Hirlpoo West

I won't be updating this blog any longer. My new site should be live - http://www.hirlpoo.com . It needs a ton of work, but I should have some time to clean it up and get it running. I looked at migrating some content from here, but there really isn't...

After three and a half years of supporting production developers, I’ve come to realize how much I miss actually writing production code. To that end, I’m heading back to my roots as a developer. I’ve taken a position with Northwoods Software in Brown...

I'm currently on infant care leave and may or may not be posting stuff over the next month or so. At least now I have an excuse for a low post count.

Andrew Photoshoot , originally uploaded by ddysart . We decided against going the mall portrait route for Andrew's four year old picture this year in favor of making use of all the crap I've bought over the past few months. Here is a mosaic...

I can't remember who turned me on to Ze Frank, but it is a welcome break once in a while. Today's episode's discussion of the Field Medal is hilarious.

Having spent the past few weeks assiting a customer on some Word Addin issues, I've come to like the development platform that is Office. You can do some pretty cool stuff with it, even in just the Macro language. I'm in the process of trying to fully...

Though hardly breaking news at this point, I'll point folks to the new Windows Live Writer blog posting tool. I've been playing with it for a couple weeks no (we were under quarantine about talking about it) and like it pretty much so far (though I still...

I've been using Office 2007 since sometime between Beta1 TR and Beta 2. (I'm currently on a post Beta 2 build.) I'm slowly finding some cool stuff, and recently discovered Melissa MacBeth's blog on Task and Time Management. A guest post by Hank Leukart...

I just got my first rash of comment spam - now I feel like a real blogger.

I saw a lead photo for this article . A Dutch designer created a floating bed based on magnetic attraction/repulsion. It looks pretty nice. The article talks about folks with piercings not having issues, unless they go underneath it (say to dust or sweep...

Dare posted on this last week , but I got my second email today where someone was "super excited" to be doing something and almost screamed. We really need to remove this from the venacular. It has gotten to the point that I honestly tune out after...

About a week ago I helped troubleshoot an issue where a customer wrote a WinForms User Control and she was trying to use it on a form she was developing. When she dragged it from the toolbox, she was getting the following error: An exception occurred...

Having explained this to a number of people in as many days, I thought I'd share this tip for working with long paths on the command line. The easist way to expalin this is to jump in feet first: Open a command line ( <Windows Key> -R, CMD...

I needed a new AC adaptor for my Toshiba M4 and it arrived today. For a simple AC adapter (Toshiba Part Number PA3283U-3ACA), it came in a huge box. Then when opening the box, the first sheet on top was: In case the text is hard to read off...

Cal Roach knows a ton about all kinds of music. Along with his girlfriend, Jennifer, they have exposed me to tons of great music over the past year or so - either by outright saying, "Here, check this out!" or slipping me a copy of the latest International...

This is quite funny

By way of Kevin Cole's email list, there is some awesome footage of the Replacements playing at the First Avenue's 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis: As a regular listener to my show you know I’m a big Replacements fan. I was doing some Replacements...

This neat trick came across on an internal alias. I hadn't seen this before, but I'm guessing it isn't new. Pretty handy for notetaking (if you're a plain text sort of guy/gal). Open a blank Notepad file Write .LOG (in uppercase) in the first...

I realized I'd left my phone in my car, so I took a quick jaunt out there to go grab it, and this was parked in the lot (no its not mine): I'd only seen one of these on some high concept Ford commercial (as in, "look we have wicked looking cars...

I'm traveling to Redmond next week with a customer for a briefing. One of the evenings we are scheduled to have dinner with the legend, Robert Scoble himself. Even with all the hatin' he's been getting in the Mini comments lately (which I agree, have...

I was looking at some of the new features of WLL and saw that there were a few collections of traffic cameras and decided since WisDOT publishes traffic camera images on its website it wouldn't be too hard to put together a collection. It was actually...

Though I can't say I've been through anything quite this rough, everyone I know has been through some form of this .

I had a spare moment and was going to go through some unread stuff NewsGator pulled down for me, and low and behold there was nothing. Odd. LifeHacker alone posts on order of 20 things a day and I hadn’t gone through my RSS folders in almost a week...

I have a gmail account that I rarely use, but will from time to time to test out various email stuff (OOF messages for my customers, etc.). I've noticed they have recipes listed right above the input window. While clearing out my "spam" folder I got a...

I'm backing up a colleague who is out on vacation this week and got an interesting issue from one of his customers. They'd implemented a simple Windows Service in C# (v1.1) to read messages from a remote MSMQ queue. The issue they ran into is when...