This was taken on Christmas Eve 2008.  Lilly’s hand is in front of her face because she is saying “Thank You” to Santa in sign language.

test update

I just finished watching DimeCast #15.  It completely blew my mind.  Part of me really likes the elegance of the syntax of using Linq to query the FS.  The rest of me can't imagine the performance of joining files to directories in such a manner would be efficient.  I need to dig in and do some side by side comparisons and get to the bottom of this.  Sounds like the makings of an in-depth blog post.

So, it's been over a month now since I purchased my MacBook on one heck of an impulse.  After, buying it I must saw that I had a fair bit of buyers remorse.  After all, I just had built a new desktop quad core PC a few months prior and I had a perfectly workable laptop provided by my employer.  Did I really need another machine?  Probably not.  Fortunately, the remorse was very short lived.  I have never worked with a better piece of computing machinery.  Period.

Lets start with the battery life.  It is incredible.  Most nights, it can handle a full load of development, surfing, emailing, and gaming without being plugged in for the whole evening.  Spending several hours out on the deck is finally an option.  I can finally enjoy my backyard investment to it's fullest.

I assumed that I would spend most of my time using windows.  After all, windows is what I know best. but that also hasn't been the case.  With the exception of actual development work, I do everything in Mac OS X.  When I code, VMWare fusion provides a seamless way for me to run Visual Studio without having to reboot into windows native.

I never have to reboot.  Sleep mode just works.  It's a great piece of equipment.

Simply Awesome

Yesterday I posted about my experience with the Errata submission process at Wrox.  I promised an update and this is it.

Within an hour of my submission, I received an email reply from someone in the customer service department.  It turns out that my observation about the missing figure had already been noticed.  If I would have looked harder, I would have found the replacement figure in the form of a JPG file in the downloads section for the book.  I still believe that it should have been listed in the errata section - after all it IS an erratum.

I also received an email from Jim Minatel.  It seems that the comment functionality of my blog was down so he emailed instead.  I was very satisfied ith the service I got from everyone involved and am happy to say that I have had my faith in Wrox restored.  I'll continue to buy books from them when I have an opportunity and I will continue to hold them to a high standard of excellence - as I do with everyone I recommend.