A friend recommended BigWords to me after I had already bought my books my first semester back in college. Luckily, she did so before the week they give you to return the books runs out, and I was able to cut my costs down by more than half. This year, I've luckily got some friends who have taken most of the classes I'm taking, and the teachers haven't switched to a new edition because they like the new font. Turns out I'm only buying one book, but I saved about $100 on it.

I'm at my dad's place for a couple of days, which is far enough in the mountains that he only has dial-up. Makes you remember just how nice cable internet really is.

I met with my investment guy yesterday to talk about getting some money out for college for my last year. When we finished talking about what I needed to talk to him about, he asked me to take a look at his laptop to see if I could figure out how to copy some music over to his Palm. I took a look, and he showed me the set of songs that he had purchased on Rhapsody. Rhapsody had an option to copy music to a portable device, but apparently they don't think of a SD card as a portable device, and it wouldn't transfer the files. I could transfer them manually, but they had some weird extension, and were DRM protected from being read without being signed in. I told him that we could free his music by burning it to a CD and then ripping it, or by getting a tool that would strip the DRM from it, but that he was better off buying music from a source that doesn't prevent him from doing what he was trying to do in the first place. I told him about Magnatune, though they don't have the tracks he was looking for, and about iTunes going DRM free for an extra fee. Either way, I doubt he's getting the money back from Rhapsody that he spent under the impression that he would be able to play it on his portable device.

Jason Mauer just tipped me off to a couple of Vista updates for performance and reliability. Head on over to Jason's blog entry for the details and download links.

They're showing off some tools that remind me a lot of Expression. I've got to go to the Flex Vs. Silverlight event next month.

So the main event is about to start. I was pretty impressed by the FlexBuilder 3 IDE. They gave me a copy of version 2, so I'll have to give that a go.

I was interviewed earlier this week for IBM's developerWorks podcast. I haven't listened to it yet, but here it is:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int072407.html

So I've recovered from MashupCamp. I came in without a lot of knowledge about mashups. I'd done some screen scraping and aggregating different web sites, but it was always brute force, no API usage or anything. Between Mashup U and MashupCamp, I learned a lot about the whole scene. I met some people from Dapper, uLocate, IBM, and Bungee Labs that had some tools that I hadn't seen before. Mashups will definitely be a topic early next semester.

I'm at my friend's house in SF, getting ready to head to Mashup U.

I've set up a calendar and a map with the events in the area. The points on the map have links to the calendar items in them, so if you find an event you want to attend, you can automatically add it to your Google calendar. I'm working on making the whole map thing automatic, mashup style, but until then, I'll just have to update these things manually.

Calendar and Map

A big part of the reason I left work and returned to school was that reached a point where I wasn't learning as much as I wanted to be. My environment had turned to one where I was working more or less in isolation, so any new advances I made were done on my own time, and any time I encountered a problem I couldn't figure out, I would have to scour message boards, hoping someone had had a similar problem that I could adapt the solution from.

Initially, I was hired to do some refactoring and maintain the parts of the software that the two other guys couldn't get to without straying from the major fixes and updates the software needed. I really enjoyed the environment these guys had created, and was learning a lot about object oriented development, source control, bug tracking, server tools, and working on a team. We got some good practices set in place, moved from sending out whatever build we had around to a latest release version, and really stabilized the product. Unfortunately, this came a little late, and one of the other developers had burned out and decided to leave. About that time, I had really come into my own as a developer, and so I took over his project, and soon had it working faster and better than ever.

The ultimate goal when I was hired was to rewrite the software that I had now inherited. We had gone through the planning stage a few times before the third guy had left, but always got pulled off to do some modifications to our existing projects before we could really get anywhere. I never got to do that project, but the planning phases introduced me to .NET, which I used when I got the chance to write an application from the ground up. I really grew to like the tools I was using for this project. The application was written in C# with a SQL Server 2005 Express server running in the background for the data.

I had participated to the best of my ability in the community around .NET, including attending what developer events my company would allow. After attending some great events, especially the MSDN Events and Code Camp up in Portland, I began to wonder if I could do something like that. I'd always enjoyed giving presentations and working with people, and it would give me a chance to stay current with the new technology coming out.

