I’ve been tagged by Brad Wilson to tell a bit about my geek childhood. Like most of you, I certainly had one 🙂 My earliest geek memories starts with watching Star Trek back in about 1972. It was Return of the Archons – the one where the zombies in robes wander around talking about “Being of the Body”. I remember being totally and completely fascinated by it, and being hooked on science fiction from that point on.

My wife, Sharon, and I were talking about our top 10 movie list and what would be on it. The requirements were pretty simple. These had to be movies that we would generally stop what we were doing and watch together. Just because one of us like it wasn’t enough to make the list — it had to be both. Here they, are in random order: A Few Good Men Field of Dreams The Shawshank Redemption Bull Durham Remember the Titans Top Gun Back to the Future Men In Black Breakfast Club No real point to this post, but I thought I’d share 🙂

I’m looking for a tool of some sort that will allow me to manage all the different projects that I have going on. I currently have about 10 different efforts in which I’m involved, each of which has its own context and state. I find myself switching between these projects all the time, and it is difficult to keep each one’s current state in my  head. Do you use a tool to let you manage things like this?

I’ve had a bunch of personal thoughts and ideas that I’ve wanted to post over time, but I’ve always refrained from posting them here. So, instead, I’ve created another blog. I’m not sure where I’m going to host it permanently, so I’m housing it temporarily on blogspot. Check it out here if you’d like to read any of this. If you live in St. Louis, and especially the Rockwood School District, it is likely fairly relevant to you.

gci -recurse -include bin,obj . | ri -recurse I was playing around with how to get this to work, and I couldn’t seem to figure out why these commands didn’t find the same locations to delete: gci -recurse -include bin,obj . ri -recurse -force -include bin,obj -whatif . I finally got so baffled that I RTFMed remove-item, and there was my answer. In the fine print, nestled away in an example that did what I was looking for, and in the documentation for the recurse parameter was my answer…

The St. Louis Code Camp was yesterday, and it went great. We had 72 people there, 14 talks, lots of good conversation, and we even gave away an xbox 360! I’d like to thank everyone who volunteered, everyone who showed up, and all the speakers. A great time was had by all. The best news out of all of this is that people were practically demanding that we do this again in the fall!

Hi, All, This entry should have something in it for everybody, since I have a bunch of little things to say. Friday is my last day at patterns & practices. I want to thank everyone there who has put up with me for 2–1⁄2 years. The experiences I’ve had there and the friends I’ve made there will last me the rest of my life. And hopefully I’ve left something of myself behind that will help them in their future endeavors.

I am very pleased to announce that I have accepted a position as the Vice President of Engineering at Asynchrony Solutions, Inc., a leading agile development firm based in St. Louis, MO, effective May 1st, 2006. I’m thrilled to take this new position, as the spirit, principles, and values of Asynchrony very closely mirror my own — honesty, integrity, agility, openness, and all that other good stuff. In my new role, I will be responsible for helping align the agile project processes and practices with the larger business goals of the organization, developing an entirely new training division specializing in agile development and management practices, creating a .

I’m interested in hearing from any astronomers out there who have had Lasik surgery. I’m tired of glasses and contacts just aren’t as comfortable as I might hope they would be. I know Sky and Telescope did a big article on this subject in September, 2005, and I’ve read it, but I’d love to hear from people who have actually had this done. If you’ve had Lasik, and you’re an astronomer, I’d be very curious to know how it affected your vision at the eyepiece.

I, like most of you, get a ton of magazines per month. I get Dr. Dobbs, MSDN, Software Developer, Runner’s World, Sky and Telescope, Infoworld, CRN, and so on. Do you save them? Do you clip certain articles out of them and pitch the rest? Do you just pitch the whole thing when you’re finished and rely on the web to find them for you again later? I’m genuinely curious to find out.

Imagine my surprise when I woke up yesterday, checked my MSN email, and found a note from Soma  It seems that someone out there nominated me for an ACE (Award for Customer Excellence) for helping get VS.Net 2005 out the door, and Soma was writing to tell me that I had won. I have to admit, I was not expecting this at all (in fact, I had never heard of this until Sam Gentile mentioned that he got one), so I was really pleased when I saw it.

I know I haven’t posted for a long time, hopefully to the dismay of some of you . I’ve been involved with remaking myself physically, which has taken a tremendous amount of my time and energy, but has also paid off very well. During my time off from blogging, however, I’ve still been generating ideas on what I should write about. Here are some of the entries that I have coming in the next days, weeks, and months, in no particular order:

I just read an article about possible changes to Daylight Savings Time in the US. They want to start it two weeks earlier and end it one week later. But here is the best part. Fred Upton, R-Michigan, had this comment: Kids across the nation will soon rejoice because they’ll have another hour of daylight trick-or-treating. Now, this is truly a man without a clue. Is there anyone out there, parent or child, that wants to go trick-or-treating in daylight?

Some of my friends here at Microsoft have been involved with some personality analysis to find out how red, blue, green, or yellow they were. These colors reflect some sort of behavior (think aggressive, depressing, party, and mom :)). Since I’m just a consultant here, I didn’t get a chance to do this, but I did go back to a Myers-Briggs testing site and took one of the on-line quizzes. I turned out to be an INTJ, which chances are most of you are, too.