This blog has been really quiet as of late, as you probably noticed by the lack of updates in your favorite RSS reader. The reason is because I got married this past weekend and have not had time to update over the past month. I will make up for it next month but for now I am going to go and enjoy my honeymoon.

Via Marc-Andre Cournoyer on Twitter, a reason for ASP.NET developers to switch to Rails: http://www.railsjedi.com/posts/15-Acts-as-ASP-NET-a-Ruby-on-Rails-Plugin-

Sadly, I bet I could sell Ruby and Rails to local businesses easier by showing them this page.

P.S. I am the altnet purse fight blog author. No one ever suspects the quiet guy.

Every once and awhile I get bugged to do a non-technical post so I created a Simpsons style Steve of myself here.

Ironically, this was found via a technical blog.

Mark off September 1st, 2007 on your development calendar with the help of Edmug, i've managed to secure a bigger spot for Edmonton Code Camp 2007 at the Fantasyland Hotel. Stay tuned to the Edmonton Code Camp website and the EDMUG meetings for information on how to be a presenter at the code camp, how to be a contributor to the code camp or to register to attend the code camp. This year we are hoping to add an additional track for a grand total of 3!

Below is the text of an actual email I received from Microsoft events notifying me of the Unify 2007 Tour. The correct information can be found here if you are interested in attending.

 

The  Unify 2007 Tour is almost here

You registered for the Unify 2007 Tour in <city name>. This is just a reminder to let you know it’s happening just 10 days from now, on <Month 00, 2007>.

Please bring the Admission Ticket you received at the time of registration to present at the door to gain admittance to the event.
Although the event doesn’t start until 9 A.M., registration starts at 8 A.M.

We recommend you arrive early to get breakfast and to ensure a seat, as those individuals on our wait list will be allowed admittance five minutes before the event begins. Once again, thank you for your interest in the Unify 2007 Tour. We look forward to seeing you there!

Your confirmation details:
Name:  <CONTACT FULL NAME>
Confirmation Number: <CONFIRMATION NUMBER>
Event Code: <EVENT ID>
Event name: <EVENT NAME>
Location:
Room: <VENUE SITE ROOM>
City: <VENUE CITY>
Event date: <EVENT START DATE>
Start time: <EVENT START TIME>
End time: <EVENT END TIME>

Finally the truth comes out! Between Donald, Justce and me, I clearly rock the most:

http://www.sucks-rocks.com/rate/donald/justice/steven

It has been over a week since I arrived back in Edmonton from Maui. I meant to post pictures as soon as I got back but the reason for not doing so is not because I am lazy, it is because the weather has been terrible here and posting pictures of the amazing Maui weather would get me lynched. If you are interested you can check out the rest of the pictures in my Maui Flickr photoset

 

Palm Tree Sunset.

Our Condo where we stayed while in Maui.

Surfer dude.

Catherine and I watching the SuperBowl.

I guess one thing that I didn't include about me in my 5 things post is that I get obsessed with watching all the nominated Oscars movies.

It all started a couple of years ago when my uncle who is a local actor here in Edmonton had an Oscars pool, ever since then I try and see all of the movies and predict the winners. So here are my picks for this year along with some movie recommendations:

Recommendations

If you are only going to see 5 of the movies that are nominated this year see these 5:

1. Pan's Labyrinth
2. Children of Men
3. The Last King of Scotland
4. Little Miss Sunshine
5. Half Nelson

Oscar Picks

ACTOR -- LEADING
Leonardo DiCaprio – BLOOD DIAMOND
Ryan Gosling – HALF NELSON
Peter O’Toole – VENUS
Will Smith – THE PURSUIT
OF HAPPYNESS
Forest Whitaker – THE LAST KING
OF SCOTLAND

Hands down this is going to Forest Whitaker. He is great playing Idi Amin. My dark horse pick is Ryan Gosling, his performance in the underrated movie Half Nelson is awesome.

ACTOR -- SUPPORTING
Alan Arkin – LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Jackie Earle Haley – LITTLE CHILDREN
Djimon Hounsou – BLOOD DIAMOND
Eddie Murphy – DREAMGIRLS
Mark Wahlberg – THE DEPARTED

I would like to see this go to Djimon Hounsou but I think Blood Diamond was a weak movie, his performance was the only reason it was watchable.