After returning to school, I got the chance to work with a lot of the students and faculty, and found that there was almost no Microsoft culture on campus. One of the students I met up with heard that I had worked with Microsoft, and recommended that I apply for the Microsoft Student Ambassador program, now called the Microsoft Student Partner program, on campus. Unfortunately, I was a bit too late for that year's application, but I was told to apply again towards the end of the school year. In the meantime, I worked for a short time doing some development with ASP.NET on campus, and worked towards identifying ways that I could help bring some .NET loving to campus.

At the end of the last semester, spurred on by a conversation I had with Anand Iyer at an event down in San Francisco, I gave a presentation as part of the series of talks put on by UPE, the computer science honors society, on what .NET is, and what you can do with it. It was an overview of the different tools available, the Express versions of the studio, XNA, the Micro Framework, Compact Framework, Mono, that kind of thing. The primary reason I gave the talk was to spread the word and gauge the interest on the idea of starting a Dot Net User Group in Chico. Around this time, I became the events coordinator for UPE, and had sent in my application for the Student Partner program. I had some big plans for the upcoming school year, and I knew that with these positions, they would be within reach.

Well, after all that, the ultimate reason for this post is that yesterday, I got an email saying that I had been accepted into the program. The only thing left is to submit proof of eligibility for employment, and I should be good to go. Now I've got to make up the site for the Dot Net User Group, contact a few of the presenters who said they would be interested in coming up to talk, get the working group for developer certification up and going, and create enough content for the UPE talks.

I left at 3:30 to head down to Sacramento for the user group meeting. I got the agenda for the meeting very last minute, but the topic was LINQ, so I had to go. The presenter was Doug Holland, a C# MVP working for Intel. He admitted up front that he hadn't done too much work with LINQ, but the session went well regardless. It started off with some things that C# 2.0 does, then went on to 3.0, and how it all came together to make LINQ possible. The format of the talk was almost entirely in the IDE, I think there were three slides. I've always liked that format. I don't know why I always make my talks so PowerPoint heavy.

After the meeting, I stuck around with the presenter and a few other attendees and talked about computer stuff for another 45 minutes. From what I heard, Intel seems like an interesting place to work. Richard was pointing out all kinds of jobs listed from Intel, and all of the developer positions he showed me were .NET.

After the meeting, I headed back to Chico to see the new Die Hard movie. I got to the theater around 11:30 for the midnight showing, where my brother and Steven were holding seats. The movie was incredible. I got up to hit the restroom after McClane took out Mai, and rushed back to find that the fight had been far from over, and they were somehow in an SUV, hanging in an elevator shaft.

I found it very funny that while I had absolutely no problem with the fights, car chases, and the killing of a helicopter with a car, but I kept thinking things like "They wouldn't get reception in the server room" and "If the phone system was knocked out, how does OnStar still work?"

I had a great time at ReMIX07. It would have been better if I had read the agenda a little closer, though. I got to the campus where it was being held at 7:00 after a wrong turn that cost me a bit of time. Had to wait until they let us up at 7:30, and as I was looking through the schedule, I found out that the event proper didn't start until 9:00. That's nearly two hours of sleep I could have had. Luckily, they had a barista on site who dispensed free espresso based drinks.

The keynote was great, and prompted me to write down that I need to have cool videos like they have for my presentations. They give you a good look at what can be done with the software without taking up too much time, and really help to whet the appetite.

Between Expression Studio and Silverlight, which uses Expression heavily, I was most excited to get home and try out Expression Media Converter. I ran immediately into a problem caused by the fact that I am running Windows Vista Business N, which doesn't come with Windows Media Player 11 installed by default. Apparently, this wasn't taken into account, because I got a hard crash. It was pretty tough to submit a bug, too. I had just spoken with one of the PMs for Expression, but I didn't get his email, and the page I would submit a bug for on any other part of the studio was missing an option for Expression Media. I ended up posting something in a discussion board for it. Hope they get it.

Even after I got everything up and running, I was having trouble with the videos I was trying to convert. I think it had more to do with the videos, as I had quite a bit of trouble with some of the other encoders I had tried in the past, like Gordian Knot. The only thing I can get to work with them is Sony Vegas, which I guess makes sense, seeing as the videos are coming from a Sony HDD camcorder. Once I've got the videos converted over to VC-1, I can drop them into Media Encoder, and everything works from there. I embedded the video into a player, which required a second conversion, but then I swapped out the double encoded file for the video I got out of Sony Vegas, and everything worked great. I tried to post it to this site, but I don't have full control. I'm still working on it, though, so we'll see how it turns out.

