Exploration of Thought

Last night I needed to wipe a machine of mine clean - back to factory settings. On the 6400 series there is a D partition that has all of the factory settings. It even has a little utility called "PCRestore.exe" that looks VERY promising. However, if you double click it it will ask if you…

Normally I try not to post non-technical items here, but this is big enough news to warrant a post in anyone's personal blog! I'm happy to announce that this last Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008 at 8:07pm, Sophia Felker entered the world at a healthy 7lbs 8ounces. Sophia and mom are doing great. The wife did…

Yeah, seriously... My "old" host as I like to call them now decided to ... umm... how do I say this nicely ... "accidentally delete my account".I also have something to admit, I didnt follow through with my original back up strategy. The only reason this blog still exists is due to LUCK. Thats all…

   I was signing up for the ThoughtWorks Studio forum today and received this wonderful/insightful error. There has been tons of discussion around the interblogs about what to do with errors and how to notify the end user. Normally these posts end with commentary that says something like this:   “If a user gets an…

I tried it out, and well … at first I twittered that it was cool, but nothing really sparked my interest about it until I decided to run EVERYTHING I did for a couple of hours through it. Before I get too far ahead of myself… What is Ubiquity? Ubiquity is a new Mozilla Labs…

Jason Bock had a similar title to this post awhile back … and I found a forehead-slapper today when reviewing some code in a app I’m working on during my free time. I seriously said “What the <ExplativeGoesHere>”. Here’s the code:   There is absolutely no need to do this. This is exactly WHAT the…

I will be presenting at the 5th Twin Cities Code Camp on October 11th. My session is entitled … Smooth Operator: Using the Workflow Rules Engine Within WCF Ever changing business logic requires rule systems that are flexible to business demands. The majority of the time the business requires that these rules systems must be…

Update: I’m having big issues with the host. Please hang in there while I take care of them. The Twin Cities Give Camp site has been updated. If you would like to volunteer, you can sign up on the volunteer page and if you or your company would like to sponsor the event, you can…

I was on my favorite travel pricing site today and I was looking up how much flights were from MPLS to Des Moines. Now I'd probably never-ever fly to Des Moines because I believe its only about 3.5 hours away via car. But with gas prices these days you have to check it out. When…

I’ve presented at code camps and given presentations to technical audiences and institutes and I will continue to do so. I have a passion for giving back to the community that has helped me become the what I am today. I’ve decided that I want to give back to the community even further. After doing…

DiscountASP just won. Argh! I wrote a long blog post (because I dont have access to Live Writer on this PC) and then clicked Publish and it logged me out. Dont understand what I'm talking about? Read on ..  Unfortunately, what DiscountASP.NET does not tell you is that due to Community Server 2007’s large memory…

Photo Courtesy of: rosendahl My first initial answer is … it depends. (Isn’t that the case for everything?) :) Today I had conversation with a colleague and we were discussing how application developers don’t plan ahead. This eventually brought up the question/topic: “Is premature optimization pure evil?” My colleague stated that all optimization should be…