Personal
Just me rambling about my personal life. Boring stuff really.
Someone recently emailed me to ask if I’m speaking at any upcoming conferences this year. Good question! I’ve been keeping it pretty light this year since my family and I are doing a bit of travelling ourselves and I like spending time with them. But I will be hitting up two conferences that I know of. <anglebrackets/> April 8 – 11 Ohmagerd! That’s this week! I better prepare! I’ll be giving two talks this week. One of them will be a joint talk with the incomparable Scott Hanselman. Usually that means him taking potshots at...
Back in March of last year, Stephen Wolfram wrote a blog post, The Personal Analytics of My Life. It’s a fascinating look at the data he’s accumulated over years about his own personal activities and habits such as daily incoming and outgoing email. Since I read that, I’ve been fascinated about the idea of how personal data analytics might prove useful to me. It turns out I found an application to my health. In my series on The Real Pain of Software Development (part1 and part2), I talked about my history with pain related to work and the...
I wasn’t prepared to write an end-of-year blog post given the impending destruction of the world via a Mayan prophesied cataclysmic fury. But since that didn’t pan out I figured I’d better get typing. Those of us that are software developers shouldn’t be too surprised that the world didn’t end. After all, how often do projects come in on time within the estimated date amirite?! (high five to all of you). Highlights of 2012 This year has just been a blast. As my kids turn five and three, my wife and I find them so...
As of today, I’ve been a GitHub employee for one year and I gotta tell you… Please forgive me a brief moment to gush, but I really love this company. I work with a lot of great people. Crazy people for sure, but great. I love them all. Just look at these crazy folks! I once told a friend that I’ve long had the idea to start a company that would be my ideal work environment. GitHub is better than that company. What Makes it Special? One of my co-workers Rob...
Once again, those crazy fools Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin are touring around this great country of ours in a big ass RV as part of their .NET Rocks Road Trip. Last time it was for the launch of Visual Studio 2010. This time it coincides with Visual Studio 2012. At each stop these gentlemen each give a presentation and then they interview a guest. If you’re in Los Angeles this Friday (November 30, 2012), you’re stuck with me as the guest. So stop on by and we’ll try to keep it interesting. If not, we’ll go...
As a kid, I was an impatient little brat. On any occasion that required waiting, I became Squirmy Wormy until I pushed my dad to make the demand parents so often make of fidgety kids, “Sit still!” Recent evidence suggests a rejoinder to kids today in response to this command, “What!? Are you trying to kill me?!” There is compelling evidence that modern workers propensity to sit for prolonged periods every day makes them fat and shortens their lives. Hmmm, you wouldn’t happen to know any professions where sitting limply at a desk for long periods of time...
Around eight years ago I wrote a blog post about Repetitive Strain Injury entitled The Real Pain of Software Development [part 1]. I soon learned the lesson that it’s a bad idea to have “Part 1” in any blog post unless you’ve already written part 2. But here I am, eight years later, finally getting around to part 2. But better late than never! The original reason that led me to write about this topic was a period of debilitating pain I went through when coding. Too many long hours at the keyboard took their toll on me...
Disclaimer: these opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent the opinion of any person or institution who are not me. The topic of sexism in the software industry has flared up recently. This post by Katie Cunningham (aka The Real Katie), entitled Lighten Up, caught my attention. As a father of a delightful little girl, I hope someday my daughter feels welcomed as a developer should she choose that profession. In general, I try to avoid discussions of politics, religion, and racism/sexism on my blog not because I don’t have strong feelings about these things, but I...
Recently I’ve been tweeting photos of my kids playing with a new toy my wife bought them that I’mthey are totally enthralled with. It’s called the Bildopolis Big Bilder Kit. This is a creation of a family friend of ours who used to be an industrial designer at IDEO. He left a while ago to start on his own thing and came up with this. We bought a set immediately in part to to support his efforts, but also because it looked cool. We were not disappointed. This thing is fun. The concept is really simple....
Next week Microsoft hosts its annual MVP Summit. So what better time for me to host my first GitHub Drinkup – MVP Edition at the Tap House Grill! Not an MVP? Nonsense! You are in my book, so show up! If you are an MVP, you’re still welcome to slum it with the rest of us schlubs. All the details are posted over at the GitHub Blog post. What is a “Drinkup” you ask? It’s pretty simple. It’s a meetup where we drink and share stories of valor in the face of code complexity....
Birthdays are a funny thing, aren’t they? Let’s look at this tweet for example, It's @haacked's birthday. Give him crap about getting old. No gifts, please. Especially not what Charlie suggests. Of course I’m getting older. We’re all getting older. Every second of every day and twice on Monday. Every femtosecond even. Perhaps the only time we’re not getting older is the moment within a Planck time interval. But once that interval is up, yep, you’re older. Yet people apparently live their lives completely oblivious to this fact until they’re next birthday...
Happy New Year’s Eve everyone! And by the time you read this, it’ll probably already be the new year. To my friends across the international date line, what is 2012 like? The rest of us will be there soon. New Year’s Eve has always been one of my favorite holidays. It brings a collective time for reflection on the past year and anticipation and hope for the year to come. And for me, New Year’s Eve has an extra special meaning because exactly ten years ago on New Year’s Eve, I met this woman at Giant Village. A...
Hubot stache me. Well the poll results are in and you guys were very close! I was taken aback at the intensity of the interest in where I would end up. Seriously, I’m honored. But then I thought about it for a moment and figured, there must be a betting pool on this. These folks don’t care that much. Today is my first day as a GitHub employee! In other words, I am now a GitHubber, a Hubbernaut, a GitHubberati. Ok, I made that last one up. If you haven’t heard of GitHub, it’s a site that...
Well, as I wrote before, today is my last day at Microsoft. Last night we had our office Holiday party in the observation deck and lounge of the Space Needle. The party was just fantastic and we were lucky to have a nice clear evening with spectacular views. What a great way to go! I had a brief exit interview where I handed over my badge with an air of finality. However, I am still an employee until midnight tonight. So it’s not so final just yet. Which is a good thing as the NuGet team is working to...
It’s not every day you write this sort of blog post. And you hope it’s not something you do so often that you ever get good at it. I’m certainly sucking up a storm here. Just last month I hit my four year mark at Microsoft. I reflected on the sheer joy I experienced working with such smart people on cool projects. I’ve been very lucky and fortunate to be able to speak about these projects at many conferences, meeting so many interesting attendees. It’s been a real blast. Today, I write a different sort of post. It...
