Scott Kuhl

Last week I was trying to decide whether to finally go ahead and order Learn and Master Guitar.  I'm not sure how I originally found out, but it seems to be a very popular system.

The reviews for it are great.  Almost too great.  Every review seemed to be so good that I started to question the authenticity of them.

First, take a look at these Google search results for learn and master guitar.

So why not believe them?

1. The reviews seemed a little too close to the same.
2. Every link title "is this a scam" lead to an "absolutely not" review.
3. Why were there so many links with scam in the subject in the first place?
4. Why were there so many paid advertisement links to reviews?
5. (This one is the worst.)  The site always has a limited time offer sale of $100 off which is about to end.  Check back after the expiration date, and the 3 day clock resets.
6. The award it won seems a little shady.

Everything started to feel like an infomercial or a get rich quick scheme.

So why believe them?

1. Forums, forums, forums.  I really could not find any bad reviews.  The worst I found were comments that the system was good but don't expect a magic bullet, or good for beginners (me) but not intermediate players.
2. Same results on Q & A sites.
3. Same results on blogs.

Is it really possible that this company is trolling all these sites to put up fake positive reviews?

I know there are some guitar players that read GWB.  Anyone know more about this?  I plan on supplementing this with real lessons from Melodic Rhythms and The Principals of Correct Practice for Guitar.

Now let's see if I can find time to learn to play, launch juggle.com and start posting more again.  My track record of late on GWB has been abysmal.

He seems to take it better than Bill did the pie.

Just got back from the Microsoft Heroes Happen Here event in St. Louis.  It was awful.  This is the first event from Microsoft I have walked out on.

The first track was titled Next Gen Web Apps and the presenter spent 15 minutes talking about CSS as if it was new and no one in the audience had ever seen it before.

Next he moved on to LINQ and then lost me as he typed out the samples.

Then we left.  Maybe it was going to get better, but I couldn't make it any longer.  It was definitely catered to the lowest common denominator and I think most of the people there just wanted to be anywhere but the office.  (and free software)

Oh, well.  Maybe I'm just having a bad day.  Back to the real fun - work.

I use to own a Creative Zen.  Looks like they got sued and I am entitled to a settlement.  But the lawyers are the only winners here.

• The two people who filed the suit get $5,000 each.
• Everyone else gets a discount on a new product made by the company that screwed them in the first place.
• The lawyers get $900,000!!!!

I think the lawyers should get paid in coupons too.

In addition, if you submit a valid claim, you will receive either a 50% discount off the price of a new 1 GB MP3 player, or a discount certificate good for 20% off the price of any single item purchased at www.us.creative.com. To receive the discount player or discount certificate you must submit a claim form available at www.creativehddmp3settlement.com by August 7, 2008. You may submit a claim for each Creative HDD MP3 Player you purchased.

If the settlement is approved, plaintiffs’ counsel will apply for an award of attorneys’ fees and expenses not to exceed $900,000, plus incentive awards for the two representative plaintiffs in the amount of $5,000 each, to be paid separately from and in addition to the relief available to plaintiff class members.

I'm looking for a site, or software, that will tell me when a television episode has been posted to the web.

Much like the way Tivo records.  So if I want to watch episodes of Monk, the service should let me know that a new episode has been posted.

Anyone know of anything that provides this?  And I don't mean illegal bittorrent versions, I don't have a problem watching the web streaming version.

I might be able to do something myself with Yahoo! Pipes and maybe some screen scraping, but if it already exists that would be better.

I can't believe I did it.  I am the first to reach the 1,000 post mark on GWB.  I know Chris and D'Arcy had the lead but I never gave up and I have finally reached the unthinkable goal.

I know what you are thinking.  The front page only shows that I have 741 posts.  But that number is incorrect.  You see that number does not include posts I made on my previous blog that I intended to port over, my posts about my weight loss that I never posted but obviously should have, and my draft posts which I never finished.

But what really pushed me over the top were the "super-posts" which can only be seen by special delegates of the blogging community.  They all now agree that I am a much better candidate to award the 1,000 post trophy based solely on the quality of my recent posts and the firm belief that only I can carry us through the next 4 years!

But don't worry Chris or D'Arcy, whoever crosses next, you are welcome to be my vice-poster.

Happy Steal A Car And Kill A Prostitute As Long You're Seventeen Or Older And Socially Responsible Enough To Tell The Difference Between A Virtual Prostitute And Your Real Prostitute Which You Shouldn't Be Sleeping With Anyway Because We Live In A Country That Has Accepted Victimless Crimes As Punishable Possibly Or Maybe Not Because Of Real Or Only Perceived Puritan Origins But Which Has Created A Black Market That Quite Probably Will Give You A Disease Unless Of Course You Live Near Las Vegas, But Not In Las Vegas, Where It Is Legal (Sleeping With, Not Killing And Burying In A Shallow Grave In The Desert) But Don't Even Mention Hot Coffee, Crap I Just Did, Day

This seems to be a hot topic right now.  Are you getting GTA IV and if so are you getting it on the XBOX 360 or PS3?  The answer to this question for most people is probably on the console they own.  D' uh.

But we have both.  We bought a PS3 for Bluray movies and have a far larger collection of games on the 360.  But I am buying it on the PS3!  Screw the extra content on the 360.

Why I am doing this?  360 hardware failures.  I am sick of them.  If you have read my blog for any length of time, you may already know this saga.  Our 360 failed 3 times.  Last Christmas we bought a new 360 and that one is now failing.  It only reads disks about 50% of the time.

Microsoft you have failed!

The 360 hardware failure rate is unacceptable and that is the sole reason we now buy games for the PS3 instead of the 360.

