We have a booth at Microsoft Tech-Ed this year, so if you happen to be in Orlando at Tech-Ed, I encourage you to stop by the Boson booth and check out some of our demos. I wasn't able to make it down this year, but we have a team down there answering questions about our products and about certification. I'm not sure what, if any, swag they are giving away this year, but I do believe that they are giving away some discount codes. If you stop by the booth, tell them I sent you.
It's been a long time since I've last posted (well over a year, actually), and it's been a busy year. In the past 12 months or so, I've changed jobs (twice), started a business (and sold most of its assets), written a book published by Sybex, and continued doing contract .NET development work. I'm now currently working as a senior content developer with Boson Software, where I've joined several of my former colleagues from Transcender. I'm very excited about this new position, as I feel like we have a chance to make a significant impact and become the new leader in certification exam preparation with our new new line of certification preparation products. I've been lucky to work with some great people over the past few years, and my new job continues that tradition. It's been an exciting year, and I'm hopeful that the future will be just as exciting.
I'm planning on posting again to this blog as frequently as possible. However, I'll be speaking more about certifications and general technology than .NET since I'm no longer doing daily .NET development, but I'll continue to post about .NET news that interests me. I'm also posting more frequently at my guitar blog, so if you're a guitarist, I hope that you'll visit there, as well.
Another list of random links I've found interesting lately:
Business
What's
the Secret to Your Success? - Michael Hyatt, president of Thomas Nelson
Publishing, gives his secret to success.
Y Combinator Startup Library - nice
collection of resources from the Y Combinator team; mostly Paul Graham
stuff, but other good links as well.
Entrepreneurial
Proverbs - good ideas about starting up a business
Getting Real - 37Signals finally
release their new book
Tech
Dual Monitor Gripe
- Damien Katz complains about his dual monitor setup; some interesting dual
monitor links in the comments.
Why Features Don't
Matter - where less features equals a better user experience
.NET
Phalanger
- PHP compiler for .NET (via David)
How Axosoft
Sold $1.3 Million Worth of Software in 3 Days - interesting insight into the
recent $5 OnTime promotion by Axosoft
Made in Express - win $10,000 by
writing software using Visual Studio Express and/or SQL Server Express
Web Dev
A
(Re)-Introduction to JavaScript - fairly detailed overview of
JavaScript
In the past, I've said that I didn't "get" podcasts. Mostly, I said this
because most of the podcasts at the time were poorly edited, so you'd have
vastly different audio levels, even within the same podcast. Other times,
the podcasts just weren't very interesting, and in some cases seemed to exist
solely to give the author the chance to tell inside jokes and pat themselves on
the back.
However, over the past few months I've found several podcasts that I really
enjoy and are very well done, and I thought I'd highlight those:
Programming
Polymorphic Podcast (.NET)
Hanselminutes (.NET and General Tech)
Ruby on Rails Podcast
CocoaRadio (Mac/Cocoa)
Code Sermon (General)
Business
StartupNation
Venture Voice
Tech
This Week in
Tech
When
Matt Hawley went to
work for Microsoft last year, he had to quit distributing and selling the source
code to his
excellent server controls.
Today he
announced that Microsoft is going to allow him to resume selling the
controls! We use his free
Unleash It utility at
work and have been very pleased with it. Congratulations to Matt for getting the
approval to resume selling his controls!
The article I recently wrote about
outsourcing was picked up by
SourcingMag.com. I spent some time
fleshing out some of the details in the article, and the modified article can be
viewed on
SourcingMag's Web site. Read my original article
here.
I've recently published an article about my experiences with IT
outsourcing, titled
Outsourcing - A Year in
Review.
Wil Shipley recently wrote a
post titled
Failure is
Success. In this post he states that failure is something to be
strived for and that nature is full of examples where failure is critical to
success. An example he gives that resonated with me is that when weight-training
it's critical to push the muscles to failure; otherwise, they won't grow
stronger. For some reason, probably because I'm currently on a weight-training
program, that statement really hit home. I have no problem pushing my muscles to
their failure limit or pushing myself to my physical limits. As the saying goes,
"No pain, No gain!" However, when it comes to pushing myself to my intellectual
limits, I all too often stop short, presumably because of a fear of
failure. Realizing that failure can lead to growth, even in intellectual
pursuits, is a powerful concept. Perhaps the next time I reach my
intellectual failure point, instead of stopping short I'll accept the fact
that it's highly probably I'll fail and realize that that's ok and continue on.
