Its been a very busy

Its been a very busy two weeks since my last post. We are in the final weeks of of completing a major development project at work. Its been a fun project, with lots of challenges, however its time to make an end. I only have two more features to code, then some cleanup. There will be some bug fixes and the typical last minute changes once the complete product is viewed by management. Overall its been a really fun project which has sharpened my ASP.NET C# skills.

I have added two more books to my reading collection. They are “A Developers Guide to SQL Server 2005”, Bob Beauchemin and Dan Sullivan, and “Design Patterns in C#”, Steven John Metsker. Both are excellent in my view. Of the 9 books now on my reading list, I have read a 1601/7004 pages or about 23%. I need to pick up the pace some to meet my end of the year goal.

My MacBook Pro seems to get better every day. I purchase and installed Paralles which gives me the capability to run virtual operating systems. I tried Apples Bootcamp, but did not like having to reboot the machine to run Windows XP. With Parallels I can run Windows XP in a OS X window. The product is reasonably priced and runs fast. Currently I have installed the Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Express and find it runs faster then my PC system at work. Now I have one computer that really meets all of my computing needs.

Speaking of computing needs… my 3+ year old Compaq Presario desktop HDD died. The machine suddenly got very slow … checked it for spy ware, root kits, and viruses and found it clean. Purchased SpinWrite, but all it reported was “immanent disk failure … backup now”. As I attempted to move files it died. No! I did not have a backup. So all is lost. Fortunately it was not my main computer so the loss was not catastrophic. The MacBook is on a backup schedule that I check in light of this incident.