VS2008 has crashed 20+ times today. Reboots aren’t helping. I’m slowly uninstalling plug-ins at the moment. Ugh.
Obviously a Monday
Over the next few days, I’ll be moving into my first home. I’ve spent the past 6 months scowering the housing market and finally found one I really like. Unlike most the country, homes in the midwest are going UP in price, so finding what I wanted (in what I could afford) was quite tricky. I’ll post up some pics over the next few days. So, time is tight and I probably won’t be posting much for the next couple of weeks. See you soon! As I do have access to the internet, I’ll be updating this post with news about the new place and photos (if/when I find my camera in the box it’s in).
UPDATE: noon, 26 June - Sellers are unable to meet the requirements of a new roof (my insurance won’t cover the highly hail damaged roof) by the closing deadline–if I can’t insure it, I can’t close on it. No extensions apply–I fear that they’ll just keep dragging it out. I let the agent know that the deal’s off. We’ll work up the paperwork tomorrow when she’s in town. Grr, guess back to the drawing boards. Now to call EVERYONE back.
UPDATE: 11:30pm, 26 June - Sellers are now able to meet the requirements (*lots of shouting, angry feelings, angst*) and we’re going to closing tomorrow even though they said they can’t make it this afternoon. I swear I’ve never felt more out of control or mislead in my life. Come to find out that what is said means absolutely nothing and requires all parties to SIGN for it. So, apparently we’re closing tomorrow afternoon. Now to call EVERYONE back… AGAIN!
UPDATE: 12:00pm, 27 June – The insanity continues. The closing time is now iffy because the title agency can’t get everything together by the 2:00pm closing time. I’m frantically trying to get utilities back on since, due to the weekend and the Sunday possession date, I don’t want to walk into a hot, waterless house on Monday morning.
UPDATE: 9:45pm, 27 June – Well, everything is done and I have keys in my hand. With what seemed like a hundred signatues, countless stacks of papers and agreements, and some awkward moments with all the shuffle of the past few days—it’s finally over. We take possession midday Sunday. If nothing else, this has been a wild ride. Pictures and more coming soon.
UPDATE: 8:00am, 30 June – Well, a day of cleaning (and partial box moving yesterday) and things are taking shape. Here’s a few photos that I’ll add to as we clean the house. Click for full images. 
Front entry with real hardwood floors.
Living room with passthrough to kitchen, dutch door, and fireplace.
Living room has old English framing and skylights.
Kitchen with eat-in dining area, bay window.
UPDATE: 11:15am, 3 July – Wow, what a rush of busy days. Everything is moved, appliances are in, and the important things are setup and working—the computer (and internet), the new HD TV and tuner, and the coffee pot.
Ever had an MSI file that you needed a library or something out of, but didn’t want to install it? Amazingly enough, you CAN get to those files.
The Windows Installer (msiexec.exe) can be ran at the command line to extract files directly using an administrative install.
How?
msiexec /a “YourMSIPackage.msi” /qb TARGETDIR=”DRIVE:\YourTargetPath”
Switches used:
/a – Administrative installation
/qb – Basic UI (simple GUI progress bar)
This is a lot easier than hacking it using WinRAR.
I’ve been using Office 2007 for, well, almost forever. Compared to the prior versions of Office, it’s better than expected—and quite a dynamic change. By that, I mean the ribbon toolbar.
I understand Microsoft’s UI “goodness” and some of the ribbon logic—especially on smaller applications, but the ribbon is still painful to use in huge rambling applications like Microsoft Word and Excel. I still, after all this time, spend time going, “where the heck is {command}?”
Most of the time, I fall back to using old Office commands that, thankfully, still work. Other times, it’s an adventure!
That adventurous spirit, however, isn’t shared by every user of Office 2007. The learning curve of the ribbon and other Office 2007 features has been the leading reason why the latest application suite is still frowned upon in our organization. Face it—the UI for Word looked the same from about Word 6.0 to 2003. In one version, that’s a lot of users to reeducate.
To ease those users along and empower the “power” users of Office products, the Office Labs team has released a sweet plugin for Microsoft Office 2007–-Search Commands. Search Commands is exactly what it says, rather than wading through the half-dozen menus, you enter what you want to do in the search box and the ribbon automagically builds for you.
