Dear Mom/Mom-In-Law/Grandma/Other,

Please stop using Internet Explorer 6.0.  Just...  Stop.

I know you're comfortable with it.  I know that's what came installed on your computer, and you're not even aware that it sucks.  But trust me, it does.

"But Cam," you ask, "If it isn't broken, why should I fix it?"  Ah, but that's the point.  It is ridiculously broken.  It's the Yugo of web browsers.  Aside from being ridden with security vulnerabilities, and lacking innovations such as tabbed browsing, its CSS standards support is horribly broken and will never be fixed.

My point about security and tabs should be self-explanatory.  The CSS problem, in layman's terms, means that, just this week, a simple web page which should have taken me about four hours to design and develop took me over two days because I had to work around Internet Explorer 6.0's CSS flaws.  That's just...  obscene.  It wastes Corillian's time.  And worse yet, it wastes my time, which I could be using to post videos of your grandkids.

So what can you do to help me?  Convert to a different browser.  A more modern, more standards-compliant browser.  Just about all of them will automatically convert your favorites or bookmarks, history, cookies, and saved passwords.   They're all free.  All you have to do is download them and install them.  And then get your friends and relatives to do the same.  Here are a few suggestions.

• Internet Explorer 7.0.  Microsoft fixed a lot of the problems Internet Explorer 6.0 had, as well as adding some useful user interface enhancements.  I know it looks a little different, but if you try it, you might just like it.  Pros: Microsoft was aware of all the issues with IE 6.0 and fixed most of them.  Cons:  Slight learning curve with the new user interface.
  
  
• Mozilla Firefox.  This is the second-most popular browser right now.  It's very fast, reliable, and secure.  It has a really neat feature called extensions, which allow you download free add-ons for the browser that perform any number of useful functions.  For example, I run an extension called Ad Block Plus, which filters out banner ads from my web pages.  In many cases, I never even realize they were there.  Pros: Insanely active open-source community backing, which means frequent security updates, new features, and extensions.  Cons:  There are still a few web pages (very few) that were designed specifically with non-standard features of Internet Explorer in mind.  These sites don't deserve your traffic anyway and whoever told them they should design their site like that should be fired.
  
  
• Opera.  I honestly don't know a whole lot about Opera, but its users are very vocal about how much they like it, so maybe you will, too.  Pros:  I've heard it's really quite good.  Cons:  Same as Firefox.
  
  
• Safari.  This is Apple's browser that comes pre-installed on Mac computers.  They make a Windows version now.  I wasn't overly impressed, but again, this letter is about giving you options.  Pros:  Um...  it's free?  Cons:  Nothing overly compelling about it.
  

With just five minutes of effort, you can take a step toward a better browsing experience for you, and, as others follow your lead, a better development experience for me.  Thank you.

Michelle and I decided we should take advantage of the snowstorm here in KC and take Connor in the backyard to go sledding.  He has two sleds, one that's just a cheap plastic disc, and the other is my three-rail sit-on sled from my childhood.  The three-rail sled didn't glide as well as as the disc, but Connor didn't care.  He wanted to ride Daddy's old sled.

Well, after pushing him up and down the hill a few times, I was freakin' exhausted, but Connor wasn't anywhere near ready to come inside.  And then I had a memory of my childhood on the farm, when my dad would tie my sled to the back of his tractor and drag me all over the place.

Well, my tractor isn't nearly as big as my dad's, but I think it works just as well.  :)

I love Guitar Hero.  As a musician who long ago gave up his art to focus on his profession, I frequently miss the cathartic effect performing had on me.  Guitar Hero gives me a way to quickly reconnect with that aspect of my life, without the long-term investment of locking myself in a room and practicing every day.  I know it's a far cry from really making music, but it does a good job of simulating it.

