From 12 ways to de-commercialize the holidays:

1. Yankee Swap
2. Secret Santa
3. Un-Secret Santa
4. Re-gifting
5. Pool your resources
6. For children only
7. Donate in others’ names
8. Limit spending
9. Families helping others
10. Plan family outings
11. Let the kids rule for one day
12. Take a trip

On the “Let the kids rule for one day” front, that’s what we do each year for each kid’s birthday. They look forward to that part of it more than any other.

From Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House?:

“When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, the daddy wants to give the mommy a special gift.

“So he buys a ‘stay-at-home’ server.”

I wish more of the rest of Microsoft had this kind of humor when dealing with the world! I thought I was going to wet myself…

I mention this because this is just the thing I’ve wanted to be able to check my kid’s math homework: the Microsoft Math Add-In for Word 2007.

For example, after installing it, I can open Word, press Alt+= to get myself a new equation and then enter:

x^2 +2x + 2 + 3x - 4x^2

it translates into:

If I right-click and choose Simplify, I get the following:

If I right-click again and choose Plot in 2D, I get:

If I’ve got an equation that I want to solve, I can enter it:

and then right-click and choose Solve for x and get all the possible solutions:

This even works if you have multiple equations with multiple unknowns, which means this is good through at least 8th grade Algebra. Wahoo!

OK, what’s the deal with installing 1 product (Visual Studio 2008 beta 2) and having to do 22 separate uninstalls?!? How is this a good thing?

Normally, this is the kind of question I’d pose and then provide an answer, but this time I just don’t have one.

If my Word settings were stored in %HOMEPATH%\WordSettings.xml, I could edit the file, back it up, carry it to other machines and generally manage it. Instead, my settings seem to be stored in the Registry, %LOCALAPPDATA% or %APPDATA%, but who knows what’s stored where or how to manage it.

Obviously, Unix already does just this and I’m jealous. If I had settings stored somewhere I could understand and apps that actually used XCOPY deployment, I wouldn’t have to uninstall at all — I could just delete.

These are the thoughts you have uninstalling VS05 and VS08b2…

In general, IE7 more than meets my needs. It shows me the web pages I want and it works well. However, there is one killer feature that FireFox has that I desperately needed yesterday that caused me to load it onto my machine. It’s not my default browser and it doesn’t replace IE7, but FireFox is there and fulfilling my one killer feature needs nicely.

What’s the feature, you ask? Well I’ll tell you: sane content scaling. IE7 has Ctrl+, but it works very poorly, unlike FireFox, where it works fabulously.

Here’s the problem. Yesterday, I started reading the most excellent C# 3.0 in a Nutshell online, but the “Text Zoom +” button didn’t increase the font size nearly enough for me to read on my giant LCD monitor. So, I started pressing Ctrl+ on IE7 and the text got bigger, but it didn’t wrap the text inside the window, instead giving me horizontal scroll bar. This confuses me, because IE wraps text just fine when the window is resized or when the text size changes — why can’t it wrap when the content is scaled?

Anyway, FireFox rescales things very nicely and made my online reading very pleasant.

I absolutely love what the Albahari brothers (Joe & Ben) have done with C# 3.0 in a Nutshell. Not only is their prose concise in a way that mine is not, but I have learned a bunch of stuff about LINQ I didn’t know, they built a tool (LINQPad) that lets you experiment with LINQ interactively in a way that the designers of LINQ themselves don’t support and the tool has all kinds of wonderful features that LINQ, SQL and Regular Expression programmers alike will want to use regularly long after they’ve read the book.

And if that weren’t enough, the tool comes with an integrated tree of samples that follow along with the material in the book, teaching the material from another angle and reinforcing it perfectly. It’s pure genius and if I ever write another book, it’s a model I’m going to follow. Very highly recommended.

I’ve posted about ebooks before (e.g. I Hate Books). It sounds like the Amazon Kindle has some real potential. All we need is a product with enough critical mass to create a market and then we can have real competition ala the music player market.

Has anyone used an ebook reader before? I have some friends with the Sony version and they love it. Are we there yet? Does anyone have a Kindle?