I’ve been using it for a week or so now, since it came out on 23 April, and love it. Once you get the Search Commands hot keys down (Alt-Y, E and Alt-Y, 1–9) you can wiz through commands.
This past week, so far, has been a total loss on the technical front. I can’t articulate how much documentation I’ve written or whiteboard sketches for new applications—but for projects that are either on hold or vaporware at the customer’s request. Ugh.
I do have a few posts in the works from various projects, including some of my first tinkerings with creating Windows Mobile 6 software. More on those later this week.
I have, literally, stacks of books around my office. SQL Server, ASP.NET, C#, and various others that are a version behind or a day too late. On half.com and Amazon, they fetch almost nothing—rarely worth the cost of shipping. I tend to donate them to the local libraries; however, the last librarian told me they simply trashed technology books (no Kansas jokes, I think it was just THAT library).
So, last week, I was referred to BookMooch, a somewhat recycling plan for books that mixes social networking with book sharing. Remember the old book markets (I went to one as a child called The Bookmark) where you brought in your books, received credit, and left with new books without ever getting out the wallet? This is the same concept, but international.
Using web services from Amazon.com, you toss up lists of ISBNs you have in your “inventory” and browse through the catalog of available books. As you send off books, you gain points to mooch off others. You can’t “mooch” without points—keeping it fair.
I dropped an ASP.NET book in the post this morning—off to a new home out east. From there, I’ve got Fabrice Marguerie’s LINQ in Action and The Mythical Man-Month on my wishlist for when I get a couple more points. To me, if I don’t need the book now, this is fantastic! I clear out my pile ‘o books and gain a few I want—without paying Amazon.com an arm and a leg.
Michael sent me this line of text in German yesterday…
Auslieferung oder Würfel!
Now, me knowing absolutely ZERO German (except swear words, of course), hit up Google Translate. Google returned:
Extradition or cubes!
Distribution or cube!
Rock Chalk Jayhawk! KU!
Congrats to the Jayhawks and their unbelievable finish in the NCAA championship! It’s been one heck of a year—screaming at the television! 
On my workstation running Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard x64, I tried to install QuickTime this morning. When visiting the download page, I ran into a browser identity crisis.
Internet Explorer: Hello there, I’m a PC.
FireFox 2.0: … and I’m a Mac.
In the image above, the left is IE 7.0 and the right is FF 2.0. I couldn’t get the Apple home page to detect FireFox as a “PC” browser for the life of me and ended up opening IE to download.
I love Gmail—in my Archives, I still have my “Welcome!” email (because, I wanted to “save it all” since I had unlimited space) dated back to August ‘04 and I haven’t looked back since.
It’s fast, has a great interface, and has become recognized and supported by dozens of vendors. It’s also available EVERYWHERE—home, work, on the road, my cell phone, wireless devices, just everywhere. I don’t have to worry about syncronizing and it connects to GoogleDocs, Calendar, and the other services extremely well. If I could find a good way (without a client) to sync my cell phone to Google Calendar, I’d happily kick Exchange to the curb (for personal stuff).
I’m on several mailing lists too… various ones for both work and personal such as altdotnet. As these groups have grown and conversation sometimes staggers, Gmail has been my saving grace by automagically keeping the hierarchy in a single “thread” to make the conversations easy to follow.
Unfortunately, Gmail can’t “autoforward” to folders—because there are no folders. Labels and filters are great, but if I go a few hours without reading my email (you laugh… but seriously), I find I have 200+ in my box and can’t see the “real” mail from the list servers.
If I was using Outlook, I’d autoforward emails to a folder and be happy.
So, to get around this with Gmail, I tried something and over the next few days, I’ll see how it works.
This applies a label, which is clickable from the Labels section on the left AND gets them out of the inbox, leaving it tidy. You can see below, at a quick glance, that I have 41 unread “threads” in altdotnet and no outstanding jotts (I <3 Jott).
You also can create hyperlinks DIRECTLY to the individual labels (if you wanted to add them to your favorites, etc) by adding #label/{label name} to the end of your google mail URL. Here’s an example:
http://mail.google.com/#label/altdotnet
Since I use the Google Homepage and Gmail web part, I have a little list of links as well and have added this in there for “quick access” to that label.
Give it a try for a few days and see how it works—hopefully it’ll help tame my information overloaded inbox.
Twitter - Me, right now!
