Equilibrium

Time flies

2008-04-26T14:05:00.002-07:00

A lot has happened since I last blogged; whoops. Let's see...

I had my birthday. It was pretty low-key and relaxing; I just took off work and played Rock Band all day, then played games with Travis and Steven in the evening.
Steven and I went to Las Vegas and met James and Nick there. It was thoroughly overwhelming, but don't worry; I didn't gamble a cent.
I've gotten myself completely addicted to Culdcept Saga. It's basically a board game for the Xbox 360 that involves collecting cards (much like Magic: The Gathering) and then using them in a game that is similar to Monopoly. At the end of each game, you win new cards (there are almost 500 different cards in the game, you start with a random deck). I think the combination of collecting something coupled with the different achievements to aim for (there are both achievements and "avatar parts" - clothing for your character that you get for meeting certain requirements during the game) is what has me really hooked on the game.

Coincidence

2008-02-15T23:04:00.001-08:00

Today on the way to work I happened to listen to the song "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind. Shortly after getting to work, Steven asks me if I want to see the new movie "Jumper" tonight.

Sometimes things like this shake my belief in coincidence.

Dvorak

2008-01-22T18:40:00.001-08:00

I've decided to teach myself the Dvorak keyboard layout. So far the tutorial I'm using has taught me the home row (aoeuidhtns) and some of the top row (,.pgcr). Hopefully in a few weeks I'll be able to type as fast (or faster) using Dvorak as I can with the standard keyboard layout.

New year, new wheels

2008-01-10T01:01:00.000-08:00

It's a new year, and I was in need of a new car after mine decided its life was over. I looked at Mitsubishi Eclipses, but the Mitsubishi dealers in Everett pissed us off, and the next closest dealer was in Auburn (30 miles is a bit far for me to drive just to look at cars). We ended up going to the Honda dealer in Bellevue and I knew that I had found a car I liked right away. It's a 2006 4-door automatic Civic, with leather seats, a sunroof, and perhaps most importantly an auxiliary audio input jack for my MP3 player (I have strange priorities). I took a couple of pictures, here's one:

Winter travel, Kapitel zwei

2007-12-25T22:56:00.000-08:00

After our flight being cancelled for no apparent reason and us rescheduling to fly to Kansas City, we got a notification that Steven's ticket was being refunded. This sounds like a good thing, but it turns out to mean that they only rescheduled my ticket (despite us being booked together originally). We called back and had to argue with the representative that she should at the very least get us the ticket at the original price. When we got to the airport, Steven had a standby ticket. The only good news from this story is that Steven got the second to last seat on the plane...in first class. Since we were travelling together, I got moved up with him, and we made it to the wrong city a day late.

Winter travel

2007-12-23T13:39:00.000-08:00

Apparently Wichita got a good deal of snow yesterday, and United decided that it would be a superb holiday trick to cancel our flight that was supposed to get to Wichita at 11 tonight. I received no e-mail or phone call that both of my outbound legs were rescheduled for tomorrow to arrive in Wichita at 9 PM. Fortunately, my parents knew the weather was bad in Wichita and checked the status this morning and saw that they were canceled. Steven called and found out that there were no available flights to either Wichita or Kansas City today. Since we were going to be going to Kansas City eventually anyway, we managed to get on a flight tomorrow to KC.

At least we didn't end up driving 30 minutes to the airport, trying to find satellite parking, and then showing up at the terminal only to find out that we had to come back tomorrow.

The benefits of meticulous metadata

2007-12-15T23:32:00.001-08:00

When I tagged my pictures on Flickr, I tried to be pretty specific about including information about where they were taken. I tagged them with the names of places, and geotagged most of my pictures. I guess someone found that information useful. About a week ago, I got an e-mail from an online travel guide publisher called Schmap. They wanted to know if they could use my picture of Lake Union in their guide. I was torn about agreeing...on the one hand, they weren't offering any compensation. On the other hand, I'm flattered that they liked the picture and were willing to use it. In the end, my ego won out, and they've used the picture. I'll keep this tactic in mind in case I ever want to put up a website and need lots of pictures but don't want to pay anyone for them.

Priced to sell

2007-11-25T16:07:00.000-08:00

Steven and I went in a knickknack store in the Bellevue Galleria yesterday because we were early for Beowulf. They had lots of nice Christmas ornaments, but none that were priced so that I would buy them. Then, we wandered into the non-Christmas section. I noticed this very cool looking cup made of a colored glass mosaic with a copper lattice between the glass. I guessed it was probably $50-$100. When I saw the price tag was over $1000, I was shocked. I decided not to pick anything up after that. Then we saw an antique painted dresser...$14,000. Who buys that kind of stuff?

Still alive

2007-11-11T19:12:00.001-08:00

I'm still hanging on. Work's been rough, but Steven and I got an XBOX 360 with a couple games to make everything OK. It's amazing how fast time can fly with some good games; I'm on a month-long Oblivion/Guitar Hero II/Eternal Sonata high.

Rejected icons

2007-10-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

When I was making the chevron buddy icon (bottom right in the previous post), I decided to have some fun with vectors. Unfortunately, the resulting icons turned out a little bit too...gay? This is fine, of course, but they were too colorful for me to ever use as a buddy icon.

Iconic

2007-10-16T00:22:00.000-07:00

My esteemed colleage and I were discussing buddy icons, so I decided to upload all of the ones I still have (which covers roughly the last two years). I know it's not quite the impressive collection he has, but enjoy it none the less.

Poll

2007-10-13T11:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went through the semi-regular ritual of reinstalling Windows on my work machine. Somehow, my copy of Excel.exe became corrupted and wasn't being recognized as a valid Win32 executable. I tried repairing and uninstalling Office, but both actions crashed the Office installer. While I was backing up my files, I realized that I actually enjoy wiping everything out quite a bit. I get to have a fresh machine, where everything is organized and pristine. Even more, I know that it's pristine because the entire drive has been wiped clean. If I were to go through all of my files and delete the old downloads and junk that's accrued on my desktop, and organize my enlistments to only have the enlistments I'm actually using on my machine, I would still have that nagging doubt that somewhere on my machine there are unnecessary files and folders laying about, destroying perfect order. Instead, I back up files from certain locations (like my desktop and documents folders) to a sandboxed "backup" folder on another drive. If I ever find that I needed a file from my old machine, I go look for it there (I rarely do such a thing). Once that backup folder is a year old, I just delete everything in it. In addition, if I were to try to get Office uninstalled by deleting registry keys so that the installer thought there was no more Office on my machine, I would have that horrible feeling that at some point, those deleted registry keys would cause instability in my operating system.

