Writing
Articles
Essays on thinking clearly, working for yourself, and doing real work while AI rewrites the rules. Two decades of them.
Restoring a Dell Inspiron 6400 To Factory
Dell's PCRestore.exe utility fails silently with no error text. Here's the actual System Restore path that resets an Inspiron 6400 to factory.
2008.09.17Read →Why Windows Task Manager Sucks
Windows Task Manager can't tell you what's hammering your disk when svchost spikes. AnVir Task Manager Free actually shows you why.
2008.09.17Read →Little Sophia
A rare non-technical post here: my daughter Sophia arrived September 10, 2008, a healthy 7lbs 8oz, via natural water birth. Mom and baby are great.
2008.09.12Read →My Blog was down, Like Whoa.
My old host accidentally deleted my account and the blog only survived by luck, not my backup plan. Moved hosts and learned the lesson the hard way.
2008.09.09Read →Mozilla Ubiquity
Hands-on with Mozilla Ubiquity, the Firefox add-on that lets you type natural-language commands for weather, Wikipedia, translation, and email.
2008.08.29Read →You Received an Error. So what. Deal with it.
A ThoughtWorks forum's ugly crash page is a reminder: always give users a friendly error message and a way to contact support, or you're losing them.
2008.08.29Read →Twin Cities Code Camp – Oct 11
I'm speaking at the 5th Twin Cities Code Camp on Oct 11 about using the Workflow Rules Engine inside a WCF service for flexible rules.
2008.08.27Read →Unnecessary Abstractions
A code review facepalm: someone hand-rolled IP address parsing logic that .NET's built-in IPAddress class already handles perfectly.
2008.08.27Read →Twin Cities Give Camp Update
An update on the Twin Cities Give Camp website, some ongoing hosting hiccups, and how to sign up to volunteer or sponsor the event.
2008.08.23Read →Insane Flight Prices
A quick rant about flight prices -- a short hop from Minneapolis to Des Moines quoted at over $700, cheaper to just make the 3.5-hour drive.
2008.08.22Read →The Twin Cities Give Camp
Launching Twin Cities Give Camp: a weekend where developers, designers, and DBAs build free custom software for local non-profits.
2008.08.13Read →DiscountASP vs. Me
A rant about DiscountASP.NET recycling its app pool every few minutes because of Community Server 2007's memory footprint, logging everyone out mid-post.
2008.08.08Read →