not to wonder why they ended up with a name like that for their site...  Link to The 9 for Monday July 17th […]

Good times were had by all, although mostly by my son (Connor)! […]

But is this really necessary?

Of course, you can get videos of the actual event from YouTube, but I found this much better than the real thing;

I have no idea what this means. I get it all the time, whenever I hookup to an airport or conference hotspot. The connection always works, so the message doesn't seem to matter, but I still wonder what it means :)

This is from a great blog "SuburbanJoe" : "The fact that it is pronounced like "we" lets them say silly things like "Wii are going to change gaming" and the double lowercase "i" is supposed to be evocative of both the controller and the ability for people to play together as it looks like two peo […]

I was browsing around on Randy's web site after reading about an upcoming session of his at Makers Faire (hacking USB keyboards!!), and I found this: http://www.randywritesletters.com/005.html All of the letters on that site (which has little or no navigation elements, so just edit the URL approp […]

Guess I had better watch my manners!!

If you are interested in portable video, downloading video podcasts, etc... check out today's episode on 10 ... featuring me!

I'm on the set of 10 today, filming a segment. Crazy stuff for a dev!

Interview with the dev team (including me) is up on Channel 9

the site is live that is... well, so are we... anyway... the real code for http://on10.net is up and running! We know about a few issues, but in general it is ready to rock, so feel free to shoot on over and grab your userid before all the good ones are gone :) […]

Adam Kinney, another member of our three-person dev team, posts our favorite comments about the preview site so far. Scoble, who really is on the same team as me... despite the fact […]

We've put up some fun short videos, but the real site is coming next week... which will be nice, I'll get to start talking about work on my blog again :) […]

Hitting this page (http://www.voodoopc.com/showroom.aspx?productID=1076) with IE7 produces several javascript alerts letting me know that I'm running an "Old Browser". Now, I'm assuming that this is a bug in their version detection code, but even so... is that what they show to someone running Netsc […]

Wow, I'm new to the team and I guess I've missed some of the C9 content over the past few years.... and, as the video description says "the second time we've had Bill on C9" so maybe this isn't as unusual as I think.... but this still really surprised me. I didn't expect to see an inteview […]

Kent blogs about the Name Registry that was sent up with the launch to Pluto... If only Futurama was still on, they'd do a good job of writing the 'what if' story about this one.

Earlier I annouced that I was leaving MSDN, and my last day has arrived. I'm pretty excited about starting with the Channel 9 team next week though, my office here is empty and I'll be returning my MSDN machines today. Luckily for me, for the purposes of copying my old files over, I already have my […]

Not to cause any form of infinite loop here, but I liked this comment from Betsy in her post about my post... It's a great fit - Duncan went from content strategy to development at MSDN most recently, and now he's going to be on the dev team of one of the most evangelical of teams. Nice to kno […]

I love this... and the funny thing was, I had just finished searching MSN for "Phil Ringnalda" (because I had forgotten his URL, well actually because I kept spelling his name wrong when I typed it as a URL) without much success. […]

ReadMe Item of the Day (from The Coding Monkey) […]

Turns out it was a TV movie (Sword of Gideon), but still... I'm surprised that it isn't mentioned in any of the reviews/articles about 'Munich' that I've read so far.... (IMDB info). Any one else seen the TV movie? […]

I have nothing really to say about this, except that I'm impressed... […]

My computer keeps searching for "overture monitor five bids NZ20041109A" .... no idea why, no idea what piece of spyware is doing it... anyone know?

I've recently accepted a job with the Channel 9 team (working for Jeff and working with Adam, Erik, Robert, and Charles), and ... because I'm mostly a one-job kind of guy, that means I have to stop working at MSDN. So, come January 16th, I'll be over in a new office at Channel 9, probably not codin […]

First Kent, now Brian... it seems like it would be a great time to apply for a job as a Content Strategist :) […]

Matthew mentions in response to an earlier post that my site might be broken for people using the IE 7 Beta ... I don't have IE 7 installed, because I thought I should really be testing any of my work projects in IE 6 (along with Firefox and Opera), but if anyone else has it on their machine, could […]

Looking at this map, my first thought was "I wonder if this will lead to businesses cleaning their roof?", but then capitalism took over and I thought "hey, people could put […]

This is the sort of thing that happens with large development teams, one team codes in 'fixes' that break someone else's work... I don't normally do this all by myself! I updated the Flairmaker to support Atom 0.3, then I updated my feeds to Atom 1.0 ... great. See the error, laugh at the coder... o […]