I hope someone from Microsoft reads this and passes it along.  Because I am tired of calling support.  We are loyal Microsoft customers, and if you lost us, how many more people have jumped ship?

There have been a couple of posts here on GWB about VB.NET vs C# stats.  (It looks like the report includes VB and VB.NET together.)

• http://geekswithblogs.net/cwilliams/archive/2008/04/21/121486.aspx
• http://geekswithblogs.net/TakeNote/archive/2008/04/21/121484.aspx

I write in both languages and I don't really have a preference for one or the other.  The fact is the languages are equals.  You can get anything done in both languages with the same amount of work.  There are some differences but it mostly is a matter of preference.

I'm a little sad to see that combining the numbers from VB and C# still fall short of Java.

When we started Juggle we had a blank slate.  We could choose any language but .NET was obvious based on our background.  What was not immediately obvious was VB.NET or C#.  When the decision was firmly made there were only two of us working on the project, myself and my wife.

We decided on C# and here is why.

1. As a consultant I worked with a lot of different people from both languages, and my experience, most of the better people were moving to C#.  Sorry Chris.  There is no scientific data behind this.  It's just what I observed.
2. The St. Louis market has more C# development positions. I double checked with recruiters to confirm this.  They were also seeing a lot more C# resumes.  And based on our work environment and project I was more than willing to compete against everyone else for the talent.
3. Kendra said we are using C#.  Period.

Notice the reasons aren't technical.  And honestly I am more than willing to hire someone that is a great VB.NET developer as long as they are okay with writing C#.  There is no need to introduce an additional language if we don't have to.

And we probably would have been okay choosing VB.NET.  So, pick the language you like and have fun. But more times than not, the language will be picked for you, so learn both.

But just don't pick Java.

Here it comes again!  This one seemed less intense.

People in California are probably thinking we are a bunch of babies, but you don't get these in the mid-west very often so you really start to wonder what's going to fall down.

Nobody panic.  There is no cause for alarm.

I am okay.

You may now resume your lives.

Well, I can finally start releasing the name of our product / company / web site since 1 - we are officially expanding the team and hiring more people, 2 - the placeholder page is up at juggle.com, and 3 - the CEO accidentally updated her LinkedIn profile two weeks ago.  Oops.  But I can't tell you what we are building yet.

Hey, here is a good way to find out.  Join the company!

Hiring in St. Louis

We are a small web development group looking to expand our team. Plain and simple, we are looking for great developers. We are focused on finding people who have a passion for development and are excited to be part of a team that is developing a leading semantic web application. There's no Ruby, Java or PHP here… Microsoft only.

You will be working in a fast paced environment that deals with a lot of Web 2.0 (I really hate that term) technology.  We value team members who make the internet a part of their lives, not just a place they send their hard work for other people to use.  Here's a quick test.  Which search engine just threw in the towel?  What do Alex and Kevin sit on?  What's the point of Twitter?  What should manager Rob write himself?

What to expect from our environment? 

We have one core rule:  Create great software.  There is no team of red tape police who have locked down your workstation and blocked 50% of the sites on the internet.  No crazy rules about reading blogs or blocking IM. 

Each Monday we start a new development iteration where you will commit to the amount of work you can get done for the week.  Thursday's are code reviews, so no sneaking in a DataSet to get the job done quick.  Friday's are iteration review meeting day where you will demo what you finished during the week.  And every morning is a quick standup meeting.

Qualifications:

• You should know C# or VB.NET (but you will be using C#), ASP.NET 2.0 or higher and SQL Server 2005.
• It would be helpful if you also knew AJAX and how to write unit tests.
• It would be really great if you already knew CSLA or ComponentArt.

The Joel Test results: 11 out of 12.

1. Do you use source control? (YES)
2. Can you make a build in one step? (YES)
3. Do you make daily builds? (YES+)  We believe in continuous integration.  No breaking the build.
4. Do you have a bug database? (YES)
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? (YES)
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? (YES)
7. Do you have a spec? (YES)
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? (NO) You will be working in an open area with 4 other developers.
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? (YES)
10. Do you have testers? (YES)
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? (YES)
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?  (YES)

Still interested even after #11?  Then send me an e-mail using the contact form or scott.kuhl@juggle.com.

If you look at the history of my blog posts (and why would you) you will notice a trend.  When posts were high a vast majority of them was simply passing information along from another site.  No more than public bookmarking with a few comments.

I used my blog to keep a history of the things I found interesting.  And if someone else also found them interesting, great!

Now that posts are low, I usually put more thought into each post and try to depart some real information from myself.

Posts dropped dramatically mostly because of Yahoo! Pipes.  It's a great service that allows you to easily aggregate all your information in one spot.  Now my history mostly comes from a combination of bookmarks, shared feeds and diggs.

Friendfeed, while not as flexible, as made this type of service even easier to use.

You can find my FriendFeed here, if your missing all the old web crawling links.

I do still use Yahoo! Pipes, but more to filter the results, like on my What's On Tonight feed that I have piping to my PageFlakes home page, than aggregating everything into one place.

Several GWBs have already mentioned the announcement of Gary's passing away.

Gary, you changed my life and no matter what the anti Dungeons & Dragons people think, you were a force for good in this world.  You will be remembered and missed.

Kotaku Annoucement

Kotaku Tribute

We love our Tivo HD.  It's one of the many DVRs we have owned that actually works.  If you don't like your DVR, it's time to upgrade.

I ordered another one from Woot today for media sharing.  Now I'll need to get some external SATA drives to hook up to them so I can have 4 tuners and 2TB of video storage going. And that doesn't include any of the videos sitting on our laptops or server.

Addiction?  What addiction?

Hurry before they're all gone.