This has been a very busy month. Started a new 12 month contract while continuing 1/2 time putting the final touches on the last one. As the saying goes, “It never rains, but it …” I do love it though. Both of these opportunities allow me to write lots of C# code. It just doesn’t get any better then this.

On top of all this great work, my Mom is visiting. She lives in Florida, not far from Disney World. She is used to the heat so our Phoenix temperatures really don’t bother her. Actually she enjoys our heat since our humidity is so low. It’s really great that she could come. We have lots of Mom’s cookies, and her world famous beet soup and home made noodles. We will be traveling to Florida for her next birthday, which is this coming February. Mom will be 90 years young. It will be a big bash with lots of family and friends.

The last few days were spent in a little cabin north of Payson, AZ, elevation about 9000 feet. So while the temperatures soared to 107F in Phoenix we enjoyed a nice 76F. The nearest civilization was some 17 miles away. We really roughed it in this 2000 sq/ft, three bedroom, two bath home, with all the amenities, i.e., electricity, hot water, AC, phone, etc.. The only thing we lacked was high speed internet. This was that longest I have been without an internet connection in years.

It was really good to get away and just relax. At this altitude and with all the fresh air I slept like a baby. Even took afternoon naps. The only computer time was spent on my daily journal entries. I did have some quality reading time. Made excellent progress on Pro C# 2005 and CLR via C#. Expect to complete each this month.

To top off this vacation, I purchased Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. I really wanted this game, however, should not have made the purchase. It’s a superior game, but a huge time sink. My first game took almost 3 hours. I love the game but it should come with warning label on the package; DANGER: TIME BLACK HOLE.

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.

Noted today that Technorati reports its been 91 days since my last post to this blog. While a little out of date, the number 91 really hit hard. Its is a not very remarkable number as blogs go. Many blogs start with a flurry of entries that slowly fade to none. Like so many projects, we start with such grand intentions. But over time life’s events lead us in other directions. The number 91 hit hard because I saw myself as being different. I would post often with interesting, meaningful, witty, bla-bla-bla,…. articles. But alas, I failed… However, I am committed to push on.

For the past couple of months I have been of a ASP.NET, C# reading/study spree. Currently I am reading and working through the following:

• Pro C# 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Platform, Third Edition by Andrew Troelsen
• Programming C# : Building .NET Applications with C# by Jesse Liberty
• Pro ASP.NET 2.0 in C# 2005 by Matthew MacDonald and Mario Szpuszta
• Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Core Reference by Dino Esposito
• Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Applications: Advanced Topics by Dino Esposito
• Head First Design Patterns by Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman, Bert Bates, and Kathy Sierra
• CLR via C#, Second Edition by Jeffrey Richter

The overall page count of these books is staggering… to get done I just make sure I read at least a few pages every day. So far it looks like I am something like 20% done. At this rate, I won’t get done until the end of the year. I am approaching these readings a little differently then my 7 book CSS reading spree last September. This time I am reading a little from most books every day. I find each book to be excellent. Really note worthy is “CLR via C#”. The author Jeffrey Richter, has a writing style that makes the most complex concepts simple to understand.

Last December I made the transition from Mac to PC. It was painful, but I did it. As it turned out it was just to painful and now I am back to Mac.

My new Mac is a Mac Book Pro, Dual 2G with a 7200rpm 100G Hard Drive and 1G RAM. This is one fantastic machine. What is spactacular is that I can dual boot into Windows XP for those times I need to code .NET stuff. This system runs cool and quite and ith the dual core processor and 7200rpm drive it handles .NET, no problem.

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The HP Pavilion ZD8000 was my first step away from Mac. Of all the PC’s I evaluated, this was the best. Howeve, having said that I found several annoyances that made me change. This system is heavy 9+ pounds, and runs very noisey (three fans) and hot. Its great if you live in a cold climate because it can also function as a space heater. Here in Arizona it quickly heated my office to uncomfortable temperatures.

I next moved to a Compaq V2000. This is a really nice little system. Runs cool and quite. Its light weight and easy to transport form place to place. However its a little underpowered. Bumping memory to 1.5G helped, but when using the .NET development environment it made you wait while it did stuff. With a dual processor, this would be an excellent system.

I am rewriting my-list.com in ASP.NET 2.0, C#. The original version was a Perl CGI web application, principally because at the time I was working for a company whose development environment was Perl. I have since changed employers where ASP.NET development rules. So … that prompted me to do a rewrite. Overall the ASP.NET development environment is orders of magnitude easier and faster then Perl. This of course assumes one knows both.

Now to my frustration. The LoginStatus control does not work in my instance. Specifically, I added this control to my splash page with a text value of “Member Login”. Clicking on the link redirects users to the login page. The login page uses the Login control with it’s DestinationPageUrl set to the proper page. The problem is that a successful login redirects the user back to the site splash page and not the DestinationPageUrl. When I remove the LoginStatus control form the splash page a successful login gets redirected properly. I am not sure why my original configuration will not work … a search of the internet did not help. If you have any ideas your comments would be appreciated.