Once in a while folks ask me for details about the hardware and software that hosts my blog. Rather than write about it, a photo can provide all the details that you need. There you have it. Well actuallyTM, my blog runs on a bit more hardware than that these days. Especially after the Great Hard-Drive Failure of 2009. As longtime readers of my blog might remember, nearly two years ago, this blog went down in flames due to a faulty hard-drive on the hosting server. My hosting provider, CrystalTech (now rebranded to be the...
As I mentioned in my last post, I have an overnight stopover in Reykjavik Iceland. After checking into my hotel at an ungodly early hour (which ended up being really late for me Seattle time), my first order of business was to head over to the Blue Lagoon. No, not that Blue Lagoon! This one! Look at that steam coming off the water! The Blue Lagoon is a geothermal spa with a 5000 square meter lagoon. The water comes from a nearby geothermal plant and is renewed every two days. According to Wikipedia, ...
If you’re in the Reykjavik area on November 7th, come join me for a beer-up. A Beer-Up is basically a meet-up, but with lots of beer! When: November 7th, 2011 at 8:00 PM Where: The English Pub (yes, I went all the way to Iceland for an English pub) Why: To talk about ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, Software Development whatever geeky topics you want. And if we do our jobs right, by the end of the night we’ll discuss life, philosophy, and which direction is my hotel? ...
Today, October 15 2011, marks four years of being a Microsoft employee for me. As such, it’s time for a little introspection, but in many ways, Tim Heuer already introspected for me. Much of what he writes echoes my own experience, thus leaving me with less to write about. It’s the Microsoft way, or the highway. Which is conveniently located near Microsoft Way. - Photo by Todd Bishop, CC BY 2.0 Looking back in my archives, I realized I haven’t written a whole lot about what it’s like to work here. I do have a...
I had a dry run today for an upcoming presentation that did not go quite as well as I would like, though I completely expected this as I was unprepared. The good news is, it was a dry run and not the real thing, so I have plenty of time to adjust. Even so, there’s one thing I did wrong, that I should have known better than to do. In my crazy sleep deprived work frazzled mind, I broke the cardinal rule of a dry run – Treat it like the real thing! Kitty Hawk by gilderm...
Stumbling around the net, I ran into the “funny verticals” meme. These are typically a vertical strip of screenshots pulled from a movie or television with funny captions tacked on. If you do an image search for “funny verticals”, you’ll see a whole slew of them. Be forewarned, there are some very crude and offensive ones. For the lazy, here are a few representative ones I found to be funny. The first example is from the movie Inception: This is another one from Inception. There seems to be a lot using this specific sequence. ...
I hate code samples in technical books! No seriously, this is bile I’m not afraid to give a permalink to (nor am I afraid to end a sentence with a preposition, so there!). Even the shortest code samples are a pain to type in. And if they show anything reasonably interesting, they’re probably too long to type in. Of course, nobody actually types in the sample code, they grab the code from the companion CD (blech!) or download zip files containing the code from the companion website. With Professional ASP.NET MVC 3 (print edition | kindle edition)...
A few weeks ago I felt burned out and was in sore need of a vacation. I suggested to my wife that we take the kids somewhere and she sagely noted that taking the kids anywhere at their ages is not a vacation. Perhaps I should go somewhere on my own. Like a deserted lighthouse!Did I mention she’s the best wife ever? I decided to take a week off and mix a bit of “staycation” with my vacation. Spend a few days at home and maybe a couple of days away. The first thing I did was...
No, I’m not talking about my mental age. My son turned four this past week which means I’m four years into my world domination plan. One of the gifts we gave my son was a toolbox with plastic toys so we can train him on building the mega-lasers and fortresses needed to take over the world. Turns out that before you start dominating the world, you have to start taking baby steps. And then toddler steps. And then 4-year old running terror steps. In these past four years, I’ve learned a lot. For example, you can get a...
It’s that time of year at Microsoft when managers are busily preparing reviews of their reports and preparing for the big stack ranking. Yesterday, my manager sent out an email asking his reports to email him with their accomplishments in the past year to help jog his memory. This arms him with important information when he goes to the mat for us arguing why we’re more deserving of a higher ranking than some other manager’s sad report. Here was my response. In the past year, I… Escaped from a black hole. Twice. I...
I’m reading through the archives of a blog where the author posts something random every Friday (yesterday was Thursday, and tomorrow is Saturday). His Friday posts are completely unrelated to the main theme and content of his blog. I like that idea a lot. I don’t blog as much as I used to mostly because I feel the need to spend so much time on each blog post. A lot of the posts I write take a bit of research and experimentation before I’m ready to post them. But a random thought? I can pull one of those...
Almost two years ago, I announced the launch of http://letmebingthatforyou.com/, a blatant and obvious rip-off of the Let me Google that for you website. The initial site was created by Maarten Balliauw and Juliën Hanssens in response to a call for help I made. It was just something we did for fun. I’ve been maintaining the site privately always intending to spend some time to refresh the code and open source it. Just recently, I upgraded the site to ASP.NET MVC 3, refactored a bunch of code, and moved the site to AppHarbor. Why AppHarbor? I’ve...
One aspect of my job that I love is being able to go in front of other developers, my peers, and give presentations on the technologies that my team and I build. I’m very fortunate to be able to do so, especially given the intense stage fright I used to have. But over time, through giving multiple presentations, the stage fright has subsided to mere abject horror levels. Even so, I’m still nowhere near the numbers of much more polished and experienced speakers such as my cohort, Scott Hanselman. Always looking for the silver lining, I’ve...
It’s the end of the year and it’s time for the annual year in review blog post. I know what you’re thinking, but don’t worry, you remembered to turn off the stove before leaving. You’re also probably thinking, “do we really need an end of year blog post from everyone?”. I asked on Quora, and the answer is a definitive no, we don’t. This is my absolutely unnecessary self indulgent end of year blog post. I wouldn’t have it any other way, would you? I didn’t want to settle with an ordinary “Ho hum bore you to tears...
Along with James Senior, I’ll be speaking at a couple of free Web Camps events in South America in March 2011. Buenos Aires, Argentina – March 14-15, 2011 São Paulo, Brazil – March 18-19, 2011 The registration links are not yet available, but I’ll update this blog post once they are.Registration is open! Register for Argentina. Register for Brazil.
For a list of all upcoming Web Camps events, see the events list. If you’re not familiar with Web Camps, the website provides the following description, emphasis mine: Microsoft's 2 day Web Camps...
At some point, everybody and every team makes a mistake they regret and wish they could take back. During our regular status meetings, I sometimes make the mistake of saying something like “if I could go back in time, I’d tell myself not to make that decision.” Image from the greenhead. That tees it up for our lead developer who’s so smart even his ass is smart. You might say he’s a smart ass. His response is usually “Really? I can think of a lot better things I would do with a time...