So, are you the kind of person who will wipe a machine clean for the joy of order, despite the inconvenience and time-sink of having to install software again? Or are you the kind of person who prefers to try to fix the machine at all costs, even if it means doing dirty things like deleting registry keys to get applications uninstalled?

Flat tire

2007-10-06T00:44:00.001-07:00

While riding to work on Tuesday, I saw one of my coworkers on the side of the trail with his bike upturned. He had a flat tire and had put a patch on, and was having trouble getting it pumped up with his hand pump, so I stopped to help him. I don't have a patch kit or a hand pump, so I thought, "whew, glad this didn't happen to me, but I should probably get a flat repair kit soon". Of course, the very next day I had a flat tire about halfway between home and work in the morning, and of course I hadn't gone to get a repair kit yet. To make matters worse, I noticed that the brand new, less-than-a-week-old flashing reflector I got had snapped off. Fortunately Steven was kind enough to come pick me up and take me to work.

Software understanding

2007-10-06T00:25:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's been a long time since I blogged. I've been hard at work on some fun WPF stuff. I'm getting to the point with WPF where I almost daily hit edge cases or bugs where it is very difficult to comprehend what the root cause is, and if it's my fault or the platform's fault. One bug I hit recently turned out to be two bugs conspiring together to make me miserable. The first bug is widespread in WPF: controls self-setting a value locally on a DependencyProperty (using SetValue) takes precedence over values coming from bindings targeting that property. Some controls use SetValue internally to set the value of a property, which can lead to bindings on that property not working. This particular bug happened to me, but only in a very weird case. If I had a non-default CollectionView bound to the ItemsSource of a TabControl, then my binding on the SelectedItem property didn't work. However, using a default CollectionView worked fine. It turns out that internally, the IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem property defaults to different values if a default or non-default CollectionView is the view the ItemsSource is set to. Also, the ItemsSource property is applied first from XAML before the SelectedItem and IsSynchronizedWithCurrentSelection properties because of the order they're declared in (which is based on the order that static constructors run, the 2nd bug). In the non-default CollectionView case, the TabControl would set the SelectedItem internally using SetValue because the default for IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem is true for non-default CollectionViews. Then, my binding was applied to the property (which never actually took precedence). I couldn't force the binding to happen first (or for IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem to be false) because of the ordering of the property evaluation. Ever weirder, it turns out that this problem only happened to me because I used a Menu first in my Window's XAML. Menu is an ItemsControl, but not a Selector. TabControl is both an ItemsControl and a Selector. Thus, the ItemsSource property was initialized first (from Menu), then IsSynchronizedWithCurrentItem and SelectedItem were initialized from TabControl.

The solution? Well, I had two choices. I could either try to influence the order of static constructors, or clear the locally-set value on the TabControl after construction. I opted for the latter; trying to make sure that Selector's static constructor runs first inside Visual Studio itself would not be easy, and would be very fragile. Of course, calling ClearValue(SelectedItem) in a Loaded event handler is also pretty strange, but at least it's much easier to control and remove when the bugs get fixed.

Bicycling

2007-09-15T11:24:00.000-07:00

I've been riding my bike to work lately. It's about 10 miles each way, so it's a fairly significant distance, and takes me about an hour. I love riding on the Sammamish River trail; it's quiet, flat, and beautiful. Unfortunately, that's the opposite of the rest of the ride. There are some pretty substantial hills in Redmond and Kirkland, and I have to go up a monster one each direction. The streets that I can conveniently use to get to the trail are pretty busy, and in some places don't even have sidewalks or bike lanes. When there are sidewalks, they're extremely annoying to ride on because of the huge dips at driveways, roots, and low-hanging foliage.

Anyway, my overall impression is that riding to work is much better exercise and more enjoyable than driving, at the expense of a bit more time. If you figure that I would have spent that time otherwise exercising anyway, then it's definitely worth it to ride instead of drive. Sadly, the days will be getting shorter and colder, so I'm not sure how long I'll be able to keep it up. I refuse to ride in the dark.

Typelepsy

2007-09-09T00:11:00.000-07:00

Today, I have been having the strangest time typing. I keep typing parts of words that I'm about to type. For example, I'll add in three or four letters from the next word I'm thinking while I'm typing, realize that I made a mistake, and have to backup and retype the word. It's really frustrating because it's killing my ability to type quickly. In fact, while typing this post I've made about 20 mistakes. Maybe it's become a self-fulfilling problem, and just typing about typing incorrectly causes more mistakes.

More marketing madness

2007-09-04T23:50:00.000-07:00

Today we got a gift from the lady at our insurance agency. The special treat? Some mailing address labels printed on label paper. Wow, what did I do to deserve that? Did they determine that mailing people address labels made them want to buy more insurance, or maybe just not switch companies? I really don't understand marketing.

Veritas

2007-09-04T16:36:00.000-07:00

What's the right thing to do when someone asks you a very personal question, and answering honestly will hurt them deeply? Is it alright to tell that person a lie if it spares them lots of suffering? Or is it best to tell the truth always and let the person come to grips with it themselves? It seems like for small things, being brutally honest is sometimes not the best strategy. A hypothetical example would be not telling a good friend that you'd rather play a new video game than talk to them, even if it's true. Maybe even "little white lies" like this are wrong; I don't know. I do know that convincing myself to tell a "big white lie" is much harder.

Identity implosion

2007-08-29T19:48:00.000-07:00

Today I got spam addressed from "Matthew Johnson" to my work e-mail address. Inside the e-mail I was addressed as "Matthew Jones", who we've previously established as the old owner of my alias. I swear, I'm one straw away from changing my name to a GUID.

Identity collision

2007-08-22T20:36:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I was informed that I wasn't receiving an invitation to a birthday party sent by evite.com. Apparently someone else registered my work email address with the site already. I didn't really think anything of it and just had the person send me the invitation via e-mail.

Today I was asked about another birthday party that I hadn't heard of. Surprisingly enough, someone else also used evite.com. Annoyed, I went to the site and used the "forgot password?" feature. Interestingly enough, evite.com sends you your original password in plaintext. So now I have some guy named Matt Jones's password for evite.com. I went to log into the site, and it turns out the guy has 9 e-mail addresses associated with his account, and the invites have (presumably) been sent to another address. I decided to be nice and remove my work e-mail from the list, and informed the guy at one of his other 8 e-mail addresses that he should really reset his password. Hopefully he actually still owns the e-mail address I used.

Failure points:
1. Microsoft, for reusing e-mail aliases.
2. Evite.com, for stupidly keeping passwords in plaintext.
3. Matt Jones, for not removing e-mail addresses he no longer controls from accounts which can use the e-mail address for completely controlling the account.

