Last Ten Blog Entries

Maybe the best thing about the iPad is all the humor it has produced.

[found via Ryan Copper’s Twitter feed]

Either these mortgage ads are getting weirder or they are trying to reach out to the native population on Pandora in an effort to drum up business.

More iPad humor.

I guess the point is to show that if an iPhone got larger, so could laptops. Maybe they’ll make a 20 inch laptop like Dell.

Visual SourceSafe’s will reach its end-of-life support date for is in the middle of next year.

This means that, if you still have source code in VSS, you are brave (or foolish). If you’ll have source code in VSS after the end of its support lifespan, you’re just plain nuts.

Ed Blankenship recently appeared on the geekSpeak webcast talking about migrating to Team Foundation Server from Visual Source Safe. [watch now]

Here are some additional Team Foundation Server resources Ed mentions during his talk.

• Whitepaper – “From VSS to TFS”:  http://sstjean.blogspot.com/2006/10/document-from-vss-to-tfs-introduction.html
• Whitepaper – Exposing TFS to the Internet:  http://blogs.msdn.com/ablock/archive/2009/08/24/exposing-tfs-2010-beta-2-to-the-internet.aspx
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Training Kit (Labs, Videos, Slide Decks, etc.): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=752CB725-969B-4732-A383-ED5740F02E93&displaylang=en

A co-worker posted this on FaceBook and I'm still drooling over the possibilities of Xbox games on a screen this big.

Imagine Halo or Modern Warfare 2 on this.

Editorial cartoonists chime in on the madness/hype/lead in to the iPad launch. [More cartoons]

Did you ever wonder how Apple keeps its secret projects secret?

Well, wonder no more.

They call themselves the Worldwide Loyalty Team. Among some employees, they are known as the Apple Gestapo, a group of moles always spying in headquarters and stores, reporting directly to Jobs and Oppenheimer. Here's how they hunt people down.

..

"Apple has these moles working everywhere, especially in departments where leaks are suspected. Management is not aware of them," he told me, "once they suspect a leak, the special forces—as we call them—will walk in the office at any hour, especially in the mornings. They will contact whoever was the most senior manager in the building, and ask them to coordinate the operation."

The operation, as Tom calls it, is not anything special. It is not one of a kind event. It's just a normal practice, and the process is pretty simple: The manager will instruct all employees to stay at their desks, telling them what to do and what to expect at any given time. The Apple Gestapo never handles the communication. They are there, present, supervising the supervisors, making sure everything goes as planned.

I don’t know what’s worse: the thug-like tactics or the eerily cheery name of “Worldwide Loyalty Teams.”

Ironic that this is the same company that produced this commercial.

All I wanted to do was send a text message to my mom, who is a Sprint customer, since my phone battery died.

Sprint wants you to log in to their web site in order to help prevent spammers from sending out messages.

That’s understandable.

I had forgotten my password and when I finally got the “reset password” email complete with link: I was treated to this:

Fortunately, there’s more than one way to send a text message from your computer.

I used to actually like Nextel, but since the Sprint merger, not so much.

I just put the final touches on chapter 9 of my Silverlight 4 book, which deals with the Bing Maps Silverlight control.

While searching for something mapping related, I came across this: a cheat sheet for Bing Maps developers.

I could’ve used this a few weeks ago. :)

Here’s a scary visualization of the rates of unemployment in the US.

It almost looks like an infection spreading across the country and, in many ways, it is.