Random Musings of Jeremy Jameson : Personal

Escaping from Double-Click Purgatory

Jeremy Jameson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:37:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I started experiencing an incredibly frustrating problem on my laptop. When I clicked the mouse, instead of responding with a single-click (e.g. to select an item), it acted as if I double-clicked the mouse button.

At first I thought that I was simply losing control of my motor reflexes (in other words, I was mistakenly double-clicking when I meant to single-click). However, over time I began to experience the issue more and more frequently -- almost to the point where it was endangering my sanity. No matter how carefully I clicked the mouse, a double-click response would occur.

You can imagine how frustrating this would be when you are trying to drag-and-drop mail messages from your inbox to another folder, or even worse, when you click the delete button in the Outlook toolbar and suddenly two messages are deleted instead of just the one you intended.

It got so bad that while I was performing a demo for the CIO on my current project, I had to use the integrated touchpad on the laptop instead of the external mouse, for fear of embarrassing myself. [If you've ever seen my laptop, you would know that I actually cover the touchpad (with a slightly trimmed business card) in order to avoid mistakenly triggering a mouse click while I am typing. I considered disabling it altogether, but there are rare occasions when I actually use it -- since long ago my daughter tore off the little rubber "cap" on the pointer device in the middle of the keyboard. There was just something about that little "blue dot" that she couldn't resist.]

I did a quick Internet search to see if anyone else had experienced similar issues and I discovered that I certainly wasn't the only one to endure this nightmare. Several sources -- including KB 266738 -- suggested that the problem was due to the mouse drivers being defective. Some people also stated that the IntelliPoint software was "crap" and should be avoided altogether. Hmmm...that didn't seem right, because the software was working fine for me for several years.

Nevertheless, I tried removing the IntelliPoint software altogether, but the problem still occurred. I then reinstalled IntelliPoint, desperately hoping the problem would miraculously go away.

It didn't.

At that point, I trekked down to the basement and dug out an old wireless mouse that I used on my desktop before switching to my current trackball. After inserting a couple of fresh AA batteries, I plugged the receiver for the wireless mouse into my laptop and, voilà...problem solved!

I've been using the replacement mouse for almost two weeks now and have yet to experience even one unintended double-click.

So, the lesson here is that while I love my IntelliMouse, it certainly has a strange way of failing after years of use and thousands (or perhaps tens of thousands) of clicks.

Hopefully this post saves at least one person the days of anguish that I experienced in Double-Click Purgatory.

Analyzing My MSDN Blog

Jeremy Jameson — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:42:00 GMT

According to my blog dashboard, this will be post #150 for my MSDN blog. So this morning I thought I would do something a little different by providing some analysis on my blog.

I extracted the data from Community Server into an Excel spreadsheet so I could easily create some pivot tables and charts. [I don't believe that the MSDN blogs platform is running Harvest -- or if it is, I certainly don't have access to it.]

Here's a quick summary of my initial analysis:

Table 1: MSDN Blog Usage Analysis
Metric	Views	AggViews	Comments	Combined Views
Total	205,142	139,377	209	344,519
Maximum	12,240	2,855	13	14,445
Minimum	196	306	0	678
Average	1,359	923	1.4	2,282

Note that Combined Views is something I defined and is simply the sum of Views and AggViews.

The following post provides a good explanation of the difference between "Views" and "AggViews" in Community Server.

Eriksson, J-O (2006). Views statistics of your blog. 2006-07-24.

http://weblogs.asp.net/joeriksson/archive/2006/07/24/Views-statistics-of-your-blog.aspx

Here's the gist of it:

Generally speaking, "Views" is the number of times somone viewed a post on the web via a browser, and "AggViews" is the number of times someone viewed the post via the RSS and Atom feeds.

More specifically, the web view count is only updated in the EntryView control. This is displayed when you are viewing a single post. If you are viewing a list of posts, such as on the blog home page, the view counts of the posts are not updated.

