Testing Picasa and Hello again. This picture was taken on 3/3/2004.

Flat Panel Monitor

Finally got a flat panel monitor at home - 17" Proview. It's an off brand but after a sale and rebates it was only $170.

Blogger, Picasa, and Hello...Oh My!

I'm not a real blogger (I have nothing worthwhile to say) but I like playing with cool things. I usually like to play with things that I can install on my web server or things I can tweak myself through code. For a blog my preference is .Text or the new Community Server. But in the past few days I've been testing Blogger - mainly because it's a Google company now and Google is just...well...you know. The main thing I really like about Blogger is the ability to post an article via e-mail. This isn't a feature specific to Blogger but it's difficult to do this when running your own blog if you're not running your own mail server. One thing I don't like about Blogger is what appears to be the lack of an image gallery. ModBlog (http://www.modblog.com) is a new blog that has this but I don't think it runs as slick as Blogger. What Blogger does have however is Picasa and Hello. Running the two together is very nice if you want to post pictures to your blog. Picasa (http://www.picasa.com) is a photo management application that is very nice. I've used it all of 20 minutes and it makes me want to go out and buy a nice digital to take tons of pictures just so I can use it. Hello (http://www.hello.com) is an app that allows you to share photos with friends and family in a unique way or post your pictures with captions to your Blogger blog via the BloggerBot.

This is a shot of Luke that I really like. It was taken on 12/5/2003 but I'm just using it to test Blogger and Hello's BloggerBot.

VB 6.0 to .NET site

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbrun/

 

Microsoft, I guess feeling sorry for the VB 6.0 developers that their beloved development platform is in retirement, has launched a site to help the VB6er's migrate to .NET.  I was a VB6 developer but found the transition to .NET easy, but I guess some people need hand holding.  I even prefer C# over VB.NET - I think it's a cleaner looking language.

Google Search History

http://www.google.com/searchhistory

There have been many times where I know I found something searching Google but when trying to find it again months later I don't remember the keywords I used.  Google's new Search History is a cool way of fixing my memory issues.

Nteam to rival Visual Studio?

http://www.cxotoday.com/cxo/jsp/article.jsp?article_id=3340&cat_id=913

 

I've never been real impressed with the team development aspect of Microsoft's tools.  I had hoped that Visual Studio 2005 would change that but it seems that Microsoft is gearing it more for larger companies.  By combining all the open source applications that most developers use into something that would work with .NET, Nteam would be an interesting, and cheaper, alternative to Visual Studio 2005.

Disney Cruise

Woohoo!  We've just booked a 4-Night Bahamian Disney Cruise for January.  Long wait but so, it's a Disney cruise.

IIS Woes

Nothing like sitting down, all ready to write some code, and have IIS not want to start.  After an hour of trying to fix it I ran netstat and found that Skype was listening on port 80 and 443 (among others) and hence causing IIS to fail.  Now back to coding.