PII

2007-08-20T00:50:00.000-07:00

I was informed that linking people's full names to their blogs may reveal more personally-identifiable information than some people want associated with their blogs. I have therefore demoted all names to first-name only. This has been a public service announcement from yours truly, who has no problem associating his full name with anything because it might as well be "John Doe".

Quality control

2007-08-17T09:41:00.001-07:00

This morning, I pulled out a syringe to make my lunchtime shot and found that the plunger was missing the deployment cap (I made those last two terms up). In all my 13 years of being diabetic, that's the first such syringe defect I've seen. At an estimated average of 3 syringes per day (I used to take 2 shots a day, now I take one per meal/large snack + 1 at night), I've probably seen around 14,235 syringes. I'd say 1/14,235 isn't a bad defect ratio. If Dr. Scott Swenseth were reading this, I'm sure he'd have something to say about six sigma, kanban, or poka yoke.

Shol'va

2007-08-16T16:09:00.000-07:00

Steven and I have been rewatching Stargate SG-1; we're currently on the 3rd season. Just watching 3 or 4 episodes a night has got me thinking random Goa'uld words that are often repeated, kind of like having a song stuck in my head. Similarly, after reading the final three Harry Potter books, I found myself thinking some of the commonly-used spells in my head. I suppose these words are unfamiliar and yet used so frequently that it's somewhat natural that they surface in my thoughts.

Left hand

2007-08-16T00:08:00.001-07:00

I just found out from our team's admin that drafts of our annual commitments are supposed to be due this Friday. This was the first notification I received; I haven't spoken to my manager in weeks, and I have no idea what I'll actually be working on for the next year. The saying about the left hand not knowing what the right is doing comes to mind.

HackWND

2007-08-14T20:23:00.000-07:00

Having done a fair amount of Win32 development in my past, I'm usually not surprised by the kind of annoyances that come up in Win32 APIs. For example, there are often several ways to do roughly the same thing. For example, you can use the GetWindow function to get the next window in the z-order, or you can use GetNextWindow. You can also use GetWindow to get a window's owner, or you can use GetParent. There are also a plethora of the "ex" methods, such as CreateWindowEx and RegisterClassEx, which were written to provide new functionality for new versions of Windows.

Having noted these things, I was completely stumped with the simple task of creating an HWND which did not show up in the Windows taskbar. I though that surely one of the extended class styles available for RegisterClassEx or CreateWindowEx would cover creating top-level windows that don't show up in the taskbar. Finally, having read all of the descriptions and found nothing, I did what any reasonable developer would do and searched the Web. The first result I found was this article by Chris Maunder, one of the co-founders of CodeProject. His technique is to create a top-level window that isn't shown, and then create an owned window whose owner is the hidden window. A bit skeptical that there wasn't a better way to do this, I decided to look in Reflector at the System.Windows.Window class's ShowInTaskbar property. It turns out that WPF does the same thing, and creates a hidden owner window if you set ShowInTaskbar to be false. This appalls me so much; I find it hard to believe that it was by design that one can achieve top-level, taskbar-less windows this way. In all likelihood, there was no way to create a taskbar-less window until someone discovered this hack, and now it's become a permanent feature of Windows until the end of time.

Impressions

2007-08-13T18:35:00.000-07:00

As a completely scientific study of the readers of this blog, I'd like to perform a test. Looking only at the shirt in this picture, please post the first noun or adjective that comes to mind describing the shirt (Steven, you can't respond for at least a week).

Dangerous showers

2007-08-10T22:45:00.001-07:00

I bumped my knee on the shower door while getting into the shower today. Now it's all swollen and doesn't like to bend. I'm pretty sure it's not permanently damaged, but man, a damaged knee would be pretty horrible, especially in our house of 4 different half-levels.

Banana pancakes

2007-08-06T00:01:00.001-07:00

In case you hadn't caught on, I'm done with posting daily pictures. Hopefully they were enjoyed; I'll of course continue posting pictures as I take more.

I decided a few weeks ago that banana pancakes sounded like something that would be delicious. Unfortunately for a few weeks ago, I didn't have any overripe bananas. Fortunately for today, I had two. I made a half-batch of the "recipe" on the Bisquick box ("recipe" being used lightly since it's just eggs, milk, and Bisquick) but also added two mashed-up bananas. Turns out two was probably excessive, but the result was delicious. I think I should have used slightly less of the other wet ingredients, though, as the pancakes were quite moist. Afterwards I Googled for recipes and found out that not only are there many, but Banana Pancakes is a song title too. Who would have guessed?

Amazing view

2007-08-01T21:43:00.000-07:00

Today's (belated) picture: The incredible view of Washington from the summit of Mt. Pilchuck.

Frightening dentists

2007-07-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

While going to the bank today, I saw a sign near the edge of Microsoft's campus:

"Now accepting patients at Megasoft Dental.com"

I think that's about the most horrifying name for a dentist. Online universities are pretty scary, but dental offices that sound like they're online are in their own level. Ones that sound like they stole their name from a bad 1980's Sci-Fi movie probably just shouldn't exist.

Esther L. Kauffman Academic Residential Center

2007-07-29T22:48:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: The place I called home for 4 years in Lincoln: Kauffman.

Obsessive-compulsive

2007-07-28T17:20:00.000-07:00

I checked Last.fm and was appalled to realize how little I've actually listened to music on my computer lately. I generally listen to almost an entire album worth of music while commuting every day that doesn't ever get "reported" to Last.fm, and so I fear that my music tastes may not accurately reflect what I've been listening to. This horrifies me so much that I will probably start recording what I listen to in the car and then submit it to Last.fm when I get home.

Olympics

2007-07-28T17:16:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: The Olympic Mountains viewed from Hurricane Ridge.

Jericoacoara

2007-07-27T17:00:00.001-07:00

Today's picture: Sunset on the dunes in Jericoacoara, Brazil.

Spire

2007-07-26T00:28:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: What's more Seattle than the Space Needle?

Lincoln in the spring

2007-07-25T00:26:00.000-07:00

Today's photo: If this one seems familiar, it's because it's one of the headers for this blog. UNL's campus is overwhelmingly beautiful in the spring; unfortunately, I got my new camera right after the really sunny, wonderful days. However, I think this picture gives a glimpse of how things would look in better weather.

Kansas

2007-07-24T00:20:00.001-07:00

Today's picture: You may have to be from the Midwest to appreciate Midwestern beauty. This was taken at Chisolm Creek park in my hometown of Wichita.

Fall colors

2007-07-23T21:28:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: fall colors in Redmond.

Blue

2007-07-22T02:19:00.001-07:00

Today's picture: one of my favorite close-ups. I love how sharp the leaves and flower petals in the foreground are compared to the background. These particular flowers reside at the Bellevue Botanical Garden.

Book of fire

2007-07-21T11:48:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: the business book burning party of 2006.

