Well, my Hanselman.com email (as well as for all my Hanselman relatives) has been down with DNS and dumb problems since Friday, so it's official.  I'm switching.  I'm switching to ORCSWeb.  I'll move all my domains there, including www.hanselman.com, www.diabeticbooks.com, www.glucopilot.com and www.computerzen.com.  Expect some weird DNS and silliness over the next few days, possibly this week.  I'm a huge believer in the permalink, so if I do it right, everything will work as before. 

After the dust has settled, I'll likely move from Radio to DasBlog.

Wow...good thing I'm covered! ;)

A Forrester research project, funded by Microsoft inc., has determined that developing software using a Linux/J2EE development environment increases a developer's risk of dying from colon cancer by up to 40% over the risk when developing with Microsoft's .Net technology.

Why do I code?  Because I can't cook, or change my own oil, or mow lawns.  Because I lettered in drama in High School but I never got discovered walking an L.A. mall.  Because I never made any money doing standup.  Because, God help me, if I wasn't coding the only think I'd be good at would be selling cars.  (I'm REALLY good at selling cars.  Seriously.)

For real, I code because I like solving problems that are decidedly solvable.  I mean, I hear the problem, I think for a moment, I figure it's "possible" and then I try to figure how to solve it in a way that feels good.  Because I dig physics.  Because the end of the Carl Sagan's "Contact" was UNSPEAKABLY cool.  I code because of that feeling I've gotten 5 or 6 times when I just NAILED a problem and (while alone) raised my arms high in victory the same way that rapid sports fans do.  Except I look at them with a worried disdain when they do it, but secretly I wish I felt like that more often.

I code because coding, at its best, is art and literature and math and physics all at the same time.

I'm sitting on a plane from St. Louis to Orlando on the way to VSLive/ASPLive.  I was thinking about who I'm going to see at the conference.  I figure that my buddy Chris Kinsman will be there and possibly acquaintances of mine such as Keith Pleas.  Why just acquaintance?  I've had the pleasure to email Keith four or five times and I've met him four or five times, but when I see him I still lead with, "Keith! Scott Hanselman, how are you doing?" just in case Keith doesn't remember me, and this way he doesn't have to waste CPU cycles looking my face up.  I do the same thing with other acquaintances and "colleagues" like Chris Sells and Don Box and [Insert name here], et. al..  They are colleagues as I see them a few (sometimes several times) a year on campus or at conferences.  I say hi, but don't expect them to know my wife's name, since when you're holding all the WS-*.* specs in your head, sometimes you can't remember lots of trivial social details. 

So I got to thinking about the difference between "friend" and "colleague/acquaintance."  I have some remote friends, Patrick Hynds for example, who I chat with a few times a week and who could TOTALLY crash at our place on a moments notice.  We've shared (soft) drinks many times and have stories going back years.   But, I've only seen Patrick at conferences and on campus also.  Hell, I started to realize that I see Don Box more than I see my uncles (I see them on the 4th of July and at Christmas) and Don remembers my name better than my cousins! 

Therefore, I conclude that either:

A. I'm not nearly close enough to my family and need to spend more time with them instead of at conferences

or

2. Patrick, Keith, Don, Clemens, Chris, Chris, Sam and MANY others that I see several times a year are my REAL family and will not be surprised when I show up on their door wondering if I can sleep on their couch.

 Anyone else have this problem, or just me?

It came in the mail today, and it's about time.  What's next?

Tomorrow, I'm leaving for Orlando to speak at ASPLive on Internationalization.  I'll be flying exactly two years (to the minute) from September 11.  Needless to say, the wife's justifiably not happy about it and I have mixed feelings. 

My boss says that even flying on September 11th is safer than driving any day.  I'm not sure about that, but I'll definitely be expecting some extra security.  It's always a challenge to get my Insulin Pump through.

If you're in Orlando at VSLive, please do stop by my Friday afternoon session called "It's the WORLDWIDE Web."  I'll be showing some cool stuff in ASP.NET like a banking site in English, Chinese, Malay, Spanish and Arabic.  We'll talk all about System.Globalization and dig into the issues around Dates, Currency, Culture and Right to Left languages.  It's a very interesting topic.  I may try to greet the crowd in at least 10 languages. :)

Remember, when we talk about what happened on 9/11, most people in the world wonder what happened on November 9th...

Oh yes, the iPod is the shiznit.  I had a Rio 500 for a number of years with 128 megs of ram and got my iPod about 6 months ago. 