ACTRESS -- LEADING
Penélope Cruz – VOLVER
Judi Dench – NOTES ON A SCANDAL
Helen Mirren – THE QUEEN
Meryl Streep – THE DEVIL WEARS
PRADA
Kate Winslet – LITTLE CHILDREN

Not sure why this category has turned into the who can play the bitchiest woman category over the years. Helen Miren will win for playing a really convincing portrayal of the Queen but Penelope Cruz in Volver is worth seeing.

ACTRESS -- SUPPORTING
Adriana Barraza – BABEL
Cate Blanchett – NOTES ON A SCANDAL
Abigail Breslin – LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
Jennifer Hudson – DREAMGIRLS
Rinko Kikuchi – BABEL

If you look at all of the awards shows leading up to the Oscars Jennifer Hudson will win but Rinko Kikuchi's performance as a deaf girl trying to be normal in Babel was really powerful.  

ANIMATED FEATURE
CARS
HAPPY FEET
MONSTER HOUSE

Monster House had better win over Cars!

CINEMATOGRAPHY
THE BLACK DAHLIA
CHILDREN OF MEN
THE ILLUSIONIST
PAN’S LABYRINTH
THE PRESTIGE

I have a soft spot for Pan's Labyrinth but the cinematography in Children of Men was the best of the year. There is an excellent scene in Children of Men where the camera follows Clive Owen through a war zone that looks like it is straight out of a first person shooter.

DIRECTING
BABEL
THE DEPARTED
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
THE QUEEN
UNITED 93

This year either Scorsese finally wins the Oscar or the Academy/Clint Eastwood lovefest continues.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
AFTER THE WEDDING
DAYS OF GLORY (INDIGÈNES)
THE LIVES OF OTHERS
PAN’S LABYRINTH
WATER

Pan's Labyrinth deserves to be in the best picture category and should win this award. If it doesn't I hope Deepa Mehta wins for Water.

MAKEUP
APOCALYPTO
CLICK
PAN’S LABYRINTH

The pale man is one scary dude.

ORIGINAL SCORE
BABEL
THE GOOD GERMAN
NOTES ON A SCANDAL
PAN’S LABYRINTH
THE QUEEN

The nursery rhyme from the score plays such an important role in the film that it will be in your head after the film is over.

 

ORIGINAL SONG
“I Need to Wake Up”
– AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
“Listen” – DREAMGIRLS
“Love You I Do” – DREAMGIRLS
“Our Town” – CARS
“Patience” – DREAMGIRLS

This song was the best part of the film and the reason that Jennifer Hudson will win best supporting actress.

 

BEST PICTURE
BABEL
THE DEPARTED
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
THE QUEEN

This is going to be the surprise of the Oscars, all of the actors in this film gave their  best  performances.

VISUAL EFFECTS
PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN:
DEAD MAN’S CHEST
POSEIDON
SUPERMAN RETURNS

The visual effects were the only good thing about Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest the rest of the movie seemed like a 2 hour long version of the Benny Hill show. 

SCREENPLAY -- ADAPTED
BORAT CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF
AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT
GLORIOUS NATION OF
KAZAKHSTAN
CHILDREN OF MEN
THE DEPARTED
LITTLE CHILDREN
NOTES ON A SCANDAL

SCREENPLAY -- ORIGINAL
BABEL
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE
PAN’S LABYRINTH
THE QUEEN

Tonight I am coming back to Edmonton from Maui. Besides coming in during a big storm, the weather here has been nothing but good to us. Check out what it was like when we got here: http://www.west-wind.com/weblog/posts/10516.aspx

I'll post more later but I wanted to link to Rick's post now so I don't forget.

<Disclaimer reason="I normally don't do these" exception="but its about programming languages" />

 

Which Programming Language are You?

Today I was inside an Air Canada plane that had its door open in -30 degree weather waiting to take off for 30 minutes when the following Air Canada recorded announcment came on over the speakers:

"Thanks for flying Air Canada, if there is anything we can do to make you more comfortable please let us know."

Maybe they should have held off on that recording until the plane door was closed and the heaters were turned on!

Sorry D'Arcy but I got this in my email today. I attribute it to my unique ability to take Nabob coffee and make it taste like its Starbucks.

------------------------------------------
Dear Steven Rockarts,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2007 Microsoft® MVP Award!

