PersonalMusings - Duncan Mackenzie .NET

Three Cups of Tea is a great book…

Duncan — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:40:00 GMT

One positive side to being stuck at home for two weeks is that I was able to do a fair bit more reading. For the most part, I read magazines and watched movies, but my wife also brought me the book “Three Cups of Tea” about Greg Mortenson’s work in Pakistan building schools for the children of poor rural areas. Mr. Mortenson, an avid mountain climber, ended up spending time in a small village near the base of K2 in Pakistan, barely making it down alive after a failed attempt to reach the summit. Spending time with those people made quite an affect on him and from that point on he was on a mission to build schools and otherwise help out the people of that area. The book is great reading, dealing with exciting events, perilous adventures and important issues … all taking place in an area of the world that is completely foreign to many of us. Check it out, read more reviews or buy it here “Three Cups of Tea” in paperback from amazon.com.

At home, recovering from surgery

Duncan — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:31:00 GMT

It has been a crazy past few months for my health, or at least the appearance of my health.

For about 30-something years now, I’ve had problems with my tonsils. This has included one or more bouts per year of tonsillitis, quite a few cases of strep throat and a ton of colds that just seem to end up hitting me as sore throats and lasting way longer than it seems like they should. All standard symptoms of someone who needs their tonsils removed, which is what various doctors have been telling me and my parents for the past 30-something years :)

When I still lived at home, and this decision wasn’t up to me, it turns out that my grandfather (who was a pediatrician) disagreed with how quickly most doctors would removed tonsils, so whenever a doctor would suggest that I have mine out he would suggest that we just wait and see if the problem went away on its own. The problem of the moment would always go away, even if it was due to come back in a few months, so we kept that cycle up for many years. Eventually, I became an adult and it became my problem… and it wasn’t long before I ended up noticing the pattern of illness hitting my throat and headed into see a doctor. Canadian healthcare is great if you need something and if you don’t have the money to pay for it, but that benefit produces a system that is generally short on resources. When you go into a Canadian doctor, in my experience, with something that isn’t absolutely necessary (even if it would be a good idea in the long run) then they are likely to suggest you not bother with the procedure, that you try a prescription instead or just waiting it out. That lack of enthusiasm, combined with my own lack of confidence about what I needed, led to many more years without my tonsils being removed. Over the past few years in the US medical system though, I’ve had so many different doctors look at my throat and straight-out tell me that my tonsils really need to come out, that I finally decided to do it. I made the appointment and on Tuesday of this week, they were removed. Now I’m stuck at home, recovering, with a very sore throat and some great prescription pain killers…

What makes this whole experience a bit confusing to my co-workers is that I’ve also been going through a completely different and unrelated medical problem at the same time. For reasons that aren’t completely understood, the hair on my head has started to fall out… rapidly and in big patches. This is a medical condition known as alopecia areata, essentially partial hair loss. This isn’t a sign of any underlying health problems, but it sure looks like it is… and people don’t really seem to believe you when you tell them that it is just a weird type of hair loss and that it isn’t anything to worry about. Combine that problem, which eventually led to just shaving my whole head to avoid looking all patchy, with scheduling some time off for some upcoming surgery and people start looking at you like you aren’t going to make it through the summer.

Fun stuff… but in both cases it is temporary and I’m happily recovering… maybe I’ll even manage to have my hair grown back in over the next few months.

Trying to open a file into VS 2005/2008 ... never works from Explorer

Duncan — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:26:00 GMT

So I have a file on disk, web.config in this case, and I right click and pick 'open with | Visual Studio 2008' ... and I get this:

Windows cannot find 'C:\projects\9\web.config'. Make sure you typed the name correctly, and then try again.

[OK]

VS 2008 opens, but no file. If I then pick the file from File | Open it works fine... what the hell? As far as I can remember, this was true with VS 2005 and it has annoyed me every day...

Xbox.com looks really boring without a flash plug-in :)

Duncan — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 16:48:00 GMT

Futurama the movie...