It is a sad day for MSDN and Microsoft, Kent Sharkey (ASP.NET & Coding4Fun content strategist, coder of many of the coolest things on MSDN and the guy to whom I send entire projects full of not quite working code with the message "help!?!?") has left to become an independent consultant type guy... E […]

I only recently noticed that my blog software (.Text 0.95) had atom support built in, so I added a button to my main page, and then I noticed it was Atom 0.3. Since 0.3 was recently deprecated, I updated the Atom generating code to output 1.0 instead and voila; Much thanks to rakaz's great guide o […]

I mentioned earlier how the Free Xbox 360 site was quite busy, and it is... tons of clicks, 12 sign-ups, and even one person has 'gone green' which is to say they completed their offer. Once 8 people (who click through your referral link) have signed-up and completed an offer, then you are all done, […]

Graphic designer time must be getting scarce at MSDN, it seems Brian is making new 'hero' (top) graphics for the C++ developer center. […]

I was considering adding one (or more) of the many aggregator-buttons (subscribe to this feed in newsgator, add this feed to your MSN start page, etc.) when I found this, one button that handles all of the most popular aggregators through a single link. […]

For the last few weeks I've had a graphic and link to a 'free Xbox 360' site up as a banner on my blog pages, and it has received a lot of clicks (and 12 or so sign-ups, although no one has completed an offer yet...). I'm guessing […]

It's a bit odd, seeing our logos redone as 'free' icons, but they are nice images so I grabbed them anyway...

Check it out here...

I was just at Redmond Town Center, an open-air mall, and I saw a bunch of folks wearing t-shirts that read "Joss Whedon is my master now" (see here and here) ... and I started thinking; how well does this movie have to do to get the show back? Should everyone who loves it go see the movie twice? thr […]

Kent Sharkey is one of the authors of the soon to be released Wiley Wrox book on Visual Basic 2005, and Brian Johnson's solo project on the XBox 360 is on its way as well... […]

Battling Google, Microsoft Changes How It Builds Software

I noticed today that Gratis, the folks behind many of the more well-know "free stuff" sites have changed their name to "FreePay"... which seems like a much suckier name than Gratis. Gratis was simple, but yet meaningful. FreePay starts […]

Like this one? How did it work out?

My latest little “life adventure” got started on Wednesday last week… Brian and I had just grabbed coffees and I was back at my desk working through my list of bugs when I started to get a wicked ache in my gut. It was bad enough that I was having trouble concentrating so I headed home early and end […]

A friend of mine, through my wife, has been a stay-at-home mom for the past few years and is trying to get back into the swing of computer programming. It doesn't take long to get out of date in the computer industry, so I can understand her desire to flex her coding muscles a bit. Although she coul […]

As my lack of posts might suggest, I'm completely under water these days at work, but I did find time to take a week long vacation back to Winnipeg, Manitoba. While I was there I snapped this shot of a sign that I've been amused by for a few years now... (click the picture to see the full size […]

Man, I'm getting sick of people's attempts to trick me... mostly because they are just pretty lame, and also because I feel sorry for the number of folks that are quite possibly being hit by these scams. One of the more recent tricks is sending me a notice about my "insert online service or bank […]

I'm not sure who invented this term, SAF, but it comes up often around folks who are into new technology for the home... "sure you might want to install a media center pc, but have you taken into account the spouse acceptance factor?" or the more common, "having to restart the cable modem sure reduc […]

Back at the start of April, I signed up for a group fitness class at the pro club, the "Boot Camp" ... a twice-weekly (for two months) running-focused outdoor workout that was supposedly modeled after real military training. Well, it wasn't anything like what I remembered from going through basic […]

If I ever get an Alienware machine, I suspect it would be their Media Center machine, but the preview images of these new Star Wars machines are quite tempting.    I wish they had a single PC though, not light/dark versions, I love the images they've used for both... it would be cool to h […]

No picture at the moment, I was just happy to get it hooked up quickly before my son came home... it seems I can never hook up electronics correctly when he is 'helping' me :) […]

Everytime Brian tells me something that involves his portable media center, I think about getting one. He has the Samsung model, which I really like the look/feel of and it seems to work well (although the length of transcoding is a reoccuring complaint), but my only real plan for getting one was to […]