Based on the second paragraph, the numbers shown above are not entirely accurate (specifically, they are less than the actual values) but my gut tells me they are reasonably close. In other words, while some people may simply browse to http://blogs.msdn.com/jjameson and start reading without ever clicking through on an individual post, I don't think this is a large number.

After all, how many times do you find yourself truly "browsing" a site compared with how many times you start from a search in order to quickly locate content of interest? Then, of course, there's the case where someone starts reading a post but then decides something like "hmmm...interesting...but not really what I was looking for...time to move on..."

Note that I had to do a little tweaking for the minimum values computed in my spreadsheet (in order to avoid showing all zeroes in the row) because I have a couple of unpublished posts that obviously haven't been viewed by anyone except me. I'll talk more about those in a moment.

I have to say that I was a little surprised by the total number of combined views. While I'm sure 345,000 pales in comparison to the likes of Scott Hanselman, Scott Guthrie, and Joel Spolsky, it's still a lot more than I expected for my humble blog. Seeing the average number of RSS views for each post exceed the 900 mark also makes me feel a little warm and fuzzy. So, for the roughly 2,800 of you that have subscribed to my blog at one point or another, I want to shout out a big "thank you!"

It's nice to know that the effort I put into writing blog posts are considered helpful for a number of people. Anyway, moving on...

Here's a chart showing the combined views for each blog post that I've created so far.

Figure 1: Combined views for each blog post

See full-sized image.

I didn't show the labels (i.e. blog post titles) on the X-axis for obvious reasons. I find it interesting how some blog posts are really "hot" in comparison with the average. Nothing mysterious here, this is obviously due to Internet search engines such as Bing and Google. More on that in a moment.

Looking at the chart above, one of the first things I was interested in identifying are my most popular posts, as well as my least popular posts.

Let's start with the top 10 posts:

Table 2: Top 10 Blog Posts
Rank	Post	Combined Views
1	Issues Deploying SharePoint Solution Packages	14,445
2	The Case of the Disappearing Hosts File	13,029
3	Dumping MOSS 2007 Variations - Part 1	9,417
4	"Error Creating Control" when using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007	7,525
5	Virtual Server Issues and Recommendations for MOSS Virtual Environments	6,908
6	Dumping MOSS 2007 Variations - Part 2	6,813
7	Creating a Site Template in MOSS 2007 that Works in WSS v3	5,753
8	Scope Dependencies for SharePoint Features	5,607
9	MOSS Development Environment and a Windows Update Bug	5,307
10	Installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1	5,199

Hmmm...nine of the top 10 posts are related to SharePoint. No big surprises there ;-)

What about the bottom 10 posts?

Table 3: Bottom 10 Blog Posts
Rank	Post	Combined Views
151	Adventures in Upgrading TFS	0
150	AutoEventWireup Issue in MOSS 2007	0
149	ArgumentNullException with Optional PublishingPage.Description Property (with some thoughts on breaking the build, too)	678
148	Eliminate MBSA Warnings Using Default Security Settings Policy	679
147	Constraining Tables with CSS	728
146	DataNavigateUrlFormatString Does Not Allow "javascript:"	773
145	Add Rooler to Your Web Development Toolbox	826
144	New MSDN Theme on My Blog	841
143	KB 896861 and "Microsoft Fix it"	849
142	Latest Version of Opera Ignores Hosts File	850

I suppose that I really should have thrown out the first two items because these posts are not published.

The Adventures in Upgrading TFS post was something I started back in March 2008 when I ran into a couple of snags upgrading the instance of Team Foundation Server 2005 in the "Jameson Datacenter" to TFS 2008. I thought I would eventually get around to finishing that post, but apparently not. Perhaps some other morning...however, I'm not sure it would help very many people after all this time. I certainly hope most organizations running TFS have upgraded by now.

