OMG! A year since my last post!

Dang!

Where has the time gone?

This time last year I had a baby on the way.  Her name is Serenity.  She is a wonderful addition to the family and I love her with all my heart.

We now have a second baby on the way.  He is due on the 26th of September 2010.  Serenity was born on the 15th of September 2009.  I was a slow starter but I am certainly making up for it now.

We have a few names being kicked around at the moment.  My choice this time as Leah chose last time.  Unfortunately Leah is definitely not keen on the name, Teal’c.  I don’t know why… Just kidding :)

In fact most things sci-fi related are out of bounds.

You may think Serenity is very sci-fi related and you would  be correct.  But I didn’t chose it so the name “Serenity” was acceptable.  I am happy.  Leah is happy.  Serenity is happy too.  The thing that is really cool is that Leah came by the name “Serenity” from seeing a movie poster.  The movie the poster depicted just happened to be based on a TV series I enjoy immensely.  The TV series being Firefly of course.  It is funny how things turn out sometimes.

Anyhoo, it has been a whole year since my last blog post, sorely overdue for some kind of update, hence the purpose of this post.

I was supposed to blog about my experience with Typemock.

I am supposed to be blogging about my experience with Lightspeed from Mindscape.  Just as an aside I just recalled my old BBS days and a friend of mine, Kenji, who ran a BBS using a application called Lightspeed for the Amiga.  Ahh… those were the days… :)

I am also supposed to be blogging about my experience with Silverlight Elements also from Mindscape.

I do have a project in the works in which I could try out all the above.  My only obstacle in the way is time.

In the very near future I should be able to allocate some time to this project, subsequently blog the results here and hopefully appease the generous people from Typemock and Mindscape.

Wish me luck…

Windows 7 RC and Me

This weekend I installed the recently released Windows 7 RC.

My goal was to dual boot Windows XP and Windows 7.  Apparently that was not to be.

I had most encouraging attempts at installing the new release over the weekend.  My main issue was how insanely long it took to install.  When I say long, I mean it was counted in hours.

The first install was taking so long that I also forced a reset.  It was sitting on Completing Installation for so long without any sign of progress other than the tiny little animation with the “…” that I started to hold the Power button on the PC to force a reset.  One Mississippi… Two Mississippi… Three… Holy cr4p the install just came to life!  Abort Reset!  Abort Reset!!!

The first install seemed to work just fine but I went and did a silly thing.  I have a number of partitions set up and I have assigned specific letters to them in XP which I wanted to do in Win7 as well.  The only issue is Win7 decided to assign “D:” to the XP partition.  I didn’t like that as I always set “D:” to my “Development” partition.

So I happily went along an dutifully renamed all the partitions.

Then it didn’t want to reboot anymore.

Sigh…

There is a trick to reassigning a System drive.  I had forgotten to implement it.  Time to reinstall Win7 again.

The next time, just play failed.

It ended up taking so long that next attempt that I gave up and left it “installing” over night.  Unfortunately at some point it crashed and every time it tried to recover it would complain that it had previously crashed and I should restart so that it would recover and continue where it left off.  It kinda felt like Groundhog Day seeing that message over and over again.

So then again I go through the pain of insanely long installs… except the third was relatively speedy.  For a moment there I had tried disconnecting my external drives having vaguely recalled that there was an issue with them some time again.

It seemed to do the trick.

Shame this install didn’t pick up the “Legacy” install of XP.

I tried everything I could think of.  I even resorted to restoring the XP partition from back-up even though it was a little dated - by only a couple of months mind you.  Strangely that didn’t help.  The XP partition wouldn’t boot and would keep reporting the Boot.ini file was corrupt and the NTDETECT failed.

Sigh…

So maybe I should take the plunge and commit to Win7 100% and finally dropping XP once and for all.

Time for another install.  No point keeping that XP partition any longer, I’ll move Win7 into pole position on the HDD.

So here I am, onto my fourth or fifth install of Windows 7 RC.  It took forever again… Sigh.

I have no major complaints really other my installation issues.  Most of which were caused by my own ineptitude but the speed of installation was worrisome.

I now have a shiny new install of Windows 7 RC.  I am now rested and calm again.  All that is left now is to install every other application I need to complete my PC…  Visual Studio… Add-ins… SQL Server… Subversion… Browsers… Tools… Utilities… ad infinitum…

A geeks job is never done…

Blog Template

I need a custom template!

I kinda like this pre-built template but I cannot really call it my own. For one thing the background pattern irritates me.

I'll need to put some thought into it this coming weekend...

NOTE: This post is testing the "future" posts feature. Hopefully this should be published automatically at 8:00am on the 12th of September 2008.

Not a very exciting note, but heck! This is my first blog and I'll get all excited over the little things if I wanna!

Points of Contact

I'm late! I'm late!

Oh dear, my membership was a little overdue. I thought I'd better pay it though I am a little unsure exactly why I am even a member of www.nzcs.org.nz

Granted there seems to be benefits to being a member but I have only been to one event since enrolling over four years ago. Has it really been a benefit to me?

Another group I seem to be a part of is Unlimited Potential. This one seems a little more hip than NZCS which seems to be a little more white collar.

Even though I've been a "member" for almost as long as NZCS, if memory serves, I have yet to make an UP event.

Now I'm really bad.

I one group I did turn up on a regular basis is the Wellington .NET User Group. It began with the Porirua .NET User Group but that seemed to fizzle out. I'm not even sure they still have a meeting. But I even gave up on the Wellington group even though I now work in town. I just don't seem to have the time any more.

Then other groups suddenly sprouted up all over the place. I tried to start going to the SQL Server group, but all it meant was I'd be eating more and more pizza.

Not really all that good for my waist-line.

Then those Geek Lunches started happening on a weekly basis. They were interesting and more importantly extremely handy as they were held across the road from were I worked.

But then my place of work moved and it was nolonger very convenient to walk halfway across town. I am basically a lazy bugger when left to my own devices.

I do regret letting the Geek Lunch thing flag as the people at those discussions are very clued into the technologies and methodologies I really need to get in to... I need more time in my day...

So what is my point?

There are so many great opportunities for getting out and meeting like-minded people who are driven and excited about the same things as I am. But I have to get myself off my A and get it into G and make the most of these opportunities. I am not getting any younger.

I have to stop making excuses and make the time to attend events and meetings again. I don't have to go to every single one of them. I'd never have time to spend with my fiance in that case.

But at least some of them... Starting tomorrow... Or next week... Once I'm over this cold...

Dammit!

Dawn of a New Age

First!

Well I guess that was a given as this is my blog. If I wasn't first then something serious would be going on.

Fortunately all is well and this post marks the first post of my first blog... ever.

There isn't much for me to really blog about at this moment. All I'm doing is trying to set Blogger up for the first time. It is not going as swimmingly as I had hoped but I'm sure I'll get there in the end. Otherwise noone will ever get to see this post... Sad...

UPDATE
Seems all I had to do was to create my first post. This one in fact. Publishing zero posts just didn't move any files at all to my web host.

Now that I have successfully created my first post my next task I guess is to come up with the topic for my next post... Wish me luck!