When I noticed the behavior that Ian describes in VS05b1 (that Ctrl+F5 no longer works to launch a console app with “Press any key to continue…” at the end), I assumed it was a temporary bug. To learn that this feature was removed “by design” is devastating. As a presenter and technology experimenter, I’ve probably used this as much as any single feature in Visual Studio with the possible exception of the text editor.

Don’t just site there! Vote to Save Ctrl+F5 in VS05! (I love MSDN Product Feedback : )

I just got back from a 3-family, 6-day trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico (“a pleasant fishing village paved over for tourist hotels”) and it was fabulous. Since it was before “the high season,” we had the place practically to ourselves. In fact, even though it was an all-inclusive place, the wait staff probably outnumbered the guests 3 to 1 at any given time. And it wasn’t as if they skimped on the food or the drinks, either! Every day, we had a giant buffet for breakfast, snacks by the pool for lunch and a 3-hour, 5-course meal for dinner. Plus, the weather was great and the pools were heated, so it was practically perfect.

The one blemish was when we drove to La Paz and couldn’t get out again. The detour signs pointed the wrong directions and all of the highways had the same number. We literally left and returned to La Paz 4 times, including the time we had to drive the rent-a-car guy back to his offer when something on the road disabled our car and we had to get a replacement. In 10+ years of business travel, I’ve never taken the comprehensive insurance until that day. I only had to pay for the half of tank of gas that I couldn’t fill up myself because to do so would’ve destroyed the engine (the rental company failed at first to see this as an argument for charging me less than 4x the going rate for gas, but I did eventually talk them down to only charging me 2x the going rate…).

Oh, and snorkeling rocks! We went to a calm little beach with a driver that brought all of the equipment, kayaks and a cooler of beers! But, I was completely distracted at my first snorkeling expedition ever. At first, I was blown away at the clarity of what I could see under the water and the ease with which I could breath (I expected to swallow a lot of water). Then, I was completely freaked out at the shear number of fish under the water (thousands!), even in areas with humans inches away. I felt like I was in an undersea remake of Hitchcock’s Birds and any moment I was going to be bait (and there were no phone booths around in which to hide). Then, I was amazed at how I was simultaneously part of and not part of this new world I was floating over. I must’ve snorkeled for an hour straight without pulling my head up. It was unbelievable and I got to share it with my wife and kids who’d never snorkeled before either.

After this wonderful family vacation, I can’t tell you how relaxed I am. At 9:37am, I think I’m ready for my afternoon siesta… : )

Most of the worst experiences of my childhood involve the dentist. I have an active gag reflex and a general aversion to sitting still for long periods with nothing to do but let somebody poke my soft innards with a metal stick, so the dentist chair has never been a good fit for me. Today, I got another reason to hate the dentist.

Because Beaverton does not fluoridate their water and because he’s a nine-year old boy, my youngest son Tom had 4 cavities to deal with today. He was nonchalant about the whole thing for the first hour alone in the chair while I waiting in the sitting room, never expressing concern or doubt about the experience to come, which made me believe that everything was going to be just fine. Even when he started crying a bit, I was able to maintain my seat, knowing that he leaned toward the dramatic. However, when he started screaming, that’s when all 6′5″ and 280 pounds of me barged through the door between the waiting area and the rending rooms, not stopping to ask the women milling around reception if that was OK and conscious but uncaring that the expression on my face stilled them to silence.

When I got back to the room where Tom was being impaled, the dentist was busy telling him that little girls cried less than he did. She further went on to tell him that he wasn’t feeling “pain” at all but only “pressure,” a sentiment she had to repeat several times while she asked the nurse to give her the extra gauze to staunch the profuse bleeding. I have to say that it was difficult to simultaneously comfort my son while expressing my displeasure at the dentist for both the potential physical and verified mental torture she was using on him. Probably it wasn’t easy for her to concentrate on her dentistry in a completely focused manner while I loomed over her, but that’s what you get for making my son cry for 30 minutes.

Anyway, at the end, as she informed me that she worked with children all the time and had two of her own (implying that the pain was somehow my son’s fault, I’m guessing), she also reached for the referral pad for another dentist to fill the other two cavities, saving me the trouble of asking.

I hate the dentist.

P.S. After a McDonald’s toy and chicken sandwich (eaten carefully from the un-decimated side of his mouth), Tom seems unaffected. However, I’m sure that the whole sordid experience will come roaring back to him in the future unless they’ve replaced the dentist with nanites and computer programs (or sledge hammers and chisels, which would be equally humane)…

Here.

Sir Black Xero (?!?) has a review of Microsoft’s increasing openness in 2004, summarizing it this way:

“Granted, there are plenty of Microsoft teams that are still opaque when it comes to their roadmaps. (Office team, are you listening?) But Microsoft has taken some in 2004 in the right direction, customers, analysts and other company watchers seem to agree.”

Frankly, I’m pleasantly surprised at how far Microsoft has come opening up to the world. I hope we’re at a critical mass where it just can’t be stopped, but as an engineer, that’s hardly surprising. : )

From securityfocus.com:

“It appears that the overall quality of code, and more importantly, the amount of QA, on various browsers touted as ‘secure’, is not up to par with MSIE; the type of a test I performed requires no human interaction and involves nearly no effort. Only MSIE appears to be able to consistently handle [*] malformed input well, suggesting this is the only program that underwent rudimentary security QA testing with a similar fuzz utility.

“This is of course not to say MSIE is more secure; it does have a number of problems, mostly related to its security architecture and various features absent in other browsers. But the quality of core code appears to be far better than of its ‘secure’ competitors.

“[*] Over the course of about 2 hours; I cannot rule out it would exhibit problems in a longer run.”

Wow. This is nice of us...

I finally figured out why I need a gigabit LAN, especially at my house: the Windows Media Center Extender (mine’s for my XBOX, which I bought especially for this purpose). It lets you get at the music, video, pictures, radio, PVR, live TV and pretty much everything else that Media Center exposes, but from any TV in the house and all with the fabulous 10-fit UI that MCE provides. I had to duct tape down the extra long wire from my office to my bedroom (I explicitly left out a network connection in the bedroom when I wired the place -- who knew?) and my megabit LAN works just fine, but I can see needing more when I put one of these things on every TV in the house, which is pretty likely, since it rocks so hard. Wahoo!

Oh, and as if that weren’t enough, the XBOX Media Center Extender kit comes with a remote and remote sensor that works for playing DVDs, too, thus saving you the trouble of buying both. I’m in love!

As I think I've said before, as the capabilities of our UI platform expands, programmers are going to need to know a lot more about user experience and graphic art. Towards that goal, I offer a recent post on Slashdot that provides advise on how programmers can bone up for the latter. Anyone got any ideas about the former?