The AutoEventWireUp Issue in MOSS 2007 post is something I really should finish. I started it back in June 2008 but somehow it fell off my plate. Stay tuned...I'll try to get to that this week. No, I won't "try" -- I will get to that this week. I promise.

In the meantime, back to this post.

It's also not suprising to see that many of the items in the bottom 10 are recent posts. As such, one would expect them to have fewer hits than others.

Since it's just so incredibly easy to do in Excel, I decided to see how my authoring of blog posts has varied over time.

Let's start with the total number of posts by year:

Figure 2: Blog posts created by year

See full-sized image.

Hmmm...apparently 2008 wasn't a very good year for me from a blogging perspective. Fortunately, the number for 2009 is much better -- and we still have almost two months to go!

Let's look at the total number of posts by month:

Figure 3: Blog posts created by month

See full-sized image.

Well, that certainly is, um...erratic. Oh, and where is December?!

Ouch...it looks like for the last two years I have completely neglected my blog in that month.

Will this year be any different? Hmmm...wait and see ;-)

I can tell you that I'll be taking quite a bit of vacation again this year in December and my wife won't appreciate it very much if I blog when I should be working on refinishing our master bathroom. However, I'll try not to skip that month entirely once again.

I read one of Scott Hanselman's posts a while ago that talked about calculating your PPM (Posts Per Month) -- or was it BPM? I can't remember. Anyway, it seems like I could definitely be a little more consistent throughout the year. Trying to maintain a steady rhythm when it comes to blogging is always a challenge when you consider how much else there is to do on any given day.

The last area that I want to cover in this post is with regards to Internet search results -- which I briefly mentioned earlier. In other words, while it is interesting that blog posts like Issues Deploying SharePoint Solution Packages and The Case of the Disappearing Hosts File are at the top of the list, what I find more interesting is why they appear at the top of the list.

Let's start with the most popular post. Drilling down on the 12,246 views in the Community Server dashboard (which does not include "AggViews") to see the list of referrals, I encountered the largest HTML table I've ever seen on a page (over 5,500 rows). After a couple of attempts, I managed to copy all of the data into my Excel workbook and then sort by Hits descending.

Table 4: Top referrals by URL for post - Issues Deploying SharePoint Solution Packages
URL	Hits	Last Date
http://decatec.it/blogs/2007/06/18/sharepoint+deployment+tecniques.aspx	83	Oct 12 2009, 01:58 AM
http://google.com/search?q=this+solution+contains+resources+scoped+for+a+web+application+and+must+be+deployed+to+one+or+more+web+applications.&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-us:official&client=firefox-a	76	Oct 12 2009, 10:02 AM
http://stevepietrek.com/2007/06/17/links-6172007/	69	Oct 28 2009, 02:41 AM
http://google.com/search?q=this+solution+contains+resources+scoped+for+a+web+application+and+must+be+deployed+to+one+or+more+web+applications&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-us:official&client=firefox-a	45	May 04 2009, 03:04 PM
http://google.com/search?q=this+solution+contains+resources+scoped+for+a+web+application+and+must+be+deployed+to+one+or+more+web+applications.&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&startindex=&startpage=1	44	Oct 28 2009, 02:03 PM
http://google.com/search?q=this+solution+contains+resources+scoped+for+a+web+application+and+must+be+deploy&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-us:official&client=firefox-a	42	Oct 30 2009, 03:18 PM
http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=this+solution+contains+resources+scoped+for+a+web+application+and+must+be+deployed+to+one+or+more+web+applications	37	Feb 04 2009, 04:07 PM
http://google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=this+solution+contains+resources+scoped+for+a+web+application+and+must+be+deployed+to+one+or+more+web+applications.&meta=	35	Oct 27 2009, 08:10 AM
http://google.com/search?hl=en&q=this+solution+contains+no+resources+scoped+for+a+web+application+and+cannot+be+deployed+to+a+particular+web+application	34	Oct 27 2009, 11:56 PM
http://google.com/search?q=this+solution+contains+no+resources+scoped+for+a+web+application+and+cannot+be+deployed+to+a+particular+web+application&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-us:official&client=firefox-a	33	Nov 01 2009, 06:57 PM
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/sharepointadmin/thread/0881326b-7cb6-4198-9bac-7df6eaed9dde	32	Oct 17 2009, 03:41 PM

However, adding up the numbers for the top 10 referrals accounts for less than 5% of the 12,246 views for this post. Upon further inspection, I found that only 8,400 of the 12,200 views actually have referral data.