Our eye in the sky reports two angry evil (but devishly good looking) cyborg units, XSP 2000 and TRS-80, are fast approaching Black Rock City. They are considered very armed and dangerous. In fact, they are mostly armed and not much else. These cyborgs do not come in peace. I repeat, they are to be considerd hostiles. However, we’ve received a secret communiqué that reveals a weakness built into these cyborg models. Due to a lack of TDD during development, a bug in their FOF system (friend or foe) causes them to view anyone offering a...
My son and I returned from a week long vacation to visit my parents in Anchorage Alaska last night. Apparently, having the boys out of the house was quite the vacation for my wife as well. :) We had a great time watching the World Cup and going on outings to the zoo as well as hiking. Well, at least one of us was hiking while another was just enjoying the ride. We hiked up a trail to Flattop which has spectacular views of Anchorage. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it all the way to the...
I saw a recent Twitter thread discussing the arrogance of Steve Jobs. One person (ok, it was my buddy Rob) postulated that it was this very arrogance that led Apple to their successes. I suppose it’s quite possible that it had a factor, but I tend to think Steve Job’s vision and drive were much bigger factors. This idea is a reflection of a pervasive belief out there that arrogance is excusable, perhaps even acceptable and admirable in successful people and institutions. In contrast, I think we’d all agree that that arrogance is universally detestable in unsuccessful people....
The June issue (also in pdf) of the online PragPub magazine, published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf has two articles on ASP.NET MVC. The first is called Agile Microsoft and is an introduction to ASP.NET MVC geared towards those who’ve never seen it. It’s nice seeing ASP.NET MVC featured in this magazine which in its own words tends to cater to a non-Microsoft crowd. To some developers, Microsoft’s technologies are a given, the river they swim in. To others, not using Microsoft’s tools is the default. PragPub being an open source- and Agile-friendly kind of magazine,...
The last time I wrote about one of my hiking adventures, it started off great, but really didn’t end well. But I survived, so on that scale, yes it did end well! It’s a matter of perspective. On Saturday, I went on my first hike of the spring to Lake Serene and Bridal Veil Falls. This hike is really two hikes in one. The main destination is Lake Serene, but there’s an absolutely wonderful half mile (1 mile round trip) side trip to the Bridal Veil Falls on the way to Lake Serene. The trail starts in the...
Last week I spent a few days in Las Vegas attending the Mix 10 conference. Mix is billed as … A 3 day conference for web designers and developers building the world's most innovative web sites. Which certainly reflects its origins as a conference focused on the web and web standards. But this year, it seemed that the scope for Mix was expanded to be about, well, a Mix of technologies as the Windows Phone 7 series figured prominently at the conference. Scott Hanselman and I are seen here attempting to tutor...
If there’s one impression that Austin left on me, besides the one that Rudy’s “extra moist” barbecue left on my gut, is that it’s a developer friendly town. This past week I spent three days in Austin meeting with all sorts of developers and had many great conversations about technology. I met with companies and people with a passion for technology that couldn’t be suppressed. Meeting with Dell The reason I was in town was to give a couple of presentations at a mini-conference for Dell employees. On my first day in Austin, the day...
UPDATE: We moved the date to February 24th. The stars at night, are big and bright – clap clap clap clap – deep in the heart of Texas! Hold onto your ten gallon hats, I’m visiting Texas for the first time! I’m very excited to visit the second largest state in the union. ;) The purpose of my trip is to meet with some developers at Dell doing interesting things and to give a talk there as well. But since I’ve heard such good things about the vibrant tech community in Austin, I am...
One question that came up recently during my mid-year review is how am I measuring customer satisfaction with the products that I work on? For example, how can I measurably demonstrate that customers are happy with the work we are doing on ASP.NET MVC and that my team is responding to customer feedback? Umm, I can’t? At least not right now in a measurable manner. I don’t have any such metric and I’m not sure how reliable any metric I might come up with will be. But perhaps that’s simply due to a lack of imagination on...
Just wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, or a Happy whatever you are celebrating at this time of year. I hope you are spending it well with family and friends! :) As you can see, I’m still hard at work watching the kids on paternity leave. My brother is a drug dealer and the name of the drug is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the X-Box 360. I’m totally hooked right now, and I don’t usually get so hooked on games. At least I am managing to still...
Ok, it wasn’t necessarily my ass that was saved, but it was years worth of images which were important to me! As I wrote yesterday, my blog’s hosting server had a hard-drive failure effectively wiping out my virtual machine, taking my blog down with it. Fortunately, I was able to get back up with a static archive of my site provided by Rich Skrenta, but I was missing all my images and other content (code samples). As Jeff mentions, I have learned the hard way that there are almost no organizations spidering and storing...
Yeah, the past few days have been a pretty low moment for me and this blog. Long story short, on December 11, a hard-drive failure took down the managed dedicated server which hosts my blog among other sites. (The following image is a dramatization of actual events and is not the actual hard drive) This is a server that Jeff Atwood and I share (we each host a Virtual Server on the machine), thus all of the following sites were brought down by the hardware malfunction: http://haacked.com/ http://codinghorror.com/ ...
Being that it’s a glorious Memorial Day Weekend up here in the Northwest, my co-worker Eilon (developer lead for ASP.NET MVC) and I decided to go on a hike to Mt Si where we had a bit of a scary moment. I first learned about Mt Si at the company picnic last year, seen behind me and Cody in this photo. I remember seeing the imposing cliff face and thinking to myself, I want to climb up there. I imagined the view would be quite impressive. Mt Si is a moderately strenuous hike 8 miles round trip...
Every good developer knows to always have a backup. For example, over two years ago, I announced my world domination plans. But there was a single point of failure in me putting all my world domination plans on the tiny shoulders of just one progeny. My boy needs a partner in crime. So my wife and I conspired together and we’re happy to announce that baby #2 is on the way. Together, the two of them will be unstoppable! My wife is past her first trimester and we expect the baby to RTF (Release To Family) around...
The third and last day of ALT.NET Seattle was a short one for me. My poor extremely patient wife was not feeling well today so I had to leave right at lunch time. But before I left, I did manage to attend a great session by John Lam and Jimmy Schementi on “Adding Scripting Support to .NET Applications”. In fact, you can watch the session here via Kyte.tv. John and Jimmy covered the topic of hosting IronRuby to provide “end-user” ability to script an application. The classic example is that many 3-D games, Half-Life for example, write their core...