Duncan — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:55:00 GMT

Just added this to my queue at Blockbuster:

"Matt Groening's cult hit series Futurama takes its killer wit to DVD with this full length movie consisting of a brand new story with all new animation and the complete, original voice cast."

Leela's hot and I'm not afraid to admit it

Duncan — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:41:00 GMT

I've been watching a few too many Futurama's lately....

Kent Sharkey's been a busy guy

Duncan — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 01:13:00 GMT

Kent's blog is back online and in one of his recent posts he updates us on all the projects he's been working since he left Microsoft (where we were both working at MSDN as content strategists)... tons of cool stuff, definitely worth reading through and following some links.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007 #

What has been occupying my time

It's been about a nice round 17 months (give or take) since I left Microsoft. Since then, Microsoft shipped some software, people have argued, and the world continues its revolution, rotation and other movements.
I know all of you were wondering, "What's Kent up to?", so here is some of what I've been up to since I left.

Kent Sharkey's Blog (home page)

Universal HD (relatively new channel) is awesome

Duncan — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 16:54:00 GMT

If you have digital cable from Comcast, including HD service, then go up into the 600's and try to find the new Universal HD channel. Repeats of shows like Firefly, Battlestar Galatica (new series, not old), The Equalizer, Knight Rider... and tons more, all in HD. I watched an episode of Firefly last night in HD and it was wonderful!

Ever send yourself an email and then click on the 'you have new mail' alert a moment later?

Duncan — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:13:00 GMT

I send myself email... which sounds more pathetic than it is. I just use it as a way to hang onto links or notes to myself (do this, watch this, etc...). I do it all the time. Every once in awhile though, right after I send something to myself I see the 'new mail' pop up on my computer and I click on it wondering 'hey, what's that...'. And then I feel silly.

I giggle in an embarassing fashion

Duncan — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:50:00 GMT

Which isn't a big deal, but it is amazing to me that the same comic can sometimes make me produce some form of giggle/snort/outburst every single time I see it. After viewing this comic once, I was going back and forth between browsers and it ended up coming up a few different times. Maybe four times. I laughed every time.

On a related note, these two comics produce the same effect... especially when viewed together.

Web-only episodes of Battlestar Galatica?

Duncan — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:27:00 GMT

This is crazy, I watch SciFi channel all the time and I never saw an ad for this! (of course, I skip all the commercials :( )

Click here for episode details about some web only episodes that supposedly bridge the gap between the last season and this one.

Feeling like it is time to get rid of the flab...

Duncan — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 10:17:00 GMT

Last year I managed to go from 205-ish down to around 175 … just by following the South Beach Diet and working out more consistently (shooting for 5 days a week, generally hit 4 at least)… but then I switched jobs to work on a new project (http://on10.net, a site that has featured Chris a few times) and totally fell off the wagon. Now I’m 187 (for months I’ve been putting 180 into the treadmill, but I actually weighed myself Monday night) and I’m really depressed about it. I’m actually thinking it is responsible for a general down-turn in my whole mood, about just about everything, so I think I need to do something about it.

By BMI terms, I believe I need to be 150 pounds (and yes, I know the BMI isn’t always right, etc... but it is a pretty good measure for most folks I think) and that is a fair ways down there. I attended an informational meeting today about the 20/20 program that I can join at our local health club (http://proclub.com/default.aspx?tabid=673) and I’m considering it… insurance will cover most of it, but it is still going to cost me around $2000 dollars, something I don’t really have at the moment. Funny thing is, if I lose some weight on my own I'll fall below the BMI # required to get my health insurance to cover any of the program and the cost will go way up (wouldn't that be silly... lose some weight while thinking about the program and end up ineligible :) ).

Hmph...

Glamour shots of dolls

Duncan — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:16:00 GMT

I love this;

Shots of dolls in full-on fashion photo shoots. This would be a great way to practice your photography skills. Who needs models?

Check out the rest of her photos under the fashiondoll tag, great stuff.

Painting the Bathroom tub

Duncan — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 22:53:00 GMT

I just couldn't resist posting this picture...

