House of Cards

Building software can be like managing a house of cards.

Maybe we should hire this guy.

Geek-O-Lanterns

I found a link to some pumpkin carvers geeking out.

Windows XP + Office 2007 = 13.5 GB

I reinstall Windows XP on my Tablet PC. I noticed that it is taking up a whopping 13.5 GB. This is after installing Windows XP (Tablet Edition), Office 2007, and all of the Microsoft updates (SP2 and about 120 updates). I should also mention that I did install a few extra options for both Windows XP and Office 2007. Sure you could remove a lot of things you may not use, but I would rather not for two reasons. First, it is time consuming to have to figure out what you don’t need. And second, I like having more features at my figure tips, not less. I really done like hunting for the install disk when I discover I need some feature that wasn’t installed. However, I am a fan of compression and I did compress my drive.

Inside of Hard Drive

This is a interesting video on how hard drives work.

Microsoft Certified

I passed a MCTS exam. I guess that makes me a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist.

Microsoft Certification Exams Completed Successfully

	Exam ID	Description		Date Completed
	536	TS: Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0 - Application Development Foundation		Jul 18, 2007

My Twin

I made the mistake of telling Brett that I had a twin brother. He repeatedly asked me for a picture and when I constantly refusing to give him one. He then took matters into his own hands.

(My face on Arnold and DeVito)

My Screencast on Lifehacker

I created a screencast about my Windows Key + R post and submitted it to Lifehackers. Seeing something that I have done on Lifehackers is very cool. I can’t wait to read my very own copy of the Lifehacker book.

Medieval Tech Support

I had a good laugh when I saw this. Although I tend to give users a little more credit.

Microsoft Surface?

A spoof on Microsoft Surface.

Programmers Prayer

From Billy Hollis

Help me learn the things I have to know,
Help me to except the things I don't have to know,
And give me some way to tell the difference.

Windows Key + R

From the run dialog in Windows XP you can open folders by using the following shortcuts.

.	C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\
..	C:\Documents and Settings\
\	C:\
Assembly	C:\WINDOWS\assembly
Cache	C:\WINDOWS\system32\Cache
Desktop	C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Desktop
Favorites	C:\Documents and Settings\Me\Favorites
Fonts	C:\WINDOWS\Fonts
My Documents	C:\Documents and Settings\Me\My Documents
SendTo	C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\SendTo
Start Menu	C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Start Menu
Tasks	C:\WINDOWS\Tasks

*The folders may vary depending on your windows configuration.

As far as I can tell, you can open directories that exist in the following directories by just typing in the directory names (without the full paths):
· C:\WINDOWS\
· C:\WINDOWS\system32
· C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\

This got me to thinking. If you are like me and would like to quickly go to different directories, you can creat shortcuts to those different directories in your “C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\” directory. Give this a try. Hit Windows Key + R to bring up the run dialog and type “.” to go to the “C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\” directory. Right click in the directory and select “New\Shortcut” and create a shortcut to another directory. Now hit Windows Key + R to bring up the run dialog again and type in the name of the shortcut that you just created. You should be taken to that directory.

ASCII Art

I was searching for some ASCII art and I found some cool sites.

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AsciiArt

http://www.chris.com/ASCII/

http://www.won.nl/dsp/usr/mvketel/Internet/Asciiart/linemain.html

http://www.messhits.com/ascii-text-art.html

Google Calculator

www.google.com has become more then just a search engine. It is a phone book, it looks up local movies, it looks up stock quotes, it can tell you the weather, and more. One thing that I thought was interesting was that it can be used as a calculator and can perform conversions between different units.

Example
- 1 + 1 in hex
- 10 + 10 in roman numerals
- 1 metric ton in ton
- 5 cubits in feet
- 20 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit
- 30 degrees C in F
- 6 fortnights
- 6 fortnights in weeks
- pi + 10 / 2
- 100 miles in kilometers
- 0b1100101*0b1001 (Binary math)
- 0x7f + 0x7f (Hexadecimal math)

I can't seem to find a full list of valid units, but it does seem to support quite a lot.

Also, google has patent searches (http://www.google.com/patents), source code searches (http://www.google.com/codesearch), and blog searches (http://blogsearch.google.com/).