Section: Blogs

I thought “Gratis” was a really cool company name, but I guess I was wrong …

Sep 20, 2005 1 min.

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 with the right word, but it doesn’t even make sense to me; I bet there was a legal reason behind the change. Gratis was the company behind the free flat screen site through which I received my Sony LCD monitor, but the only sites I still follow are those run by OfferCentric, because they offer a wider range of ‘gift’ choices, usually including a PayPal option (which seems almost as good as cash to me).

VB Futures section up on MSDN…

Sep 20, 2005 1 min.

Now, to me, VB 2005 is the “future”, and anything beyond that is really just coffee-break information to read briefly…. but I guess I wouldn’t be a very good Microsoft person if I didn’t start pushing the version-after-next version of our development tools before the next version has even shipped. So, with that in mind, check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/future/ which, despite my comments, is quite a good pile of info on post-Whidbey VB features and even includes a download to bring LINQ features in VB 2005.

New MSN Developer Center is live…

Sep 16, 2005 1 min.

I’ve played around with coding against the Messenger APIs before, but it seems that MSN has really gone all out now and released a bunch of information for coding against their search, messenger, mapping services, and more… check it out on MSDN as of today! http://msdn.microsoft.com/msn/

A public site for collecting your exception info… like Dr. Watson via SOAP…

Sep 15, 2005 1 min.

This is an interesting idea … http://www.exceptioncollection.com/, something that I’ve pondered before... I’d have to know more about it, in terms of the privacy and security of their data collection… before I could recommend it without any pause, but I would certainly take a look if you are building a widely distributed application (outside of a single company/enterprise), and I would probably try to integrate with the Exception handling/logging block from PAG.

Media Center Keyboard…

Sep 12, 2005 1 min.

I have no idea when this is coming out, but I have got to get one… I’ve tried various remote keyboards but this one seems much better designed for lap-based use, which is exactly what I’m aiming for…

What an interesting few days…

Sep 12, 2005 5 min.

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 ended up there by four in the afternoon. Well, I felt pretty silly about it, having to come home early with a “tummy-ache”, but it just kept getting worse and I had to ask my family to make-do without me for a few hours while I tried to take it easy until this pain went away.

Getting back into programming after a few years at home with the kids…

Aug 19, 2005 1 min.

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 could just go back to what she knew before, she has decided to try learning something that is completely new, which I think is a great way to go.

Some things shouldn’t be an impulse buy

Aug 17, 2005 1 min.

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 version) I guess I would understand this text in a yellow-pages ad, if you know you have to find a place that offers this service you’d be looking in that section of the yellow-pages and this would be useful information, but on a street-side sign doesn’t make as much sense to me.