The iCup Arrives at on10 (The Show On 10)

Duncan — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 16:16:00 GMT

A bit of an odd video on 10, sorry... but I couldn't help myself, I was (and continue to be) so excited about the arrival of the iCup :)

Link to The iCup Arrives at on10 (The Show On 10)

Yahoo now has a video site... called "The 9"

Duncan — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Now, I'm not saying they are copying anything we are doing, and I get where the "9" comes from (they show 9 videos a week), but still... it is hard to not to wonder why they ended up with a name like that for their site...

Link to The 9 for Monday July 17th

Hit the fountain and fair at Seattle Center this weekend with the kids

Duncan — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 11:06:00 GMT

Good times were had by all, although mostly by my son (Connor)!

Played in the fountain, ate some hotdogs and did a few rides (very few) at the fair that sits below the Space Needle (you can see the needle in the back of this shot).

My high-point of the trip? When my son looked over a perfect stranger in line (a guy, probably around my age... no kids with him) and asked for a bite of his cotton candy. Well, after a look at me to make sure it was ok, the dude pulled the plastic bag off the top of his cotton candy so that Connor could grab a previously untouched piece and Connor got his first taste of pure sugar in stringy/fluffy form.

Now, I don't want my son to be all weird about strangers but I did mention to him later that asking strangers for candy is not normally a good idea... although I'm less concerned about folks that he asks for candy, compared to someone who offers :)

Ok, so I hate mismatched socks as much as the next guy...

Duncan — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 11:34:00 GMT

But is this really necessary?

Sometimes I just have to blog the same things as everyone else has ... Zidane video from YouTube

Duncan — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 01:04:00 GMT

Of course, you can get videos of the actual event from YouTube, but I found this much better than the real thing;

ZIDANE a new way to solve problems

At least one of your changes was not applied successfully to the wireless configuration.

Duncan — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:11:00 GMT

I have no idea what this means. I get it all the time, whenever I hookup to an airport or conference hotspot. The connection always works, so the message doesn't seem to matter, but I still wonder what it means :)

Favorite quote about the Wii

Duncan — Wed, 03 May 2006 11:22:00 GMT

This is from a great blog "SuburbanJoe" :

"The fact that it is pronounced like "we" lets them say silly things like "Wii are going to change gaming" and the double lowercase "i" is supposed to be evocative of both the controller and the ability for people to play together as it looks like two people standing next to each other. Two limbless, hairless, featureless people who live next to a giant "W"."

lest you think he is just another Nintendo basher, he goes on to make some really great points about how Nintendo makes good games for both adults and kids (much better games for kids than the Xbox has, if I wasn't opposed to yet another console in the house, I would have bought a gamecube for my son ages ago)... and that people shouldn't be reacting so strongly to the name

"what person can look at a console, look at the games, say "yes, I want to play those" but then doesn't because they don't like the name? Do these people, upon hearing that their friends' or relatives' new baby, who had, in the womb, originally been named Mark, is now named Christopher, swear off all contact with the new child? Is that child now dead to them as all support for the spawn evaporates?"

A letter to North Dakota by Randy Sarafan...

Duncan — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 00:59:00 GMT

I was browsing around on Randy's web site after reading about an upcoming session of his at Makers Faire (hacking USB keyboards!!), and I found this: http://www.randywritesletters.com/005.html

All of the letters on that site (which has little or no navigation elements, so just edit the URL appropriately to go up to the front page) are hilarious, but for some reason I find this one to be the best... let me know if you disagree.

My wife is now a published author

Duncan — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 10:11:00 GMT

Guess I had better watch my manners!!

I'm on 10, covering some new Portable Media Center devices and more...

Duncan — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 14:58:00 GMT

If you are interested in portable video, downloading video podcasts, etc... check out today's episode on 10 ... featuring me!

I'm wearing makeup... how unusual... :)

Duncan — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 14:06:00 GMT

I'm on the set of 10 today, filming a segment. Crazy stuff for a dev!

