I have begun the torture of another writing cycle. We are starting work on Professional C# 4th edition. Should be released about the time Whidbey goes out. One of the issues that I always have when writing is keeping backups in sync. I will use either the laptop or my home desktop for writing. I have tried several different syncing tools and I think I have finally found one that actually works. SyncBack from 2BrightSparks. It's simple, functional and reliable. You can backup to another drive, folder...

I posted a while back that I had been the lucky winner of an Audiovox PPC4100 at TechEd, courtesy of AT&T. I've been using this thing as both phone and PocketPC (that is what your supposed to do with it) for a month or so and have come to the conclusion that as a Pocket PC it's great. Small, fast, good video with plenty of memory. As a phone it just plain sucks. It's to big, the audio is not great and the battery life is terrible. If I turn the phone off, the battery is actually pretty good....

to Lance Armstrong and the rest of the USPS team. What he has accomplished is amazing. One leg of this event would put me out. He has to be one of the greatest athletes of all time. If you ride a bike half way seriously you know what I'm talking about, if you don't ride then you'll never understand

Some time today my inbox for Hotmail was completely emptied. Nothing of any real importance was lost, there were about 30-40 messages, all of which I had read. The other folders that I had set up were fine. Then this evening I fired up the browser and the My MSN homepage that I have had for several years was not blue anymore. It was a pink color with flowers and a picture of a mountain. At the top it said suzanne's page. I don't know any suzanne. Passport still seems to know who I am so I don't know...

I have really been trying to get Firefox to work for me. But I still seem to have at least one or two crashes a day. Handful of sites that it doesn't want to play well with (.Text admin being one of them). I still keep coming back to Maxon (formally MyIE2). It is Explorer under the hood, but it does have tabbed browsing etc etc etc

In the latest ACM Queue magazine there is an interview with the father of Java James Gosling. The interview is generally about virtual machines and the question of .NET comes up. First he says “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” No comment from that one. The other thing that I keep hearing from the Java camp and something that he really railed Microsoft on in the interview was unsafe regions. Why is it that this always keeps comeing up? I have done hundreds of thousands of...

James Greenwood has a post that raises an interesting question. His premise is that having a good architecture can actually be bad since it makes it difficult to justify migrating to new architecture. Now there is a bit more to his post then that, but this is an interesting point. When I do the architect role, the goal is to develop something that will pass the test of time. So, do I architect in the capabilities to migrate to the next sexy architecture of the day? Of course not. How can I if I don't...

It was supposed to be an easy project. Replace the bathtub and lay new tile on the floor. Here is what my bathroom currently looks like