I started writing this entry about "Giving advice on technology to friends and family...", but I realized after I had rambled on for a bit, that it was more about technology decisions... when companies force us to decide between MP3 and WMA or iTunes and WMP or even Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio or […]

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you probably know about my column "Coding4Fun", well now there is an entire site on MSDN going by that name... to be clear, this is not a site all about my column :) ... it is a site dedicated to the same concept though, hobbyist coding. Check it out at: ht […]

And I'm not trying to be casual... stupid thing is, I went for a run on Monday as part of a "Boot Camp" group fitness program, and it was probably my longest run in the last 12 years... and now my foot is just killing me when I put on my normal shoes. Turns out, when I put my running shoes back on […]

The theme at my son's preschool last week was Caterpillars, and it also happened to be his turn to bring the snack (the kids rotate through this task, bring snacks/juice for 16 people)... so my wife went all-out and baked these breadstick-larva creations... ... and these butterfly cookies. Recipe f […]

(see this post for an introduction to this topic...) […]

This topic has been in the 'news' lately (well, at least in the blogs) and I've been considering replying.... but it turns out I don't have to, because Dave Totzke has done it for me. I don't really agree with his comment that we've kept C++ alive because Office is written in it... it is actually be […]

No idea what we've caught, but everyone in my family is sick.... and it has lasted for three days so far. Fever, shivering, sniffling, coughing, ugh... This was the first year that we all got flu shots and I'll tell you, we have never been sick so often :) […]

Sign-ups seem to have plateaued, I posted that I had 2 left for the free flat screen site on February 16th, and I'm still at the same point. What I do have though, is about 15 "yellows" which means a person signed up but never completed an offer... everyone starts out yellow before going to "green" […]

I was searching the web for details on how best to take all the various body measurements that is a standard part of any personal training program, when my search brought me to this essay. […]

If you sign up for one of the sites created by Gratis (free flat screens, free ipods, free handbags, etc...) then one of the available offers is Zooba.com, and I have to say it is one of the best offers I've tried. Basically, if you are someone who likes to read then you probably won't mind the 'req […]

Gratis, the company behind the various www.free***.com sites (and the original free iPod folks), provide banners for use on sites like mine, but they don't really keep them up to date. For example, the banner for the Free PC site is all about the Dell machine you can get, but they recently added a S […]

I saw a newsgroup post (by Todd Bowra) that an update was available for my XBox media center extender, but I can't find anything about this on any of the media center sites on http://www.microsoft.com or xbox.com, so I thought I would spread the […]

I'm up to 6 out of 8 referals on the free flat screen offer site, it will be interesting to see what the 'order' process is like if I ever get to 8. Of course, in the time it has taken, I could have probably found some other way to get a LCD monitor for my wife's computer, but that wouldn't be sport […]

SQLServerCentral.com's newsletter included a link to a newly built ring similar in many ways to Stonehenge... overall it looks like a really cool project to illustrate how this technology was originally used. Someday, a similar project will be formed to recreate a massive scale version of a P4, that […]

I won't be bidding on this, but with some work I bet it would make a great addition to a home theater/gaming room :)

I signed up for RefStop, where you create a list of the current 'free offer' sites that you have accounts with and then you are matched up with folks who can do a referral for you in return for you doing one for them... and […]

In the comments of this post; […]

I've mentioned it before, but it is worth saying again. When I decided to build my site up from its static beginnings and add on various asp.net-driven

Wanted to get this into a better place for discussion than my blog comments.... new forums here ... I should warn you though that I've been having a ton of errors with the Forum code of late though. I've even turned on full errors (bad, bad, duncan) as part of a desperate attempt to track down an an […]

I few people emailed me to ask if the various free (referral based) offers out there are working for me... well, yes and no. I have 4 out of the 8 referrals required for a free flat screen, 1 out of 11 for the free mini mac and none for the free Personal Video Player... which makes sense actually, I […]

When I first came down to the US, I had to pick a doctor and go in for a physical, and when the doctor was done with all the various procedures he needed to perform, he asked me if I had any particular health concerns. I really only had one, but I didn't see the point in mentioning it, I didn't […]

I'm not sure if this is already over-hyped, but I just heard about it today so please forgive me if everyone is talking about this already :) Mr. Potato Head Darth Tater […]

Google and various blog software vendors recently announced a method to deter comment spam by reducing its benefit to the spammer... it sounds like a pretty good idea, so I updated my installation of .Text to use this new attribute in the comment section by adding just a single line within comments. […]

