I'm still not showing up in Google's index.  According to this guy, you can send an email and request re-inclusion.

I wonder if my hosting provider (actually, my friend Sean's hosting provider, since Sean was the one who gave me a subdomain to his hireageek.net domain) was down when Googlebot came calling.

Update:  No dice.  I sent them a message and got the following reply: 

Thank you for writing to Google. We'd like to assist you, but we only respond to messages submitted through our online contact form. Please visit http://www.google.com/support/ to submit your message, and we'll get back to you soon. We apologize for any inconvenience, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,
The Google Team

If you can find the online form they mention, you've got more patience than I do.

Somehow, I've disappeared from Google's index.  WTF?  I know I was there at one time.

I guess Googlebot is pissed off at me or something.  MSNBot still likes me.  Maybe Googlebot got jealous.

Just got back from seeing Superman Returns.  That movie ROCKS.

It's not a remake.  It's a sequel to the Christopher Reeve movies, taking place 5 years after the events of Superman 2.  I mean, you have to suspend disbelief in that Superman 2 was filmed (and obstensibly takes place) in 1980, yet this movie clearly takes place in modern times.  That said, director Brian Singer (the dude that did X-men 1 and 2) was totally respectful of the original movies, including the theme music (John Williams) and the opening credits (the 3D "whoosh" captions).  Plot points from the original movies figure in as well, including Lois and Superman's interview at Lois' apartment in the the first movie, as well as Lex Luthor finding Superman's Fortress of Solitude in the second movie.  Thankfully, nothing from the third or fourth movies was mentioned, and they seem to be ignored.  :)

The guy they got as Supes (Brandon Routh) is really good, and Kevin Spacey was born to play Lex Luthor.  They even used archive footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-el, Superman's dad.  Wow.  

I just cannot say enough good things about this movie.  I was really afraid that Hollywood would screw it up, but I was wrong.

Go see it.  Now.  Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

I was playing around with Google's custom homepage today, and I found a gadget for a site called SongTapper in the content listings.  It's a site that guesses what song you're thinking of by having you tap the rhythm using your space bar.  I was only able to stump it with a few obscure Duke Ellington songs, but it still had heard of my songs (just not with my pathetic sense of rhythm).

Intrigued by Scott Hanselman's blog post and podcast on Office 2007, I finally managed to carve out some time to give the Beta a try.  I'm totally stoked about the overall usability improvements, particularly in Word, but, as with all Office releases, Outlook is the application by which I live and die.  Outlook 2007 doesn't disappoint, although most of its improvements are really subtle in nature.

I installed Office 2007 Beta on a VM, as I wasn't going to install it on my office workstation or laptop (I've been busted for that sort of thing before) and I don't really have time to play with it at home (since I'm usually spending time with my wife and kid).  But once I got it installed and running in my VM, I figured there wouldn't really be any harm in having Outlook connect to my Exchange message store on the corporate network from my VM.  It was in that way that I was able to try out some of the cooler functionality, like calendar overlays using my coworkers' shared calendars.

That said, I discovered a couple rather interesting features.  The first problem was that I couldn't get my Outlook profile to operate in cached mode.  It kept throwing an error that the offline cache file wasn't a valid PST file.  Then it would present me with a dialog box to select an OST file.  The only OST file in the dialog, Outlook.OST, threw the same error, so I assumed it was the file that caused the problem in the first place.  I tried giving the dialog a PST file, but it then told me that the file I had given it wasn't a valid offline cache file.  Well, no kidding!  But an OST file isn't a PST file, and it complained about that, too.  Sheesh.  So I gave up on cached mode and just ran in online mode.

The other problem, which caused a fair amount of anxiety for me, was when I started Outlook and it complained about my rules being bad and having to convert them all to client-only.  This wasn't what bothered me.  What bothered me was when I went back to Outlook 2003 on my laptop and none of the rules actually worked, I couldn't delete them, and I couldn't add any new server rules via the "Create Rule" context menu in the inbox (only client-only rules, although the Rules dialog seemed to work to create new server rules).

True, I could workaround the rules issues, but I don't like workarounds.  I like things to work the way they're supposed to work.  That was problematic for me, though, because I don't know thing one about Exchange Server, and I could just imagine the trouble I was going to be in if I had to go to the Exchange Server admin and ask him to fix it.

Luckily, as it often does, Google saved my butt.  Turns out I'm not the only one who had the problem.  I didn't have access to Web Outlook as one of those posts mentions, but a little more Googling turned up the /cleanrules switch.  I ran Outlook 2003 with /cleanrules, re-built my rules (luckily I only have 5 or 6 of them), and all was right in the world.

It's not unusual for my coworkers to come to me seeking my help with .NET, HTML, JavaScript, or just about any other geek topic.  What isn't so obvious to them is that more than half of the time, I don't know the answer to their questions.  My black belt in Google-Fu is what enables me to quickly help them.   Case in point:  Easily 2/3 of all my Google searches start with "site:msdn.microsoft.com." 

I cannot over-emphasize this point:  If you want to be an effective developer, learn Google.  To get you started on learning the advanced features, check out Google Guide.  When you're ready to put your skills to the test, try Gwigle.