Day two of ALT.NET is over and I’m already pooped (for you non-English speakers, that means tired, not something else that might come to mind). Once again, photos by our Chronicler, Brad Wilson. As a testament to how engaging the sessions were, there are a lot fewer photos from day two in his photostream. The first session I went to was on the topic of Encouraging Open Source in the .NET Space as seen above, which veered all over the place. Many felt the industry is shifting towards more and more Open Source software so those...
Day one of the ALT.NET Seattle conference is over and I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions. As an Open Spaces event, the first order of business was for us, the attendees, to set the session agenda for the rest of the conference. In the above photo, you can see Scott Hanselman proposing a topic in one of my favorite conference photos taken by Brad Wilson. This process took about two hours after which many of us headed out to Red Robin for a nerd dinner. This is my second ALT.NET Open Spaces event and...
At the end of the year, it’s very common for bloggers to take a look back at their own blog and list their favorite 10 blog posts. I find that somewhat narcissistic, so you know I’m going to do that. But before I do, I thought it would be great to list the top 10 blog posts by others I read in 2008. The only problem is, I have very bad short-term memory and I can’t seem to remember which ones I read that had a real impact on my thinking. I’ll have to try and keep better track...
UPDATE: There’s a workaround mentioned in the Google Groups. It’s finally resolved. Ever since I first started using FeedBurner, I was very happy with the service. It was exactly the type of service I like, fire and forget and it just worked. My bandwidth usage went down and I gained access to a lot of interesting stats about my feed. When I was first considering it, others warned me about losing control over my RSS feed. That led me to pay for the MyBrand PRO feature which enabled me to burn my feed using my own domain name...
During my talk at the PDC, I heeded Hanselman’s call to action and decided to veer away from the Northwind “Permademo” and build something different. In the middle of the talk, I unveiled that I was going to build a competitor to StackOverflow which I would call HaackOverflow. This was all news to Jeff as he hadn’t seen the demo until that point. The demo walked through some basics of building a standards based ASP.NET MVC application, and sprinkled in a bit of AJAX. At the very end, I swapped out the site.css file and added an image...
Whew! I’ve finally found a bit of time to write about my impressions of the PDC 2008 conference. If you’re looking for insightful commentary and a “What does this all mean” post, you’ve come to the wrong place. There are plenty of others providing that sort of commentary. I’ll just string together some random impressions and pics from my perspective. First of all, one thing I’m very impressed with is that all sessions are viewable online almost immediately afterwards, with full video of the slides and the presenter. Now I understand why they asked me not to pace...
In my last post, I joked that the reason that someone gave me all 1s in my talk was a misunderstanding of the evaluation form. In truth, I just assumed that someone out there really didn’t like what I was showing and that’s totally fine. It was something I found funny and I didn’t really care too much. But I received a message from someone that they tried to evaluate the session from the conference hall, but the evaluation form was really screwy on their iPhone. For example, here’s how it’s supposed to look in IE. ...
Before giving a presentation, I review Scott Hanselman’s top 11 presentation tips. Well I have a twelfth tip that Scott needs to add to his list, and he’ll vouch for this. A couple of hours before Jeff and I gave the ASP.NET MVC presentation (the video is now posted!), we played some RockBand in the Big Room (exhibition area). Playing Eye of the Tiger before a big talk has a great way of both pumping you up and loosening you up at the same time. When I ran into Scott and told him this tip, he said...
I just can’t help myself. I said I wouldn’t be one of those parents, but forget it. I am one of those parents. I think my kid is adorable, so sue me. Check out Cody’s halloween costume. He’s with his BFF Forever, Alex the Panda. Meet, Codysaurus! Coming to terrorize a neighborhood near you. Technorati Tags: halloween,costumes,dinosaur
Today marks my one year anniversary at Microsoft. Tradition dictates that I bring in a pound of M&Ms for each year that I’ve been an employee. I’m going to buck that trend (because I like bucking things) and bring in 1 kilo of Japanese candies. Since I just returned from a trip to Japan and it is also customary to bring gifts back from a trip, this ends up killing two birds with one stone. Software is not the only place to apply the DRY principle. Looking back at when I first was hired and later at...
Just got back from our trip to latest Japan yesterday morning. On previous trips, I ate really great Yakitori, ate Blowfish and lived to tell about it, celebrated the new year, , learned about ritual suicide and played around with sharp swords, visited a temple in the midst of old Tokyo, and visited the hotel from Spirited Away. This trip was mostly a relaxing affair consisting of eating good food and lying around doing as much nothing as we could muster. Unfortunately, travelling with a 15 month old child meant that the amount of actual relaxation to be had...
Where have I been? ;) You probably heard the news already from the GU already, but just in case, we will be shipping JQuery with Visual Studio. ASP.NET MVC will have the privilege of being one of the first products to include JQuery. I am glad we finally announced this because I got tired of stifling my mouth everytime someone suggested we just include JQuery. :)
As you can see from demos I've done in the past, JQuery will fit nicely with the ASP.NET MVC style of development.
The internet access I had at my mother-in-law's last time I was in Japan turned out to be a fluke. I am at a Japanese Manga and Internet cafe (because those three things go so well together) right now typing this out. I've received a lot of comments and questions via my blog and once I get to Hong Kong, I will do my best to answer.
No promises though as I hear that the pool at the hotel is nice and I do have three talks to prepare. I must admit that not having daily internet access is probably a...
If you happen to be in Asia around October 8-10, I’ll be speaking at Tech-Ed Hong Kong. Come by and say hi. I’m giving three talks, one on each day. October 8 11:45 AM – 1:00 PM ASP.NET MVC - An alternative approach to building Web Applications October 9 ...
As Scott wrote last week, using a punny title I have to admire, he and I (among many others) were both the subject of a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Looking through my logs, it looks to actually be a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack coming from multiple IP addresses. The attack appears to actually be an attempt at a SQL Injection attack, but for his blog, which stores its data in XML files, that is entirely pointless. For my blog, which doesn’t do any inline SQL, it’s also mostly pointless. So far, the SQL injection part of...
It’s been a long time coming, but we are finally ready to release Subtext 2.0. As I mentioned in April (was it that long ago!?), this is scaled down a bit from our original 2.0 plans. But even so, we have a lot of new goodness in here. It’s not just a bug fix release, though there are plenty of those too. Highlights With this release, Subtext has top notch support for Windows Live Writer thanks to some check-ins from Tim Heuer. Enhanced MetaWeblog API implementation to support providing a "slug" URL name for...
