Random

Recently, I was telling my kids about this one time during college when some friends invited me to go check out a cave with them. It has been a long time, but I’m going to do my best to recall the experience here.

I've been going through some of my old code from college lately and I've been surprised by just how little I knew early on, even during my senior year. It made me think about the sorts of things that new programmers don't (usually) learn or that are learned best from mentors as opposed to from books or classes. In this post, I want to share concrete things that _I've learned_. No calling out other people here, this is all me.

It's a holiday break, my four year old is taking a nap, so I'm writing up a post on 2023. I'm also letting AI proofread. Here goes!

Now that the year of the Mayans is upon us, I wanted to take some time to look back over 2011. And don't worry, I'll do my best to not mention the Mayans and 2012 anymore this year. I won't guarantee it won't come up again because I think it is funny, but I'll try.

So, my blog looks different now... and it isn't just a new theme. It's new blog engine, new web host, new look and feel, new everything!

First off, apologies for not posting anything in 2 (wait, has it been 3?!?) months - that's the longest I've ever gone without posting anything. Second, apologies for talking about not posting. That's a no no. Third, apologies for apologizing for... oh, right.

It's 2010. Seriously. Can you believe it? Aren't we supposed to have flying cars, hoverboards, and have space ships that can reach Jupiter? I mean, really, we're way beyond the year 2000 now. As a kid, I remember thinking how awesome it will be to actually get to live in the future. I guess I should be consoled in the fact that TVs are a lot bigger. That's a plus.

A review of 2008 and looking forward to 2009.

I ate sushi with some other developers from DevLink

This post is about, well, how I got started in programming. Yep.

Eating exceptions for breakfast.

One thing I wanted to bring up if you've never been to Tech Ed before is the great experience that the Hands on Labs (HOLs) provided. Basically, you walked up to the HOL computer and, in a few short steps, you had a full development virtual machine ready to go. It was a really nice experience and ensured that you could try out new features without having to set up your own VM or worse, download and install a lot of betas on your own development machine.

Turns out Gmail was down.

FSDNUG will be hosting Chris Koenig to talk about Silverlight

Apparently I'm a beta junkie

I'm talking more about how commenters really have no clue what they're talking about. From Joel's post, "99% of the participants in the flame wars are not going to understand what they're talking about."

The inaugural FSDNUG meeting covering BDD.

A group of us traveled up to hear Jean-Paul Boodhoo present to NWADNUG.

Brian Sullivan has a blog now!

It's hard to believe that it is already 2008... 2007 completely flew by. I spent most of this Christmas holiday telling my family I had seen them just a few months ago when, in fact, I hadn't seen them since... last... Christmas.

It is Halloween after all. It would be a great day to start learning Boo.

I got a BSOD on a VM

If you get it shipped and it doesn't arrive, you have to wait while others can buy it in the store.

...my first *real* job was tech support at an ISP. Tonight, I was practicing my troubleshooting skills on my internet connection. I got home from work and couldn't connect to anything except my router.

Surely you can't be serious.

Reminiscing about RSS-related services.

Apple has released a public beta of Safari for Windows

The local news channel showed up on Worse Than Failure

What is my nerd score?

Vimperator - vim-based keyboard driven extension for Firefox

This post has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Just some ramblings from my brain this morning.

Random reflections on work life in a cubicle

Firefox extension that shows preview of open tabs with using alt-tab

IE's "show friendly HTTP error messages" can hide server errors if they're less than 512 bytes.

Microsoft Expression added to MSDN

Someone left a collect call voice mail on my work phone

I messed up and ordered the wrong cable adapters

Your programmer personality type is...

NTWind and some really nice Windows tools

Thoughts on software certifications, software as a profession and more

DailyWTF got renamed (but the name didn't stick for very long)

"It's not that I'm lazy, it's just that I want to be thorough."

Using Google Reader to share items (RIP from my future self)

Sharing about PowerShell automation and my LASIK experience

A brief review of the Logitech Harmony remote and how I had issues with it on the UHF satellite receiver

Process Explorer released by Sysinternals

I figured out how to use the middle click on my mouse... future me doesn't use it any more, though

Nine minutes of fame... random website from a long time ago.

Microsoft sent Firefox a cake

TLDR - you can bypass compatibility install warnings, but not for the uninstaller

Akismet couldn't solve my Trackback spam

Trackback spam is annoying so I disabled them

New beta release of SlickRun

Google Reader has been updated and it is usable now! (and now future me is sad)

Firefox's built-in functionality for tabs compared to Tab Mix Plus

Wherein I complain about a loud office.

TLDR - I went to Alaska and tried out a different bookmarking service

The process of creating "reality" by making something up on Wikipedia.

Sysinternals and Winternals acquired by Microsoft.

I saw a big storm and thought it was cool... and then found photos online from it.

I used to like to rant online a lot. This time about content filters at work.

My works per minute while typing.

I'm still complaining about corporate proxies

Has anyone ever heard that saying? One of my MBA professors said that it was the number one rule for managers. "You get what you reward." Basically, the idea is that if you want a team to work together, then you need to reward good team behavior. It is all about recognizing what true motivation is, because the reward has to be perceived as a reward. A nice pat on the back isn't a real reward for someone unless that pat on the back will motivate them.

Where I rant about being able to save as a PDF

Short article where I complained about captcha not working for me one time

I just found out about CodePlex

In just over 24 hours, I will be skipping my grad school graduation. For those who didn't know, I've been working on my MBA for the past two years.

Well, I jumped on the "Share Your OPML" bandwagon today...

I just found another nifty shortcut to finding items in Desktop Search. Let's assume you want to find an email with test in the subject in body. If you're like me, you'll find a ton of emails because you get to test a lot of code at work. HOWEVER, what if you know it was in the past couple of days?

I've been using Consolas for a few months now and it is easily one of the best programming fonts I've ever used...

How I used to use MSN Desktop Search (because Windows didn't used to include any usable search)

Short post on how Best Buy employees were using a pirated version of Winternals.

Firefox 1.5.0.2 was released.

Sharing about how one of my blog posts was too big.

Sharing a link about if every movie had occurred in real life, what the history might have looked liked.

Thoughts on 360 degree reviews.

Internet Explorer 7 released. Or a beta. I can't remember.

Adding feed icons to my blog.

Some kid wanted to print the internet

Ranting about corporate proxies at work and tools that don't work around them.

Sharing a link to a 24 monitor setup

Short reflections on the Live.com search engine.

Sharing that my feeds are now on FeedBurner.

Sharing some funny videos on Microsoft and branding.

On the myth of better programming languages.

Reflecting on the usability of having both icons and text.

Trying out the Performancing Firefox add-in

Describing how my dasBlog site was set up.

My website is live!

(notes from my future self) - why did I feel like this was blog worthy?

"The A to Z of Programmer Predilictions" is a funny little article that categorizes programmers into various stereotypes, most of which are surprisingly accurate.

Reminiscing about my old websites

My First Blog Post