Archive for September, 2007

Grand Central – the Service, not the Terminal

Posted on September 29th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under services, user experience | 1 Comment

Check out Grand Central (the Service, not the Terminal). Recently purchased by Google (and only available in the US for now), Grand Central unifies all your phone numbers into a single number. Here’s how it works, in a nutshell. You select a local number anywhere in the continental United States. Then you enter all your [...]

"Web 2.0" is Making My Head Explode

Posted on September 20th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under misc | 1 Comment

I saw this thing called inviteshare.com today (via Mike), which is apparently the way to get invited to the hottest and latest Web-2.0-social-networking-mashup-who-even-has-the-time sites. I was struck by just how many sites there are with ridiculous names who will connect you to your BFF, cure cancer, clothe the poor, and apparently they do all that [...]

Save I3DIR Files to CSV with PowerShell

Posted on September 18th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under interactive intelligence, powershell | 2 Comments

Here’s a post that will apply to exactly 0.3 people out there. But I think it’s a great story of how PowerShell came to the rescue for one of our customers.
A support request came in this morning for a customer who had accidentally deleted the source for one of their data sources. (Background: our client [...]

Why I’m Not Going to Show Ads… Yet

Posted on September 15th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under blogging | 3 Comments

A few days ago I signed up for Google Adsense and put a few ads on my blog. I figured there’s enough traffic coming in that maybe it’ll pay for the hosting fees and “break even”, which is all I wanted. But I had one problem – I hate ads.  Actually let me qualify that. [...]

Your Code is Suboptimal!

Posted on September 11th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under humor, misc | Comments Off

I just can’t pass up a free t-shirt, even when “free” is relative. It didn’t cost me any money–that’s free in my book. I’ve been known to head to Kohl’s and stock up on $3 t-shirts around the 4th of July.
So, here’s to Eric Sink for giving me a cheap-as-free shirt, thanks!

(Click to see my [...]

Visual Studio 2005 Debugging Tips

Posted on September 11th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments Off

I was going to post more on some neat tips that John Robbins showed us in a Mastering .NET Debugging class, but when I did some searching to see what was out there I came across Jim Gries’ helpful blog. He’s posted about pretty much every item I had on my list, so just subscribe [...]

The Talented Mr. Edit.GoToFindCombo

Posted on September 11th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under Uncategorized | 11 Comments

In the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley, Matt Damon plays Tom Ripley, “a young underachiever”. Ripley is gifted at improvisation and impersonation, but he takes an obsession too far.
Apparently our Visual Studio friend the “Go To Find Combo” (weird name, I know–from this point on I’m just going to call the dang thing the “Find” [...]

New Google Reader Features

Posted on September 6th, 2007 by aaron
Filed under Uncategorized | Comments Off

Recently Roy Osherove mentioned that regardless of how much people love Google Reader he won’t use it, citing the lack of search functionality. Which is funny, really, because I mean it’s Google, for crying out loud. Why can’t I search my feeds?? I feel you, Roy. Of course, I still use it anyway, and here’s [...]

Symbol Server Transaction Manager

Posted on September 1st, 2007 by aaron
Filed under debugging, tools | 17 Comments

Part of the recent Mastering .NET Debugging course I took covered setting up and using Microsoft’s Symbol Server technology – something that’s been around for a while, but yet many people don’t do it. While it’s incredibly useful to have a symbol server set up to contain operating system symbols (the LAN is faster than [...]