Rural

2007-07-20T00:11:00.001-07:00

Today's picture: Nebraska sunset, near Arlington, Nebraska.

Canopy

2007-07-19T00:14:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: Forest canopy at Discovery Park, west of Seattle.

The devil inside

2007-07-18T23:58:00.001-07:00

Software is a strange thing. I find that knowing how the internals of a program is structured drastically affects my perception of the usability and overall quality of the program. Just the mere fact of knowing that the code for an application isn't maintainable makes me feel unclean when using the program. By not maintainable, I mean that it's full of hacks, that there's 10-year-old legacy code interspliced with brand new code with radically different coding styles, that the UI layout code is tightly coupled (inseparable) from the logic...the list goes on. Every repaint flicker reminds me that the rendering logic for each control is spread across the codebase; every hang reminds me that the threading model is severely shortsighted at best. I think maybe it's best if I remain blissfully ignorant about the internals of software that I have to use on a daily basis.

Winter wonderland

2007-07-18T08:47:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: proof that it does occasionally snow in Redmond.

Sammamish River Trail

2007-07-17T21:36:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: The Sammamish River near the head of the trail, just north of Marymoor Park in Redmond.

Automated credentials

2007-07-16T21:16:00.001-07:00

I have an annoying problem with multi-site login identities. For example, Blogger uses the same authentication system as Gmail. This sounds convenient, and it is in many ways: I only have to remember one username and password. However, I've always been in the habit of logging out of mail programs when I'm done reading mail. I know there's no reason to log on and off all the time on my own machine, and I've tried to stop, but I do it anyway. With multi-site logins, I get penalized again. If I sign out of Gmail, I automatically get signed out of Blogger, and then I have to log in again every time I want to post a new entry or post on someone else's Blogger blog.

I just a mouse that will send a sharp pain through my hand every time I hover over a "logout" link so that I can train myself not to.

Ice cream fellatio

2007-07-16T20:59:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: Kevin pleasuring...err, enjoying his ice cream a little too much.

Aside

2007-07-15T00:21:00.000-07:00

So far, my picture-posting spree has proven one fact: kitty pictures win. Out of the first 4 pictures, the kittens receive 66% of the reader comments. Pictures of nature only got 11% of the comments per picture. That's only 1/3 of a comment per nature picture, but 2 comments per kitty picture. Don't listen to those statisticians and their confidence intervals: kitties sell.

Skyline

2007-07-15T00:16:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: the Seattle skyline, viewed from Alki Beach in West Seattle.

Grand Tetons

2007-07-14T00:13:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: Jenny Lake, in Grand Tetons National Park.

Dew

2007-07-13T01:11:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: dew beading on some plants at Olympic National Park.

Kitten tree

2007-07-12T00:04:00.000-07:00

Today's picture: Kittens playing in a tree at Tracy's house.

Favorite pictures

2007-07-11T00:31:00.001-07:00

I'm going to post a random picture each day to keep you, my avid reader, entertained. If this sounds familiar, it's because my friend and photographic superior already used this blogtrick a while ago.

Today's picture: Mowich Lake, on the slope of Mt. Rainier.

Dream come true

2007-07-05T22:58:00.001-07:00

My dream of having no physical computers underneath my desk has been realized, thanks to Steven. I was surprised today when I got home and Steven had cut a small hole in the wall between the loft and the bedroom closet to feed the necessary wires through (the monitor, keyboard, and speakers). Everything else is making its noise and heat in the closet. I cannot express how happy the soundlessness and heatlessness make me!

Familia

2007-06-28T22:15:00.000-07:00

Well, life has been rushing on at record pace. I've been playing Oblivion some, working quite a bit, and cleaning up the house. Yep, my parents are here to visit and we finally had to clean up the spare bedroom (which I'm pretty sure hadn't been vacuumed by us...ever). Mom and Dad are staying until Monday, so hopefully we'll find enough to do this weekend not to be bored. Also, hopefully the weather is not rainy, or otherwise we'll surely be bored.

Next week Steven's brother is also coming to visit, so we'll keep the guest bed warm. This reminds me that it's going to be the Fourth of July before I know it: one of the few landmark holidays that demarcates my otherwise uninterrupted flow of time. In college the year had many more corners...a lot more to break up the flow of time so that I noticed how fast things were going. Now that I'm working I really only stop to think about time on a handful occasions: my birthday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Fourth, Steven and my anniversary, and my Microsoft anniversary. Even these events rush up and then are done in a day (or a few days for Christmas break), unlike semester breaks, summer breaks, spring breaks, and all the other little breaks and reminders that I used to have.

Oblivion

2007-06-16T14:42:00.001-07:00

No, I'm not talking about the product I was formerly working on, I'm talking about the game that was released years ago. I've finally gotten around to playing it, and it's sucking up all my free time. I started playing as an Altmer mage, learned how leveling up works and which skills I actually use, and then restarted as a Breton mage. I'm impressed with how vast the world is; I will easily spend hours and hours exploring it. I'm also impressed with the scenery, which is beautiful and renders wonderfully on my new computer. The only thing I'm not really impressed with are people's faces. I haven't seen any faces I would consider "beautiful", and most of the faces look especially bad in poor lighting. For a game where you run around and talk to people, I would have loved if their faces had had higher-quality textures.

If I don't post for a while, you can blame Oblivion.

Better late than never

2007-06-09T20:48:00.000-07:00

As promised, I got around to uploading vacation pictures to Flickr, which you can browse at your leisure here. To whet your appetite while that page loads, here are a few of my favorites.

Jericoacoara beach

Fortaleza Culture Center

Thunderstorm over the dunes

Dog training

2007-05-31T23:54:00.000-07:00

We're trying to teach Apollo that he can't get his way by barking or yipping by ignoring him, but it's heartbreaking to listen to. We also decided that it's best if he doesn't sleep with us every night so he doesn't become whiny and attached to us. Please, feel free to post your favorite dog training tricks!

Meet Apollo

2007-05-30T23:29:00.000-07:00

Today we got a new puppy, Apollo. Apollo's a Dachshund, 8 weeks old. I'd describe him more, but a picture's worth a thousand words, or so they say.

Steven has been wanting a Dachshund for a while now, so we drove to Covington to look at this one and his sister. Steven really wanted a girl, but we both agreed that Apollo was far more adorable than his sister. Besides, Caprica wasn't going to be that great of a dog name anyway (if you don't get these references, maybe I don't know you).

Made it back

2007-05-30T22:27:00.000-07:00

First off: no, I did not drink the water, all the water I drank came from bottles.