Learn a bit about how on10.net was made

Duncan — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 12:11:00 GMT

Interview with the dev team (including me) is up on Channel 9

We are live...

Duncan — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 13:05:00 GMT

the site is live that is... well, so are we... anyway... the real code for http://on10.net is up and running! We know about a few issues, but in general it is ready to rock, so feel free to shoot on over and grab your userid before all the good ones are gone :)

A couple more team members post details about our new project...

Duncan — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 00:03:00 GMT

Adam Kinney, another member of our three-person dev team, posts our favorite comments about the preview site so far. Scoble, who really is on the same team as me... despite the fact that I've hardly ever seen him :)... also discusses what we have been up to.

My boss blogs a few hints about our upcoming release...

Duncan — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:36:00 GMT

We've put up some fun short videos, but the real site is coming next week... which will be nice, I'll get to start talking about work on my blog again :)

Voodoo PC's website is ahead of their time...

Duncan — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 10:08:00 GMT

Hitting this page (http://www.voodoopc.com/showroom.aspx?productID=1076) with IE7 produces several javascript alerts letting me know that I'm running an "Old Browser". Now, I'm assuming that this is a bug in their version detection code, but even so... is that what they show to someone running Netscape 4 or IE 5... "Old Browser" ? Odd....

Wow, BillG interviewed by Channel 9

Duncan — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 09:17:00 GMT

Wow, I'm new to the team and I guess I've missed some of the C9 content over the past few years.... and, as the video description says "the second time we've had Bill on C9" so maybe this isn't as unusual as I think.... but this still really surprised me. I didn't expect to see an inteview with the man himself on there. Bill Gates sat down with Charles Torre and chatted about Mix06, Office and more... check it out here.

What will they think of us?

Duncan — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 18:34:00 GMT

Kent blogs about the Name Registry that was sent up with the launch to Pluto... If only Futurama was still on, they'd do a good job of writing the 'what if' story about this one.

Last day at MSDN...

Duncan — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 10:28:00 GMT

Earlier I annouced that I was leaving MSDN, and my last day has arrived. I'm pretty excited about starting with the Channel 9 team next week though, my office here is empty and I'll be returning my MSDN machines today. Luckily for me, for the purposes of copying my old files over, I already have my new machine from the Channel 9 team, a Tecra M4 tablet PC. This is my first time using a Tablet, so I need to track down all the utilities and apps that will make the most of this cool convertible machine.

Cyclical reference, blog style...

Duncan — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 23:13:00 GMT

Not to cause any form of infinite loop here, but I liked this comment from Betsy in her post about my post...

It's a great fit - Duncan went from content strategy to development at MSDN most recently, and now he's going to be on the dev team of one of the most evangelical of teams.

Nice to know other folks think I made a good decision... not that I need reassuring of course :)

Phil Ringnalda questions the value of letting Google and MSN index his pages...

Duncan — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 12:58:00 GMT

I love this... and the funny thing was, I had just finished searching MSN for "Phil Ringnalda" (because I had forgotten his URL, well actually because I kept spelling his name wrong when I typed it as a URL) without much success.

Phil Ringnalda: Searching Where I'm Not Hated

... I don’t have any way of knowing whether Google first decided I was garbage, and then decided that made me a duplicate of other people aggregating me, or decided I was garbage because I was a duplicate of people duplicating me, but I know it isn’t helping: the only time you should let search engines index the output of an aggregator is when that’s the only place the feeds appear as HTML. Otherwise, it’s duplicate content, and that’s going to wind up hurting someone, whether it’s you or the source. ...

just a small quote there, you definitely need to read the whole thing...

This isn't the first time I've seen someone questioning the implicit relationship between crawlers and content producers (we let you use our bandwidth, in return people can find our content), see Jakob Nielsen's search engine post, but it does appear to be happening more and more these days.

Turns out the VS 'read me' authors have a sense of humour...

