I've finally upgraded my blogging engine to dasBlog 1.7.5016.1.  I must say the upgrade process was very straightforward and I am quite pleased with the new features in this version.  At some point I am planning on upgrading the look and feel of this site.  The themes and templates in dasBlog are pretty slick and I've found it very easy to create new themes (CSS mostly).  I have yet to find any good dasBlog theme libraries on the net, so I will publish some of the ones I've created (for other blogs).

These new human-powered hydrofoils look pretty fun.  It's interesting how more and more renditions of the hydrofoil keep showing up in this next generation of water sports.  If you don't read the article, at least check out the video.

For those of you [non-geeks] (I am not one since I saw it on opening day) who are planning on seeing Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith but are in need of a refresher (because it has either been too long since you've seen the others or you just plain forgot what is was about), you can find a humorous one here.

I really like the design behind Keith Brown's PasswordMinder tool for managing the plethora of passwords one needs to survive in today's dangerous digital on-line world.  Has anyone ported this to the Windows Mobile platform?  I'd really like to have secure access to my passwords on my PDA/phone.  This may end up being the app that finally brings my development experience into the .NET compact framework world.

From the Pluralsight tools page:

[PasswordMinder is a] Utility for securely managing, generating, and retrieving passwords on your machine. Protected by a central password, this utility simplifies using good passwords in all websites and applications that require them.

I needed a tool to manipulate file names and ID3 tag data on mp3 files.  I found ID3-TagIT which did exaclty what I needed.  It's free and written in .NET.  Very nice.

A few folks have asked me about my home recording setup so I've finally got around to posting about it.  I should note that this is a very old setup but has worked quite well for me over the years (hope to upgrade my home setup soon).  Most people think you need high-end hardware to get a good quality recording on your PC...not true.  Arguably, the most important component in PC home recording is a good sound card with a good analog to digital converter (ADC).

Here's a link to a schematic I put together.

Specs:

• AMD Athlon 900Mhz
• 256M RAM
• 60Gig Hard Drive
• Win2k Pro OS
• Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card (18 bit ADC / 20 bit DAC)
• Mackie Micro Series 1202 12-Channel Mixer
• Fostex 3-piece speakers (w/sub)

Four members of the Microsoft CLR team (Brad Abrams, Jason Zander, Kit George, and Claudio Caldato) have come to Atlanta this week to visit customers, gather feedback, promote the .NET community and share vision and direction.

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet these guys and I must say that they are all a class act. These guys are not only very cerebral, they are very cool as well. I want to thank them for caring about the users of their work and being willing to be open and giving of themselves. Thanks for coming guys...keep up the great work!

For those of you living in Georgia, I would highly recommend checking out the Georgia Navigator website.  It has been nicely updated since I last visited.  It allows you to customize your view of the areas you're interested in including updated camera views, signs, accidents, trip times, etc.  Another bonus feature...customized email traffic updates.  I used my T-Mobile SMS email address and I now I receive the updates on my phone.  I'll let you know how it works out.

I'm almost ready for a home media server.  When I have more time I'm going to evaluate Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (ie. talk to Michael Earls) or consider building one myself (I admin it...I'm a geek).

I've just discovered (thanks Glen) that Georgia Navigator has a PDA version of their site.  Now I can get live traffic updates wherever I am (using my T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone and its GPRS capabilities)...woohoo!  Here's a sample of the realtime traffic cameras.

I agree with Aaron Skonnard's thoughts on the contract-driven approach to SO development. I especially enjoyed Joel Spolsky's comments on leaky abstractions. He's right that in some sense, being a proficient programmer is becoming more and more difficult (especially in terms of troubleshooting/debugging) with the increasing number of leaking abstractions we're building on top of.

I've often struggled with how to address all of the various abstraction boundaries when I've taught programming classes (ASP.NET being the king-of-abstractions). How many layers down do the students really need to grasp in order to become good developers (really all the way down to the TCP/IP stack, but there's never enough time).

Anyway...Aaron, nice comments on the much belabored "contract-first/code-first" debate.

I recently needed to install VS.NET 2005 beta 2 from an .iso image to a Virtual PC. Solution...this handy utility, Virtual CDRom Control Panel, for mounting .iso images as virtual disk drives. This utility is free, but un-supported from Microsoft. Its UI is a bit crude and quirky at times, but it did the job. Enjoy.

Check out some of the videos of one of my software heros, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, Anders Hejlsberg.

Here's another one of the crazy videos.  The end makes it worth it :)

I wanted to share this quote I recently came across from poet and professor Stanley Wiersma (good Dutch name ;):

"When you are too sure about God and faith, you are sure of something other than God: of dogma, of the church, of a particular interpretation of the Bible. But God cannot be pigeonholed. We must press toward certainty, but be suspicious when it comes too glibly."

This is the best Windows task switcher I've seen yet...Top desk from Otaku Software for $10.  Do note that to run it smoothly requires a lot of RAM and a hefty video card.  Thanks for sharing the tip Scott (this is why blogs are so cool)!

I did it...I finally got engaged!  I asked the girl of my dreams to marry me.  We took a trip to Miami to visit my parents and I asked her to be my wife on the beach.  Here are the photos.  Enjoy :)

I've been playing with Whidbey (VS.NET 2005) for a couple of days now and just found this new feature.  I must say I'm quite impressed.  Microsoft has made it so easy to debug code that now we really have no excuse for writing bugs into our software :)

Have you ever been at a place in life where you've felt so fortunate and blessed to the point where good stuff is piled on top of other good stuff, higher and higher? I've found myself in a similar place recently and I have been doing some reflection about that.

Much ado about nothing.