Now that we've cleared that up, I had a great vacation in Brazil with the exception of some indigestion and diarrhea. I could bore you with the details, but here are the most interesting tidbits and random thoughts I had:

Brazilians don't have a concept of a line. When we were at the São Paulo airport everyone pretty much ran like cattle to get onto the plane. Similarly, when getting off the plane no one waited for the people in front to get off first. Every domestic flight I've been on people wait for the rows in front of them to empty first.
Brazilians are scary drivers. It's a good thing none of us were driving, because we probably would have caused an accident. The most notable differences between American driving and Brazilian driving is that Brazilians don't always drive in a lane; they more or less freely merge between lanes or drive in half a lane if it suits them.
Pizza Hut and McDonalds are among the more expensive restaurants; definitely above the level I associate them with in the US.

The rest of the trip can probably be summed up best by pictures, which I'll hopefully put on Flickr soon. In the meantime, you'll have to do with James's pictures.

OOF

2007-05-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

Look forward to pictures when I get back.

Pre-withdrawal

2007-05-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

I just realized that while I'm on vacation for a week and a half, I'll have no access to the Internet. My brain wonders, "No Internet, how is this possible? Internets are like bread!" Indeed, my brain is correct. I think the last time I can remember being away from the Internet for more than a week was high school. Checking e-mail and reading forums are as routine to me as taking showers or putting in my contacts. Hopefully the vacation will be so fun I won't even notice the side-effects of Internet disconnection.

The garden

2007-05-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

I've been working at Microsoft for almost a year now. In all that time, I've only begun to fathom all of the difficulties that arise while writing a software platform that's meant to be extensible enough that other people can build things you've never imagined with it. All throughout college, I only wrote applications that were built for myself or for a class. These applications performed a finite set of purposes. The most extensible application I wrote before starting at Microsoft had only one dimension of extensibility; you could add new actions by putting an assembly in the same directory as the application and applying the correct attribute.

The platform I'm working on now has many extensibility points. The difficulty about deciding what has to be extensible is tied with the lack of "The Application" that has "The Features" that need to be enabled. For example, consider Visual Studio's project system. Projects themselves are extensible; C++ project, C# projects, and even some unknown third-party project all have to be supported. The Solution Explorer is also extensible; third parties can add context menu items, as one example. When Visual Studio was written, how was it decided that it was important to be able to extend context menus by adding items? How does an extender place their new item relative to other existing items? Why can an extender not simply replace the entire context menu with something else when a file is right-clicked on? It's these kind of questions that make developing a platform difficult.

The simile I pondered on my way home from work is that writing software is like tending a garden. Every single feature has the possibility of being a beautiful flower or a horrendous weed. Useful, simple, cohesive features and necessary extension points are what end users will really want; the flowers. Every other feature is a weed; it sucks up resources (development time, testing time, maintenance time), and makes it more difficult to appreciate the other features. A needless feature is bad enough. For example, it might be considered bad that Word displays a modal dialog box at the end of every Find operation. However, bad features are easy to weed out and replace by better features. Unnecessary extensibility points are much more difficult to get rid of, once they're consumed. Once the door is open for extenders to replace an entire context menu for a project item with a Bonzai buddy or a picture of a clown, that possibility will have to be considered by everyone for the rest of the lifetime of that project system. The difficulty with software, unlike gardening, is that the weeds are not always apparent from the flowers.

Nothing more annoying

2007-05-02T20:12:00.000-07:00

Today was New Contact Lenses Day. For those of you who don't wear contacts, know this: New Contact Lenses Day is a day of peril. You have been wearing the same comfortable contacts for a month. They may be getting a little worn, but you know exactly what to expect every morning. Then, you uncork two new contacts, figure out which concavity is correct (believe me, it irritates the eyes to no end to put the in backwards), and stick them in your eye. 95% of the time the new contact feels wonderful and fresh, but 5% of the time it's already torn or blemished slightly. Perhaps the brand of contacts I use sucks, I don't know, but this morning my new right contact felt horrible. I didn't notice it at first, but by the time I got to work my eye was watering and irritated. I managed to get by for most of the day, but ended up just taking the contact out and throwing it away. Thankfully, it's the insurance company's loss.

In ur bank, stealin ur moniez

2007-04-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

Steven and I have recently (tomorrow) been a victim of credit card theft. I checked our transaction history today because I couldn't run my card at McDonalds yesterday, and there are two items totaling over $1000 scheduled to post to our account tomorrow. Both were at real, physical stores in Fresno, CA. I don't understand how this could have happened, given that both of us have our cards still. Wouldn't this necessitate either card forgery or two stores willing to accept a 16-digit number entered into a computer instead of an actual credit card? Anyway, this is a really disheartening thing to happen, to say the least.

On the brighter side of life, I went to my first ever major-league baseball game tonight with a coworker: the Mariners versus the Royals. The game was fun to watch for the first few innings, but after that we started to space out and notice how much a crowd of humans resembles a herd of sheep. The most ridiculous thing I've ever seen is this "racing game" they have between innings. There are three colored cars (or speedboats) and everyone cheers for the one they want to win. As far as I can tell, the result is purely random, but everyone gets into more of a frenzy about it than they did about the game itself. I really don't understand this kind of social response to something that everyone should have been laughing awkwardly about.

Plague of humanity

2007-04-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

Humanity has many plagues, but today I'm talking about the plague of people with horrible e-mail signatures. The vast majority of e-mail signatures are just fine, but there are several typical examples of e-mail signatures that just drive me crazy.

The Overly-Important Person. This person has listed in their e-mail signature their job titles for the last year, three phone and two fax numbers, MAC address, and children's names. Furthermore, this person frequently sends and replies to mail threads, leaving the entire signature duplicated dozens of times
The Wacky Typeface Person. This person uses a Vivaldi font at 20pt with magenta coloring. This produces Something Horrible. Unfortunately for this person, some mail clients may un-disgustify their gaudy choices.
The Perfect Image Person. This is similar to the Wacky Typeface Person, except that Perfect Image Person has captured the essence of their soul by having their name reflected with a ripple and slant effect, along with an outer yellow glow. Some mail clients will disable showing the images in general (and thus image signatures), so often I see an empty image box instead of a signature.
The CaSe DeStRoYeR. I don't know what's cute about this, but I've seen it before. Why would anyone mutilate their own name like this?

I'm sure their are other forms of horrible signatures. Please let me know if I've missed one and I'll add it to my taxonomy.

Code-free

2007-04-15T23:58:00.000-07:00

I went for this entire two-day weekend without reading or writing a single line of code. What kind of sad person am I that this is a notable event?

$400,000 commodities

2007-04-12T22:58:00.000-07:00

I got an automated e-mail from our lender giving me tips for my next home purchase. This even included a pre-approval number "to show buyers I mean business". First of all, I think two months and change is a little soon to be shopping for a new home. Second, how could they possibly approve me for another loan knowing that I have the first one?