Breaking down the referrals by domain name, I found the following:

Table 5: Top referrals by domain for post - Issues Deploying SharePoint Solution Packages
Domain	Hits
google.com	3,893
google.co.uk	628
google.co.in	519
google.com.au	310
google.ca	288
google.nl	211
google.de	198
search.live.com	129
google.fr	125
decatec.it	99

Note that the post was created back in June 2007, which helps explain why you see search.live.com instead of bing.com in the top 10 list.

To help me get a better feel for the Google vs. Microsoft ratio, I grouped the results into categories and subcategories.

Figure 4: Referrals by category for post - Issues Deploying SharePoint Solution Packages

See full-sized image.

It turns out that the subcategories were really only interesting for the purposes of identifying the top-level categories.

What's up with Alta Vista and AOL? Does anyone still use those search engines? Evidently a few people in the last couple of years ;-)

I have a strong suspicion that if I went through the same exercise for my second most popular post, I would see very similar results.

I'm not sure how useful this information might be to others, but I found it very enlightening. It gives me some great things to keep in mind when I sit down to work on my blog.

Is AutoCorrect making me stupid or just plain lazy?

Jeremy Jameson — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:03:00 GMT

Yesterday's post got me thinking about something.

Do you find yourself occasionally typing one word when you are actually thinking of a different word that sounds the same? A faint recollection from one or more of my English classes long ago suggested that these words are called homonyms. However, a quick search just now on Wikipedia indicates these are actually homophones.

For example, have you ever typed the word "do" when you meant "due", or similarly "overdo" when you meant "overdue"? Surely you know the difference between the two, yet somehow in the time that it takes your fingers to turn your thoughts into characters, then words, and eventually sentences on the screen, something goes terribly wrong.

I honestly can't ever remember doing this as child, although it undoubtedly happened more than a few times as my vocabulary grew at a faster pace than my ability to spell. I definitely don't remember it happening in high school or college. This made me wonder if this infliction is somehow related to typing -- or more specifically, my typing speed (which has vastly increased since my college days). This got me thinking that perhaps it's not actually related to my skills as a typist, but somehow related to the fact many of the applications I use on a daily basis have some sort of "auto-correct" feature.

Consider the AutoCorrect feature in Microsoft Word -- and Outlook -- as an example. I have to wonder if the fact that this has been fixing my typing and spelling errors for almost fifteen years has somehow made me just a little too dependent on this feature. I can honestly say that I don't do as much proofreading today as I used to a few years ago, and this really isn't a good thing.

It's probably overkill to proofread every single e-mail message before sending it out, but at the same time, isn't it embarrassing to send a message that uses the word "to" when it should be "too"?

Of course, I'm not saying that these errors are the fault of software features like AutoCorrect. Surely I'm the one that bears ultimate responsibility for the words I write. Perhaps I just need to consider disabling the AutoCorrect feature in Word and Outlook for a while -- or better yet, maybe I should look for an old IBM Selectric on ebay and subject myself to some exercises on that for a little while. Without a doubt, a few dozen pages on that -- and a couple of bottles of Liquid Paper, of course -- would cure whatever ailment I seem to have contracted in the last few years.

The Original "Jameson Datacenter"

Jeremy Jameson — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:18:00 GMT

This morning I was doing some cleanup of my documents folder and I stumbled across a rather old Visio document that showed the beginnings of what I now refer to as the "Jameson Datacenter" (a.k.a. my home lab). For some geeky reason, seeing this again brought a smile to my face and a sense of nostalgia. It also caused me to recall two things:

That old Greatful Dead song "Truckin'" -- specifically the line

Lately it occurs to me: What a long, strange trip it's been.

