How about a patent for using human skin as a power conduit and data bus.
I’m not making this up! http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-5244766.html
Thanks to major DotNetNuke (DNN) fan, Jim Duffy, who is one of the goofy gaggle of DevTeach speakers, for pointing this out to me…
I have a pair of woodpeckers that like my suet. Usually I see either the male or the female but rarely both at the same time. THe female flies into my windows once in a while. Just now I watched as the female hung out on one post while the male got some suet and brought it over to her. Awwwwwwww. Very sweet. They are “Hairy Woodpeckers” (I’m sure based on the song which you can listen too from that link) although I did wonder if they may be “Yellow bellied sapsuckers”.
When I was at DevTeach, Rob Windsor who is the user group leader for the Toronto Visual Basic User Group, was very happy to show me his new Acer C110 tablet. This is the same as the one that I have and love. He told me he bought it because I am always talking/writing about how much I love mine.
I received my new desktop computer that will replace my “daily driver” last Thursday. I left Sat. a.m. for DevTeach in Montreal and returned last night. I have a lot of work to catch up on, of course. The box is still unopened. it will take some setting up. It has no 0/S on it. I have to flip my 160 GB drive into it and make it the master drive. I have to install the 2GB of RAM I bought at Crucial. I wonder when I’ll get to it?
Maybe I should have a pool where people can make guesses and the winner will get – ummm… hmm how about the 128 MB RAM that I will be extracting from the new p.c. and hanging on my christmas tree?
DevTeach was once again (and as expected) a wonderful conference. I had a great time hanging out with everyone and this time also got to see a little more of Montreal since my hubby was there for Saturday and Sunday. Marcie ended up hopping a train from Toronto early Monday morning and “crashing” the conference. With Rich back in Vermont, I was able to offer her the other half of my king-sized bed. She definitely had some fans in Montreal.
I really enjoyed doing my sessions. There was definitely a limited “market share” for Whidbey and Tablet SDK but it made the sessions that much more fun to have a small audience of about 10-15 people where I was able to adjust the talk to meet their needs. My tablet talk was preceded with a BSOD as I pressed the Fn & F5 key to push my screen to the projector. Luckily all was well by the time I was supposed to begin and my RC2 bits held up perfectly fine with VS2003 and even asn ASP.NET application.
So far my evals are great (all three of them …heh). But regardless of those, I know that in both sessions – especially the Tablet session – the attendees were really excited to be able to see some of this stuff live and have someone they could ask questions of.
I can completely understand Heather’s reaction to this.
Well, I’m not the only one who was unable to digest this article in one sitting (or have the appetite for it…). Every post I have seen so far is basically saying “interesting, need to read and think more before I say anything.”
Mike and his wife are working on getting a baby out into the open! Some false labor must be driving them batty. I know this stuff worked darned good for my neighbor. We ended up delivering the baby on the living room floor. Not only was there no time to get to the hospital, but the ambulance arrived 10 minutes after the baby. 🙂 Good luck. Let us know who you get!
I read the instrux, went to the update windows site and sat and waited and waited and waited while it said “checking for updates”.
I stopped it and started it again. And waited and waited and waited.
After at least a 1/2 hour of this nonsense, I finally noticed the very small and very unnoticable notice above the i.e. box that i.e. was blocking activex scripts and I should press some key or another to let the activex script run.
So Windows XP SP2 RC1 was preventing itself from updating itself. And I, a “professional” couldn’t figure it out. Hmmmm….
This very long post from Joel Spolsky speaks to me and depresses me on so many levels.
I have been a programmer for a long long time. I have been programming to DOS and Windows and for a few years, thanks to some great innovations by the Fox Software folks, to the Mac. I have always accepted that Microsoft is in the business of selling operating systems and if they own the developers, they own the world. It is one of the reasons that I have nearly jumped ship a few times. But, well, they own me – Joel drives this point home (and how they do it) pretty clearly in this post.
He also talks about the “Raymond Chen Camp” – which represents those at Microsoft whose biggest interest is to keep Windows and dependent applications running, no matter what – no breaking changes. He quoted some great posts from Raymond Chen’s awesome blog as examples. He compares this to the MSDN camp – which he says is compartmentizing software tools too much and encouraging developers to use disjointed and complex “code chunks“. And he says they’ve won – because they have gotten away with breaking changes quite a lot lately. Not only breaking our code but breaking a lot more in our lives in order to try to keep up.
I definitely get frustrated with the changes and the effort of keeping up, but change is necessary. I believe I have quoted Ilya Prigogine’s Nobel winning theory of chaos and disorder in the universe on my blog before: “You can’t have order without change“. I accept that. I stomped and whined a whole lot when .NET came out and I saw what it meant for my vb6 applications and skills. But I learned and I am writing better applications.
I don’t think Joel is decrying change, but breaking changes. I’m sure Paul Vick could easily explain why it was maybe close to impossible to move VB to .NET,give it the power it can have now without breaking VB6 code.
He also talks about Windows .NET apps vs Web .NET apps which was the point that one of my user gruop members took away from this post and is thinking maybe it’s time for him to go back to FoxPro if he wants to focus on Windows applications.
I have too much work to do and to much invested in all of this to step back and think about what he is saying (this week or this month or this year). Doesn’t that sound awful? Self-serving? Uncaring about the big picture?
There is much to read and absorb in this article. It’s a pretty interesting look at software regardless of if you agree with him or not – and you will probably find yourself agreeing with some, disagreeing with other parts or just realizing that you really don’t want to think about it at this level…
[just a note – yes I deleted the post. I realized my gut reaction did not express my opinions well, so I have modified it a bit and reposted. And I still am a bit uncomfortable with this because it’s a huge thing to think about and I haven’t taken the time that I think it deserves…]