It’s a quiet friday afternoon with all of our devs in training today, so I figured I’d take a breather and respond to this meme I’ve been tagged with by Simone, Keyvan, Steve and others. How Old Were You When You Started Programming? Have I even started really programming yet? I guess I got my first taste when I was around eight with my first computer, a TRS-80 Color Computer. That sucker could display 9 colors, all at once, believe it or not. My programming experience back then was pretty minimal. My dad and I mostly spent hours...
I credit Google AdSense for really opening up the possibility for small blogs to become sources of passive income. Look around the web and you’ll see nearly every blog sport an AdSense ad or two…or three. For most people, it amounts to a bit of pocket change - maybe enough money for a coffee or an occasional indulgence. But soon, the lure of adding more ads from other ad networks overwhelms publishers and soon blogs start to look more like the movie Idiocracy. A while back, Jeff Atwood wrote about how content is becoming dwarfed...
…and the feeling’s right. If I can muster up the time and motivation, I like to try and post lighter more humorous fare on Fridays such as my recent RAS Syndrome post. On this beautiful Friday day (is that redundant too?), I started off fresh out of ideas (and motivation) so I wasn’t planning on writing a blog post at all, until this was just handed to me. Which Software Blogger Do Girls Like Better? In this post, Nick Berardi takes a quick look around at the demographic information collected by Google’s new ad planner....
I did another interview with those wild and crazy guys, Carl and Richard. My first time (show 261) being on .NET Rocks was back in August of 2007 when I talked about Subtext, Open Source, and my blog.
This time (show 339), the interview focused on my experiences with working at Microsoft and the work I do on the ASP.NET MVC project. Notice that my profile pic hasn’t changed at all. I should do something about that.
I haven’t listened to it yet as I hate hearing myself talk. Even worse is seeing myself on video.
In any case, if you are interested,...
If ever someone was undeserving of having others spend their valuable time translating his blog, it would be me. But hey, some people from the http://blog.joycode.com/ site went ahead and did it anyway. I must admit that I’m very flattered that anyone would put the effort in. Before this, I learned that Subtext powers MySpace China's blogs, and now my blog is translated to Chinese. As David Hasselhoff says, “I’m big in China”. (To my Chinese audience, that is a joke. I am quite small.) Technorati Tags: Chinese,China,Blogging
UPDATE: This was an April Fool’s joke. I actually stated this in the bottom of the original post, but in a very small font, which some people noticed. :)
I’m totally done with blogging. Hanging my blogging hat and never looking back. I started blogging on http://haack.org/ way back when around 1998. I tried to include a Wayback Machine archive link, but some domain squatters put a robots.txt file onto haack.org. Bummer. Shoulda held onto that domain.
If you follow my twitter stream, you've probably noticed I've been lamenting about blogging lately. A lot of bloggers, myself included, put an unhealthy amount...
LazyCoder (aka Scott Koon) is organizing a little drinky drink this Wednesday around 6:00 PM-ish at The Three Lions Pub. This is just an informal gathering, not the huge production like the Hanselman Geek Dinner which requires eating at a mall food court because some three hundred plus geeks show up. (Did you know his last geek dinner was covered by the Seattle Times online?). No, this will be a smaller intimate affair. Here’s your chance to get me sloshed by buying me beers in order to slip your pet feature into ASP.NET MVC. If it’s a really crazy...
My family and I recently moved into our new home after a two month stay in temporary housing. One of the perks of moving is when your stuff is delivered from storage, it feels like Christmas again. “Oooh! Look at all the boxes I get to unwrap. Hey! I have a Stereo just like this one!”.
I have a tendency to get distracted by the things I’m unwrapping. For example, I found a few of my old college Math textbooks. I started thumbing through the Complex Analysis, Abstract Algebra, and Number theory books and they seemed like total gibberish to me....
You don’t so much return from Las Vegas as you recover from Las Vegas. Right now, I am recovering from my Las Vegas trip. Recovering from Vegas Nose caused by the extremely dry air and massive second hand smoke inhalation. Recovering from the sensory onslaught they call casinos. Recovering from the fake kitschiness and manafactured excitement as people sit like zombies feeding machines their life savings. Yet despite all that, I still love the place. Maybe because despite the bad things, Vegas is really the Disneyland for adults with a slight bad streak inside that yearns to get...
Well today I turn old. 33 years old to be exact. A day after Hanselman turns really old. It seems I’m always following in that guy’s footsteps doesn’t it? Oh look, Hanselman gets a blue badge so Phil has to go and get a blue badge. Hanselman has a birthday and Phil has to go and have a birthday on the next day. What a pathetic follower! What’s interesting is that Rob Conery’s birthday was just a few days ago and we’re all recent hires and involved in MVC in some way. Ok, maybe...
No, the title of this post isn’t suggesting that L.A. is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route. It’s pretty much already one big freeway already, isn’t it? ;) Seriously though, I am going to miss this wonderful city after spending the last fourteen years here. A lot of people look at L.A. as a place they could never live. I thought that myself coming from Alaska, but boy was I wrong. I think the weather alone is enough to move to L.A. Perhaps the only place with better weather...
You’ve been forewarned, this is yet another end-of-year slightly self-inflating retrospective blog post (complete with the cheesy meta-blogging introduction). But this year for me was quite significant and full of big changes. On a personal level, this was the year the agent of my little world domination plan was hatched. He was tiny then, but six months later, he’s gotten quite big. He’s remained in the 95th percentile in height for a baby his age. As much fun as it has been with Cody, he’s never taken his devious eye off the prize...
UPDATE: We released Subtext 2.0 which also includes the fix for this vulnerability among many other bug fixes.
A Subtext user reported a security vulnerability due to a flaw in our integration with the FCKEditor control which allows someone to upload files into the images directory without being authenticated.
As far as we know, nobody has been seriously affected, but please update your installation as soon as possible. Our apologies for the inconvenience.
The fix should be relatively quick and painless to apply.
The Fix
If you’re running Subtext 1.9.* we have a fix available consisting of a single assembly, Subtext.Providers.BlogEntryEditor.FCKeditor.dll. After you download it...
It was only two and a half months ago when I wrote about receiving my Microsoft MVP award. I was quite honored to receive this award. In a follow-up comment to that post, rich with unintentional foreshadowing, I mentioned the following... However, I would like to hit up that MVP conference in Redmond before doing anything to cause my MVP status to be dropped. Unfortunately, I will not be retaining my MVP status long enough for the MVP conference. I have committed an action that has forced Microsoft’s hand in this matter and they must remove my MVP status....
The shirt forgets to list a couple spells. Charm Person and Stinking Cloud. Via Cool Thing Of The Day via Scott Kuhl.