I do recommend, however, immediately jettisoning the crap MusicMatch software and using these tools:

• EphPod for the quick and dirty work: Add a song, edit IP3 tags, adding Outlook Calendar appointments, vCard Contacts, text files, etc.
• MoodLogic and DeviceLink are the best thing to happen to MP3s since Napster.  Of course, I don't share music anymore, but I do rip the hell out of my 500+ CD collection.  MoodLogic is worth the money just for it's song identification capabilities.  It fixed the file names on at LEAST 1000 of my songs, including what # it is on the CD, who the artist is, etc.  Plus, it creates "Mood Mixes" in the iPod automatically.  Coincidentally, the core of it's iPod compatibility is...EphPod.
• Then, just for kicks, use Muse.NET to listen to your 20 gigs of music, legally, from work with .NET and Web Services.  There are lots of sample applications (many in .NET) to exploit their API, and exploit the programmaticalshipfulness of your music.

Now, if I had only waited, I could have had a 20 gig iPod for the same price...

It's almost over.  We're having a great time at TechEd Malaysia.  

We've spend a great deal of time with a great many friends, some new, and some old.  I've put up a small photo montage of Malaysian Faces.

The Zen of .NET presentation went fabulously.  I started out on stage in the Lotus Position and everyone seemed to find it quite funny. As promised, here's a list of the tools I used and some of the code zipped up.  Haven't seen the scores yet, but I think the general feeling is one of positivity.

I hope that more people start using tips like "devenv /fs 14" (devenv /fs 8 to revert) and the Zoomin magnifier.  I have also decided I'm going to write a new presentation Magnifier Tool in .NET that includes some features I'd like, like auto-positioning.  More on this later.

Zen of .NET Tools

• ILDASM.exe comes with the .NET Framework
• Blunck's ieHTTPHeaders for seeing HTTP Headers within an IE Explorer Bar
• Zoomin for making demos easier to see
• Lutz Reoder's Reflector for decompiling code
• Dotfuscator for keeping people from decompiling code!
• Cassini, the tiny .NET Web Service from http://www.asp.net
• Helloworld in C#, C++, C, and IL

When we get back to the states I'll write up some thoughts on culture and doing business "elsewhere."

Yesterday was an exhausting day.  I had back-to-back-to-back sessions.  Tim Huckaby and I did a Web Services Chalk Talk and had a blast.  Tim and I have very different philosophies but when we work together we compliment each other very well.  We had to do a little (a lot) of "teeth-pulling" to get folks to open up, but humor always works - and you know Tim is funny.  Then I presented Internationalizing ASP.NET for the first time to a non-native-English speaking crowd. ;)  I showed an ASP.NET eBanking site that (along with the help of many friends) I localized to English, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Bahasa Malaysia.  After this session I directed a Hands on Lab (HOL) on Internationalizing ASP.NET.  It was my first experience with Microsoft (Connectix) Virtual Server (Virtual PC).  (Seems like a pale VMWare-lite to me.  As a VMWare user for the last several years [since Version 1] I don't see why people are making such a big deal about Microsoft's acquisition of VirtualPC; It's hardly as cool as VMWare 4.0.)

Mo visited the Batu Caves with Kevita.  They walked up 272 steps to the Temple Cave, a Hindu religious site. 

"The best known of these caves is the Temple Cave, a large cavern with a vaulted ceiling about 100 metres above the floor. To reach it one has to climb 272 steps, a feat performed by many Hindus on the way to the caves to offer prayers to their revered deities. Every year, on Thaipusam, as many as 800,000 devotees and other visitors may throng the caves. As a form of penance or sacrifice, many of them carry kavadis. These are large, brightly decorated frameworks, usually combined with various metal hooks and skewers which are used to pierce the skin, cheeks and tongue."

We're doing lots of shopping, but not lots of buying.  Some kinds of electronics are cheaper here - you can buy an optical mouse for about $2 to $5 US Dollars.  But if you want a deal on a digital camera you'll actually pay slightly more here.  I paid $400 US for my Casio but here the best deal I could find was RM1688 (US$444).  I did get a fantastic idea on a local phone (handphone).  I paid RM200 (~US$50) for a new Siemens phone, a local number and enough minutes and SMS credit to last the week.  Plus, I'll sell the phone back to the guy for RM100 before we leave. 

This evening we were given a tour of the Microsoft Malaysia office on the 29th and 30th floor of the Petronas Towers.  They have a FANTASTIC office.  My ears popped on the way up. 

Tommorow I'll give kind of an experimental session on "The Zen of .NET" for the first time.  I'm still formulating my thoughts about what I want to say.   A lot of people don't quite understand where .NET fits into the world.  They try to fit it into little catch phrases like "It's Microsoft's Java" or "It's just another VM" or "It's the new Platform."  I want to explain a lot of the concepts I talk about in The Myth of .NET Purity. People forget that Windows is the platform (today) and that the .NET Framework levels the playing field.  I think I'll spend a lot of time at the command-line and in ILDasm and Reflector.  We'll see how it goes!