The Microsoft MVP Award is our way of saying thank you and to honor and support the significant contributions you make to communities worldwide (or just at work). As a recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award, you join an elite group of technical community leaders from around the world who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing your real world expertise with users and Microsoft.  Microsoft salutes all MVPs for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success everyday.  To learn more about the MVP Program, visit: www.microsoft.com/mvp.

Your extraordinary efforts in Making coffee every morning at the office and making it PERFECTLY during the past year are greatly appreciated. The benefits you will enjoy as a recipient of the MVP Award are outlined below.
--------------------------------------------

The secret to achieving this MVP status is actually to go above and beyond in the coffee making newsgroups and forums. Its not actually about making coffee.

Last week, a trial version of the Opera web browser was released for the Wii. I was able to successfully control my mouse on my laptop using a bluetooth adapter and today I found a media center has been released for the Wii by Red Kawa.

I installed the media center and found that the music functionality does not yet work on the media center, its no big deal because I was planning on using it for movies/tv anyway.

Converting the videos takes about 20 min with the Red Kawa Wii Video Converter, a couple of games of Wii Sports Tennis should make that go by quickly.

Apparently you can combine the Red Kawa converter with Videora and it will automatically download and convert Bit Torrent RSS feeds for you. The downside is that Videora is not free but there are other programs out there that can do the same thing.

Once you have your video converted you use the Wii browser to access the media center and play your videos. It works pretty well but the Wii browser controls never go away so you have to deal with them while watching your videos.

I would be very impressed if Nintendo built its own media center and made it available for download from the Wii Shop Channel. Hopefully Nintendo provides a better experience.

Hardware

The Wii is a sexy machine. It is a lot smaller than what I expected. The only problem that I have with it is that the power adapter is big and the power cord isn't that long. The Wiimote is akward at first but feels natural once you get the hang of it. My best advice to anyone new who uses the Wiimote is to use the wrist strap! I thought I was too cool to wear it and I ended up throwing my Wiimote into the ceiling while bowling.

Wii Channels

The Wii was able to find my wireless router easily and I had no trouble connecting it to the Wii shopping channel. I have run into problems with the Wii Forecast channel and the Wii News Channel, when I try and access them it says that I need to update my Wii but when I try and update it says that no updates are available, I hope that this gets ironed out.

The Wii shopping channel is easy to use, you need to buy Wii points before purchasing any of the old games. The games cost between $5 and $10 each. I bought Golden Axe, Bomberman and Bonk's Adventure. The best thing about the downloading is that the progress bar while you wait for your game to download is Mario getting coins and smashing blocks.

Gameplay

This is the best part about the Wii! I haven't had this much fun playing video games since I got my first system. I didn't sit down the whole time I played Wii sports (I don't think you can). The graphics are not even close to the XBox 360 but to tell you the truth I didn't really care. If Nintendo comes out with a hockey game it will rock because you will actually get to deke the goalie with your best move on a break away instead of moving a joystick back and forth.

There will be no spoilers in this post. I'm not that kind of guy.

Today Catherine and I went to see the movie Borat (Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan). This movie was one of the funniest movies I have seen in a long time.

The way that Sacha Baron Cohen portays another culture coming into a new country, really shows how oblivious the western world is to other cultures. Kazakhstan is taking the movie in stride (they get it), but the brilliance of this movie is how it portrays some of the radical extremes in the United States using a character who is oblivious to absolutely everything.

So if you are like me and only see one movie a year (because you are playing too much buzkashi), go see Borat.

It took me 46 episodes to discover it but Geekdrome is an awesome podcast. From their site: "Two geeks debate movies, comics, music and video games while ripping each other new ones... or re-ripping each other fresh ones."

Over the past couple days I have found myself watching this over regular television.

This weekend, Catherine and I participated in 2 charity walks this weekend. The first one was the Superwalk for Parkinson's. The Parkinson's Superwalk was extra special because of the passing of my Grandpa last week.

Thanks to everyone who was kind enough to donate, Catherine and I managed to raise over $1,000 for Parkinson's research, hopefully next year we wont have to! If you would still like to donate you can still sponsor me using the instructions here.

Today, Catherine and I also participated in the 15th Annual HIV/AIDS Walk for Life. We decided to bring along Daisy along for the walk and she got pretty tired after 1km so I ended up having to carry her for the rest (4km) of the walk.

 

 

Technorati Tags: parkinson's - hiv - aids - charity - walk

Last night I played poker with Catherine, my uncle and my cousin and I pulled off a Royal Flush with clubs!!!