Not too long ago I announced that my wife and I are expecting a baby this year as part of our world domination plans. Adding fuel to our plans is the discovery that this year is a special year according to the Chinese Zodiac.
It is not only the year of the Pig, it is the Year of the Golden Pig. According to Chinese Folklore, this is an event that occurs once in every 600 years and will ensure that a baby born on this year will experience a prosperous and wealthy life.
This legend is so popular, that Korea is expected...
No, this was definitely not a good sight for me. With my team pressing the attack, an unfortunate turnover left our defense out of position to help as the opposing team quickly capitalized. (Click on any pic for a larger view).
Squinting toward the sun, I saw 6’ 3" Ezra Hendrickson of the Columbus Crew barreling towards me, the last man back on defense. Fortunately his midfielder’s cross was a bit too long, allowing me to pluck it out of Ezra’s path.
With Ezra backtracking towards me attempting to regain the attack, I looked up for a midfielder to distribute the...
UPDATE: This code is now hosted in the Subkismet project on CodePlex.
Not too long ago I wrote about using heuristics to fight comment spam. A little later I pointed to the NoBot control as an independent implementation of the ideas I mentioned using Atlas.
I think that control is a great start, but it does suffer from a few minor issues that prevent me from using it immediately.
It requires Atlas and Atlas is pretty heavyweight.
Atlas is pre-release right now.
We’re waiting on a bug fix in Atlas...
Update: You can click on the images (except the vegas one) to see larger pics. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently on a road trip with my younger brother, which explains the lack of blogging. This crazy kid started off from Anchorage and drove down the Alaskan Highway (which is known for being gravelly and unpaved in parts) and made his way to Los Angeles. And that is just the first leg of his drive. His final destination is Luverne, Minnesota where he will live for a year interning with a pastor at the local church....
UPDATE: Sorry, but this site appears to be down now. I'll try to find the tools and upload them elsewhere.
My colleague Jon Galloway has been on a spree of unleashing useful tools lately. I released a few of my own as well.
One thing in common with these little tools and utilities is that we are hosting them on our new company tools site, http://tools.veloc-it.com/.
These tools are little scripts and apps that we use internally to increase our efficiency. Many of them relieve us from the drudgery of boring repetitive tasks. Quite likely, these are the tools that...
Watched a free screening of this last night in Downtown Los Angeles as part of a film festival. Prior to the screening, Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora played some live music and Al Gore was on hand to introduce the movie. Mayor Villaraigosa was also there oddly suited in a tux and comically referring to Richie as Richie Santora.
The basic premise of the documentary is that humans are affecting the Earth’s climate, this is a very bad thing, we can do something about it, and we don’t have to destroy the economy to do it.
This particular premise...
Security expert Bruce Schneier writes a fantastic essay on the value of privacy. This is a great response to the rhetorical question “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?” often used to counter privacy advocates.
A couple key points he makes.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
...
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny....
So Adam Kinney isn’t quite as ga-ga over Oblivion as I. Understandable. As he points out, it is missing the key ingredient of social interaction with other real humans.
Now why would you want to interact with other humans when you have the computer? ;) I suppose it is true that conversation via a drop down list isn’t doesn’t produce quite as stimulating a conversation. What if the AI reaches the point that a game like Oblivion is indistinguishable from an online multi-player game? Would that be as satisfying?
I digress. As Adam states,
I don't...
So after getting my Yahoo password phished, my wife reminded me that we should put a fraud alert on our credit file. I first heard about this from my friend Walter a while ago, but we never got around to it.
This is a flag that the major credit bureaus (experian, equifax, and TransUnion) attach to your credit report. If someone (including yourself) tries to open up a new credit account, the lender is supposed to (though not required by law) to contact you by phone to make sure that you really do want to open a new account.
Keep...
I am absolutely livid with my company’s bank right now and I need to blow off some steam. We had two recent deposits reversed because of a missing endorsement. This is odd because I am always careful to sign every check. Well it turns out that they changed their endorsement policy on March 31 and didn’t bother to notify us.
The problem is not that the new requirements are so onerous, they are not, but that without notification, I have no way of knowing the new requirements. Adding to the problem is that they mail the checks back...
Ryan Farley gives the lowdown on his tricked out desktop.
In the past I’ve tried to get into tricking out the desktop, but everytime I switched to a new computer, I felt less and less inclined to do invest the time. Besides, I remember some of these programs would slow down the OS. I like my desktop to be lean and mean.
But after seeing Ryan’s screenshot, I may have to consider playing around with some of the customizations.
It’s funny to me how many geeks I know would dread spending time selecting drapery and customizing the small details of their...
When you hear the phrase, “use your head” you are typically being told to think. There are other uses of the head that are quite unwise. For example, trying to clear a soccer ball away from another player rushing in on the attack when you are a step too late. Unfortunately that’s exactly what I tried today. My head just happened to get in the way of the shoulder of the onrushing soccer player when we both jumped to try and win the ball. It was really no contest as his shoulder won, leaving a nice inch long...
In a blatant ripoff of Scott H, I am going to post the best of “You’ve Been Haacked” 2005 edition. This year, you laughed, you cried and when you were done, you came over and briefly glanced at my blog. But I took it in stride and continued to write, rant and rave... and this was the best I could come up with in 20051.
Technical
Quickstart Guide to Open Source Development with CVS and SourceForge
Hopefully this helps get many .NET devs to get involved in open source.
An Abstract Boilerplate HttpHandler
Wherein I first ripoff Scott, make a slight improvement, and...
If Joel can do it with FogBugz, I can try and do it with my blog. That “it” being to post a picture of the day.
This is one of many metro entrances in Bilbao, Spain, home of the Guggenheim Bilbao. As I stated in a previous post, Bilbao is full of interesting design touches like these cool entrances.
Strangely enough, we never went in the metro in Bilbao because everything we wanted to see was within walking distance or a short bus ride.
Wired News has a very interesting article on History’s worst software flaws.
It makes me think of my worst software bug when I first started off as an ASP developer right out of college. I was working on a large music community website and was told to implement a “Forgot Password” feature. Sounds easy enough. I coded it, ran a quick test, and then deployed it (that alone should rankle your feathers).
We didn’t quite have a formal deployment process at the time. A few days later, we find out that the code never sent out any emails, and never...
Who I am
In case you were wondering, not that I have any reason to believe you were, Haacked is not my real name.
In the offline world, (which some prefer to call the “real world”), people tend to call me Phil Haack (pronounced, you guessed it, “hack”) — unless of course they are calling me more colorful names as is sometimes deserved.
