• Find a happy place

    Find a happy place

    There are certainly more stressful jobs than being a software developer.  Still, there are unique pressures that come with the territory when working to ship a product, support a product, or (in my case) serve a client and their systems. Let’s face it, when dealing with technology, or sometimes end users, we can often feel […]

  • Replaceable parts and software design

    Replaceable parts and software design

    This past weekend I replaced the brake pads and rotors on my car.  It took a couple hours, cost about $90 in parts, and left me not just with a sense of achievement and personal satisfaction, but a with lots of thoughts about how mechanical systems work, how standardization should function, and how these things […]

  • Upgrading to OS X Mountain Lion

    Upgrading to OS X Mountain Lion

    Upgrading to Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

  • The Internet thinks I am 5 years old.

    The Internet thinks I am 5 years old.

    In the early days of the good old World Wide Web, the emerging anonymity was often summed up with the cartoon “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” published in 1993. Now, 20 years later, not only does the Internet know you’re a dog, it knows whether you’re a mutt or a purebred; whether […]

  • Why can’t I collapse HTML in a master page? Oh, wait, I can! (Sort of.)

    I’m going to file this one under Stupid Visual Studio tricks. When editing a master page file in an ASP.NET project (or in my particular case, a SharePoint solution), it came clear that the normal display of the HTML source was missing the very useful expand/collapse option. Exhibit 1.  Master page with no collapse With […]