I found a really nice journal application for the HP laptop. It is called “The Journal”. It is simple to use and from my perspective feature rich. The Journal contains two main section. First is the daily journal and the second is a notebook. Text entry has a look and feel similar to Microsoft Word. The realtime spelling checker is really nice. I really depend on the spell checker to help me not look stupid. Navigation among entries is a simple matter of moving through a tree view of entries presented in the left margin of The Journal’s window. The addition of tables and images is a snap. There are many other features, and if you are into journaling you should really check this one out. One feature was the ease of importing journal entries form other tools. In my case I imported entries from MacJournal. In my case I just exported the MacJournal entries into a rich text file format, change the file name with some Perl script to a date format of mm-dd-yyyy, emailed them to myself, and within seconds imported each to The Journal. Another feature I really like is that I can post notebook entries to my blog. The notebook is a great editor, and the page provides a nice history of what I have blogged.

Here is the Perl script …

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use vars qw($dirtoget @thefiles $file $newname @filenameparts $filenameparts);
$dirtoget=”C:/Documents and Settings/Michael/My Documents/My Journal”;
opendir(IMD, $dirtoget) || die(“Cannot open directory”);

@thefiles= readdir(IMD);

closedir(IMD);
chdir(“C:/Documents and Settings/Michael/My Documents/My Journal”);
foreach $file (@thefiles)
{
unless ( ($file eq “.”) || ($file eq “..”) )
{
@filenameparts = split / /,$file;
#$newname = $file;
#$newname =~ s/([a-zA-Z ]*[0-9]*)[a-z]{2}(, 2005\.rtf)/$1$2/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/January/01/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/February/02/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/Februry/02/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/March/03/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/April/04/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/May/05/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/June/06/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/July/07/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/August/08/;
$filenameparts[0] =~ s/September/09/;
$filenameparts[1] =~ s/,//;
$filenameparts[1] =~ s/th//;
$filenameparts[1] =~ s/nd//;
$filenameparts[1] =~ s/rd//;
$filenameparts[1] =~ s/st//;
$filenameparts[1] =~ s/ //;
if(length($filenameparts[1] < 10)){$filenameparts[1] = "0$filenameparts[1]";}
$newname = “$filenameparts[0]-$filenameparts[1]-2005.rtf”;
print “$newname\n”;
rename($file, $newname) or warn “Couldn’t rename $file to $newname: $!\n”;
}
}

My transition from Apple Mac OSX to PC Windows is almost complete. Today my iBook G4 sold on eBay and I have 8 bids on my Mac-Mini. By the end of this week I will be Mac less. It’s a scary feeling. I have not been in this position for many years. If the withdrawals get to bad perhaps Sandy will let me use her iMac G5. From now on I will only have this HP Pavilion zd8000 …

I expect this transition to be short lived. Once Apple completes its move to the Intel architecture I plan to transition back to a new Powerbook. One that will, hopefully run windows natively. As a .NET developer I really need the native windows feature. Virtual PC was just to s l o w.

We are back in the Holiday Inn in Las Cruses, NM; only 5 hours from home. It will be so good to get home … 20 days away is a long time.

For this trip I took along a new HP Pavilion zd8000 laptop instead of a Mac PowerBook G4. I love my Mac, but must admit that the HP performed admirably. I burned the book “Linked” to CDs using iTunes, three times faster then on my Mac. Windows Movie Maker was disappointing when compared to Apples iMovie and iDVD. However, I purchased Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4.0 and Premier Elements 2.0 and found they provide all the features of iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD, and more. They were easy to use and fast. The HP has the serious advantage of duel Pentium 4, 3 Mhz processors while the PowerBooks is only a 1.2 MHz G4. The operating system, Windows XP Professional is OK, OS X is much better. The constant threat of worms, viruses, Spyware, Rootkits is really a pain. As a Mac user I am just not used to all these threats. The HP is running Symantec AntiVirus, Internet Security, and AntiSpam, along with Microsoft AntiSpyware. Am I protected? Doubt it …

Spent New Year’s Day at Moms. She fixed one of her great dinners, after which we played cards for several hours. I managed to win the first game while Sandy eked past Mom to win the second. Mom is really getting good … if we could spend a few more days with her she would start winning on regular bases.

Tomorrow we begin the drive home. Our visit with Mom has been wonderful, Christmas and New Year’s was great. We really hate to leave, as it seems like we just arrived. But every visit is to short. For our trip home, I have scheduled stops in Mobile, AL, Kerrville, TX, and Los Cruces, NM. We have only one long driving day of 713 miles.