I've been a customer of Yahoo! Music Unlimited for about six months
now. Up until about a month ago, I was really happy with the service. They
have a great selection of music at a great price of $4.99/mo for the yearly
plan. I use it all the time at work.
However, my problem lies with their customer support. Originally, I signed up
for the month-to-month plan, which is $6.99/mo. After about four months, I
decided I liked it enough to go ahead and sign up for a full year. Their music
interface is fairly easy to use, but after that it gets really confusing. For
example, IMing a song to a friend is not intuitive at all. The help system is
almost useless. I searched for a way to upgrade my account. There was no
information anywhere about doing this, so I decided to e-mail customer
support asking if I could upgrade my account. The reply I received said
(emphasis mine):
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Customer Support.
We apologize for the inconvenience this matter has caused you. The
feature you are mentioning is not currently available through Yahoo!
Music Unlimited. However, we may include this feature in a future
release. It is through user comments and feedback that we are able to continue
to make improvements. We always have something on the drawing board, and many
of our best new features have been suggested directly by users like you.
At this time, we would request you to please cancel your monthly
subscription and then sign up for the yearly service.
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.
Regards,
Faye
Yahoo! Customer Care
On Oct 21, I received an e-mail from Yahoo! Music indicating a price change
for transferring music to a portable device, effective Nov. 1. They were
doubling the cost of the subscription to transfer music. I decided that it was
time to go ahead and get the annual subscription. My monthly subscription was
due for a bill payment on Oct 31, so I decided to wait until a little closer to
then before canceling and renewing. On Oct. 29 without much thought and
following the advice they gave me, I canceled my monthly
subscription and attempted to renew for a year. However, I was unable to renew
because my monthly subscription did not expire until Oct 31. All I wanted to do
was renew my account for an annual subscription before Oct 31 to take advantage
of the pricing at that time.
I immediately e-mailed their support explaining what I was trying to do.
A while later, I received a reply that made it obvious that they didn't
even read my e-mail. So, I immediately e-mailed them back re-explaining
to them what happened and including the previous e-mail that I sent. At this
point, I started getting a little nervous because I wanted to be sure that I was
able to renew in time to receive a year under the previous pricing plan, which
would save me about $60 if I wanted to transfer music to an MP3 player. I
waited, and waited, and waited. I tried a few more times to renew my
subscription with no luck. Finally, on Nov. 1 I was able to renew my
subscription. Of course, conveniently, that was the day the new pricing scheme
took effect so I have to pay $9.99/mo in order to transfer music to a portable
device. I finally received an e-mail with a phone number for Yahoo! Billing
questions, which is 408-349-5151 (which is not listed anywhere on their site
that I could find and routes to India from what I can tell). I tried to explain
my situation to the representative, but it was obvious that he didn't
understand. He said he'd have a "supervisor" look over my question and get back
in touch. I later received another canned response indicating that their was
nothing they could do. I e-mailed, and then called again. Essentially, I was
finally told that inside the e-mail on Oct 21 was a link to an upgrade site and
I had to click that link and that they couldn't (wouldn't) do anything for me.
So, ultimately it was my fault for not carefully re-reading the e-mail before
canceling my account. However, I just assumed that since they had
already told me I had to cancel my account in order to upgrade, that
that's what I needed to do. Furthermore, if they had read my e-mail sent on Oct
29 instead of sending a canned response, then maybe I could have known at that
point that I just needed to create a new account and purchase the annual
subscription. Instead, I'm left extremely frustrated by the whole (negative)
experience and with a bad feeling about doing any further dealings with Yahoo.
David already mentioned
this, but I thought I'd mention it too. One of the guys at work wanted a
utility that would display the size of a folder in Windows Explorer, so I did a
little searching. I found Folder
Size for Windows, a freeware utility that adds more columns to the Windows
Explorer interface. The columns that can be added include:
- Folder Size
- Folder Size Sort (same as Folder Size but formatted to sort properly)
- File Count
- Folder Count
- Sibling Count
As well as several other useful features. Check it out.