Off topic
I’ve been tagged by Pablo, so here goes five things about me that most people don’t know:
1) I was born in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Like Tom, I was born in the same hospital were my now-wife Catalina was born but as she was born almost a year before me, so she wasn’t there (luckily) when I left the hospital
2) My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI 99 4/A. And after typing huge program listing from a TI gaming book and getting very boring games I decided to start writing my own boring games. A couple of years after that, I got my hands on a Sinclair Spectrum (in almost all its flavors from 48k to 128k), and I started to write not-that-boring games. I still remember when we (two mates from school and I) coded our first “Pacman-like” game, it was a huge success for us when we’re able to make solid walls by ‘hiding’ # characters (using a very advanced technique of selecting the same fore/back colors…) and then checking for them. After that, a heavy Sanyo PC XT with mono video card replaced the Spectrum, and we started disassembling the game Leisure Suit Larry with Fernando in order to cheat the monies counter to advance the Casino scene.
3) I like sports; I did play soccer, tennis, and paddle for some time. I even got to practice Kung Fu for almost 2+ years. Right now, I’m into tennis and swimming.
4) I haven’t work before as an employee (I was always a freelancer) until I co-funded my own company Clarius Consulting with Daniel. I’m now legally a Clarius employee since almost 3 years now.
5) I’m learning to cook… and incredible enough, against all odds, I’m making progress!!
And here goes five tags to other people:
Fernando, Juan Carlos, Jose, Adrian and Mauro.
I'm not talkin' about tennis...
Today I received a *very* cool gift (signed by Soma) consisting of a transparent (and heavy...) cube with the Visual Studio 2005 logo and a few paragraphs floating inside of it (ok, its hard to explain). Very, very cool:
It is the "Visual Studio 2005 ACE award", which recognizes the contributions done to make VS a better product, like a lot of bug reporting, suggestions, etc.
Almost five months without any blogging… bad… bad… bad...
Here is the list of the main excuses reasons that kept me from blogging:
Reason #1: ClariuS is growing, a lot!
And at a really quick rate, which has been keeping me busy with a lot of extra stuff that range from internal training, looking for new office space and things like choosing furniture color… :S
Reason #2: Work overload.
As usual I’m working on several different projects at the same time which adds for long days. Add to this the usually ignored task-switching overhead and you get the idea.
Reason #3: Lots of Community stuff.
Wrote a few articles for different magazines and online websites. One of them is about the new interesting Virtual Path Provider feature that will be appearing shortly at MSDN. I also did a few talks and I’m currently working on finishing two presentations I will be giving at VSLive! Boston June 23rd (let me know if you’re planning to attend!).
I also helped at the TechEd 2005 ASP.NET Cabanas in Orlando last week where I had the chance to answer a broad range of customer’s questions and met again with team members like AndresS, SimonCal and a brand new software architect. J
Ok, enough excuses so far. Its time now to get this blog working again!
Microsoft is boosting MVPs visibility by launching an MVP Community site. This is cool. What is not so cool is the fact that if you’re an MVP and want to include a link to your bio on that site, for example as a signature for newsgroups posts, mailing lists, ect. you have to add around 200 extra chars because the URL produced by that site is huge; this is mine using the MS site URL:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/mvp/mvpdetails.mspx?Params=~CMTYDataSvcParams^~arg+Name=%22guid%22+Value=%22c451d24e-5397-405f-a0d4-ae797459ccd4%22/^~sParams^~/sParams^~/CMTYDataSvcParams^
Hopefully kzu has noticed this and quickly hacked up a handler to offer shorter URLs; mine now looks like this:
http://aspnet2.com/mvp.ashx?vga
That’s about 180 chars shorter, now imagine the traffic the MVP Community site surely gets each day and try to count the saved bytes for each MVP profile link listed if they were using this format. Yes, @ ClariuS we take performance that seriously! :-)
I can see that Paul noticed this already.
Now, the “More” part of this post’s title
Dave Massy is working in the IE Team for almost a month now and already believes that he wouldn’t feel comfortable using any other browser. W-o-w. Dave, are you serious? Maybe you need to do some catching up of IE current status by downloading the latest bits and playing with them. I bet you won’t resist more than a day or two and will hurry up to download FireFox or any other updated browser.
NikhilKo is back to blogging!! His latest posts contain nothing but excellent inside stuff on the Whidbey bits. Go read them! :-) Now if we could just get ScottGu to start blogging again…
During last week I had a couple of different meetings (online and in person) with a bunch of Microsoft employees and we touched a big range of topics. One thing I’ve told them all is that if they were willing to destroy their credibility in a snap all they have to do is to try to defend the obsolete Internet Explorer or the non-working GDN Worskpaces. Any of these two positions will have the same instant effect: zero credibility for you.
What does this post have to do with ASP.NET internals? Absolutely nothing.
What does this post have to do with ASP.NET? Just a bit, read on please…
My graphic design team, leaded by Antonio, has been recently doing some really cool Messenger-related work; a small sample:
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I didn’t wanted to let this opportunity pass by so I asked them to do some work for me; so now, if I’m on your contacts list you will notice my brand new picture:
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And also my brand new wallpaper (for freely advertising my blog on my talks!):
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(click on pic to enlarge)
Ok, now comes the slightly on topic part of this post:
I’m looking for some cool ideas (let’s put my "vga" initials aside for a while) for ASP.NET weblogs wallpapers and related messenger pictures so I can ask the designers team to do a few more and send them to ScottW to make them available for download. I was thinking about something in the lines of a “C# messenger” but that’s not really that much original. What about a .Text messenger picture and wallpaper? How would you imagine a ScottGu, RHoward or NikhilKo’s green messenger picture? For NikhilKo’s one, what about a messenger having a custom composite control stamped on his t-shirt? but wait… how would that look like??
Please help my graphics creativity skills by leaving a comment here or emailing me. Thanks.