Update

Doh! You would think a guy with a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering could spell "Grateful Dead" correctly! I suppose that I really should do more proofreading before clicking that Publish button ;-)
An article I read about a year ago describing the origin of Google that also included some photos of the original Google infrastructure in the Stanford University computer lab.

Now, please don't misunderstand -- I most certainly am not claiming that the Jameson Datacenter will ever amount to even the most miniscule fraction of what Google grew into in less than a decade. All I'm saying is that in the incredible way the neurons are wired together in the human brain, things that we see very often trigger distant memories with amazing clarity.

For those of you that may not have seen the original Google server farm, I did a quick search this morning and managed to find the following:

Google Stanford Hardware

http://geektechnique.org/media/google/googlehardware.html

If you haven't seen this, take a quick peek. It will surely bring a smile -- if not a burst of laughter.

After enjoying the nostalgia for a moment, I almost deleted the Visio diagram and continued my cleanup effort. However, then I decided that I might as well "archive" this on my blog. It definitely won't help your efforts of deploying Microsoft technology, but I think it's okay for a blog to wander a little every now and then -- perhaps for no other reason than to keep you guessing as to what may come next on the Random Musings of Jeremy Jameson.

Here's the physical architecture of what I now refer to as the "Old Jameson Datacenter":

Figure 1: Old Jameson Datacenter - Physical Architecture

See full-sized image.

Apparently the last time I updated this Visio diagram, I still hadn't decided what to do with all of the Dell servers I had procured through various channels (primarily the Dell Outlet and ebay). Hence the Dell PowerEdge 4300 with the "??" next to it. As I mentioned in my original post on the Jameson Datacenter, this server was the original BEAST (which is now my "Production" database server). However, it has since been replaced with a home-built server.

From the previous figure, you can start to see why I've consolidated these servers in recent years by leveraging virtualization. The power consumption by all of these servers was really rather ridiculous when you consider what I was using these servers for.

Notice that I use to run a back-to-back firewall configuration with a perimeter network (a.k.a. DMZ):

Figure 2: Old Jameson Datacenter - TCP/IP Configuration

See full-sized image.

This is because I had one server with a public (static) IP address and therefore ran a couple of Web sites on the old "ICEMAN" server -- hence the name "ICEMAN", because it was my "IIS" server. Get it? Yeah, I know...more geekiness.

The naming convention was such that the names corresponding to X-Men heroes were all members of the TECHTOOLBOX domain, whereas servers corresponding to X-Men villains were considered "dangerous" and thus not members of the domain. Egad! Does the geekness ever end?! [I wonder if someday when my daughter is much older, she'll ever bother to read this and seriously start to question her father's sanity.]

Anyway, here's the DNS and DHCP configuration for the original farm:

Figure 1: Old Jameson Datacenter - DNS/DHCP Configuration

See full-sized image.

There's nothing really too interesting about that, I suppose.

Perhaps the most laughable aspect of the Old Jameson Datacenter -- at least when compared to today -- was the storage infrastructure:

Figure 1: Old Jameson Datacenter - Disk Configuration

See full-sized image.

I can still remember when I thought the 18 GB of RAID1 and 72 GB of RAID5 on that Dell 4300 was fashizzle ;-) [Of course, that was long before I was even aware of the term "fashizzle", but you get my point.]

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this brief diversion down Memory Lane. Perhaps it invoked some distant memories of your own experiences in the world of technology.

Personally, as I'm wrapping up this post, my head is spinning with thoughts of my father's original Apple II+ (which was the first computer I ever "programmed" on) as well as my very own Commodore 64 and all those late nights my dear friend Chris Gatewood and I sat in front of it typing in hundreds of lines of code from a magazine just so we could try to play some silly game based on "sprites." [Note that the games almost never worked due to some error or another, but nevertheless we kept trying anyway.]