Just saw this, a whole list of MiniMac sized PCs.... maybe Mac folks would say it isn't about the size, it is about the experience... but I'm […]

A few people have emailed to let me know about the various 'conga lines' out there, for people interested in the referral based offers discussed in my previous post. One source for these, that I know of, is a forum on GearLive that lists a few different ones. I guess it isn't surprising that these […]

I read this PVP cartoon last week, talking about the free iPod thing, and now I've seen similar things (free dvds, free pcs, free video games, etc...) from the same company. After reading about it, I gave in. I signed up for the Columbia deal personally, though the blockbuster offer seems 'free-er' […]

The recent annoucements around Visual Fox Pro 9.0 have brought up a bunch of memories, and have me tempted to install VFP for the first time in years... Whether or not you have a chance to give VFP 9 a try, if you are planning on getting into .NET or VB .NET specifically and have a FoxPro backg […]

He was talking about the generic bad guys in the new Prince of Persia game, but this line crosses into Halo, and it is so true... […]

I've been rebuilding my site to use master pages (which is done and works great!) and along the way I decide to get rid of the tables used to create my top and side menu areas, moving instead to a CSS model... […]

A variety of folks (including me) associated with the online MSDN site have their bios up at http://msdn.microsoft.com/aboutmsdn/team/default.aspx

Luckily or sadly, depending on your point of view, I will still be posting the occasional blog entry and responding to at least some of my email, but my output volume will be reduced for the next 4 weeks (thanks Microsoft!!). I'll be spending my time at home with the kids; […]

I stopped at Starbucks in Redmond today on my way into work, and the drive thru was really backed up so I decided to run inside. Well, that was lucky for me because I got to see and play with the latest expansion to their service offerings, the ability to

The discussion started with the question of 'what should you put into VSS, other than source code?' and it has grown from there... you can check it out here […]

I've been a bit busy lately, and it hasn't just been with MSDN work... there is a new addition to the Mackenzie family! Jada Elizabeth Mackenzie […]

I've been playing through x-men legends for the XBox, which has been a lot of fun... kinda like Gauntlet but with the X-Men ... it isn't as much fun right now though, because I went and got stuck :) […]

(I'm kidding) […]

Robert Green and I are planning a series of articles focused around Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition... quick articles, not a lot of text, but with enough code to do something cool and useful... but we need ideas, and we are looking for submissions of content. If you have some ideas, comment away.. […]

... and it is almost ready to ship.... […]

Everything comes down to that one of those two groups to my son, and he seems to really like that idea (wouldn't we all like the world to be that clearly defined). Today he is a bit sick and my wife sent me this message; Connor's feeling pretty sick today. He still has a fever. […]

I took Scott Watermasysk's 'book control' and modified it recently to display more than one book (moving it to VB.NET along the way), and I reduced the file it pulls from down to just a list of ISBN #s.... but then I wasn't able to display the title of the book as a tooltip (like the original does). […]

As part of the United Way's Day of Caring, I went into Seattle today and did some work for a non-profit counseling center... specifically creating an Access system for them.... a few tables, 3 forms, and a bunch of analysis queries and reports all around stats... […]

I've recently signed up for NetFlix, but earlier I had tried out GameFly, a service I like to think of as "NetFlix for Games"... and I remembered that I had planned to describe my experience on my blog at some point, but I had never gotten around to it! Basically Gamefly is the same deal as NetFl […]

I was staring at my bandwidth usage tonight and it is quite high.... and thanks to this cool SVG based stats system that easerve provides, I can drill down and figure out which pages are causing the bulk of that traffic... well, the biggest offenders for # of hits were the aggBugs that .Text […]

Olav Gausaker, a programmer who reads my Coding 4 Fun columns just emailed me with something cool... he wrote (before reading my column on the topic) a web based version of my "Halo2 Countdown" application from July... very nice... in fact, with the large images (refresh to see a variety of differen […]

I noticed the cool ads rotating on the side of the developer centers (VB and C#) so I “Viewed Source” and grabbed the relevant HTML... voila, I'm now showing MSN Ads on my site... totally inappropriate? Perhaps, but very easy... <div class="mnpAds" style="width: 181px; height: 100%; padding […]

I created a Pocket PC remote for Windows Media Player, but I only had speakers right next to the music system... so the remote wasn't all that useful... but I just picked up this wireless speaker; and suddenly it is time to install that software again ... my wife now puts the speaker wherever s […]