For those that aren't familiar with it, a royal flush is the best hand in poker and the odds of getting one are about 650,000 to 1. Unfortunately, I didn't win much money off of it because everyone else had crap.

I have been waiting for GeoTagging to come to Flickr for a long time and now it is finally here!

Here is the definition of GeoTagging from Wikipedia:

"GeoTagging, sometimes referred to as Geocoding, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds, or images. This data usually consists of latitude and longitude coordinates, though it can also include altitude and place names."

Basically, it maps the locations that you took your pictures so that you can give people a virtual tour of your trip, here is an example I made up tonight of our trip to Vancouver in 2005:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenrockarts/map/

Adding the GeoTags to our pictures was fairly easy and will convince me to renew my Flickr pro account when it expires. I am also probably going to buy a GPS that I can bring along with me when Catherine and I go on vacation later this year.

One gripe that I do have with Flickr GeoTagging is that it uses Yahoo Maps for its map layer (since it is now own by Yahoo). The Yahoo maps don't have the level of detail that Google maps has and I found myself switching over to Google maps to get a better satellite view of Vancouver.

This stop motion movie called Game Over has to be one of the coolest stop motion movies I have seen. It uses house hold items to recreate old school video games.

Chech out the other movies while you're there. They are pretty cool.

Registration for Edmonton Code Camp is now open!!!!!! Hurry on over to http://www.edmontoncodecamp.com and sign up because once we are full, well we are full. Seating is limited because of fire regulations or else I would have the library packed to the rafters.

In addition to the great speakers that are going to be presenting at the code camp, there is going to be a lot of great swag that we will be giving away for free at the end of the day. So register now!

If you have some spare time tonight, come out to the Edmonton .NET User Group meeting at the Edmonton Public Library downtown. Richard Campbell (from Dot Net Rocks) will be presenting on SQL Server Tips and Techniques. This talk has been popular with other user groups so it should be a good time.

We will also be giving out free copies of asp.netPRO magazine to everyone and you will also have a chance to win free swag and meet other members of the Edmonton development community.

Last weekend my Dad and I went to the 2nd annual West Edmonton Mall Grand Prix presented by the Brick at JAGflo speedway...I think they need to have less sponsors next year. Here is my recap of the race weekend.

During the 1st round of qualifying, Sebastian Bourdais set the best qualifying time with a time of 59.895 seconds right behind him was rival Paul Tracy with a time of 1:00.067.

The 3rd practice session was an interesting one with half of the drivers breaking the minute mark. The rookies Dan Clarke and Katherine Legge were both broke the minute mark in what ended up being their best times of the weekend. Katherine also broke the minute mark in the second qualifying round but the time didn't count because of a crash on the track.

 

In the second qualifying session, Bourdais once again had the best time of the session coming in at 58.560, with that time he also beat the track record set last year by A.J. Allmendinger. A big surprise was rookie Will Power's time of 59.460 which ended up being good enough for the 6th spot on the grid.

At the start of the race my money was on Sebastian Bourdais and Paul Tracy to have an incident  in the first turn but it ended up being Cristiano da Matta who ended up going into the tires.  Here is a low quality video of the first turn from my camera and a couple photos of the result:

First turn video

My money was on Nelson Philippe to win the race but he ended up crashing late in the race on turn 7.

 

The turning point of the race was when Justin Wilson beat Paul Tracy out of the pits, he narrowly avoided beating him out but it proved to be worth it. I was actually surprised when Wilson passed Bourdais for first on the back straight away, he made Bourdais look like he was lap traffic and ended up taking the checkered flag. Here is his celebration.

I have a lot more pictures up over at Flickr if you want to check out some good shots of the Atantic race and some additional champ car pictures from the weekend. Also, Mack has a recap of the weekend as well.

Tonight I added a couple of very rough drawings of what should be close to the final layout of the Edmonton Code Camp. If you are interested you can view them here. If you have any questions about it feel free to contact me or anyone at Edmug.

If reading isn't your forte you can now get the JPod audiobook for your iPod here:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=155791678&s=143455

It is even $1 cheaper than buying the book.

This is a review of the Atlas UpdatePanel Control PDF By Bertrand Le Roy and Matt Gibbs published by O'Reilly.

