Blogging
For reasons that are too deathly boring to go into here, I’ve changed my name on Twitter. Because I ended up creating a new profile instead of changing the name (again, for reasons not worth talking about), you’ll need to re-follow if you’re interested in what I might have to say there. New location: http://twitter.com/panopticoncntrl. Hope to see you there!
Gosh, it’s been six months since I’ve said anything on this blog. I was beginning to wonder myself whether I’d ever come back or if this just would become yet another decaying corner of the Internet… Anyway, things have been quiet around here for several reasons. First, there’s just been a lot going on in my world, and blogging (and tweeting and facebooking) has been pretty low on the priority list. None of it is worth broadcasting to the entire world on the Internet, but suffice it to say that it’s been a very heavy year. Second, I...
Things have been quiet around here for a number of reasons. One of the more important was that I really, really, really wanted to get off of the ancient .Text blog engine I’ve been on forever and I was loath to add a lot more content until I could get moved over. I decided to move to Subtext since it was very compatible with .Text (although its migration code for .Text appears to be completely untested as it contained at least one blocking bug and I had to do some of it by hand), but was blocked for a while...
No, not really, just going through another dry spell on the blog. But I have been playing with Twitter, so you can try me there as well: http://twitter.com/paulvick. No promises that I'll keep it up, but...
Just a quick note for those who might care--I haven't given up blogging just yet, even though January was the first time in the history of this blog that I went without saying anything for a month. My wife, kids and I went on a big vacation to the Dominican Republic in January, with a swing by the East Coast for a baptism for good measure, and that took up most of the month! Then, just as I was starting to dig myself out of the hole from that trip, I was off for another week. So needless to say,...
It's amazing how many viruses babies manage to bring into the house. I think we've been down with something pretty much continuously since we got back. Fortunately, we haven't been all sick at once, but this is starting to get a bit old... Things have also been extremely busy around work. I've been working on something that I'm hoping we'll have at least a mention of at MIX07 and will probably have more to say about later in the year. I realize there are some threads that have been left hanging, so I'm going to try and tie them up...
Just for fun, as I was starting at the "Archives" in the left pane started working out what my "post per month" average was per year. It comes out to: 2003: 19.6 PPM (only 6 months of the year, though)2004: 12.3 PPM2005: 9.3 PPM2006: 4.9 PPM (only 11 months so far) As you can see, my average has dropped precipitously this year and I'm in danger of getting awfully close to zero next year if things continue as they have been. The real question is: why has my posting average gone down so much? I mean, I'm not surprised that...
...it turns out the Live search box I tried to put on my blog broke comment submission. It's fixed now (by removing the search box) and you should be able to spam away!
As some may have noticed, the quantity of my blogging output has dropped precipitously in the past few months. This hasn't been due to a lack of interest in blogging, instead several big things have been going on in my life that have conspired to limit the available time for blogging. One of the "big things" is some new stuff I've been heads-down on doing while I'm at work and which I'll talk about over time as it becomes more solid and public. But work aside, there is also a "big thing" going on in my personal life that's going...
This is, unfortunately, only a test post to ensure that only posts tagged as "Visual Basic" are posted to the MSDN Visual Basic developer center. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.....
My blog is syndicated on the MSDN Visual Basic developer center (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vb), which is great because it drives traffic here but is bad because it means that all my personal posts show up there as well. I don't think everyone who goes to the developer center really cares that much about my personal life... After a little hacking on .Text, I think I've got it set up properly such that only posts tagged as "Visual Basic" will show up in the VB developer center. So, I hope, this post won't show up there. If it doesn't, then I'll test it...
Just an FYI, the spammers seem to be working around the laughably simple filters I’ve put in place manually, so I’m seeing if adding in the Akismet service will help turn the tide back. If, for some reason, you find you can’t leave a comment, please leave me a note in the Contact area. Thanks!
Just an FYI, I strengthened the spam filters this morning on the blog to attempt to filter out some of the spam that had been creeping around the edges. Hopefully, no one will notice, but if you run into problems, do drop me a line using the comment form. Thanks!
…life just went and got very complicated for a while. In particular:
My wife Andrea has had some strange medical symptoms over the past few months that our neurologist thought indicated pretty strongly she has MS. So the past month has been spent getting MRIs and lumbar punctures to try and narrow down the diagnosis. The good news? It’s pretty unlikely she has MS or any of the related types of diseases (RA, Lupus, etc.). The bad news? Still not sure what’s going on. Still, since none of the symptoms are extremely serious, I’ll take “don’t know” for now, given the...
You can read more about the details of the case in the Seattle Times, but, briefly, it was a trial for attempted first-degree murder. The first maybe two-thirds of the trial was not too hard to deal with, as it was sort of an extended episode of Law and Order crossed with CSI, which was quite interesting. However, the last third was quite difficult — between discussions of the impact of the shooting, the testimony of the defendant and the actual rendering of the verdict, there was a lot to process. Thankfully, the other people on the jury were just...
Not that I usually am burning up the weblogging wires around here this time of a year, but as an FYI, I’m going to be a bit slow blogging for the next couple of weeks. I’ve been selected as a juror in a trial, and the expectation is that it’s going to be going for a while. I can’t say anything about the trial until it’s over, but it’s definitely been an interesting experience so far. On the one hand, it’s a super-inconvenient time both with the holidays and with our work to get an updated LINQ prototype out there...
