This has simplified my Christmas shopping for all my married friends.

Me?  Naahhh, I don’t need that!  Right honey?

I realized this has been around for a while, it is so dead on though, I couldn’t help but share it.

I just signed up for a 24/7 Web Monitoring service, and granted it is probably a startup and probably going through growing pains, I still couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony.

I needed a virtual machine to test an application in isolation and realized I didn’t have any of my .vhd images on hand.  

I looked around and came across this collection of downloadable VHDs directly from Microsoft, pre-activated, for both Vista and XP with different versions of IE including IE6 (XP only), IE7 & IE8.

The OSes are trial versions (of course) and expire January 1st for the XP installs and 120 days after first use for the Vista images.

Images require at least 1.5GB of HD space once expanded, so make sure you have some room available for it.

It appears the word/verb “Refactor” is absent “out of the box” from all if not most of the environments that provide a spell checker service or feature.  At least the ones I’ve used lately and since I started to notice.  From (this) Live Writer to Word to within the browser on the update textbox of twitter, you name it, I keep having to “right click, Add to Dictionary”.

Wikipedia does have an article for the term “Refactoring”, and so does Dictionary.com but the “verb” Refactor is not on either (Wikipedia redirects to Refactoring) and Merriam-Webster comes up empty when searching for either.

Is there a way to carry around one’s dictionary from environment to environment and use it on all if not most of the aforementioned tools? 

I guess I have to do a little bit of research, and no I won’t hold the post until I do.  I’d rather note my observation and I *should* then later do the legwork and update with my findings.  I reserve the right to slack on such task, do nothing and instead keep “right clicking, Adding to Dictionary” as I go.

Image by hisks

If you take the approach to clean up after yourself as you progress through whatever maybe your daily routine, and create this good habit for everything you do, you’ll end up avoiding what is almost unavoidably natural for most of us: procrastination.

Whether it is while you cook, write code/implement software solutions, do the laundry or go though things on your desk at the office, if you let things pile up… well, you’ll end up with a pile of <insert appropriate noun here>.

Why not keep your projects, solutions, classes, layers, frameworks, third party components et.al. in an organized manner right off the bat?  Regardless of the size and scope of the project, platform or technology…  Why wait until it becomes a tangled mess of bad historic legacy waiting… clamoring for someone to come in, criticize, refactor and “waste time” cleaning up your mess?

Why wait until your roommate, spouse, parent or sibling comes around and has to deal with piles of dirty dishes, filthy counters or messy bathroom?

I believe it is one of the easiest forms of procrastination to avoid with the highest payback in quantity, quality and immediacy of satisfaction.

Be it with the proverbial or actual dirty dishes, don’t be a slob, love yourself and those around you and Clean as you go… whatever that may end up being.

My wife seems to be addicted to strollers… or maybe it is just to the action of buying them and finding every little possible flaw in them.

Disclaimer intended for my beautiful and beyond perfect wife: Honey, I love you, but this has got to stop.  A stroller is a stroller is a stroller.

Going on for about 2 years now, but most definitely a lot worse during the last year.  Those that I can count and recollect, she’s gone through SIX (6) different stroller, not counting the ones she accumulated in the garage that she picked up in what seems to be random places as she drove past.

She has bought them direct from different places the majority of them coming  from craigslist.

The following are pictures of the ones currently in our possession including:

a) A double Burley bike trailer

b) A “jogging” (wink-wink) double stroller

c) A double “regular” stroller.

d) Our first and reliable Graco single stroller.

She “just” bought “b” as a “bargain” from Craigslist and took it out this afternoon.  Upon returning she reported “I don’t like it… its weird”… which only means one thing:  a new stroller will be added to the line up.

God help us.

Got myself a new toy, a Linksys NAS 200, picked it up at on sale at buy.com for $75 and stuffed it with dual 1TB Hitachi 7200RPM hard drives from Newegg.com for $65 a piece after $10 immediate coupon and, where I to get my ass in gear I have a $10 rebate on each that would bring the price down to $55 a pop.

Here is my cliff notes review.

Installation

Physical

A snap, quite literally (do notice I did have a helper throughout so take that into account!).

Take the front covers out by releasing the plastic latch, then squeeze in the 3.5” SATA drives which fit snuggly and perfectly, until you feel the connectors in the back perfectly couple with the drive’s own.