The PDF was written Bertrand Le Roy and Matt Gibbs, members of the Microsoft “Atlas” architecture and development team. I subscribe to Bertrand's blog (you can't go wrong subscribing to a blog whose title is "The universal answer is in building 42") and the content on his blog about Atlas is always great so I expect this PDF to be great as well.

According to the PDF: "You'll learn what you need to know to make UpdatePanel part of your application pages. You’ll also learn how to use the control to improve the performance of an ASP.NET Wizard control; create a better master/details page for the AdventureWorks database; and add a pop-up preview to a search page. Finally, you’ll learn how to display UpdatePanel error messages and deal with its quirks and limitations. In short, this PDF has exactly what you need to begin adding the interactivity of AJAX to your ASP.NET 2.0 applications today."

The PDF starts of with a history of XMLHttp up to the Atlas UpdatePanel. It talks about how Microsoft was using XMLHttp with their Outlook Web Access product. This is often overlooked when people talk about Microsoft and Ajax. One thing I found interesting was that Classic ASP supported remote scripting using Java Applets and ASP.NET did not support remote scripting. The ancestor to the update panel was called the RefreshPanel. The purpose of the UpdatePanel is to hide the interaction between the browser and the server.

The PDF points out that for the majority of user input actions, a webpage does not need to be refreshed. I agree with this statement but I think you really need to think about the design of your page before adding AJAX/Atlas to it. Thinking about what will need to be refreshed on a postback and what doesn't need to be refreshed is crucial to providing the user with a good experience while using your software. Things like images, menus, forms etc do not need to be refreshed and I am happy that the PDF pointed this out.

Atlas uses project templates to setup Atlas websites. One thing I have noticed is that the teams at Microsoft have been using them in a lot of their beta software. The PDF shows you everything that the project template does for you in order to give you a ready to use Atlas website. This is very valuable information as if anything ever goes wrong it can help you troubleshoot. The PDF even points out that you will need to do these steps in order to Atlas enable an existing website.

Here is the minimum requirements you need to add an UpdatePanel to your webpage:

<atlas:UpdatePanel EnableViewState="true|false" Mode="Always|Conditional"
RenderMode="Block|Inline" >
    <Triggers>
        <atlas:ControlEventTrigger EventName="" />
    </Triggers>
    <ContentTemplate>
        <!-- HTML and ASP.NET content goes here --> 
    </ContentTemplate>
</atlas:UpdatePanel>

The PDF proceeds to explain the sections of the UpdatePanel. The content template area sends back to the client, only the HTML specified in the ContentTemplate area. The content is accompanied by the updated viewstate data, header and scripts!

The PDF points out that if the UpdatePanel mode is set to Conditional the the UpdatePanel relies on the Triggers collection to update the controls contained in the ContentTemplate. This is very powerful and cool.

The PDF points out that Atlas has a TimerControl control that ticks on the client side and triggers a postback on each tick. This is great for situations where you need to autosave a form but the PDF reminds us to keep in mind that scalability can be a problem.

The PDF now moves on to "3 increasingly complex examples" on using the UpdatePanel, each example begins from an ASP.NET 2.0 page that runs without Atlas. The first example shows you how to build a wizard control without Atlas and then once you have it working you enhance it with the Atlas UpdatePanel to eliminate the postbacks. It was very easy to add the extra Atlas functionality.

The second example is a GridView that shows images of various products in the AdventureWorks database. Once, you have it built the PDF once again shows how easy it is to add an UpdatePanel to an existing page. In this example we get to use the UpdatePanel triggers to trigger the Ajax call. On a side note, I was impressed with the use of a HttpHandler to return images to the master/details pages.

The third example extends upon the second example and adds search capability to the GridView. What was interesting to me in this example is how they show how a strategically placed UpdatePanel can lead to a more fluid user experience. The PDF also points out that placing an UpdatePanel around a search box can render the back button on a user's browser useless and you should distinguish between navigation operations and application operations when thinking about your UI design. It would be awesome if the Atlas team could make navigation operations easier to manage in the final version of Atlas.

Last of all, the PDF shows you how to deal with displaying error messages and various caveats you will run into using the UpdatePanel. I am starting to think every control should have a PDF out available, it would save me a lot of Googling :)

In conclusion, the PDF is a great reference for anyone looking to learn a lot about the Atlas UpdatePanel. I highly recommend giving this PDF a read and spending the $10 to purchase it. I would even go as far as to call it the definitive guide to the Atlas UpdatePanel. Check it out here: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/atlasupc/index.html

The guys who put together the Calgary Code Camp did a spectacular job. The whole thing ran very smoothly and I hope that the Edmonton Code Camp can have as much success.