Duncan — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 23:17:00 GMT

ReadMe Item of the Day (from The Coding Monkey)

Was reading the Visual Studio 2005 SDK Readme and happened upon this rather humorous note:

Setup fails if the installation path is customized to path with more than 128 characters excluding the drive letter and the slashes. (We realize it is ironic to put this information in a file that is installed by setup, but at least you know that we know about the problem you have already worked around).

And now you know that I know that they know about the problem...

With all the press around 'Munich', I remembered seeing another movie about the same events...

Duncan — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 02:20:00 GMT

Turns out it was a TV movie (Sword of Gideon), but still... I'm surprised that it isn't mentioned in any of the reviews/articles about 'Munich' that I've read so far.... (IMDB info). Any one else seen the TV movie?

Convergence... Toaster Style

Duncan — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 01:47:00 GMT

I have nothing really to say about this, except that I'm impressed...

Ok, I've been infected with something... or else I like to type overture monitor five bids NZ20041109A for no particular reason

Duncan — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 23:56:00 GMT

My computer keeps searching for "overture monitor five bids NZ20041109A" .... no idea why, no idea what piece of spyware is doing it... anyone know?

I'm making a change... (a rambling post that contains some nuggets of information)

Duncan — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 01:31:00 GMT

I've recently accepted a job with the Channel 9 team (working for Jeff and working with Adam, Erik, Robert, and Charles), and ... because I'm mostly a one-job kind of guy, that means I have to stop working at MSDN. So, come January 16th, I'll be over in a new office at Channel 9, probably not coding anything yet as it always take a few days to get ramped up, connected to the right source trees, etc...

This is quite a big move for me, even though it is still within Microsoft. I joined the company back in 1999, working as a MCS consultant up in Winnipeg, MB, and then I moved down to Redmond in 2001 to join the MSDN article writing team. Since then I may have moved around a bit in terms of role (Writer, Content Strategist, Developer), but I stayed with the same group for the last four and a half years. As time goes by, it becomes harder and harder to make a change; you get very comfortable working with the same people on the same issues, in the same offices, even the same source trees and server names. I think that, as much as I have enjoyed the last year, even my move to the MSDN development team was a bit of cold-feet about leaving MSDN. I had decided that it was time to make a change and try out a different role within Microsoft, but it seemed so much safer, so much more familar to find another position that was still within MSDN.

Now it is a year later, and some might say I still am not making that big of a change... it is still Microsoft, it is still working on one of our web properties, it is still somewhat similar in its content/community focus (not that similar, but relatively so)... but in the ways that matter to me, it is a very big change. Channel 9 is a much smaller team, and their mix of content vs. community is tilted much farther towards the community side. Not that it necessarily means anything, but I certainly noticed that everyone on the Channel 9 team has a blog ... which isn't required for any team, but it does suggest certain attitudes and priorities...

I'm sure I can still write articles for MSDN (if I have time), although I might end up contributing some content to other sites as well. I still plan on talking about some of the work that has been done to build MSDN's new web platform, including all the great work that will be done after I've left, but you can expect to start hearing more and more about the new work I'm doing at Channel 9 as well. I'll do my best to make it all interesting to read :)

I suspect that some folks will connect this change with the recent departure of Brian Johnson, and the not so recent departure of Kent Sharkey... and I would be lying if I said there was absolutely no connection... but I am not leaving MSDN because they did... although I was starting to worry about who I would be going for coffee with each day. For at least a year, it was a near unbroken ritual for the three of us to make our latte runs together in the morning each day, and for the past few months Brian and I have done our best to continue on without Kent, but soon it would have just been me and that would have been weird. Now I guess I need to figure out who on my new team shares my caffeine addiction and develop some new rituals.

A couple of days late in seeing it... but Brian has annouced his departure from MSDN

Duncan — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 10:17:00 GMT

First Kent, now Brian... it seems like it would be a great time to apply for a job as a Content Strategist :)

Is my site broken in IE7?

Duncan — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 07:25:00 GMT

Matthew mentions in response to an earlier post that my site might be broken for people using the IE 7 Beta ... I don't have IE 7 installed, because I thought I should really be testing any of my work projects in IE 6 (along with Firefox and Opera), but if anyone else has it on their machine, could you let me know if you run into any problems? Contact me through the blog, or email IE7Issues@duncanmackenzie.net... either way! Thanks!!