Haacked is simply my blogger handle (creative, eh?). I also go by @haacked on Twitter
What I do
I recently joined GitHub doing whatever I can to make it even more awesome.
Why I do it
Ever since I first laid my hands...
My former coworker who wrote that 2600 article I mentioned recently sent me this link to a GameSpot review of SkillJam Arcade.
This is the last project the both of us worked on while at SkillJam. We essentially developed all the back-end support and integration into the existing tournament engine for the mobile version of the games. It is quite satisfying to see our work reviewed in a major online publication. Most of the work I have done in the past wasn’t geared toward the consumer market and thus wouldn’t be featured by any reviews....
Putting the ball in the back of the net in a competitive game of Soccer is one of the most exhilarating feelings around. Why, I think it can feel as good as ... well I won’t go there. Suffice to say, it’s a great feeling, even in a city rec league. As long as there are teammates patting you on the back, refs blowing a whistle and a net to capture the shot, it just feels great.
Scoring two in a game, well, that’s even better.
Missing a third great game-winning opportunity, well that almost makes you forget about...
Well I am back home in the good ol’ U.S. of A and strongly feeling the effects of jet lag despite the few coffees I’ve had in a pathetic attempt to stave off the lethargy.
Despite many of the fancy schmancy meals we had (which were all extremely delicious), my favorite meal was when we went out to a gritty smoky Yakitori place in a nook underneath the train tracks in the Ginza district. As you can see in the photo to the right, the place is tucked against the curving wall of the tunnel.
This was my father-in-law’s favorite Yakitori...
In ten minutes we’re getting on the train to go to the Narita airport. I always feel sad when leaving, but excited to get back to work and the exciting opportunities therein. The fact we are flying Singapore airlines is some consolation. They have a fantastic in-flight entertainment system. If only they had wi-fi.
Technorati Tags: japan,tokyo
Yesterday we were given a tour of Asakusa from an old family friend who resides there. He is an “Edoko”, a 3rd generation Tokyo native. Apparently, it takes three generations before you get to carry the Tokyo native membership card. I’m not sure if it gets you into the hottest clubs or not, or even if it at least provides car insurance on rentals, but I am sure it is an honor nonetheless.
Anyways, sources tell me it is the same way for “Parisians”. You’re not a Parisian unless your parents and their parents were born and...
Since I have a free moment (and the internet connection is back up), I thought I’d write a short status update of my trip to Japan. But first, let me point out that I used the term “status update”. What am I? A project manager?
In any case, we’re having a pretty nice time. Below is a little mural of photos I’ve taken thus far. Yes, I have been suppressing my Asian side by not being quite as trigger happy as one would expect.
Meguro Gajoen
One of the highlights so far was our one night stay at the...
For those of you who give a damn, we made it safely to Japan. The trip itself had quite an interesting start in the form of a cab ride to the airport with a, ahem, slightly odd-in-the-head fellow.
It started off innocuously enough as we called a cab to take us to the airport. When the driver called to let us know he was outside, we hurried out looking for the cab, but had difficulty finding it. We then noticed this dark Suburban pull out and the driver gruffly barked that we needed to come over to...
Tomorrow we head off to Tokyo, Japan for a memorial service to celebrate the life of my wife’s father. We’ve both been very busy with our respective work, plowing ahead head down. It finally feels good to lift our heads above the chaos and exclaim...
Holy Shit! We’re leaving for Japan tomorrow and we haven’t packed!
In any case, we are looking forward (as always) to staying with Akumi’s mother and her wonderful cooking. The geek in me enjoys the technological aspect of visiting Tokyo as much as the food. It’s like visiting the Epcot center only cleaner...
I’ve been pretty head down lately with work. But I just had to take a short break to blog this sweet funky song. The refrain is too catchy. You can click on the image to the right to sample the CD at Amazon.
I hope to see you soon
In La La Land.
Something about those little pills
unreal
the thrills
they yield
until they kill a million brain cells.
I have a feeling he’s not singing about a particular physical location, but “La La Land” is a common term for Los Angeles. Breathing the air here will have the same effect as the little...
This is what I was working on before the siren call of independent consulting lured me away.
The new product, which Philp projects to go live next month, will be known as SkillJam Mobile. For the initial product launch, SkillJam Mobile will be separate from the SkillJam.com site, giving users separate log-ons. Philp said the company hopes to combine the two sites in the future.
SkillJam Mobile will offer what Philp calls multipack gaming, an innovative concept in the mobile space. Most carriers have games on their systems but are able to deliver them only one at a time....
I put up an HTML version of my resume on my blog. It has a slight bit more information than my Word resume which I think lends well to the online experience. For a moment I thought about using the Marquee and Blink tags all over and have animated dancing babies, but I don't have the design skills to do that tastefully. I even forgoed adding Google and Amazon ads all over.
Since I'm now an independent consultant, I think it's a good idea to have that sucker online, though I think my blog posts will give the potential...
Do you remember that episode of the Simpsons (number 24 to be exact) where Homer takes his family to a Japanese restaurant and orders the blowfish? Yeah, me too.
My father-in-law took us out to a very traditional Japanese dinner as a celebration of TY's (Akumi's brother) impending wedding. Here's a picture of our room and Akumi listening attentively as our server tells her the menu (or something like that. I couldn't understand as it sounded like a bunch of jibberish to me. I think they call it "Nihongo" or "Japanese" to you and me).
And for the main...
Yesterday, along with Akumi's uncle Tadashi, we visited her grandmother at a rest home. She's a spunky 90 year old woman and gives me great insight into where Akumi gets her rebellious nature from. We took her for a walk and I jumped onto a thin railing. Her reflex wasn't to wave me down for my safety, it was to reach out as if to push me off and cause me to crack my skull. We made sure to push her wheelchair to the edge of the river as if to push her in. ...
After a wonderful time with my family in Anchorage, we flew back to Los Angeles for a day, dropped Twiggy off at a doggy day care, and flew into Tokyo. Below is a picture of Anchorage from our airplane as we were leaving.
The transition from 2004 to 2005 was quite uneventful this year. I think I was asleep when we crossed the international date line. Unfortunately we didn't have a countdown or bubbly. Well there's always next year. New Years Eve is a special day for my wife and I as that is the day...
Sasha is starting a US Residency at Avalon. Noticed this on Groove Tickets. That's pretty sweet as he's one of my favorite DJs.
Technorati Tags:
Music
Americans often have a low view of soccer players (though that is changing in recent years). They don't think of the sport as physical as football or even basketball. However from my experience, soccer players are every bit as tough as their counterparts in other sports.