So, with great anticipation, I picked up Rock Band today.  Well, my wife picked it up, actually.  She's probably too tolerant of my fetish for geeky expensive toys, at least from a financial standpoint.  Understand, she plunked down the MSRP $170 for the full set, with the game, the guitar, the mic, and the drums.  This is not a cheap hobby.  This just supports my theory that I have the best wife ever.  Scott Hanselman sometimes gets shot down because of low Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF), but I don't think I've actually been shot down yet.  The rule of thumb is, as long as the bills are paid, the kids are clothed, food is on the table, and I don't question silly expenditures like family portraits, she won't question the serious expenditures like $170 for a toy guitar and drum kit.  I think it's a good arrangement.

I digress. 

Rock Band is awesome.  Well worth the money, particularly for a Guitar Hero fan.  Aside from the guitar and bass parts, the game also allows you to play drums and sing vocals.  Or, at least, try to sing.  It makes me feel like I can sing, and that's what's important.  I reject your reality (the one in which my singing voice is somewhere between William Hung and a cat in a blender) and substitute my own (where my voice would make Frank Sinatra jealous).

The defining moment of my evening tonight:  When I discovered that, while playing the vocal part, you sometimes get to tap the mic in your hand to simulate a tambourine or, in the case of Don't Fear the Reaper, cowbell.  Yes, that's right.  I got to be Will Ferrell!  :)

More Cowbell!

Well, not really.  The folks at Infusion have posted their "trailer" for their upcoming video recap of Sleepless in New York.  Get it here.

I've got a decent amount of screen time in the trailer.   Before you ask, no, I wasn't really worried about hidden microphones.  It was about one in the morning, they were conducting personal interviews of all attendees, and I was punch drunk.  So for every question, I kept coming up with the most off-the-wall answers I could think of.  They did three takes of my interview, and I never answered any questions the same way twice.

Hopefully some of the funnier answers of my interview will be available in the future.

AT&T, the poster child for telecommuting, the company that practically invented telecommuting as we know it, appears to be forcing its teleworkers back into the office.

Yikes.  As someone who telecommutes full time (and absolutely loves it), I really feel bad for those workers.  Apparently, the suits at SBC, who recently acquired AT&T, don't share the former management's liberal views regarding work arrangements.  This is a scenario I sometimes worry about, as the company I work for, Corillian, has been acquired by CheckFree, which is in turn being acquired by Fiserv. 

Well, if it happens, it happens.  I'll enjoy it while I can.  I have a feeling, though, that with the rising costs of transportation and energy, AT&T may be an oddity.  I think it's likely more companies will embrace telework.

Look, I get Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services as a platform.  I get what it is, what it does, and why it's so cool.  Hell, Sleepless in NY was all about MOSS, and it was fun.  But I do need to rant about something.

At Sleepless in NY, Kurt Guenther, in his introductory Sharepoint presentation, characterized MOSS as "Microsoft's Web Platform."  Full stop.  Almost implying that that ASP.NET developers that didn't build on MOSS were an endangered species, that all .NET web development would eventually be done on MOSS.  I don't know if that's what he meant to imply, but that's what I heard.  And I don't buy that.  At least, not when MOSS has such a painful development story right now.

When I'm developing ASP.NET, I make my changes, I do a build, and I debug.  Wash, rinse, repeat.  Once I'm in that rhythm, things progress very quickly.  There's some JIT overhead here and there, but besides that, it's a very smooth process.

When I'm developing on MOSS, however, it's a lot harder.  I make my changes, deploy to my bin folder (or the GAC), sometimes IISReset, wait forever for the whole damn thing to JIT.  And then, when I debug, if I set a breakpoint and leave the code running at a break too long, the entire Sharepoint object model times out or something and turns null, locking up Sharepoint in the process and requiring another IISReset to correct.  What a huge pain in the ass.  And all that's assuming that I'm not dealing with code that requires feature activation or a new site collection to test.  And don't get me started on the cryptic exceptions.  GAH!

So yes, MOSS brings a lot to the table.  Collaboration, search, business intelligence, business forms, workflow, content management, and more.  It's an awesome product.  There's a reason why every headhunter and his brother is looking high and low for MOSS developers right now - they're in high demand.  But until the development story improves, I think I'd prefer to wait before calling myself a MOSS developer.

