I guess the trendy thing bloggers do is summarize their year of blogging. Here’s mine:
The wife and I got into drinking wine after a trip to the Cuvaison Winery in Napa Valley in 2003. The merlot we tried was so good, we added a wine rack in our kitchen when we built our house.
It’s funny how those you’ve know in the past can turn up with interesting new hobbies they’ve been doing for years. Adam Courtney, who I worked with around 2001-2, makes his own wine. He’s been doing it for a decade or so, but I had no idea. It wasn’t something I was interested in then.
I got an email from him yesterday with a link to his blog where he has announced his self-published Wine Making Journal, for the homemade wine maker.
I’m hoping someday to give one of his wines a try.
I *was* right in the middle of a nice long post, until I accidentally closed the Firefox tab and lost my work.
I dropped my iPod and cracked the LCD.
I haven’t seen my wife all week because she’s been staying at her mom’s house helping her mom after a knee replacement.
My kids have had a schedule that is scarily busier than my own.
The project at work is deploying tomorrow.
I haven’t started Christmas shopping yet.
Breathe!
Sorry about losing that post.
It seems my post on Writing Effective Email is one of the most popular ones I’ve written here at uhri.com. In that post I talked about some techniques for better subject lines, but I’ve recently seen a few additional things that have been very helpful.
At my current client, the project on which I’m working has a new project manager who uses these techniques. The first is the <eom> trick. <eom> stands for “End of Message” and is used when the message is the subject. Busy people can save a bit of time because the <eom> tells them there is nothing in the body of the message. For example, a subject of Build has been deployed - please retest <eom> tells the reader everything without opening the email itself. For me, opening an email is a slow process (*ahem* Groupwise) so I know I don’t need to click the link and can clear it from my notifier instead.
Another beneficial thing the project manager does is append “please respond” to the end of her messages when she actually needs a reply. It almost always leads to my immediate response, so she’s doing the right motivating with it. I’m always able, based on her well crafted subject, to reply in less than two minutes to the topic.
Merlin Mann at 43Folders has more to say on the topic of good email subjects in his Writing Sensible Email Messages post.
I was trying to add yes / no values to three dropdowns on my ASP.NET page. We’re using custom drop down controls, so I needed to add the dropdown items in code behind. Always liking to be efficient in my code and make it pretty, I used this:
At our house, we have Daddy Jobs and Mommy Jobs. These are jobs that are defined by who does them. We got the idea from one of my wife’s coworkers. When they travel, even in her car, he will pump the gas just because that’s a Daddy Job. The Jobs have turned into a running joke at our house.
One piece of functionality that is often requested is the ability to submit a web form using the <enter> key. In some cases, you may need multiple textbox controls to submit differently by defaulting to different buttons. In the past there have been various javascript hacks to ensure this works successfully, but in ASP.NET 2.0 there is a simpler function.
By setting the defaultbutton property on a form or - even better - an <ASP:Panel> control, the page automatically handles it for you. Each set of controls which should submit with a certain button can be contained in the panel and everything is hooked up automagically.
One caveat: If you set a default button on a panel but not in the form, other controls seem to use the panel’s default button even when they are not in the panel.
The Wife has been making fun of me (and my friends) behind my back. I know it seems crazy, but it’s true.
At the end of September, “Weird Al” Yankovic released a video for his parody “White and Nerdy” (hat tip: Jeremy). Its hilarious, you should watch it. I’ll wait.
Back? Funny, no?
When The Wife saw it, she merely shook her head: “I never knew knew how truly geeky you were until now. It’s like your theme song.”
The other day, she dropped a new word I hadn’t heard before. I had to ask her to repeat it because I thought I had misheard her.
She had asked, “Are you going to The Koreana for lunch on Friday?” Honestly, she was jilted that I wasn’t taking her to the best sushi in town. I told her that I was.
“I see how it is,” she protested, “you gotta hang with your Nerdies.”
Apparently, Nerdies is like Homies for the slide rule crowd. She tells her coworkers things like “My husband was hanging out on IM with his Nerdies last night.”
I guess I’ll just have to spill a bit of Earl Grey tea for my fallen Nerdies.
“This one’s for Nelly’s XML Bridge.”
“Fo’ Shizzle.”
Yes, it is true, I’ve switched to the dark side. The last bastions of VB.NET have fallen.
After a conversation with a pair of developers I work with, I have finally been convinced that C# is a better syntax than VB.NET. That’s saying something, considering I used to believe I liked my languages verbose. You know, like COBOL. There were three things in the C-based syntax of the language that bothered me:
- Case sensitivity
- Curly braces
- Semicolons
We came to a traffic light on our way home where a State Trooper was stopped with lights flashing. In front of the trooper was a minivan, obviously broken down in the right traffic lane. As we passed them on the left, our eldest made a comment.
“Ahh, a 30-year old woman,” he said, as if that explained everything.
Being in my thirties I was somewhat offended and unsure of the relevance of the driver’s age. “What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
The 9-year-old answered: “You can’t trust those young hippies.”