There's a reason why people have the impression that certain things are hard to do: they are.

Somehow I end up committing myself to things that fall into this category.

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Categories: Family | Personal | Professional | Rules to Live By

You may or may not know that I am currently writing a book.  If you didn't, now you do.  That's a picture of the cover.

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Categories: Books | Code | Development | Professional | Software Projects | Technology

Update 5/4/2013: Source code now available on GitHub.   I just spent a couple hours writing a Windows Store application for use at our Deeper in .NET conference this weekend.  It's a simple app that displays the time remaining until the next session starts, and also allows you to cycle through slides (image files only) during the countdown.  Event Timer was initially published on 4/4/13.  You can find it and screenshots in the Windows Store.  For now, and for... [More]
Categories: Development | DiDN | Event Timer | Professional | Software Projects | Technology | Tools

My whole life I've heard, "Use the right tool for the job," and I am a big proponent of that and tell people all the time.  But there are times that something is low-risk, and it's easier to try to use whatever is on hand than going to get the right tool.  So you take a calculated risk and move on with your life.  Sometimes, though, you're wrong.  You mess things up with the wrong tool and end up having to try to patch it, taking more time and effort that it would have taken to do it right in the first place.

This especially sucks when the "right tool" is your electric beard trimmer and the "wrong tool" is the safety razor you thought you could use to touch up your moustache.

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Categories: Personal | Professional | Stupid Things I've Done

Eighteen months ago, I sat down and wrote out a description in bullet points of what my ideal job would be like.  I described my position, the company, and my co-workers.  My previous job had many of those qualities.  It was a good job at a good company, but it wasn't everything I wanted.  I wanted to change things, but they weren't mine to change.

I've been at SafeNet for about 7 weeks now.  I realize that's not that long, but so far it seems like every single bullet point on my description of an ideal job has been satisfied.  Here's my list from June 2010.

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Categories: Professional | Work

If it wasn't for dominoes, we wouldn't have the "domino effect".

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Categories: Professional

The other day I signed up for Vizualize.me.  Once I got over the fact that they misspelled "visualize" it looks like a pretty nifty little service. They make a graphical resume for you, like the one to the right. I'd always wanted my very own personal infographic, and now I have one.

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Categories: Professional

Jason Bock will be speaking at this week's WI .NET Users Group meeting.   Evolutionary programming and computation have been used in the past to produce amazing and unexpected designs, yet a lot people don't know how powerful these concepts are. This session will describe these principles and show how you can use them as you develop .NET code by using LINQ expressions. The meeting is on a special night this week: Thursday, August 11.  More info and registration is at the link abo... [More]
Categories: Community | Professional | UG

So I was wondering something tonight.   What would happen if the worst 10% of people in any given profession found a new line of work?  Would there suddenly be a shortage of programmers, for example, if the worst 10% of all programmers quit their jobs?  Perhaps, but I'd bet that most would not be replaced. So what would happen if the best 10% of people in any given profession mentored someone?
Categories: Professional

I'm rebuilding my computer after a hard drive failure, and I keep running into issues where things I've taken for granted are missing – things such as the "VS Command Prompt Here" Windows Explorer context menu items. Years ago, Scott Hanselman posted INF files to add VS 2005 to the context menu. Using that as inspiration, I've created a version of the file for VS 2008 and another for VS 2010. For what it's worth, I tweaked his VS 2005 file because my copy of VS is installed in "P... [More]
Categories: Development | Work | Technology | Software Projects | Code | Professional