The trip was awesome.  Greg Brill and Infusion were great hosts, from picking us up to the airport, to feeding us, to keeping the training interesting and fun.  The first night, they even treated us to catered BBQ on a rooftop 17 stories above Times Square.  Yes, that was as cool as it sounds.

They weren't kidding when they called it "Sleepless in NY," though.  They started us off with a Sharepoint/MOSS overview Friday night (before the food), getting us all to bed around 1 AM for our 7 AM wake-up call.  The following day focused on a wide range of topics, including Sharepoint specifics (like the Business Data Connector and Excel Services), WPF, and Silverlight.  Then, Saturday night, they gave us the assignment:  By 10 the next morning, in groups of 3, we were to develop something intended for contribution to the open-source Community Kit for Sharepoint. 

While the other teams attempted projects with a fairly broad scope, my team decided to define a very narrowly-scoped project, so that we could be assured we would deliver a fully working prototype.  The additional benefit to this approach was that we were likely to finish quickly, so we'd hopefully get some sleep and be fresh for our presentation to the judges.

In around four hours, we created a simple web part that implemented Digg-style content rating using a custom site column.  This got us in bed around 2:30 AM, so we were ready with a high-energy presentation the next morning.  The judges really seemed to enjoy our idea, and Ed, the presenter from our group, did a fantastic job presenting the solution, but we didn't win.  The prize actually ended up going to a team that really did pull an all-nighter, and they certainly deserved it.

The competition for Insomniac (the laptop) was a Sharepoint quiz show.  I was actually one of the first to get eliminated, so no laptop for me.  That's cool - everyone still got a Tom Bihn Brain Bag and a couple books.

Hanging out with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell, as well as the talent from Infusion and MVP's and Blue Badges they had as judges was a blast.  As my flight was one of the last ones out, I even got to enjoy Carl's musical talents as he jammed on an Infusion guy's guitar to pass the time waiting on his train.  I recorded a few minutes of Carl's impromptu concert on my Creative Zen Vision:M, downloadable here (not the best quality in the world, mind you.  Cheap mic, and the Zen only records 4 bit, 11 Khz PCM).

Overall, I had a blast - The weekend gave me just what I wanted in terms of challenge and networking.

A couple months ago I announced my departure from Commerce Bank.  I left my job as their lead developer of online banking, and joined RiverPoint Group as a contractor.

I'm not going to blog bile (see #5 on that list).  I'll just say this:  I don't think contracting is a good fit for me.  I wasn't as effective as I'm used to being, and it really hurt me to go from feeling like a leader, in control of my project and caring about its outcome as a reflection on me, to being a detached mercenary, without a whole lot of say in anything.  I also wasn't prepared to put in the time the client required of me, especially in light of my family life;  I just didn't have any time with my wife, Michelle, or our two awesome little boys, Connor and Cade.  That was the hardest thing for me to deal with:  Seeing my boys in the morning when I left for work, only to return home after they were in bed.

Be sure you understand me when I say I'm not blogging bile.  RiverPoint is a great company, and if you want to be a contractor, I think they're a great company to work for.  Our client, who has asked me not to disclose their name on this blog, is one of the best companies in the country to work for, and they deserve that reputation.  I just did not fully anticipate what my new role was and how it was going to affect me on a personal and professional level.

So I was talking with some friends of mine at Corillian (now a part of CheckFree), and I asked them if they thought I'd be a good fit there.  My friends gave me a good recommendation, then I went through a series of intense interviews, and now I've been hired.  On September 17, after taking a week off to relax, I will be joining Corillian/CheckFree as a Sr. Software Engineer/Technical Lead in their Professional Services division.  What this means is I will be doing a job very similar to my old job at Commerce, but I will be doing it for other clients of Corillian Pro Services. 

Ready for the best part?  I'll be working remotely from my home office.  This is the Holy Grail for me;  A job that suits my talents, that I enjoy doing, in a company whose values align with my own, that I can do from home.  I'm thrilled that the time I used to spend commuting can now be spent with the kids, or on open source projects, or going to Lodge meetings, or .NET user groups.  As much as I hate to leave a new job so soon, there are no words to describe how much I am looking forward to this.

