Phil Scott's WebLog

http://www.wkrn.com/Global/Video/WorldNowASX.asp?ClipID=121299&LiveURI=&ShowCC=0&TargetAdsTag=News&CurrentPosition=0

Still trying to take the flippin' 70-300 exam.  Same problem as yesterday.  In the mean time, I'll be productive.  You see, normally I'd just go to espn.com and read some articles.  But I can't make it to espn.com without having to see a big freakin' picture about U of L falling apart at the end of the season.  Hopefully Rick gets the boat righted before the NCAA (if we make it of course).  So today I'll try to make some sense out of the ghetto CSV file that I have our course schedule data was set in. 

Not sure how many sports fans are out there, but if you haven't stumbled upon ESPN Motion yet (or are scared to install it), I'd give it a shot.  Basically it is a background app that downloads videos in the background.  I usually hit ESPN.com three or four times a day (once in the morning, once when Page2 is out, and once at night) and when I do they have a video (usually NBA tonight or perhaps top 10 plays of the day) ready to view.  No streaming, not waiting, and pretty good quality too.  Very smooth.  No idea how it works on Macs or Linux, but it works great for me.  Also cool is the new ESPN Intelligence page.

Tried to register for the 70-300 (Analyzing Requirements and Defining Microsoft .NET Solution Architectures) exam today.  I called up Prometric and the lady on the line said that things were running terribly slow on their system.  On Tuesday when I called last the other lady on the phone told me that the system was responding slow ever since they upgraded to the new system. 

Justin Gehtland's blog has moved with his switch to BlogX.  Justin is one of the authors of one of my all time favorite VB6 books "Effective Visual Basic : How to Improve Your VB/COM+ Applications."  Part of the "just buy all of Ted Pattison's COM books" recommendation I always am always willing to hand out to the VB6 students trying to wrap their heads around COM.  If I ever get a chance to write a book, I hope it is as informative, interesting and easy to read as that book.  Sure book's like Tim Ewald's Transactional COM+ book are full of good info, but that thing was a beast to read and I like to think I'm an above average developer. 

Scott was talking about descriptions, and RSS and the such.  One of the more interesting post abous this (well, same topic but October) is from Joel:

Had a pretty rough day with the whole car fiasco, but I came home and installed Diskeeper.  Man, they should package Defrag software with those Pure Mood CDs from Target.  Most relaxing thing I've seen this year  28% fragmentation to 0%.  I forgot how much more info they showed in Diskeeper than the Win2k version.  I still can't get over they have a button with a caption of "Set it and Forget It" on the main form.  I'm talking to myself again.

Executive sent me a NFR copy of Diskeeper to play around with hoping that I will pimp their product like I am right now.  I'll probably going to just throw it on the machine I use in class for demo purposes.  It has scheduling, networking and all that built in that normal defrag doesn't.  But where is the fun in that?  Clicking on analyze and seeing a whole mess of red, and then watching little ol' defrag move everything around is one of the most rewarding experiences there is (besides watching DOS Defrag work of course).  Now, some would say that never having to run defrag is rewarding, but these are the same tortured souls who probably keep their house clean at all time and never know the joy of spending a satuday and sunday getting things looking good. 

The Diskeeper site actually says "Set it, and forget it."