New MSDN Theme on My Blog

Jeremy Jameson — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:12:00 GMT

I noticed this morning that the new color scheme released this past week on MSDN has made its way into our Community Server template (and thus onto my blog, since I'm currently using the default "skin").

I'm still not sure how I feel about the combination of purple ( #36295E ) and this particular shade of blue ( #4EA5D2 ). I certainly like each color by itself, it's just that when you put the two together, my stomach starts to feel a little queasy. Oh well, I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Personally, I would have chosen one of the other color schemes proposed for the overhaul of MSDN. Nevertheless, this is what the Visual Studio marketing team has chosen for their two primary colors for the 2010 release, so -- like I said before -- I'll get used to it.

In the meantime, I've updated some of my custom style elements to match the new color scheme.

Minor Setback

Jeremy Jameson — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:55:00 GMT

I haven't blogged in almost 8 weeks. Ouch.

However, I like to think I have a good excuse -- at least for a good portion of that time.

On April 17, 2009, I broke my left leg in 6 places skiing one of my favorite runs at Mary Jane called "Outhouse." I've skied it countless times before, but the snow had been falling very heavy the previous day and into the morning, and consequently the bumps were rather "choppy" and it was just one of those fluke accidents where my ski binding did not release when it should have. Let's just say that the human ankle isn't meant to rotate 90 degrees :-(

It took two surgeries -- and a lot more metal than I'd prefer to have in my body -- to put me back together again.

In the first operation (performed the night of my accident), the surgeon attached an "external fixator" to my shin, ankle, and foot in order to hold it all in place for about a week in order for the swelling to go down.

Figure 1: Broken tibia - external fixator

See full-sized image.

In the second operation, the surgeon removed the "external fixator" and implanted an "internal fixator." Let's just say that you really don't want to be behind me in the airport security screening line.

In the last X-ray that I saw, the lower half of my left leg looks like one big metal lattice. It took the surgeon about 4-1/2 hours to complete the second surgery (an hour longer than originally planned).

Unfortunately, while the first surgery was relatively noneventful, the second was not. It involved two of the worst nights -- from a physical pain perspective -- that I've ever experienced.

The good news is that the pain is quite manageable now -- actually it has been since I left the hospital after my second surgery. The bad news is that I can't put any weight on my left leg for 12 weeks after the second operation. At least I've greatly improved my ability for going up and down stairs on crutches.

I've even been working for the past 4 weeks, rejoining a project where we are helping a large, international company deploy an Internet platform based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. I just prop my leg up on a filing cabinet here in my home office and I'm good to go ;-)

Who is this guy?

Jeremy Jameson — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 21:20:00 GMT

Ugh! I reserved my MSDN blog address in May of 2005 and almost two years later I am sitting down to author my first blog post.

I joined Microsoft in September of 2000 after a series of interesting experiences in the telecommunications and healthcare industries. My software career began with what was supposed to just be a summer job as a data entry clerk for AT&T Bell Laboratories (now Lucent Technologies) in the Engineering Records department.

[Marlene, you have long since retired and I doubt you'll ever come across this post, but just in case, thank you so very much for the opportunities you provided me. You and Nancy changed my life.]

My job was to load CAD drawings into an "electronic vault" for subsequent distribution to manufacturing facilities. I could literally spends hours writing about that initial experience, but I certainly won't bore you with that here.

Well, okay, I suppose some of the details are important to understand a little more about me.

Let's just suffice it to say that I really am not very good at repetitive tasks, so I quickly found myself automating my job using Unix shell scripting (Korn shell was always my preference, by the way). However as the complexity of the scripts increased, I switched to C++ in order to directly utilize the API of the product data management system we were using. (It was a product called CMS by Workgroup Technologies -- I wonder what ever happened to them).

