Sloth of bears.

Army of ants.

Murder of crows.

Tribe of monkeys.

Embarrassment of richest.

What about geeks? Conference? Shy? Intelligence? Slather?

P.S. this site on collective nouns has a bunch of fun ones. I think I like “smack of jellyfish” best…

If you read the ReadMe.htm from the Visual Studio 2005 setup, you’ll see a detailed list of up to 23 things to uninstall in the right order (plus 2 notes if you have trouble).

To solve this problem, Dan Fernandez posts about a VS05 uninstall tool that worked wonderfully for me.

I just had the most amazing consumer experience and I just had to share it.

I was looking for the local Mom & Pop computer store in my area and I stumbled across www.puzzlecomputers.com. His site doesn’t mention a store, but I left him a message asking if he could upgrade my computer or point me at the local Mom & Pop. Not only does he do that kind of work, but he came to my house, picked up the two computers I wanted to use as parts, e.g. case, RW-DVD, HD, etc, recommended and purchased the new motherboard, CPU, memory and quiet power supply, put them all together (including modifying my old proprietary Dell case to fit), brought the whole thing back to my house and then spent another hour installing another HD I had lying around. The specs on the parts were 1GB of RAM (upgradeable to 2GB), 2.8GHz AMD processor and ABIT motherboard with all the trimmings.

The whole thing, parts, labor, delivery, etc. cost $400. Plus, he hauled away the extra parts so I don’t have to look at them. And when the drivers didn’t install right away, he was available for phone support.

Highly recommended. I wish all my consumer experiences were like this one!

Mike Swanson and the folks that made this possible, you guys rock!

“If you were unable to attend the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference 2005 (PDC05) in Los Angeles this year, never fear; 209 breakout sessions, panels, and symposia are now available online. Each session includes a video of the presenter, a navigable index of the content, the PowerPoint presentation itself, and video of any demos. We’ll be hosting this content for free, for anyone, for six full months.”

I’m really loving having Mr. Petzold in the blogesphere. His latest essay has the following abstract:

Visual Studio can be one of the programmer’s best friends, but over the years it has become increasingly pushy, domineering, and suffering from unsettling control issues. Should we just surrender to Visual Studio’s insistence on writing our code for us? Or is Visual Studio sapping our programming intelligence rather than augmenting it? This talk dissects the code generated by Visual Studio; analyzes the appalling programming practices it perpetuates; rhapsodizes about the joys, frustrations, and satisfactions of unassisted coding; and speculates about the radical changes that Avalon will bring.

It doesn’t end the way I expected it to. Fun stuff.