I wonder if Virtual Earth will lead to building-roof advertising?

Duncan — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 20:19:00 GMT

Looking at this map, my first thought was "I wonder if this will lead to businesses cleaning their roof?", but then capitalism took over and I thought "hey, people could put ads on big roofs like that... it would be cool!"

Looks like I coded myself into a corner here...

Duncan — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 23:00:00 GMT

This is the sort of thing that happens with large development teams, one team codes in 'fixes' that break someone else's work... I don't normally do this all by myself! I updated the Flairmaker to support Atom 0.3, then I updated my feeds to Atom 1.0 ... great.

See the error, laugh at the coder... or will it be fixed by the time you click this?

Kent is gone... ok, not really "gone", but gone from MSDN...

Duncan — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 14:19:00 GMT

It is a sad day for MSDN and Microsoft, Kent Sharkey (ASP.NET & Coding4Fun content strategist, coder of many of the coolest things on MSDN and the guy to whom I send entire projects full of not quite working code with the message "help!?!?") has left to become an independent consultant type guy... Expect MSDN to get a bit duller as of this moment :)

Kent's official annoucement

Moved my .Text blog from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0

Duncan — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:11:00 GMT

I only recently noticed that my blog software (.Text 0.95) had atom support built in, so I added a button to my main page, and then I noticed it was Atom 0.3. Since 0.3 was recently deprecated, I updated the Atom generating code to output 1.0 instead and voila;

Much thanks to rakaz's great guide on moving from 0.3 to 1.0, which enabled me to update my code with almost no knowledge of Atom 0.3 or 1.0 :)

Free sites update...

Duncan — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 22:15:00 GMT

I mentioned earlier how the Free Xbox 360 site was quite busy, and it is... tons of clicks, 12 sign-ups, and even one person has 'gone green' which is to say they completed their offer. Once 8 people (who click through your referral link) have signed-up and completed an offer, then you are all done, but the sign-up to completion ratio is not great, probably 1 in every 5, so a lot of folks sign-up and then find that they either are not interested in the available offers or they don't think it is likely that they'll get an additional 8 people to sign-up through them. One of the more difficult aspects of these sites is that they don't tell you how many referrals are needed until after you sign up, so if you were thinking 4 referrals and it ends up being 10, that is a pretty good reason to bail on the entire system. I'm currently sitting 3 away on the PVP site, 4 on the PSP and 4 on the MP3 Players site... and, in all honestly, I don't really expect any of them to go completely through. Now that I'm not going through a service like RefStop, where you trade referalls on somone else's account for them signing up through you and doing a referall on your account, 3 or 4 sign-ups is a pretty unlikely target.

New graphics for the MSDN Developer Centers...

Duncan — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 10:08:00 GMT

Graphic designer time must be getting scarce at MSDN, it seems Brian is making new 'hero' (top) graphics for the C++ developer center.

Have you heard about SoloSub?

Duncan — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 21:57:00 GMT

I was considering adding one (or more) of the many aggregator-buttons (subscribe to this feed in newsgator, add this feed to your MSN start page, etc.) when I found this, one button that handles all of the most popular aggregators through a single link.

Check out http://solosub.com for more info...

Lots of folks interested in the free Xbox 360 link...

Duncan — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 00:21:00 GMT

For the last few weeks I've had a graphic and link to a 'free Xbox 360' site up as a banner on my blog pages, and it has received a lot of clicks (and 12 or so sign-ups, although no one has completed an offer yet...). I'm guessing that with the difficulty of obtaining a pre-order at this close to the release, the idea of a free Xbox 360 is pretty appealing. Personally, I headed down to the local EB Games and put down a $50 deposit on an Xbox 360 in one of their future allotments (all the machines in the first allotment were already pre-sold). I figured that if I didn't do that, I'd be driving around to Walmart and Toys R' Us for days before I managed to find a machine for sale at the end of November.