As a few people have commented, I’ve added a picture of myself to my blog. This was, indeed, prompted by a number of the “how to make your blog better” memes that have been bouncing around lately. I don’t think most people really care that much about what I look like, but I have found blog pictures to be very helpful when attending conferences and meeting people — the people that have pictures on their blogs are immediately recognizable by me, whereas people who don’t have their picture on their blog fall into the unfortunate black hole of memory that I...
I was reading secretGeek’s “Five Ways to Play Nice with ‘Live.Com’” and tip #3 (“Specify an icon for your feed”) reminded me of the fact that, while I would love to have an icon for my feed, I have yet to actually find one. What I’d love to have is a web-suitable icon of a small TARDIS (or, an old English Police Box, if you prefer), but I have been totally unable to locate one. Anyone have any idea of where I might score one that would be free to use on my website? If not, I guess, I’ll stick...
As with last year, my recognition of my second anniversary of blogging is a bit belated. And, as with last year, it’s hard to believe where all the time has gone. The whole blogging phenomenon seems to have transitioned from adolescence to early adulthood and is rapidly growing up (as much as it ever can). Wonder what year three will bring?
Close one hole and they move on to another… Spammers have started to work around my filtering by using Trackbacks. This is a test to make sure that I’m not breaking Trackbacks by adding filtering to them too.
Normally I don’t comment too much about the waxing and waning of my blog activity, but looking ahead at the summer I think that it’s worth letting everyone know that things are likely to be somewhat slow around here through September. I don’t expect to cease blogging entirely, but the somewhat sauntering pace of entries is probably going to slow even further until we get to the PDC. As I’ve mentioned before, we’re working on some new ideas for post-VB 2005, and our hope is to be able to talk about them some in the fall. To do that, though,...
Lisa Feigenbaum asked me to pass along the info that the VB IDE team (those responsible for the VB portion of the Visual Studio development environment, as opposed to the core compiler/language) has put up a new blog! It’s already got some interesting content there, so check it out!
Something Josh Ledgard said struck me as he was talking about an angry email he got about the introduction of the new web-based MSDN Forums:
I've heard Scoble say it a lot... if you work at Microsoft... and you blog... you had better have think [sic] skin. My own experience suggests that having an active blog at Microsoft for any length of time pretty much guarantees you your share of mails like this and it does effect [sic] you... at least it effects [sic] me. Not to get too touchy-feely, but I'm not some Borg drone that doesn't ever feel insulted....
I don’t think I’ve said this before, so let me say it now: Server Intellect, the company who hosts my blog, is a great web hosting company! A while back when I decided to stop hosting my own blog, I moved everything over to them on the recommendation of a co-worker and it’s been a real pleasure ever since then. Last week there were some problems with my site (not of their doing) and they proactively noted the problems, took some steps to fix them and then dropped me a very nice note letting me know they’d taken care of it....
In my continuing quest to block out comment spam, I made a tweak last week to my SQL scripts. Instead of doing a full-text match to a list of banned comment titles (among other filters), I started doing a keyword match. So if, say, you use the name of a certain drug that can help Bob Dole, then the comment would be automatically filtered out. Because this was a hack, I didn’t do anything fancy like put filtered comments into a table so that I can know if I’m filtering out legit comments.
Which, it appears, came back to bite me...
How ya been doing lately? Glad to see you haven’t forgotten to drop me a line every now and then…
When people haven't written a while they usually start off with some kind of apology like "sorry I haven't written in so long, but I've been doing xyz." My feeling is: blogs (with some exceptions) are strictly amateur hour, so no apologies are necessary for life intervening. That's just the way it is, and people should come to expect that from blogs - you get what you pay for.That said, I'd really like to say that I haven't been writing in a while because I've been busy, but that's not really it. The holidays took up a lot of time...
You may have noticed the comments coming on and off today... I'm getting innundated by an extremely agressive comment spammer (I believe other .Text sites are also getting hit hard), and I'm trying to block them out. Hopefully it'll work, but please bear with me.
Sorry, but some jerk seems to be spamming me faster than I can delete his spam. I'm going to turn off comments to stop this madness for a little while and give me some time to think about how best to proceed.
This is a test blog post to see what's going on with the .Text tracking system. I'm not sure if my method of using BlogJet is causing problems with people getting posts or whether .Text's tracking system is broken. Anyway, please ignore.
It appears that my blog has been stricken with the .Text threading bug, so while the front page seems to be working, everything else is giving .Text errors. For some reason I can't seem to log in to my hosting provider to fix this from work, so it'll have to wait until tonight when I get home. So please bear with us...
More professionalization.
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen...
Has it really been that long?
Hail, hail, the gang's all here...
I'm in talks with K-Tel about them.
Just can't get away from it.
Trying to improve bandwidth.
Help keep America blogging.
I can only carry old URLs for so long.
Setting the record straight.
Linking contest concluded.
My brillian plan has worked.
How to get ahead in the blog world.
Thoughts on being on hiatus.
Still not content to leave well enough alone.
The language designers are in.
I manage to get something wrong. What a surprise.
Explaining 'Panopticon Central'.
Watch out what you start.