Noah Coad

Weird Al does it again with a new geeky music video... White & Nerdy is just hilarious! Warning, you must be a major geek to fully appreciate this fine work of art. Of course there's also the classic It's All About the Pentiums

Dawn and I just visited the Texas Renaissance Festival where friends of ours, Chris Aquino & Sharon O'Brian, got married! Dawn and Sharon have been best of friends since they were young. It was truly a renaissance wedding and absolutely beautiful...

This past weekend my wife and I flew down to Houston Texas for the largest renaissance festival in the US, the Texas Ren Faire . Dawn has been going to the fair for over a decade and I've been the last four or five years. We always have a blast! There...

Last week Dawn , my sister Sarah, and I attended an Andre Rieu concert in Seattle, it was a blast! Andre is known around the world for his orchestra w/ choir and traveling guests. The orchestra ladies dress in beautiful gowns, they play fun music, and...

Check this out! The Koreans really love VSTS, they even have a song about it ! <lol> This was good entertainment, even though I only understood four words (you figure out which four). I wonder what they're saying the rest of the song... A transcript...

It's desktop background image w/ my product on it! I typically have wallpaper turned off with a plain blue colored desktop, but this is a real nice blue. The logo is in the bottom right corner so it doesn't interfere with desktop icons (typically in the...

My hockey team, Gang Green , just entered the Winter 2006 season of the Greater Seattle Hockey League (part of USA Hockey ). This is our 2nd season and we just got new jerseys! Our team website is http://ganggreen.org/ That's me in the middle with the...

Get SlickRun ( download now ) I'm a keyboard guy. Give me shortcuts. Let's see how long I can go w/out touching the mouse. To this end, for years I've wanted an app that would let me type short commands to access files, folders, programs, web pages, write...

A product I once worked on completely failed when it got into the customers hands and the business eventually went under, for one key engineering reason.  The product had too many customer dissatisfiers (missing key features, broken workflow, etc...

Perhaps you're familiar with such URL protocol handlers such as http://microsoft.com , ftp://user:pass@server outlook:Contacts , file://http://www.coad.net/blog/images/Greenstone.bmp , ms-help://... Want to make your own client-side URL handler? Maybe...

Fry's Outpost is has a great deal on a 400GB HDD for only $90 . It is the slightly older EIDE ATA 100 interface (not SATA) but looks like a good drive. Its a great deal and includes free ground shipping. It uses the new Perpendicular Recording Technology...

Get a lot of spam? My personal address, noah@coad.net , gets about a 1,000 a week, but I don't see a single one of them. If you don't mind getting spam, this isn't for you. If you find junk mail annoying, and the viruses, identify theft (from phishing...

When copy/pasting from MS Word, the HTML it generates is really messy and can't be used verbatim. This has been a pain of mine and many others. I've found that many 3rd party controls, and some client-side blogging tools (like BlogJet) have a miraculous...

A little known feature of VSTS Team Developer is the ability to use the run-time analysis of the Profiler specifically targetting the code in a Unit Test. There are a two key scenarios this integration feature targets: Collect Performance Data on Specific...

Do you find that you need to frequently change your screen resoltion? I do several times a day and some reasons are when: doing demos, showing my laptop screen to serveral people at once, switching between monitors, recording/capturing the screen, connecting...

< LOL > I picked up my phone, hit a number, and got BillG (well, his voice)! When you dial the main Microsoft phone number, 425-882-8080, an automated operator says "Who would you like to contact?", you just speak the name and it connects you. Real...

Two weeks ago I visited Texas A&M University's Computer Science Department for an Industrial Affiliates Program meeting and do so some recruiting. I had the privilege of presenting just how easy it is to do team software development with Visual Studio...

I just set up my blog with a new RSS feed provided by FeedBurner . Please subscribe to the new RSS feed . It should help provide better usage stats. I've also signed up with FeedBlitz which let's you subscribe to receive e-mails of new posts . If you...

A surprise packaged just arrived on my desk and upon opening it, walla! A new book on Team System! Jamil Azher came and visited me a few months ago and mentioned he was working on a new book, well, it's out! Global Sourcing with Microsoft Visual Studio...

It's common in today's high-tech jobs to spend a lot of time on e-mail, but just how much e-mail are we really dealing with? At MS, we're make such comments as "I'm swimming in e-mail!", "I've got x00 e-mails to get through", etc. But incoming e-mail...

Life Hacking, which is defined as "anything that solves a problem in an clever or non-obvious way" in regards to general everyday life, is a new term I just "discovered". I'm excited because I love tools, organization, process improvement, etc when it...

It's that time again for another exciting 1hr live online chat with the Visual Studio Team System team. Team Data (aka Data Dude) will be present for the first time too. Come with tons of questions since this is a big investment of time for VSTS, with...

This is in regard to installing Team Foundation Server for Visual Studio Team System with the TFSSETUP, TFSSERVICE, and TFSREPORTS accounts, whether they must be Admins on the local machine or Active Directory domain. It also includes my tips to installing...

From NewEgg.com, Sale ends Tuesday 9/12 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820141037&CMP=OTC-RSS (Noah: Wow, 4GB, I'm impressed.) $58.99 - pqi 4GB Secure Digital (SD) Flash Media Model AE40-4030-0101 - Retail Monday, 11 September...

Microsoft EMEA (Europe)'s TechNet website has a site called "IT's ShOwtime!" where you can all the presentations from WinHEC, TechEd US 2006, and more online (for free). They have sites in many languages, including English. I'm catching up right now on...