In a previous post, I mentioned that a flaw in the installation routines for telligent's forum system resulted in the deletion of a fairly important set of data... well, after posting that, a few things happened that impressed me... My web host, easerve, contacted me and let me know they had daily […]

I need authentication and role based security for another project that is coming soon, so I've put forums up at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/forums/ ... nothing there at the moment, but feel free to visit the 'discussion' forum and contribute your ideas... What forums should I add? I was thinki […]

Ok, so any action you take against your database is your own responsibility... so this is my fault, but I'm still miffed. […]

A few people asked about the code for that tool described in my first post on this new site, and I just wanted to reassure anyone who was interested that I would be posting the code soon... I actually ran into a couple of minor bugs in the transfer that I'd like to fix (or at least document) before […]

With the recent annoucements, I get to check something off of my personal wishlist.... Avalon (and some connected systems thing... "purple" I think it's called...) will be available on WinXP!! […]

Within a few hours of being up, I ran into this issue... odd, since it doesn't appear to be affecting very many folks... .Text Threading Bug...If you are one of the 7 regular readers here you might have noticed some problems over the last few weeks. Every so often .Text would display an error page w […]

Last night, I wrote up a little Visual Basic .NET app that uses the .Text web services and moved all my categories and posts to a new .Text server... […]

I've set up my own little .Text installation and I'm considering copying (not removing the existing versions) posts to my installation so that I still have a visible archive... has anyone done this before?

The age-old question of 'how do I avoid putting funky Office HTML into my blog postings' came up on an internal email list today, and one of the answers was a pointer to http://stevemiller.net/PureText/, which I had never heard of... but […]

And maybe the Forums code too... Nothing against www.asp.net, but I'm just thinking it might be interesting to host my own blog... moving seems disruptive though, leaving a large number of my posts here, new ones there.... what do you folks think? Have you thought about hosting your own blog... are […]

I'm sure I'll be one of many commenting on this, but the recent updates to .Text on this site are a wonderful improvement. For the past while I had been unable to really sift out the good comments from the bad, so real (non-spam) comments to the VB or C# FAQ sites, and to this blog... were all being […]

A couple of weeks ago I posted my "Quick Poll" Coding 4 Fun column in its unedited form... was that useful? […]

Add a Quick Poll to Your Web Site […]

I'm playing around with my voting control and I was thinking of (in addition to a cookie based check) querying to see how recently this IP address had tried voting and if it was within 'x' seconds, rejecting the vote... […]

Not sure what scenarios this will be used to enable in the long run, but I might play around with some web services (with authentication) and a few 'prototypes' for articles and MSDN features that I've been musing about... […]

I blame google.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I use a trigger to update a "DateCreated" field in one of my tables... and various people commented on this... asking "why not pass in a value in your Insert?" or "why not use a default value?" Since I feel that replying to comments in the comments section is […]

One of the big reasons I redesigned the poll component, was so that I could track votes over time... I did this by adding a 'dateVoted' column to my vote table, and then using an “On Insert” trigger to set that column to the current date/time.... peachy keen, except when I exported the tables and st […]

How Long Now? […]

I had been planning to go to Spiderman 2 last night at 12:01 am... but I decided to skip it instead... so I went out during the day and spent my Father's Day gift (a gift certificate for Best Buy... my wife made a great choice) on a wireless xbox controller from Logitech and the new Spiderman 2 game […]

I installed MCE onto my main home computer recently, which happens to have a modem that supports caller id.... and I was just sitting in front of it tonight watching a recorded episode of “The Dead Zone” when someone called... a nice transparent message floated up telling me their name and #.... and […]

It is like bootleg concert recordings but the quality is better and I had to pay for it :) […]

Well, maybe not improved, but certainly more complicated... I setup my new data model, built a new voting component in Visual Basic, and put it up at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net/ Eventually, once I've run it for awhile and worked out any kinks, this will turn into a published sample... […]

And (hopefully the formatting will work out ok in the blog) here are the results :) […]

Just today, I've added the new "Smart Client Offline Application Block" (from PAG), FotoVision, these articles by Cliff Atkinson about PowerPoint... and I brought home Murach's "ASP.NET Web Programming with VB.NET" to start reading in my spare time... While all of these things, and especially that b […]

