The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Category: General

  • Who reads this blog?

    Here’s a way to find out….

    Today Ana and I announced to our families that we are expecting our first child, God willing, this December.  We’re very excited, to say the least!

  • Photos

    I’ve put some of the photos I took in Chicago online.

  • Canon 30D

    This week I made the long sought after purchase of a digital SLR camera – the Canon 30D.  I spent a few days doing some research, reading anything and everything I could find on cameras and lenses in particular.

    It’s amazing how hard it is to take a “bad” picture with it.  I’ll be using it in Chicago this weekend so I’ll be posting some photos soon.

  • Weekend in Chicago

    Ana and I are headed up to Chicago this weekend to see the Yo-Yo Ma concert I purchased tickets for back in November.  We’ll be staying downtown, just a couple blocks from the Sears tower.  I’ve really only spent a day in downtown Chicago in the past, so it should turn out to be a good weekend.

    We’re both working full days today so we’ll be getting a relatively late start on the drive.  Hopefully we won’t find ourselves sitting hours upon hours on the interstate.

  • No Waste

    I generated this today, and ended up not needing it.  In the spirit of conservation, I’ll put it here so it doesn’t go to waste.

    8122289b-cabb-4799-9f46-614ae9a56402

  • FireFox

    I’ve used FireFox for a few years now and have been quite happy with it.  It was always faster, had better features than IE, and was very stable.

    I’m about this close (forming a gap about an inch wide with my index finger and thumb) to dropping FireFox and going back to IE. Why?  FireFox has been crashing left and right on me and it’s really pissing me off.  I realize I’m running Vista on 2/3 of the machines I use daily, but it’s even crashing once a day or two on my XP machine at work.

    Take last night, for instance.  I was filling out a form online (a Google one) and I hit Enter on the keyboard.  BOOM.  FireFox died and took 3 or 4 wizard pages of data entry with it.  Nobody should have to think about their browser before entering data into forms online, but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing lately.

    Now that IE7 has the tabs and seems to be pretty fast, I’m wondering why I’m still sticking with FireFox.  It may not be that way for long…

  • Dear Microsoft,

    Today I needed to locate some very specific information on your plans with IIS 7, and found myself at www.iis.net.  From the few minutes I spent there, it looks like you have put together a lot of information.  But I have one very large problem.  So much of that content is in VIDEOS!  Do you know how much longer it takes for me to watch some guy fumble through a presentation instead of just scanning through dozens of articles to find the exact information I need?

    This doesn’t even touch the fact that the valuable content in these videos isn’t searchable. Come on, videos are cool and all but just too darned inefficient to consume.

  • 256MB.

    I suck.  Today I went to add 1GB of RAM to my webserver that I just happened to have laying around.  I opened the case to find a single 256MB stick of RAM running the machine.  No wonder it has been slower than molasses!

    I apologize for being a software guy and forgetting that I apparently stole its RAM a while back.

  • A welcome to M. Wilson

    Mr. Wilson has finally started a blog.  Be kind to him, he’s a good guy.

  • Vi

    Any Vi fans out there like myself that spend their days in Visual Studio?  A couple years ago I looked around for a way to get Vi behavior in the Visual Studio editor, but came up empty handed.

     

    Then I was browsing around this morning and ViEmu for Visual Studio appeared.  Finally!  I just installed the 30 day trial and so far it’s exactly what I wanted: vi functionality tightly integrated with Visual Studio without losing VS’s other great features.  I’ll be trying it out for a few days and see if I run into any issues – I’m not an advanced vi user so I don’t expect I’ll find any.  But if I do, the author seems to have excellent response times to issues and feature suggestions so I’m not too worried about it.

    Check it out, I think this guy’s got a great product.