Microsoft, .NET and Life in General
In the Mexican tradition (my wife is Mexican), and I am sure in many other cultures, it is supposed that the way we bring in the new year is the way that the entire year will be spent. With that in mind, the house is cleaned, the refrigerator is stocked and the garbage is taken out. The first day of the new year is spent eating and relaxing and no stress or fighting is allowed. New Year's day is also a day of reflection on the past year on about how to better oneself in the coming year. For me it ......
Wouldn't you know it, the last day of work before the holidays and I have been tied up on an urgent client issue for the better part of the last five hours.... At long last it's been solved, so everyone is happy.
I'm almost out of here for the next few days so Happy Holidays to everyone!
1. Christmas Tree: Up and Decorated.
2. Halls: Decked.
3. Car: Winterized.
4. Oil and Tires: Changed.
5. Presents: Purchased, Wrapped and under the aforementioned Tree.
All that's left is the holiday food shopping. Can't wait for Christmas (even though I have to carry a pager).
Gretchen at the Microsoft Jobs Blog suggests that this coming January should be Be Nice to a Recruiter Month. This post comes in response to a blog entry by Bill Canning. Personally, I think that every month should be a Be Nice to Recruiter Month. As long as a recruiter is polite and respectful and understands what "I'm happy with my current position, but thank you anyways" means then there is really no reason why you should not be polite with them. After all, they're just trying to find a better ......
Update: I rearranged some of the text due to poor grammar. Bad grammar. Bad! No treats for you! Tom Peters published his 2004 MVP list. The entry that jumped out to me most was this: MVP/Winning "Experience." The opened envelope reveals the winner as Maxine Clark's Build-A-Bear. The company, which just successfully went public, provides scintillating experiences for kids by the tens of thousands. Maxine's Build-A-Bear Website is also a/the Top Pick in my book (or, rather, Blog). It doesn't really ......
Thanks to Dana Epp for pointing out this interview with Dr. Bruce Lindsay. It is an interesting conversation about architecting systems in a way to deal with “unexpected” failures. Some interesting quotes from the interview: Let’s consider an example of system design for graceful degradation. In the Sabre system for airline reservations, they’re willing to have something like one in 1,000 duplicate reservations, because it turns out it doesn’t matter if somebody has ......
Last night John Robbins spoke at the Montreal Visual Studio User's group meeting. He did a great talk about performance tuning for .NET applications as well as talking a little about perceptions and expectations that end users tend to have and a little about GUI design. John also talked about garbage collection and how misuse of long lived and short lived objects can greatly affect the GC and hence memory usage which impacts performance. Plus a whole bunch of tips for all sorts of stuff. What a great ......
Alex Kipman shows a very cool demo on Channel 9 of Microsoft Streets and Trips 2005 using MapPoint web services the GPS locator and a Pocket PC. I almost bought Streets and Trips a few weeks ago at Costco but I decided against it for now but after seeing this demo I think I'll be sneaking an extra item onto my list for Santa. And while you're at C9 don't miss Don Box speaking about “What goes into a great technical presentation?”. Always fun to hear Don speak ......
The Northern Voice Blogger Conference schedule has been published and is available here.
The conference is a one day affair happening on Saturday, February 19, 2005 in Vancouver B.C. I don't think I'll be able to make it (unless I find a job out there before February and make the big move!) but I would love to be there... Still you never know...
Edit: The correct day is Tuesday the 14th, not Wednesday. Sorry about any confusion. John Robbins, the bug slayer, is speaking at the Montreal Visual Studio User's Group (GUVSM) meeting this coming week. See the GUVSM page for more details. Date: Tuessday, December 14th, 2004.Time: 18:15Subject: .NET Performance Tips and Tricks I'm really looking forward to this one. I may even be a total fanboy and bring my copy of Debugging Applications for Microsoft .NET and Microsoft Windows to get signed.... ......
Tom Peters writes about the New Work Survival Skills for 2005. I found the following ones very interesting, I added my own comments to each regarding what each point means to me and how I derive these in my life and career. Thanks for the inspiration Tom! Mastery! (Best/Absurdly Good at Something!) - Software, IT and Engineering is so big you need to specialize in something and being the “go to guy“ is the position to be in. Just don't be the GTG of a dead technology! (See “Passion ......
I really liked to original .NET rocks format as well and I'm glad that they went back to it. I found that the other segments added too much overhead to the show and made it too difficult to focus on the technical content, they just detracted from it. I'm glad they pulled the rest of the content into Mondays. So far I have enjoyed the first three episodes of Mondays brought to you by Carl Franklin, Rory and the rest of the .Net Rocks! team. I found that the serious guests in episodes 1 and 2 added ......
As I blogged about earlier, Erika and I caught the Elevation Tribute to U2 show on Friday night. The band was even better this time than last! It was an awesome show. The band played mostly the same songs as the last time we saw them but it was a good selection of classic U2 songs like With or Without You, Sunday Bloody Sunday and Elevation (of course). They added Walk On, which was very well done and four songs (I think) from the new album. I was surprised they did so many as well as playing them ......
Back when we were kids and used to play dodgeball, there were always one or two kids who played the “stay quite and you won't get nailed“ strategy. Those were the kids who kept back and tried not to attract any attention to themselves and they usually did OK until they got in someone's sights and got nailed. It's much the same with protecting computers today. I've been meaning to respond to Stephan Fassmann's (Engineer2Entrepreneur) recent post about why he likes the Apple OS more than ......
The great U2 tribute band Elevation is playing another couple of shows in the coming weeks, if you're in the Montreal area you should definitely check them out they put on a great performance. Erika and I missed the last batch of shows unfortunately but we will definitely be going to the show this Friday night. If any Montrealers are going to be there let me know and we can meet up. Friday, December 3rd, 2004Le Medleyrue St.Denis (corner René-Levesque)Montreal, PQDoors: 9:00PM Thursday, December ......
Rory is asking bloggers to stick it to the man. Well, actually he is just trying to show the big wigs at Microsoft that blogs do drive traffic and make an impact. So, if you want to do your part and show Microsoft that blogs and loggers matter then check out Rory's post or just click here to go to the MSDN Events page. Currently listening to: New Naturalism - (51:12)Tom Daniel, Pop!Tech 2004 ......