Catching up, CTP Madness, and PDC ranking

I'm playing catch up today as things in the universe are just a little off kilter for me.

The weekend was a bit of a bust with regards to getting my Remote SharePoint Explorer out as I was bogged down in re-installing (yet again) Windows XP. For the life of me, I couldn't get my SATA drive to boot as the master device so couldn't get my OS moved from a small 40gb drive to where it should have been in the first place, on a nice happy 200gb one. So I had to run out and grab a 200gb IDE which the system would recognize. Then I spent the better part of the day screwing around trying to figure out why it kept complaining that it couldn't find hal.dll (when it was clearly there). Finally I yanked the SATA connection out and all was well. Seems Windows XP got confuzzled over where it was looking for files. At boot time it was talking to my IDE, but then at install time it figured my SATA drive was in charge and thus couldn't continue. Installed XP on the IDE, replugged the SATA drive back in and that was that. Sometime around Sunday night I finally finished setting up Visual Studio for the umpteenth time. You can read the brochures and rally around products like Norton Ghost and Acronis Disk Image, but moving installed programs under Windows around just never works. There are always left over droppings of registry settings, files in common places, and configurations in Documents and Settings that screw up moving anything from drive to drive.

On top of that, some kind of weird electrical oddity occured in our building at work so Monday was Snow Day for me and we were turned away at the doors (well, the few that didn't read the email on Sunday night saying the building was closed). So I tried getting some work done but just couldn't and ended up killing some brain cells with Halo 2 most of the day.

Okay, with that out of the way I did find a very cool page on Channel 9 that handles all the grunt work of CTP madness for you. You know, when you try to install a Community Technology Preview of something but end up messing up your environment so badly (thank the maker for Virtual PC) that you don't know what to do. CTP Build Finder is a slick tool that lets you select a product (from the list of all the current CTPs) and it will show you what other CTP products it's compatible with. Very cool and very useful if you're planning to try out something like Indigo and Longhorn at the same time. Check it out here.

Thanks to everyone who supported me (or felt sorry for me) and clicked on the PDC link. As far as rankings go, I'm tied in first place with 41 referrals (there are three different urls it's tracking, the original one, the original one with a "/" and the archived entry). Of course, referrals are not just the criteria for the contest as they'll be reading the blogs and deciding based on content and all that jazz. My pathetic attempts at humor will of course put me in last place here but hey, it's all fun until someone loses an eye.

I do have a dilemma with the PDC contest though. The contest ends mid August while the early bird registration ends in July. The early registration will save you $500USD for the conference, which in Canadian money is like $10,000. So if I wait for the contest and lose, I'm costing my company an additional $500USD for the registration. What's a girl to do?

Finally on a side note, there was an article on Slashdot about the rise and fall of blogs and how it's degraded into a personal rant fest and most people would like all bloggers to curl up and die. This post just contributes to that dribble so enjoy the wasted bandwidth and 2 minutes of your life you took reading this as you're not going to get it back.