While I was working on all this, I came across an article on streaming video to the Xbox 360, since they just picked up support for more formats. I set up the sharing, and was able to open a couple of the files I did in Vegas no problem. I'll have to set up the 360 in my bedroom with the projector.

I got into the Popfly Alpha a little while ago, but when I tried to use the addin for Visual Studio, it wouldn't connect to the server. I did some looking around on the web, and found out that they had a server problem following an upgrade. I just checked this morning, and it's back up, so hopefully, I'll be able to a Popfly gadget to the page soon. I'll let you know how it goes.

Seems like I've been going down to the bay area more and more often lately, and every time I wait in line to pay the toll, I tell myself I'll sign up for one of the FasTrak passes. Well, I called and left myself a voice mail so I would remember this time, and just finished signing up. They said it will take from 5-7 days, so I won't get it in time for my trip Friday, but I'm sure I'll be down again before long.

I just got back from San Francisco, where I attended a talk given by three of the program managers of the .NET CLR team. I got a lot of insight into some of the tools I had used in my winforms development. I've really learned so much since I left my previous application development project and returned to school. Sometimes I wish I could go back and take care of the problems I had encountered and didn't know how to address at the time.

The talk started off with a bit on garbage collection by Claudio Caldato. To be honest, I had no idea how it worked before the talk. I had never had a problem with it, so I'd never gone into it. Turns out, a lot has been done to allow developer control over GC. I meant to ask after the session, but the only problem I've experienced that I think might have been helped with better control over garbage collection was working with unmanaged assemblies through com interop. I got his card though, so I might contact him about it if I don't see him on Friday at ReMIX.

I learned loads about NGEN from Surupa Biswas, and why I got a lot of speed out of it where others might not have. Turns out I avoided a lot of potential problems without even knowing they were there. I was writing my code with separate DLLs, then combining them with ILMerge to make deployment easier and increase run-time. Turns out this was helping in that with a single executable, I wasn't seeing code page collisions like I might have if I had kept them separate. I also learned of a potential problem with what I was doing if it gets deployed to Vista, which hadn't been released at the time, so you can't blame me.

The highlight of the talk had to be what I saw on the steps being taken to simplify threading, presented by Judd Hall. I used threads primarily to keep things responsive, and didn't go deep in to optimization or multi-processor coding. Even the simple threading I was doing was rather difficult to grasp, and I'm not totally sure that I was using the concepts such as anonymous delegates like I should have been. Some of the upcoming things like LINQ, PLINQ, and the ease of adding parallel processing to code are very exciting.

Overall, I really enjoyed the event, and I even won a book, to boot. Gotta love events where they give out free stuff. Which reminds me, I really need to start going after sponsors for my events.

If you look over to the left of my page, there should be a list of events coming up that I have been watching. My next step is to get my feet wet with PopFly, create an iCal feed, and a calendar control to consume it. Ideally, filtering by location and distance would be nice.

I went over to my older brother's house in Fort Bragg to go diving for abalone Thursday and Friday with my dad and younger brother. We planned on getting a camping spot over by the beach so we could make the low tide around 6:00 AM. My brother tried to get us a spot, but everything was full, since this was going to be the lowest tide of the year. We decided to crash at his place instead, and since we no longer needed to set up camp, we had enough time to go get some crabs. We ended up with six crabs, and three abalones a piece. Mine are the small ones on the right.

I've got a lot of stuff I'm working towards right now, so I'm just going to list them off for future reference.

SCUBA certification
Learn to roller blade
MCPD certification
.NET User Group web site
Timeline application
Silicon Valley Code Camp
Compile a cookbook with video
Laptop or tablet
Patch hole in the wall
Check on insurance for next school year

The last MSDN event I went to down in San Francisco, I met up with Anand Iyer, who recommended that I attend MIX07. I went home, went to register, and found out that it was too late. They had booked solid. I learned a few things at Code Camp in Portland shortly thereafter that got me really wanting to learn more about Silverlight, and a recent talk at the Sacramento .NET User Group by Scott Stanfield of Vertigo made me regret missing the MIX event even more. I read on Anand's blog that they are hosting an event down in Mountain View called ReMIX07, with much of the content of the original.

More information here: http://www.undertheradarblog.com/remix07.html