I got a chance to sit down and chat with Scott Hanselman for 20 minutes or so while I was in Portland.  Scott was a totally gracious host, and took an opportunity to introduce me to another tool that he raves about (and I never tried), PowerShell.  For the uninitiated, PowerShell is a command line and scripting environment.  Think cmd.exe, but with first-class support for the .NET framework class library, XML, WMI, and much, much more.  After Scott demoed it for me, I went back to my hotel and played with the shell for a few hours.  Although my need for it has been limited, I'm madly in love with PowerShell.  This is powerful stuff.

I can't say anything about PowerShell that hasn't been said already, so do yourself a favor and check it out.  While you're at it, check out some of the info on Scott's blog, his podcast on the subject, and his recent post about the PowerShell IDE.

Slashdot ran this story about a couple whose hard drive, which had been supposedly destroyed by Best Buy, turned up at a flea market.  The implications are, of course, a little scary.

It amazes me how blazé people are with their data.  It's just not a lot of effort to keep your data secure.  Here are the measures that I take: 

1. Password-protect your user account.  My wife an I run as local admin, which is a bad idea, and I strongly recommend that you do NOT do that unless you are very confident in your ability to protect your system from malware.  That said, it is ALWAYS a good idea to password-protect your user account.  My wife and I have separate logons on all of our systems, and we use Fast User Switching to log on/off.  Password protecting your accounts ensures that anyone in your house using your system is going to be logged on as the guest account, and will only have the rights you grant them.
   
   
2. The directory tree on our network that we store all of our stuff in is set up with proper ACLs to deny access to anyone that isn't me or my wife.  This is lets us comfortably allow a guest to login to our desktop system without worrying that they'll get into our files.
   
   
3. The really sensitive stuff (financial records, images of our birth certificates and SSN cards, medical records, certain pictures) is kept in a TrueCrypt drive.  This way, if the machine is stolen, and an adversary bypasses the ACLs (easy enough to do - reinstall the OS), the sensitive stuff is still safe.  The TrueCrypt drive also has ACLs to deny guests access if we leave the drive mounted while they log on via Fast User Switching.
   
   
4. Sensitive information is never sent to anyone via email.  I've got my mom and wife using PGP to encrypt plain-text messages and binary files for email transmission.  The basic functionality will always be free, thanks to the efforts of Phil Zimmerman (a true hero, in my mind).  My wife is a power user, but my mom is a more "typical" user, and she caught on very quickly.  If my mom can pick it up, how hard can it be?  (Sorry, Mom...)
   
   
5. Backup your stuff, but take the same measures to protect your data.  I use the cheap-o cheezy Backup app that's built into Windows to backup all my directories and TrueCrypt drives to an external drive, but I maintain the same ACLs on the backup media as I do on the "production" media.
   
   
6. If you're going to be selling/throwing away/giving away a drive, please, for the love of Pete, at least format the stupid thing first.  A better option would be Darik's Boot and Nuke, but a regular format will take care of most adversaries.
   
   
7. Whenever I connect to my network remotely, it's all done via SSH.  The only inbound port on my network is SSH, and I use PuTTY to set up a secure tunnel for any connectivity I need from work or on the road.
   

When I first started this blog, I wrote in the introduction that the primary purpose of this blog was technical and gaming.  However, I warned that their might be an occassional picture of my son, Connor.  Well, it's time I made good on that.  Here's a shot Michelle took of Connor and me bumming around on the weekend enjoying an episode of the Wiggles together.

What fun I'm having up here at Corillian!  I love Portland anyway, but I'm really getting to give my brain cells a workout on this project.  That makes it oh so much better.

Since I'm up here over Memorial Day, my wife and I decided to make a family vacation out of it, and she and our 18-month-old son are flying up to join me.   We're looking to do lots of fun local stuff, like the beach and driving around Mt. Hood.

I blogged earlier in the week about playing with my GPS mid-flight.  It was a fun little diverision.  As I'm waiting for my wife's (two-hour-delayed) flight to come in, I thought it'd be fun to track her flight in real time online.  There are lots of sites around the web to do this, but FlightView seems to be a predominant one.  Very similar to the thing with my GPS, I don't see that the information is actually useful for anything, and it's ultimately about as exciting as watching paint dry.

It ultimately doesn't tell you anything the flight status page on the airline's website doesn't tell you, but it is kind of fun to look at that blip and say, "hey, my wife and kid are somewhere over Nebraska right now."

I'm in Portland, OR right now doing a residency with our friends at Corillian in an effort to collaborate on the next release for Commerce's Online Banking product.  It's a three hour flight from Kansas City, and I've made the flight several times before.  I often find myself wondering where I am geographically when I stare at the patchwork quilt thousands of feet below the plane.

I recently picked up Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006 with GPS Locator, and it's a fun and useful little gizmo.  On a lark, I pulled out my laptop on the plane, stuck the GPS module's suction cup to the window, and waited.  It took a few minutes, but eventually my GPS got a lock and began reporting my position.  Not that you can do much with it at 33,000 ft going 460 MPH, but it's a fun little diversion when you don't have anything better to do mid-flight.