I have never encountered this before until today.  Today while working in my VM, I hit the R key in a notepad window and suddenly the windows run prompt popped up.  Next and E brought up the windows explorer window.  WFT???  Closing the terminal and reopening did not help.  Apparently locking your physical machine in the VM by pressing the CTRL + L key combo can cause this.  The solution:  minimize the terminal session and press the ctrl or windows key 6-12 tim... [More]

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything about my back problems, probably because it’s been so long since it has bothered me.  I would characterize the spinal fusion surgery I had 2 years ago as a huge success (with some limitations). History I had a 360 Spinal Fusion, aka Posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF/TLIF), done 2 years ago tomorrow (5/14/2007).  I’ve written about my history before, here and here and I did a quick update after my surgery to describe my situat... [More]

Today’s workout:  10 mile bike ride – loop back 10 mile route - delanoFind more Bike Rides in Delano, Minnesota

Yesterday I was cleaning up some websites on my machine and I accidentally deleted the Default Website that is automatically installed with any IIS machine.  I right clicked, choose delete and flew past the warning dialog before I knew what hit me.  Not thinking it was a big deal at the time, I went upon my way without worrying about it. This morning, I tried to open up a Visual Studio 2008 project with a web site project pointing to localhost:8079.  Right away, a popup exclaimed... [More]

My GoogleTalk client is sitting in the taskbar right now taking up 30% cpu.  Strange.

Sometimes it's just the little things that make my day.  With clients inquiring more about good SEO practices, it's becoming more important to make sure all of your http redirects issue a 301 (permanent) instead of a 302 (temporary) unless your redirect truly is temporary!  In ASP.Net, if you do a Response.Redirect, the engine will emit a 302 back to the browser.  Just pop it up in Fiddler and see.  To force it to send a 301, you need to use code like this: &n... [More]

Thanks to firefox_answers for pointing out that Firefox 3 crashes with Windows on Godaddy are problems with the Silverlight plugin.  Disable or uninstall the plugin to remove the problem.

If you've ever attending a presentation on a software development technical topic, the law of Developers in the Audience always states that these 2 events will happen:  1.  When the presenter makes a mistake (even a little one), there will be a jeer, snicker, giggle, or some sort of snarky behavior by someone in the audience.  It someone will be ready to pounce at a glitch or mistake and expose the presenter as a fraud. 2.  Someone will always ask for the font siz... [More]

I was all fired up to try out Wikia after reading it on Matt Cutt's blog today.  When I visited the site, bombs away: UPDATE:  Looks like Wikia's service is up and down.  Not surprising for a brand new product getting a LOT of attention.  

It's hard to scratch that constant itch for quality new fiction books.  The books I prefer are mostly of the science fiction, fantasy or mystery/thriller variety.  The trouble is, the market is so flooded with lousy writing, it becomes difficult to findthe gems buried within the muck.  Here's a list of the methods that have worked for me, in order of most helpful to least. Find what your favorite bloggers read? Don't rely on a scifi/fantasy blog/web... [More]