Marketing

2007-04-07T18:48:00.000-07:00

Around here, it's pretty popular to hire someone to stand beside the road and market your product. Every single morning on my way to work, there are two mattress companies with crazy people dancing and holding a sign advertising their companies on the same corner. Today when I helped some friends move there was a guy advertising the development that their new house is in. I don't understand how this marketing strategy is cost-effective compared to, say, a non-human sign. You have to pay that person every day just to stand and hold a sign.

In other marketing pondering, I'm wondering why the multi-flavor Quaker oatmeal packs I buy have 2 blueberry, 2 strawberry, and 2 banana, but 4 peach packets. Did they do market research that shows that having extra peach packets increases sales, or did the guy in charge of packaging put in extra peach because that's what he eats?

By popular demand

2007-04-01T15:07:00.000-07:00

I decided to switch to using Flickr to post images on here after being fed up with imageshack. I can't find my login information for imageshack (it used to automatically log in) and I can't seem to get them to email me a recovery password, so too bad for them.

I uploaded a slew of pictures of our interior here.

Here's the picture of our interior that I think came out the best:

Painting

2007-03-27T20:07:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks. Two weeks ago was AppWeek at work, where we broke into small teams to work on personal projects that tested our framework. Last week, well, it was just busy (this is of course a lame excuse for why I haven't posted in so long).

Last weekend I decided to paint the off-color wall in our living room. Inspired by Travis (in so many ways), I chose green. I'm not sure how it's going to look; I need to apply the final coat today. I'll post some pictures once the process is complete.

Ridiculous gambling

2007-03-12T23:44:00.000-07:00

Facebook.com has a contest where you can compete against your friends by (of course) filling out an NCAA tournament bracket. It has a nice "randomize" option, which I've used to pick my teams. I've always really hoped that I can randomly select teams and come out victorious, proving that agonizing over these damn things has no consequence.

Heroes

2007-03-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Steven and I just caught up with television in watching the show Heroes. It's an excellent show that reminds me of a mix between The 4400 and X-Men, if that tells you anything. The downside is that each episode has a cliffhanger ending, which makes me sad that I now have to wait a week between episodes.

Having watched several TV series now (Stargate SG-1, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek: Voyager, Stargate: Atlantis, The 4400, and now Heroes), I've come to realize that I like watching a television series way better than most movies. Sure, there are some really good movies that are better than a TV series, but movies are over so quick! Characters don't have any time to develop in a "normal", 1.5-2 hour movie, so movies tend to rely on lots of special effects or plot twists to keep you interested. Barring that, movies tend to rely on sequels to fit in the plot the writers dreamed up. I'd much rather only have to wait a week for the "sequel" to Heroes than 2-3 years that it takes an average movie sequel to come out. Plus, Heroes is basically an 18-hour movie anyway!

Skiing

2007-03-04T17:34:00.000-08:00

Friday I went skiing at Crystal Mountain with my team as a morale event. I had never been skiing before, so I was a bit nervous about it. However, it turned out to be slightly less scary than I thought it would be. I took the 2-hour lesson, which taught me enough to go down the bunny slopes. I went down several times and was starting to feel pretty confident. Then one of my coworkers suggested that we should try the real green slope, so I thought, "Sure, why not?" It turns out that I was not ready for the green; it basically looked like I was going down a cliff (seriously, I couldn't believe how steep it was compared to the bunny slope!) I had one fairly heavy fall on the way down, but I managed to survive with only some sore arms.

My takeaway advice for new skiers is this:
1. Don't go off the bunny slopes your first day; it may crush your illusions about how much you've learned.
2. If the ski instructor tells you that poles aren't required, don't believe him. I'm not sure how I would have gotten up or put my detached ski back on when I was sitting on a 25 degree slope in the middle of the mountain.

Evil help namespaces

2007-02-25T01:34:00.000-08:00

The worst stage of installing Visual Studio 2005 is the help namespace merge step (at least, I'm pretty sure that's what the step is). Not only does it take a ridiculous amount of time, but it has no progress indication! There's nothing like staring at "Executing action:HxMerge_VSCC_v80" for 5-10+ minutes wondering if the installer failed or not.

Bus to work day

2007-02-25T01:20:00.000-08:00

I saw a sign at work about a Bus To Work Day, where apparently you're supposed to ride the bus to work instead of driving. This sounds like a ridiculous idea to me; it's like having a day where you pay to not be in the lottery. If everyone rides the bus on the same day, the bus system will be crowded an obnoxious, and the freeways will be clearer for people who are driving cars. Trying to make people ride the bus by just having a "bus day" probably isn't the way to go, since it's an anti-incentive. I suppose they're assuming that "saving the environment" is enough of an incentive.

Drizzle

2007-02-19T14:28:00.000-08:00

While driving to work today I came to the following two realizations.

1. Every day needs to be President's Day. I don't care if I have to work when everyone else doesn't as long as the freeways are that clear. It usually takes me 22-25 minutes to get to work, but today it only took 14.

2. Auto manufacturers need to make cars with special windshield wiper speeds for the Northwest. Maybe my car just sucks, but the slowest speed just isn't slow enough to actually let the drizzle we have here accumulate on the window. I always end up leaving the wipers off and manually flick them on one time when the window actually gets wet. Otherwise, my blades end up scraping the mostly-dry window and then leave little blurry streaks wherever there was a minuscule drop of water.

Interesting dining experience

2007-02-19T00:20:00.000-08:00

This evening a friend and I went to an Indian restaurant in Redmond for dinner. When we arrived I was surprised to see someone vacuuming the sidewalk. Yes, I'm not kidding, there is that green, fake-looking carpet on the sidewalk, but only in front of the restaurant. Then, we got seated next to a portable space heater. Hopefully they don't use those things for cooking as well.

Meet the neighbors

2007-02-18T16:22:00.000-08:00

We met our next-door neighbor in the townhouse across the sidewalk from us. She seems really nice, and chatted with us for 30 minutes or so. During that chat, we found out that our homeowner's association is apparently a drama festival. Among other things, they want everyone to buy new matching windows. Also, the association president's windows leak. I'll let you jump to the same conclusions I jumped to.

Does the east exist?

2007-02-11T13:06:00.000-08:00

In the shower the other day I was thinking about where people I knew from high school and college ended up living. I realized that almost all of them are either in the Midwest or west. In fact, I can only think of one friend from high school who lives in an eastern state. Then I thought more; do I know anyone from any eastern state? As far as I can recall, I've never met anyone from Pennsylvania or Massachusetts or Virginia. Do those states really exist, or are they just a myth?