Command line programming quickly got old, so I soon started developing in X-Windows using Motif. Ah, those were the days…XtCreateManagedWidget, XtAddCallback, etc.

Whenever I am feeling nostalgic and thinking about the old days, I sometimes do a search for:

"Jeremy Jameson" widget

And browse through the results to see if there is any semblance of my legacy in the deepest, darkest corners of the net.

(Like most people, there are a number of porn stars out there with similar first and last names. Putting my name in quotes is the only way I have found to tell my mother how to look me up on the Web.)

Just a sec…

Yep, the Motif FAQ is still out there, and somehow after all this time I still manage to be in it:

http://www.rahul.net/kenton/faqs/Motif-FAQ.html

Writing Motif applications in low-level C++ code, can best be described as masochistic. Fortunately I was able to convince my management to buy one of the really expensive UI builders for X-Windows, namely db-UIM/X. That was certainly fun for a while. I basically had the opportunity to develop a completely custom front-end for the PDM system, which we affectionately called OLIVER (the Online Information Vault for Engineering Records). Cute, huh?

Okay, I am definitely digressing. Let me try to get back on track.

When I left AT&T, I joined COBE Laboratories where a man named Jim Hogan was kind enough to take a chance on my ability to transfer my C++/Motif/Oracle skills on the Solaris platform to Visual Basic 4.0/Access/FoxPro on the Microsoft platform.

I couldn't believe how easy VB was after spending all those hours tracking down segmentation faults and "Panic on CPU0" messages caused by one of my inevitable mistakes manipulating pointers. I spent a couple of years ramping up on the Microsoft platform and developing some very cool applications for tracking the manufacturing of kidney dialysis machines. Anyone who has ever worked in an FDA-regulated environment can certainly relate to the rigors of developing systems that support the traceability of "critical" assemblies, subassemblies, and components.

Imagine that one of your suppliers notifies you that 20 or 30 lots of a piece-part used in your pump assembly were determined to be faulty and now you have to identify the hundreds of machines that need to be recalled -- months after they have been shipped to hospitals and clinics across the country.

Digressing again...I know.

So, after COBE Laboratories came Micromedex -- a smaller company that creates knowledgebase systems for the healthcare and environmental industries. Micromedex hired me for my VB skills, but I also took on other development projects in C++ and CORBA (if memory serves me, we were using the Iona Object Request Broker). This is also where I got my first exposure to SQL Server (it was version 6.5 at the time). I can still remember how doubtful the industry was at the time that SQL Server would scale.

When I left Micromedex, I joined one of the three major DSL startups at the time -- Rhythms NetConnections. Ah, what an experience that was. Everyone talking in the hallways about what they were going to do when they retired in a couple of years from their thousands of stock options…

Needless to say, I took a financial bath at Rhythms -- I was never able to exercise a single stock option and over the course of a year, I managed to write off 15% of my salary through a dismal ESPP program.

Nevertheless, I consider my short time at Rhythms to be a valuable experience for several reasons, not the least of which is that I gained experience with ASP and MTS.

When I left Rhythms in August 2000, I joined Microsoft Consulting Services the following week.

On day #2 (management was kind enough to give me a day to configure my laptop), I joined a consulting engagement at a large ERP company here in Denver under the mentoring of Mike Fitzmaurice. It was an "early adopter" project deploying "Tahoe" (which was later renamed SharePoint Portal Server 2001) .

[Fitz, I will never be able to thank you enough for the mentoring you provided in those early days. We miss you in Denver, but it's great to see the new things coming out of the product team -- many of which I am sure can be directly attributed to your genius.]

Interestingly enough, that ERP customer was located in the building where the local Microsoft office moved last year. Talk about coming full circle!

Not that I expect anyone -- with the possible exception of my family -- to read this far, but that wraps up my first blog post. Perhaps you can see why I have been putting this off for so long.

In the future, I will strive to spout information you might actually find useful when building solutions on the Microsoft platform.