I was actually really impressed with the Edmonton contingent that showed up. We ended up cleaning up on the swag, check out the t-shirt I won, I pledge to wear it to at least 5 edmug events this year.

There were a couple things I learnt from the code camp:

- Have a breakfast/snack for attendees

- Have presentations with a lot of code examples.

- Offer more than one track to attendees.

- The presentations are always going to run late.

- Make sure there are pens.

The date for the Edmonton Code Camp has been finalized! The code camp is going to be taking place on Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at the Edmonton Public Library in the Edmonton room.

I will also be announcing the first confirmed speaker shortly.

I know that it is early in the year twenty O six but I am already proclaiming jPod by Douglas Coupland to be the best (and also my favorite) book of the year. A lot of things in the book remind me of my work day at TG and of the tech industry as well. You will relate to a lot of things in this book if you are a programmer. 

Anyway, go buy the book. It is better than reading this.

I have been playing with Ruby a lot lately just for fun. I was pumped today to see Don Box on his blog that there is a Ruby programming IDE and debugger for Visual Studio 2005. Awesome!

Left side = Justice from Gray's Matter
Right side = Mike Score from A Flock of Seagulls

Ouch!

I took the plunge and bought TopDesk. I’m not sure that it makes my Alt tabbing any faster but now if i’m bored I can alt+tab and be amused. Besides being sweet eye candy, I think TopDesk makes finding an open program a lot easier. If you’re interested you can download a trial.

Well, Don let the cat out of the bag first. There is a new .NET user group here in Edmonton and so far we have managed to get a couple of speakers in to feed the developer hunger in this city.

The group’s goal is stated on the front page. I think that the group will be a lot better if it is a 2–way conversation between the group members and the people that run the group. Essentially, I would like it to be the group members that really drive the direction that the group takes.

Right now, we have 4 of us who are really dedicated to making this work. That being said we are looking for a 5th member from the development community to fill a role within the group. If you have a passion for .NET and helping others learn about .NET along with a lot of spare time and a willingness to run what we like to call “the gauntlet” contact us here.

Our first speaker is going to be Jean-Paul Boodhoo from ThoughtWorks. After talking to him I can tell you that he is going to give a great talk with concepts that you will be able to take to work the next day and actually use.

On a side note I was pumped to see Sasha mention the upcoming code camp on his blog! If you are interested in attending please stay tuned to http://www.edmontoncodecamp.com

Riya is now in public Beta. If you are the type of person that hates naming pictures or sets of pictures I suggest you sign up, download it and give it a try. Riya will take your pictures recognize the faces in them and tag them based on the faces it recognizes. The technology behind it is interesting.

I tried downloading the uploader tonight so I could try it out but it failed on the install, so I am hoping someone else will have better luck.Go here and give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Now playing: The Flaming Lips - Feeling Yourself Disintegrate

These shoes are hilarious: http://www.dadafootwear.com/

From their webpage: ““How do we compete with the excitement that electronic companies bring to the market today?  The Code M System from Dada brings excitement to the athletic footwear industry!”

Imagine a life where Allen Iverson runs down the court and you pick up his personal shoe music feed. Or not.

Now playing: The New Pornographers - The Jessica Numbers

My sister just sent me this picture she took of Paul Allen’s yacht. You get an idea about how big the yacht is because it is docked next to the cruise ship she works on:

 

I just found this http://preview.local.live.com/ via Omar Shahine’s blog. It would be awesome if we could do something like this on my team where I work.

I recommend switching your view to “walk” for a smoother experience.

Now playing: U2 - City of Blinding Lights

I have decided to try to get a free laptop from freelaptops.com. If anyone out there would like to help the cause with the promise of better technical posts on my end.

Please sign up and complete an offer here: http://laptops.freepay.com/?r=28039079

 

Now playing: U2 - New Year's Day (Live at Foro Autodromo, Mexico City, 3 Dec '97)

Found this via Digg :

Fill out the form and get a free USB Drive from Microsoft here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mysterysolved/corp/default.mspx

The answers to the questions are 2, True, True, True.

Go now before they run out!