The mutant cure

2007-02-07T00:18:00.000-08:00

Recently the media caught wind that researchers are trying to determine if homosexuality is biologically-root by studying rams, a species which has approximately the same percentage of a homosexual population as humans (see here and here). I really don't see what gay people are getting worked up over; they should be glad that people are presenting scientific evidence that homosexuality is biological in nature. The thing I find most weird is that they are basically letting rams rape each other to find out if their sexual orientation. I guess that's what you have to do when you can't just ask.

Home zodiac

2007-02-04T22:47:00.000-08:00

So far we're loving the new house. Everything except the largest furniture has been moved in. Sadly we noticed a few drawbacks about the house: the garage door openers were so old that we couldn't find remotes that work with them, and we had to replace the whole opener. Also, most of the doors in the house are missing doorstops, so they just slam into the wall. The door from the garage to the house has apparently been slammed so many times that they plastered over a hole in the wall. Oh well, at least we can buy some doorstops.

Another interesting aspect of the house is the master bedroom door. The doorknob has a convenient lock, you know, for keeping out pesky guests. However, a clever guest might walk through the adjoining bathroom, which has no lock! Foiled!

The room we're sleeping in has a vaulted ceiling with little glow-in-the-dark stars attached to it. These stars basically fall into the "eyesore" category during the day, but once we turned out the lights I thought they looked pretty neat (note: my contacts were off and this may have impaired my vision). There's even an Orion pattern right above our pillows. I tried looking for other constellations, but I don't really know what any besides Ursa Major/Ursa Minor look like, and those didn't appear.

If you're tired of hearing about the house, I'm sure the glamor (and work! lots and lots of work!) will taper off soon and I'll stop ranting about it.

Transporting objects through space

2007-02-03T01:16:00.000-08:00

Well, if our move had a progress bar I'd say we're about at 50%. Most of our smaller stuff is moved over to the house, but not really unpacked. My desk and computer are all dismantled, so I'm using the laptop. I haven't really used my laptop in several months, and I'm finding that it isn't really set up for what I wanted to do.

I wanted to message Nick to ask him if he knew how to change Vista's welcome screen. I don't have any messenger client installed, so I ended up using meebo, the online messenger client. Turns out Nick was idle anyways.
I wanted to edit an image to use as my welcome screen, but I don't have any image editing tools installed. No, mspaint doesn't really count.
I needed to use a resource hacker to embed the background in Vista's imageres.dll, but didn't have anything installed. I usually use ResHacker, but it turns out that imageres.dll uses some kind of compression that ResHacker couldn't handle. I ended up installing a trial version of PE Explorer, which worked great.

Since I'm already rambling about changing my welcome screen image, I might as well list the steps here in case other people are interested (or I forget). First, find an image that fits the resolution of your monitor. If you routinely change your screen resolution, you'll need to hack in multiple images. Once you've picked out the image, use PE Explorer to open %WINDIR%\System32\imageres.dll and use the Resource Viewer/Editor to find the IMAGE that's size matches your screen resolution. Edit the image, replace it with yours, and then save it as something (say, imageres.dll.new). Now you have to delete the old imageres.dll and replace it with yours. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't like for that kind of thing to happen. To delete the file you have to take ownership (in Properties\Security\Advanced\Owner), then you have to give yourself full control. (Even members of the Administrator group can't mess with the file otherwise, only the TrustedInstaller group has full control by default). After all of this, restart the machine and press F8 before Vista starts booting. You should see a list of modes to start Windows in. If you choose Safe Mode with Command Prompt, you can (relatively) quickly get to a command prompt to copy imageres.dll.new over imageres.dll. After all of this you should finally be able to reboot Vista in normal mode and see the replaced Welcome screen.

Note: I strongly recommend backing up the original imageres.dll, in case something goes wrong. You can always start in safe mode and restore the original if your machine gets slammed because of something unforeseen (after all, there's a reason they don't want you editing random parts of platform assemblies).

Keys to the kingdom

2007-02-01T15:10:00.000-08:00

Well, the townhouse is officially, finally, and irrevocably ours. Now the arduous process of moving things over there shall commence. We're making the final move on Monday, but we've got a lot of packing to do before then.

News

2007-01-29T20:53:00.000-08:00

Last week went by so fast that I didn't realize I hadn't blogged all week. The main thing to report is that we signed on the townhouse today. Yep, we'll be living in a home in less than a week! I'm pretty excited about it.

The other main thing to report is that we're going to Fortaleza, Brazil in May with James. One of his relatives has a timeshare, so we only have to pay for the plane tickets (expensive!), the passports/visas (way more than it should be) and the meals/souvenirs while we're there (probably the cheapest part of the trip). It's hard to tell if I'm more excited about the trip or more excited about the house.

Nightmare

2007-01-25T01:38:00.000-08:00

Last night I had what I would consider a nightmare. I decided to leave my current team to work on something new, and decided I was tired of writing managed code for some reason. I ended up working on some team that was writing C++, which I somehow forgot I swore I'd never want to work in again. To make matters worse, this new team worked in a giant room with row after row of computers in an open space with complimentary piped-in elevator music (if you've been to Sandhills, I think you know exactly what my nightmare looked like). I wanted to go back to my current team, but I couldn't because I hadn't been working on the new team long enough.

When I was half asleep I was seriously terrified that all of this was true. Then I started thinking about the current feature I've been working on, and started wondering why I didn't check it in before I left. Then I realized that wow, I didn't really leave; I just dreamed that I had, and was able to go back to sleep.

Arrested development

2007-01-23T01:33:00.000-08:00

When I was driving out of the parking garage tonight, I saw a man who looked just like Buster Bluth from Arrested Development. If I had to look or act like a television actor, I have to say Buster Bluth would be pretty low on my list.

Yep yep, great story.

Musical taste

2007-01-19T00:35:00.000-08:00

Tonight at game night we got to discussing music and I was asked what kind of music I listen to. I don't really know how to describe what genre of music I like; listing off some artists doesn't really convey that much to people unless they already listen to those artists, and saying something like "alternative rock" usually means different things to different people. I think it's really easiest to direct people to my Last.fm user profile. People can see the list of artists I like, can see tags that users have used to classify that artist's genre, and can see related artists.

Pesto

2007-01-17T00:28:00.000-08:00

Tonight we had pesto and tortellini; two things that I never had when I was growing up. When I was living at home we had three types of pasta: lasagna, spaghetti, and manicotti (I guess we had various kinds of macaroni and cheese too, and various non-spaghetti pastas like rotelle or penne). We also always had the same kind of tomato spaghetti sauce. My point is that I never had any kind of filled pasta (ravioli, tortellini) until I came to college, and I never had any kind of other sauce (pesto, alfredo) until college either. Now I can barely stand the thought of having spaghetti with tomato sauce because it seems so boring. In fact, I tend to eat meals that I would rarely or never eat at home, like chicken lasagna and hamburger helper.