Case in point, for the past two weekends in L.A. it's been rainy and cold (don't laugh, cold for L.A.). Both weekends we had games scheduled on the most perfect pitch and a full squad showed up. However, there have been several times that we couldn't get a full squad for...
My buddy Dan sent this site to me. You can generate your own church signs.
Or how about this friendly one...
My buddy Ed posted some pics from Burning Man this year. This pedal powered Ferris wheel particularly caught my eye. How cool is that!
When you can't afford a hamster.
I wish I could have been there to try it. Visit Ed's blog to see some more great pics.
NOTE: He's got one of them stupid Xanga blogs so I can't link directly to the entry. You might have to hit the "Next 5" link a few times if you see this much later. The pics were taken on September 29.
Technorati Tags:
Burning Man
So after much deliberation and research, we've decided that we're going to provide a home for a dog. In particular, we hope to adopt an Italian Greyhound from a rescue center. A rescue center is basically a foster home for dogs rescued from the dog pound. A rescue typically specializes in finding homes for a specific breed. For example, there is a Labrador Rescue, a Poodle Rescue, etc...
While paging through pictures and bios of dogs in need of a home, my wife grew really sad and wanted to rescue all of them. But we have...
So today, loads of clean people will be driving through the small town of Gerlach into the temporary city of Black Rock City. Trust me, they won't stay clean for long, and will definitely bring home a souvenir of a nice coating of Playa dust over everything.
They are there to begin a week long festival known as Burning Man. This year's theme is "Vault Of Heaven". I believe my friends Ed and Michael (not Krimm) are going to be out there getting into all sorts of trouble.
I hope you all have a good time out there and be safe....
No, I'm not talking about Pizza from Chicago. I'm talking about this dynamic duo:
As you can see at the bottom, I'm listening to their remix of Dido's Thank You which won a Grammy. These guys are one of my favorite electronica bands out there. They're much more in the deep funky progressive house area. Somewhat dark, without being too malicious. I highly recommend you check them out. Especially this Dido remix.
[Listening to: Dido . Thank you - Deep Dish - Global Underground 021 - Moscow CD1 (7:25)]
Technorati Tags:
Music
UPDATE: I cannot help you move to Alaska. This post was written in 2004. If you want to move to Alaska, please don’t contact me. Try looking for information at the official Alaska homepage. Thanks!
As a relocated Alaskan, I read Rory’s post about moving Canada to the right a bit so that Alaska could join the “lower 48” with amusement. I don’t think that idea would go over too well with Alaskans, as we...er...they take great pride in their independence, not only in spirit, but in location. Not only that, it could affect the fishing season, and you...
UPDATE: I finally followed up with part 2, only 8 years later.
When you ask the average programmer what problems plague the practice of building software, you’ll probably hear responses such as: The impedance mismatch between relational databases and object oriented code. The difficulty of writing secure code. Managing complexity and requirement changes.. Certainly, these are all worthy problems to tackle, but the problem that comes to my mind is how much pain I’m in when I write code and how few people really understand this. I hope to write a series of articles about typing pain...
The video is gone. Sorry.
Innovation happens everywhere. http://www.geeklife.com/files/how-to-fold-clothes.wmv.
I know someone looking to fill a .NET developer position. They're paying around 75K for someone with around 2+ years of experience with ASP.NET, C#, etc... Let me know if you know someone who might be interested.
My man in the field, Koba, found this site with sound bytes from Rumsfield that put him almost in the class of the President himself.
It’s finally official. We are legally, emotionally, officially, proud owners of a townhouse style condo. For you non-LA people, I could buy a 5 bedroom estate in Anchorage, Alaska for what we're paying. Heck, I could buy a 5 bedroom house in Seattle or Portland.
But what that gets us in L.A. is a two bedroom, 2.5 bath 1000 sq ft town house condo.
I don't know if you caught Saturday Night Live this weekend, but the Donald was hosting. He was a bombastic, self aggrandizing, braggart in true Trump fashion. For some reason, it just works for him.
This was one of the funnier episodes of SNL. I especially loved the skit where Trump plays a janitor and Darryl Hammond plays Trump. The janitor walks into Trump's office and starts bagging on the hair, the decor, everything. Classic.
Also attended a baby shower for my good friends the Perezes. Seems like everyone from my college is churning out the babies. There were two...
A group of us went snowboarding at Mammoth mountain this past weekend to celebrate Judy's (Dan's wife) birthday. I won't be so uncouth to tell you how old she turned. We stayed in a nice little condo with the 7 of us.
On the slopes for the first day, the weather was brilliant! It was very bright, sunny and hot, probably around 65 degrees or so. Hot enough for girls in bikini tops to snowboard around, while I was stupid enough to be wearing a long sleeve shirt and my jacket, completely burning up.
This was a good trip for me...
Ok, this post has been effectively deleted. Apparently the link I posted is no longer up. :(
We found a place we like and we're making an offer. Wish us luck.
Bush believes that an amendment is necessary to bring “clarity” to the issue of gay marriage and to preserve the social fabric of our great nation.
Praise Be The Lord! Well Ok Bush, I’m with you. But before we work on that amendment, there’s another Amendment we need to pass first. The Amendment to remove the scourge of Divorce from our country. It is necessary to preserve the social fabric. For it sayeth in the Gospel of Mathew chapter 19 verse 9 (King James Version):
And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and...
We went on a triple date last night with Walt, Celine, Dan, and Judy to eat at Jiraffe. They are having some sort of Monday prefixe special. Unfortunately, a lot of French food has egg product in it to give it an added richness, which makes it difficult for my wife. I, on the other hand, had no problem with any of the food. Especially the Fois Gras. Very rich and tasty!
Let's see. On Friday we went to see a sneak preview of Starsky and Hutch. If you liked Zoolander, I think you'll like this. It's not the same, but has similar type of humor. It's hard to approach Zoolander in my book, but Starksy and Hutch does well.
Saturday played a game of soccer in the cold rain. Had a stalwart crew of 10 people out there.
And on Sunday, slept in till noon, had lunch in Eagle Rock, and basically had a nice relaxing lazy day.
Yesterday Akumi, Laura, Judy, and I drove to Mountain High (not a reference to smoking out) for a day of snowboarding. This would be my second time snowboarding since the big Conversion from skiing. Right now, I would rate myself as an intermediate snowboarder and advanced intermediate skiier.
Mountain High is only a two hour drive away from Los Angeles, which makes it ideal for a day trip. The only problem is that it’s only two hours away, meaning anybody and everybody shows up. To start the day, we took a lift up the beginner hill to get warmed up, and...