Power up…

Setup

Pop in the Installation CD, which runs the app that scans for the device in your local network.  Either follow the wizard (which I did the first time) or change settings manually (without the wizard).  Settings to set include device network name, IP (static or DHPC) and drive configuration.

The NAS supports as much as you would expect from a $75, 2 drive device.  RAID 0 (stripping) for speed, RAID 1 (mirroring) for peace of mind.  You can also configure it to use the Two separate disks (Recommended)or Two disks configured as one large disk (JBOD/LVM).

I configured it using RAID 1, since I don’t think I have close to that amount of data requiring “secure” storage.  This is the purpose that best fits my immediate needs and that in my mind justified the roughly $150 expense.

One small shortcoming that I think is, again typical to expect of your $75 device, is that you are tied to manage permissions and setup shares and such from the proprietary software interface, something that may fall short of a great experience but also something that I am probably going to do seldom if ever now that it is up and running. 

It is manageable via its self contained and hosted web interface or via a desktop app included with the supporting media.

If you happen to need additional storage to be served via the same mechanism and want to add to the NAS, one option is to do it via it’s USB interface.  The device will manage up to 2 external USB drives and serve them up via the same interface with some limitations, served straight up no RAID.

Some cool, non advertised features include power management (very welcome indeed) and a “Media Server” option which I haven’t tried out yet.

Thus far, not quite 1 month into the purchase, installation, setup and configuration, I would recommend this product to anyone looking for a truly inexpensive way to store and manage (secure if so desired) data.  How expensive or cheap you end up going depends on your options for the actual drives you put in it, but you could start with one and add to it.  Of course that would limit or somewhat restrict your ability to use mirror after the fact.

This literally just came into my inbox… (cut edited for obvious reasons)

And what exactly am I supposed to do with this?

I know its not the biggest, or most powerful or most impressive out there, but MY jaw certainly dropped when I first got my hands on this bad boy.

This is our new Database Server.  Check out the # of processors, and if you are still standing, check out the amount of RAM installed!  I am running at least 2 machines that have a smaller hard drive than the total amount of RAM on this monster.

Yeah, it rocks!

A couple of weeks ago, more precisely on March 31st, I attended the ArcReady event on Architecting for the Cloud.  Sparing you of all the details, suffice it to say that it was much needed motivation to take action on a few personal goals around something that has always been a passion of mine… Continuous Education.

I am currently working on some personal tasks pertaining to that goal, as I said before inspired and motivated by the contents of that ArcReady event.  Expect a stream of content coming from me on the topics around cloud computing, specifically developing for Azure.

Be it learning through trial by fire, attending a more structured lecture, seminar, conference or class or a combination of them, doing *that* allows me to frame my actions within the right mindset.  It is a way to cope with the routine of our daily grind, where implementation of current technology is not always a welcome approach and other priorities take precedence.

This coming Friday April 17th, I will be attending an all day seminar on ASP.NET MVC, presented Jeffrey Palermo.  Its a paid event at $125 for the day, including food.  Not bad.  Work is not picking up the tab (at least proactively), and I have no problem paying for it out of my own pocket.

I wouldn’t usually be willing to pay the $125 for a conference of this nature, but I’ve seen Jeffrey speak at a user group meeting and I genuinely enjoyed his style.  At times, speakers either by choice or inadvertently focus their tone and message towards a certain audience, leaving some others with much to be desired and some others lost in the land of glazed eyes.  In this case, Palermo certainly spoke to my “level”.  Lets leave it at that.

I know Brennan and Scott Isaacs will be there.  I don’t know who else, but I am sure 70% will be familiar faces as it always ends up being.

Next on the agenda for this month is an MSDN Events Unleashed afternoon session coming up Tuesday April 28th on Internet Explorer 8 for Developers and Developing on Microsoft Windows 7.  Interesting topics, enough to coerce my attendance.  On that, I wanted to comment on the fact that some people expect too much of these sessions, and honestly, they are what they are (isn’t that enlightening!)… You should attend with more than one point on your agenda.  It is a chance to network and a chance to be there when perhaps this one bit of information which you weren’t aware of gets revealed to you.  You may think on topics like these, having done your homework is good enough and “what else could I learn from going there?”, but you’d be surprised.