I haven't been able to watch much TV because of all the stuff that I've been doing for school and work, but I am happy that Scrubs is coming back tonight.

I recently installed Windows Server Server 2003 x64 R2 on my main box to play with IIS, Sharepoint, and some other server tools. In the process of getting ready for a test I have coming up, I wanted to print out a sample from the instructor, so I went to HP's website to grab the driver. Problem is, they don't have a driver for my OS. They do have a driver for XP x64, so I figure it would probably work. Downloaded and run the installer, and it gives me a splash screen with an exit button. No error message, just an exit button.

I searched the net a bit to see if I could find a driver for my OS, but there was nothing. Seems getting a $20 printer to work on a $3500 OS isn't a common thing. I went ahead and browsed to the temp directory where the driver was trying to install from, and ran the executable directly, and got an error telling me my OS wasn't supported, and I should look at upgrading. Sure, soon as Longhorn Server comes out, but I doubt they'll have a driver for that.

I tried manually installing the printer from the Add Printer button in the Control Panel. Bingo. It installed perfectly, then automatically ran the installer that told me it wouldn't work for some reason. I just printed, though, so I know it works.

I am officially registered for the Halo 3 Pre-Launch in Mountain View. My ADE got in touch with Jason Mauer, who got me the invite. As I understand it, they may be over-booked for the event as it is, so I'm really grateful that I could get in, but that means I'm going to make the drive on my own. I'll post some pictures when the event comes around.

I got an email yesterday letting me know that I was invited to a Pre-Launch party for Halo 3. Hooray, I thought. Then I looked at the location. Irvine. Hmm... Never heard of that, let's see what the map has. OK, that's Irvine, zoom out. Damn. Right by L.A. Can't quite justify an 8 hour drive, though I've gone further for less.

Good news is, I called my contact that gave me the invite, and he let me know that they were holding an event in SF. Now I'm back to Hooray! Hopefully, I'll get the invite shortly.

I'm really specific on certain things. Writing instruments have always been one of those things. In high school, it was the Dixon Ticonderoga #2. It had the best eraser, that didn't rip a hole in your paper, and wouldn't turn it pink. When I needed a pen, it was a BIC Round Stic Grip, the clear tube ball point with a rubber grip. My current choice of implements is a Pentel Quicker-Clicker 5mm, and a Pilot G-2, Extra Fine.

I went out looking for a replacement pencil last night, and it turns out that only one store seems to carry the things, and they were out. Chico needs a stationary store.

Is it really over all ready?

My classes seem good so far, but the four classes I was planning on taking turned in to six. One that I'm quite excited about is a new class based on competitive coding. We're focusing on techniques that will be useful for competitions such as the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. I was a competitor last year, but we didn't have much warning, and as such, we didn't do incredibly well. Interestingly, in the three weeks leading up to the event, I learned a lot of tricks that came in really handy on some of my programming assignments.

The student organizations I'm working with seem like they'll take a lot of time this semester. I'm trying to get a lot of students involved in these clubs, and get some cooperation going for events. I'll be attending four organization meetings next week, so we'll see how that turns out.

I made your standard issue Philadelphia Cheese Cake today. Turns out if you half their recipe and only use 2 packages of cream cheese, you get exactly enough filling for one of those Honey Maid graham cracker pie crusts. I'm planning on topping it with some ice cream topping strawberries, because I already had them, and the store I was at didn't have little cans of cherries.

I made quiche for the second time ever tonight. My last quiche was delicious, but a bit runny. I modified the recipe I used last time by using less egg, and adding shrimp. I also wrapped the edge of the crust with tin foil, which I remember will keep it from burning. The recipe I based this quiche on is here. I'll let you know how the modified recipe turns out.

Edit: The quiche was good, but I need to meet in the middle. The reduced eggs made the spinach a little over powering. The shrimp was a great addition. My wife recommended that I add mushrooms next time.

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?"