My favorite tool today is… Knee pads. Not just any knee pads, though: CLC’s Gel Kneepads with grooved caps (you can get them at Ace Hardware). I spent about six hours this evening on my knees pulling wire in cramped spaces so that we can restore the original...

Earlier this week I ordered a 13-inch Grizzly planer-molder . Our initial job for it is to plan several thousand lineal feet of painted molding from our house through it to strip it back to its original finish. After that, some custom molding for the...

Surprising factoid: after HTML and Javascript, C++ is the language most used by non-professional developers (including students, hobbyists, etc.). This based on some of our internal research over the past 4 years (statistically significant sample, but...

I’m not encouraging you to switch jobs, but this made me laugh.

Let me preface everything in this post with the statement that SPSS is a remarkable tool for data analysis and that I’m not an SPSS expert – I used to have passing familiarity with SAS (different beast) and some college-level statistics from nearly twenty...

Check out Number 10 . Another bbSpot special.

Today I did two in-person interviews and five phone screens plus set up another four informational interviews. Hiring is tiring. It’s really nice when, during the course of the Microsoft interview cycle, one of the interviewers emails you and asks, “Where...

Have you ever sat down and thought up some brilliant thing, then realized, “Why bother?” Today during an interview, a candidate related a question he was asked about how he’d implement a particular feature. To me, the feature (it’s not important what...

Well, here's one : a PC case modded to look like a Hollywood nuclear device.

Transcription of the Morse code in Sunday May 21 st ’s Fox Trot . ... s --- o -- m . e -.. d .- a -.-- y .. i .-- w .. i .-.. l .-.. l .-. r ..- u .-.. l . e -.-- y --- o ..- u .- a .-...

Today I’m going to be at an offsite with a bunch of other managers from the VS team. When I was younger, I always looked forward to offsites as an opportunity to learn something, to play around, and (really) to take a day off from work. As I’ve gotten...

I’m checking out Joe Friend’s work to make Word 2007 a good blog post editor. So far what I've noticed is that setting it up was harder than I expected, in part because in order to find the Metaweblog API for blogs.msdn.com I had to RAS into corpnet over...

From the post of a former Apple support person . This actually describes a lot of software from Apple, Microsoft, and many, many others.

Via Fark : PawSense -- catproof your computer . My favorites: "PawSense analyzes keypress timings and combinations to distinguish cat typing from human typing." "If a cat gets on the keyboard, PawSense makes a sound that annoys cats. This teaches...

During the renovation on our house we've moved to West Seattle and I've noticed that things take me longer here. Not only is the commute 50% longer, but performing my morning ablutions takes longer. Things aren't where I expect them, the doors don't open...

Do we need a complement to Visual Web Developer Express (i.e. a free, simplified Web page editor) that is aimed at the HTML jockey? If so, what features should it have? The big question for me on this one is where a sitebuilder (the Web-based configuration...

When Visual Studio "Orcas" ships, we have a question we need to answer: which version(s) of the .NET Framework/WinFX should it target? Having a single tool that can target various runtimes has been something I've been a strong advocate of for years, but...

Courtesy bbSpot : 2006 Summer Blockbuster List and why you shouldn't go see them .

Building on my Principles for First-Use Tools , I'm thinking about Principles for Express. Express is a tougher job because its customer base spans so many people -- from professionals coding after hours to students to people who aren't developers using...

Courtesy bbSpot (again): Watch reviews .

Getting the right team name is critical to setting the right tone for the kind of team you want to have and for recruiting. A cool name gets you the cool people. A boring name gets you people like me. So, in an effort to come up with a team name I sat...

We have two cats: Mac and Jack (yes, named after the beer). Yesterday we moved from our house to a house in West Seattle so that the contractors could descend and remove the existing second story from our house and build a new one. The cats, of course...

C is for Cookie . Thanks to bbspot .

How did you learn to program? Especially if you’re not a professional developer and never had been (I already have the data that says that something like 70% of professional developers got degrees in computer science or engineering). I’m wondering how...

Following up from my previous post about creating a cap for our front porch pillars out of concrete: it worked. I unformed them last night and the concrete seems to have emerged relatively as I wanted it. But we're likely not to use what I created. Why...