I've been running Windows Home Server RC1 for two months now, and I love it. There's very little not to like about it.  I won't bother re-hashing what it is and what it does, because you can find plenty here, here, and here.

My experience with it has been awesome.  So far, the only things I can complain about are:

• It doesn't support the scanner function on my HP all-in-one printer. HP never released a Windows 2003 driver for it. So I can use it as a print server, but I have to pass the scanner through to a Windows XP VM to use it.
• Mozy's consumer offering doesn't support it. Admittedly, duplication puts my mind at ease regarding losing data to a hardware issue, but there's always that need in the back of my mind for off-site backup. The way I've worked around it, for the short term anyway, is to run Mozy on a Windows XP VM inside my WHS and do an hourly mirror of the most important 4 or 5 gigs worth of data (pix mostly) to the virtual machine so Mozy can back it up from there. I did try the one consumer-oriented online backup solution that supports Win2K3 (I think it's i-Drive), but I couldn't get it to reliably map the drives to backup if I wasn't physically logged in on the WHS box. Honestly, I'm thinking I may just revert to a semi-annual DVD going to the safe deposit box for my offsite backup.
• I had a motherboard die on me, and I tried simply replacing the motherboard with a new one (and upgraded to a dual-core CPU, too). WHS booted up, but, long story short, it left me in a less-than-satisfactory place (as I expected) so I went ahead and did the reinstall option. This went well, and recovered all of my shared folders nicely, but I had to recreate all my users, and for some reason, I can't set up the dynamic host name function anymore. As soon as I put in my Windows Live ID, it bombs out with unknown error "80072F19," which is apparently related to some sort of untrusted certificate coming from the Windows Live servers. I've tweaked some IE security settings, and added some IP addresses to the trusted sites, and still no dice. Weird.
• Up until today, I didn't realize that the shared folders had file versioning. It never really occurred to me to check the file properties for a previous version tab, and that this would only be viewable from a connected client (not the server), and then only if you're running XP, Vista Business, or Vista Ultimate. But I did stumble upon that today, and was very happy I found it. That's half the reason I use Mozy - so I can fix a "whoops."

I did have one moment of WHS-related sheer terror today. I noticed that about half of my 30 GB library of MP3s seemed to be unreadable. My pictures and documents are backed up via my XP VM running Mozy, but my backup strategy for music and videos relies on WHS.

So, as I was freaking out, seeing if my Creative Zen Vision:M supported copying my music off of it back onto the server, I rebooted the WHS box. When it came back up, everything was fine.

The best I can figure is that it has something to do with the extra external hard drive I added yesterday. I have a 120 GB external drive I was using to take work home, and, since I'm quitting that job this week, I decided to put that drive to better use as a member of my WHS storage pool. So I plugged it in, formatted, added it to the storage pool, and left it alone. I'm wondering if there was some kind of a hiccup or something in the file duplication process the next time it balanced storage (hence, why only some of the MP3s were hosed).

At any rate, I'm buying this as soon as NewEgg lists it.  It's 100% pure awesome, and worth every penny.

(Full disclosure: This post is made up primarily of snippets of forum postings I made on Scott Hanselman's forum...)

I've been invited to Infusion's Sleepless in NY training weekend. 

This sounds like a fun little trip, getting to hang out with some geeks, including one of my personal heroes, Carl Franklin.  SharePoint is a good technology, and while I'm not personally overly excited about it compared to other technologies (like Silverlight), this is free training, and it's a great opportunity to network and get my name out there a little. 

And who knows?  Maybe I'll bring home the grand prize, "Insomniac, the developer's machine that never sleeps..."

Today I'm 1D in hexadecimal, which I prefer because it makes me look like I'm still a teenager.  Or 11101 if you prefer binary.  Let's just not talk about how old I am in decimal, okay?

Alright, I'll put it this way...  The hippie adage is "Never trust anyone over 30."  Which means you can only trust me for another 366 days.