When I started out to build a voting control, I drew up a set of requirements that led to a 5+ table system... some form of UI for creating/editing polls... plus the control itself. Then, when I had SQL running behind my web site, I wanted something up fast.... so I just grabbed a simple voting […]

Then, first let me say you have my pity, and then let me direct you to this nice piece by my old business partner (we started our first consulting business together out of our house)...   […]

As with my earlier messing around with a poll, I took a concept from the www.asp.net site today and made my own "CheckDotNet.aspx" page. The one on www.asp.net only checks for the .NET Framework 1.0 or better, so I modified the logic to detect 1.1 and 1.0 as two distinct cases... recommending an upg […]

As other people have probably mentioned here and there, there is a very nice health club near Microsoft and a membership to that club is one of the options in our benefits plan. Therefore, it isn't all that surprising that most of the folks in the gym at any particular time are […]

It appears to work fine... assuming you haven't voted from the machine you are currently on, you should be able to see the new button (and try it out) at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net […]

I've been using unpublished posts as a way to create planned blog posts for later... then, when I have a chance I go back and finish them up and mark them as 'Published'... but I just noticed that when I do that, the published date is the date on which I originally created the unpublished post. I […]

I've added some functionality to my personal site because I now have SQL Server available on the back end... so, as a test, I've put a voting component onto the home page at http://www.duncanmackenzie.net ... I plan to add some features to […]

And it doesn't even have to be implanted into the hand - clubbers can have the chip injected into any part of their body, as long as they are able to flash it in front of the scanner. […]

Something must have changed, but I had no idea what it was... but suddenly, existing applications (the same version of which run fine on other machines) were crashing with IO errors, specifically "System.IO.IOException: The device is not ready.".   At the same time, I could no longer […]

Back in highschool, I cut lawns for a lot of people.... so many that it was really a summer job and kept me quite busy, and then in University I took a job laying sod for a landscape company.... kinda went from the amateur level to the professional there. Both jobs were hot, dirty and left me ready […]

I heard this was coming in a few weeks, but it is here now.... […]

In many ways, I'm ok with that; it isn't like they took away the book when they made the movie... […]

It is all about "My", a feature of Visual Basic 2005... and I think it is fairly interesting stuff :)

I am a closet audiophile, with all the usual history.... did the 'music man' thing for plays, moved up to music guy for bar bands, blah, blah, blah... spent way too much time worried about the alignment of my high-end tape deck, etc... but at some point my obsession with all things audio related […]

Bah... I've been digging around the web for a couple of days now, and I'm getting frustrated, so I thought I would share my pain with you […]

Very little to say... I had a great time (and maybe I'll talk about that later, but it is pretty far off-topic from my normal 'content'), but now I have hundreds of emails to dig through... most of them have resolved themselves (they emailed me... Exchange bounced an Out-Of-Office back to them... […]

Eric Gunnerson has posted some information regarding upcoming C# language changes, definitely worth a read; Customer Focused Design Since February 1st, I've been getting a ton of negative feedback about the C# language, and two weeks ago we were notified that the FCLC was shopping a proposed rule, […]

Chris just got back from Disney, Sea World, etc... Brian heads there (Disneyworld in his case) this weekend, the site manager for C#, Amy, is going to Disneyland this weekend.... […]

Hmm... pretty cool so far, guess I'll see when I decide to start moving music around to my MCE box, my laptop, my Rio device... etc... found the Cake song I wanted though :) […]

You may never see the actual web interface to my blog, but if you do you'll see two new graphics along the left-hand side... […]

Forgive me in advance... I'm not posting about .NET, in fact I'm not going to say much at all except to post to two great posts Chris Sells: Same-Sex Marriages *Should* Be Allowed Harry Pierson: In Support of Gay Marriage and then to a little web-shop that I heard about tonight... if you are into t […]

Writing my last post started me thinking about the C64... and I found this page detailing software releases over the years the C64 was hot (really, it […]

While I did manage to find some really nice desktop backgrounds at http://www.ninjagaidengame.com/NinjaGaiden/images/wallpaper/wallpaper3_1280.html, I didn't find a release date for the game I've been waiting for... Now, considering who I work for, I'm not one to talk trash about a company for slipp […]

"By the way, you might want to send a Valentine to George Lucas. His first "Star Wars" trilogy is the most-wanted stuff on DVD, and the big announcement of the week is that it's finally coming in September." from Mark Rahner at the Seattle Times... […]

