# Tuesday, 07 November 2006

Here I am at my second Tech Ed in three weeks and ready for a great time. The RDs already had a great dinner Monday night, and Tuesday is Girl Geek night. I've picked up an extra session, too, a panel discussion Wednesday afternoon:

DEVPD01 .NET Rocks! Talks Agile Development!

Carl Franklin , Richard Campbell , Stephen Forte , Roy Osherove , Kate Gregory

Wed Nov 8 15:15 - 16:30 Room 116

Enjoy a live audience recording of .NET Rocks as Carl and Richard bring together a group of serious thinkers on agile development for a no-holds barred debate on what works and what doesn’t in the world of agile. Bring yourselves and your questions to the panel and help create a future episode of .NET Rocks!

Kate

 

Tuesday, 07 November 2006 07:46:44 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Monday, 06 November 2006

Tim Sneath has a neat trick: how to launch something "Run As Administrator" without right-clicking it and selecting from the context menu. And no, I don't mean use the ContextMenu key on your extended keyboard.

"Simply press Ctrl+Shift+Enter from the search bar on the start menu with a selected application, and that triggers elevation."

This is part of a series of useful tips you should probably read.

Kate

Monday, 06 November 2006 07:40:17 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Sunday, 05 November 2006

How much story can you pack into six words? Apparently Hemingway wrote "For sale, baby shoes.  Never used." Aaaawww, so sad.  But for true pathos, how about the sad laments of cast-off programming languages? Who says "They’ll come crawling back. You’ll see!" or "I was it once! What happened?" Let me try my own for C++ right now:

Unmanaged APIs everywhere. It Just Works.

What do you think?

Kate

 

Sunday, 05 November 2006 06:27:53 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Saturday, 04 November 2006

http://msdn.microsoft.com/canada/liveforyou/

Every Tuesday in November, at noon Eastern, you can tune in and learn about Windows Live while it's still in beta. Search, Virtual Earth, Gadgets, and Messenger Bots are the four topics. This is a presentation of MSDN Canada.

Sign up and watch!

Kate

Saturday, 04 November 2006 06:04:36 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Friday, 03 November 2006

I've been using Windows since the beginning. And I use the system icon in the upper left quite a lot, mostly to close things, and especially when the window is off the screen a bit so the X isn't available. In Vista, it looks like that icon/button is gone, but it isn't. Just click where it should be:

Double-click to close the window, or do any of the things you would otherwise do on that menu. Isn't that cool?

Kate

Friday, 03 November 2006 05:52:51 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Thursday, 02 November 2006

Lots of C++ content in this talk with Soma on Channel 9. I spoke to Charles about this interview and he told me he really didn't know where it was going to go when it started, and it didn't need any editing, which is unusual for a VP. Soma also blogged it.

Thursday, 02 November 2006 05:47:59 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Wednesday, 01 November 2006

Spotted in the speaker room in South Africa:

Those feet belong to Karen Young, MVP Regional Manager for EMEA:

 

Alas, the shoes aren't swag. Karen had them done at a street stall in China that was painting roses and anime characters onto shoes. They're one of a kind!

Kate

Wednesday, 01 November 2006 05:06:57 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Saturday, 28 October 2006

[backdated with dasBlog]

We didn't have a church ceremony for my father. Instead we gathered at the sailing club. A family friend acted as MC and each of us (the five children and my dad's wife) spoke, read a poem, or played some music. A table nearby was piled with newspaper clippings about his inventions, his trip around the world, and so on, as well as the sextant he used on his trips, his pipes, and so on.

Afterwards we got onto the boat, which is 26 feet long. A gale was forecast for that night, but it was afternoon and we were only 15 minutes from home. We had something to do and we went out and did it. His hat was still floating on the waves when a pulley that holds the tender (small dinghy) up out of the water broke. There followed several exciting minutes while the only two qualified sailors (my brother, who sailed the Atlantic with him 20 years ago, and my sister, who is eight months pregnant) wrestled it out of the remaining pulley, got it tied behind us, and got all the water out of it. When this was all settled we realized we had gone quite a long way and decided to take down the small sail we'd been using and motor back home.

The motor started fine and the prop turned, but it didn't make the boat move. This is the point where Dad would have opened things up and fixed them, had done so even just a few days after abdominal surgery, but none of us could. We tried a few things and then called the Coast Guard.

The ocean is big and even when you're on a cell phone telling them what island you think you are going past, it can take a long time to find you. It was getting darker and windier by the minute. We got a sail up (my brother wore the safety harness he'd worn in the North Atlantic) and actually got into a cove and at anchor by the time they found us. They said we'd lose the boat if we left her there that night, and decided to tow us to a marina. That all went without incident. Afterwards, standing around in our funeral clothes outside someone else's wedding reception, we acknowledged that maybe we hadn't been super smart in what we'd done, but that we'd been fine till the engine broke. That's when the Coast Guard guy said "Boats can be tricky that way." I thought he was going to patronize us, point out they take you onto the ocean or some such, but he went on "they don't like losing their owners." Told us a few tales of boats that sank the day they were sold and the like.

Later, my brother realized the pulley that broke just as we finished our private remembrance was the last thing my father had fixed on that boat. And I realized that when "bloody hell" (my Dad's favourite oath) started, and competence and capability (things my father valued highly, along with brute force) kicked in, the crying stopped. The five of us kids pulled together and rescued ourselves, now that we don't have Dad to rescue us any more. We're going to be OK.

Kate

Saturday, 28 October 2006 07:59:36 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #