Basketball was ugly this morning. Lots of bickering and fouling. Dan, you didn’t miss much man. Sometimes you just want to slap everyone upside the head and tell them to grow up and graduate from Pre-School. But that’s insulting to pre-schoolers who are much more mature than the fellas this morning. Then again, sometimes you wish you’d just make the damn game winning shot instead of clanking it in and out.

One pet peeve I have is how the auto completion works regarding methods. I know this is nitpicky, but I’m wondering how other IDE’s that try to help you handle this. Suppose I type out the following and am about to hit the open parenthesis character.

I’m trying to convince my coworkers that we should use the Isolated development mode for ASP.NET projects as described in the Patterns and Practices document Team Development with Visual Studio .NET and Visual SourceSafe. They’ve agreed to read the document and we’ll meet to discuss. I hope the document convinces them, because I’ve had too many headaches in the past dealing with FrontPage extensions.

Ian Griffiths finds a niggle about my post on sockets.

Odd yet interesting.

After hearing so much about how IntelliJ IDEA is the ideal IDE and blows every other IDE to smithereens from various Java pundits (and even a friend who’s a C# and Java developer), I was excited to try out Resharper 1.0.2 from Jetbrains, the maker of IDEA.

No, I’m not talking about Pizza from Chicago. I’m talking about this dynamic duo:

The path of least resistance when writing threading code as well as socket communications is to use techniques that cause indefinite blocking of some sort. Personally, I prefer never to block indefinitely. For example, it’s quite common to see code such as:

This seems to be my favorite geek subject, but I have to tell you a success story using Ian Griffith’s Timed Lock struct with my enhancement.

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility!

This posting is GoMeme 4.0. It is part of an experiment to see if we can create a blog posting that helps 1000’s of blogs get higher rankings in Google. So far we have tried 3 earlier variations. Our first test, GoMeme 1.0, spread to nearly 740 blogs in 2.5 days. This new version 4.0 is shorter, simpler, and fits more easily into your blog.

Why are we doing this? We want to help thousands of blogs get more visibility in Google and other search engines. How does it work? Just follow the instructions below to re-post this meme in your blog and add your URL to the end of the Path List below. As the meme spreads onwards from your blog, so will your URL. Later, when your blog is indexed by search engines, they will see the links pointing to your blog from all the downstream blogs that got this via you, which will cause them to rank your blog higher in search results. Everyone in the Path List below benefits in a similar way as this meme spreads. Try it!

Instructions: Just copy this entire post and paste it into your blog. Then add your URL to the end of the path list below, and pass it on! (Make sure you add your URLs as live links or HTML code to the Path List below.)

Path List\

1. Minding the Planet\
2. Luke Hutteman’s public virtual MemoryStream\
3. JayBaz_MS blog\
4. You’ve Been Haacked! and you like it.\
5. (your URL goes here! But first, please copy this line and move it down to the next line for the next person).

(NOTE: Be sure you paste live links for the Path List or use HTML code.)\

Dave Winer writes:

Having been on one of the most beautiful hikes during our trip to Seattle, it would be a grave disservice not to post a few pictures of the hike here. For all you Microsofties out there (and other geeks in Washington state), I highly recommend getting out of the office for this hike. Bring some water and sunscreen.

This is too funny. Rory talks about his dog and his visionary ideas for improving dogs in general.

Patrick Cauldwell points out that the challenge of coding a business app isn’t in writing the code, that’s easy. The challenge is in understanding business requirements, and not because developers and architects can’t understand plain English.

I’m happily married, but if you’re not, and you live in L.A., I recommend you take your dog for a walk at the Barrington Dog Park, on the east side of Barrington just south of Sunset. We were playing a game of soccer, but we couldn’t help noticing that all the talent was in the dog park area adjacent to us. Looked like a bonafide LA pickup joint.

If you’re a lazy mofo like me, there’s one thing you’re not lazy about, getting out of having to do a lot of work. An important skill that should be on every lazy developer’s utility belt is the ability to understand requirements.

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!

There ought to be a law that requires employers to give their charges the day off due to great weather. Back in Alaska, we’d have the day off when it dropped to -60 F with snow up to your nostrils. They call it a “snow day”. Well there ought to be a “good weather day”.

We saw a fantastic movie at the Landmark last night called Twilight Samurai. It stars Hiroyuki Sanada who played the bad ass in The Last Samurai who beats the crap out of Tom Cruise and was the Samurai leader’s second in command.

My friend Julie showed me and Akumi around the campus today. She works for the Finance department in Building 4. When I say “campus”, Microsoft really has a collegiate feel to it. We even saw a group sitting in a circle in a plot of grass having what appeared to be a discussion group. We had lunch at the cafeteria there and the food reminded me of my college dining hall, not terrible, but nothing to write blog about.