I loved Allegiance, it was beautiful, fun and incorporated a lot of neat multiplayer concepts that I enjoyed (like being able to have one player in a gun turret on your destroyer and another acting as the pilot).... but it withered away for some reason... I was never sure why, and a lot of its fans […]

I play Halo for the PC, and every time I get an update I am very excited... last time it meant a big reduction in the activities of team-killing losers, and I bet it will be equally cool next time. Lots of the applications on my machine have updates available, but unless they check on their own […]

http://www.nightmarearmor.com/

I'm back in town, but I was a little surprised to see snow all over the place... that is what I just left in Winnipeg, MB... I thought I was heading back somewhere green :) […]

I'm getting back into my column writing, and I'm looking for topic suggestions... I actually have a long list of ideas already, but I'm always interested in hearing what you folks want to read about! So... suggest away! Feel free to include topics related to the Media Center edition of Windows XP as […]

I'm off in Winnipeg, visiting relatives for Christmas, and I've been experiencing severe bandwidth issues. I brought my laptop along to do some work on my next book, check email and to play movies for my son, but I've barely even had it on. Dial-up isn't usually a problem for me, even though I have […]

I've been playing with some serial port code lately, working out the details of controlling an LCD Panel...

A neat little discussion about Random Number generators (or pseudo-random that is) has been happening on GDN for the last day or so, http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/MessageBoard/Thread.aspx?id=169292&Page=1#169538neat stuff.... […]

Written with the wonderful assistance of Erik Porter, Joel Semeniuk and Andy Baron, this book is focused on the move from VB6 to VB.NET... check it out at Amazon.com […]

I'm getting a little tired of playing with people I don't know... so if anyone is into playing Halo feel free to try to track me down or if someone felt like it, we could even set up our own game(s)... my Halo name is, boringly enough, "Duncanma" so you can try to find me online using Game Spy […]

I recently acquired a digital camera so I started thinking about a photo blog... something my family out in Winnipeg could subscribe to. A colleague, who has a camera phone, suggested textamerica, which seemed quite happy to accept my registration but I didn't go through with the sign up because it […]

I just read the description of this game on xbox.com, which I've done before ... then I read "Nov 2003" for a ship date. I swear I actually shivered... oooh. […]

Earlier today I posted some background pics... including some from www.dolomitesworld.com... Frank Redmond (Content Strategist for .NET Framework) just bust out laughing in my office because he thought I was posting backgrounds based on one of the […]

I'm always looking for nice desktop backgrounds that are tasteful enough to display at work and searching on google (on this particular topic) just doesn't find that many high-quality sites, so I thought I'd post a few of my recent finds; […]

It seems to me that you just have to be in technology to fully understand this comic; […]

My music system is finally hooked back up in my new house (after months of sitting unplugged) but I didn't have a network connection available for it. Well, the recent release of some new networking standards have made 802.11b adapters rather cheap so I picked one up today and went to install it ont […]

Julia appears to have lost something I downloaded and installed the VB Language Enhancements for Whidbey White Paper & code from an MSI and […]

Kent and his little sony pda/camera thingy.... hmmm... now where did I put that wma file of him playing his new musical instrument...

I am getting really tired of seeing web services (or RSS feeds, or .NET methods, or anything else) with large blocks of complex, structured data that is exposed as "String". […]

Ok, maybe a night of Halo with my coworkers has skewed my perspective on this topic, but come on... wouldn't that just be the coolest... maybe the little alien guys, the chief, Cortona (not sure on the spelling for that one)... […]

Now, it is helping me to find things! The blog page on my personal site has become stuck in DVI/HDTV/Component Video land after one of my posts, all of the ads are about HDTV related stuff... but, this just appeared and it looks pretty cool. Not the most visually appealing device, but I'm thinking t […]

I have to learn the keyboard/mouse commands, and quickly. My boss just sent out an invitation to a Halo PC LAN fest... so, while I managed to resist tempation for two days... now I just have no choice.

Kent used a phrase a few days ago "loaded for bear", and while I can't even really explain what it meant (though Google certainly can), it makes me laugh every time I think of it...Anyway, I recently bought a home machine (from Dell, because I realized that if I built it myself I would probably spen […]

I see by Kent's latest post that we've gone public with our new aliases.. in the great tradition of Early and Adopter, we have decided we should be known as 'adhoc and random'. Details won't be coming, but let's just say that we have a reputation at our workplace as being a bit too quick to write an […]