I wonder if I had grown up always having pesto and ravioli if I would completely love spaghetti and tomato sauce.

Hoth

2007-01-13T14:42:00.000-08:00

We've received quite a bit of snow for around here, and everything looks pretty. Here are some pictures.

The trees out the front of our apartment

People abandoned their cars on Bel-Red road

The back of our apartment

Some ferns along the trails in our complex

Denounce...denounced

2007-01-10T17:42:00.000-08:00

OK, so I can't really recommend using this software unless all you care about is pretty-looking. Out of 4 blogs tried, only Travis Spomer's feed worked. Steven and Jordan (who both use Wordpress, I believe) have feeds with proper dates, but Denounce reads the date on every entry as "January 01, 0001". Derrick Stolee's feed crashed the app completely.

Oh well, I just thought I'd try it because it looked neat.

Denounce

2007-01-10T17:27:00.000-08:00

I found this nifty feed/podcast aggregator written using WPF: Denounce. I'm going to try reading everyone's blogs for a week using it and see how it goes.

Supposedly (according to the WPF distribution list) some of the default feeds are NSFW, so just a warning.

KOTOR 2: The game that wasn't quite baked

2007-01-08T21:37:00.000-08:00

I finished Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 2 yesterday. Although I was warned by multiple people that the ending revealed an unfinished game, I was still pretty upset. There were several plotlines that were not only unfinished, but nonsensical. For example, you have to power up 4 gravity well generators as the remote, but then G0T0 comes to stop you when they're 98% powered. You never find out if the gravity well generator successfully obliterates Malachor V or not. You crash your ship on Malachor V, and it falls into a pit, but then it comes to pick you up mysteriously right after you kill Darth Traya. Also, when Mira fights the Wookiee, she can die, and it doesn't stop the plotline. What's up with letting one of your party die? They even threw in Bastila and Carth, apparently just for "old-time's sake". Bastila was supposed to be dead! I haven't played KOTOR 1 as a dark Jedi, but I think I might do that next; at least then I'll see how Bastila could possibly be alive.

Acute symphonitis

2007-01-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

I've noticed this every time we go to the symphony: between movements, people cough extremely loudly. I think they are all either deathly ill or want to fill up the silence. They can't possibly have to cough and manage to hold it for 9 minutes just to cough between movements.

Home

2007-01-06T11:38:00.000-08:00

Things have been moving fast on buying the townhouse. Oh yeah, we're probably going to buy the townhouse we first looked at a week ago, barring any unforeseen flaws uncovered during the walkthrough. Today at one we're talking to the loan representative from the bank to go over all our mortgage options, and on Monday morning the inspector is...inspecting. After that we can decide for sure that we want to buy it.

Anyway, I'm really excited about getting a home. Nervous too, but excited.

The latest, greatest WPF horror story

2007-01-03T21:26:00.000-08:00

If you haven't used WPF's embedded resource format, you're lucky. WPF introduced a new URI scheme for accessing resources called pack. A pack URI looks something like this: pack://application:,,,/folder/resource.jpg. This lets you reference a resource embedded in your application named "folder\resource.jpg". You may notice that this isn't the way a normal URI is constructed; normally a port follows the colon, like http://localhost:80. However, if you've only tried to construct a System.Uri from such a URI in a WPF application, you might think that this is an acceptable URI format. Wrong! When one of WPF's core assemblies loads (I haven't figured out exactly which, but either WindowsBase, PresentationCore, or PresentationFramework), it registers a custom URI handler that allows System.Uri instances to be created with this wacky format; otherwise the Uri constructor throws a UriFormatException because there is no port following the colon. I was working on a test case where the first time the WPF assemblies loaded was after I had initialized the Uri and passed in the pack URI string. It took me nearly 20 minutes to figure out what was different in my test assembly that made the Uri constructor throw when it didn't throw in my application.

End of an era

2007-01-02T20:35:00.000-08:00

The era of Star Trek: Voyager has ended. Steven and I finished the season finale of the last season yesterday. My overall thoughts were that the series was OK, but overly formulaic (in other words, it was Star Trek). The final episode was good, but tried to do too much. They managed to cram in time travel, a victory against the Borg, a baby's birth, a Vulcan neurological disorder, trans-warp travel, stealing from Klingons, a Voyager reunion, and two Kathryn Janeways. All in all, that's too much even for a two-hour episode.

Now we'll likely be starting on Battlestar Galactica.

Regimen

2007-01-01T23:50:00.000-08:00

It's not exactly a New Year's resolution because I started about a week ago, but James and I have resolved to be online exercise accountability partners. So far I've only missed one day since last Tuesday, so I feel like I'm doing pretty good. I've worked my way up to 50 minutes on the elliptical machine at our apartment. Nothing like burning 610 calories to tire you out, though.

In other news, I have to return to work tomorrow (well, I don't have to, but if I want to take vacations this year at all I probably should). The funny thing is, I have virtually no idea what I'll be doing this week. At least the week's only 4 days long.

Real estate

2006-12-31T18:26:00.000-08:00

Today we went to look at condos and townhomes. We looked at 4 total, only two of which were nice. Guess which ones were about $100 and $200 thousand more?

The first condo we looked at was $319K for a condo that's slightly bigger than our current apartment. I really liked it; it had skylights and felt bright and open. It's also pretty close to work for me, and not really any further from work for Steven than our current apartment, just one extra exit further on SR520.

My favorite one was the second townhome that we looked at by accident when the realtor got lost. It was $410K, which is so expensive given my midwest outlook on housing costs. But it was sweet; it had 3 bedrooms, a 2-car garage, and this nifty loft. The living room had the most beautiful view of Lake Washington as an added bonus.

The scary part of purchasing realty has yet to come; we need to talk to a mortgage expert. Nothing sounds worse to me than having my finances brutally analyzed to find out how much debt I'm allowed to go into. Well, maybe the Holocaust, but you get the picture.

Status report

2006-12-30T12:12:00.000-08:00

I've already sunk about 6 hours into KOTOR II. I'm playing a Jedi Guardian again, but this time I didn't come up with a clever name, I just made one up that sounds good: Jydan Symnar. The only name I wasn't considering was Anton after Travis warned me that it was a bad name choice :-).

There are some features of the game that I like much better over the first KOTOR. Possibly the best new feature is that empty containers are suffixed with (EMPTY) so that I don't wonder if I've alread looked in them (yep, I'm pretty easy to please with new features). I also really like that you can have an alternate weapon and switch between them with a single keystroke.

I decided to be a light side Jedi again, despite Steven trying to convince me that being a Sith would be more fun. It always seems too mean to be evil to characters, but maybe I'll play the game again sometime as a dark Jedi.