I’ve been totally slacking lately.  Lots of great reasons for it.  The main one is that I’m not slacking on the job.  I’m delivering a big truckload of whoop ass on my client’s project.

In the meantime, enjoy this interview with Marc Andreessen.  There is a lot of thought provoking stuff here:

This week was a ball buster.  I put in 54 hours to get the UI component of my client’s project to code complete.  There is a reason I hate UI stuff and this is it.  Most of the time spent has been twiddle UI elements around to satisfy my customer.  That is a priority, but at the same time they’re wasting their money that would be better focused on things that will actually realize business benefit. How exactly does a font in a bit map image button affect the business?  It doesn’t.

Part if the problem I created.  I should have invested more time on the specs and gotten them signed off before coding.  However, based on the progress before I suspect we’d still be documenting the specs and would now be really behind schedule.

I have a few ideas how I’ll address this in future engagements, but I’ll have to find time to implement the ideas.  On the upside, the code is checked in, the customer is happy and I can move on to other parts of the project.

Looking around on YouTube I found these videos by Ty Howard who I plan to work with in a few months:.

Body Position:

Braking

This year I’m mostly going to focus on riding at Eagles Canyon so:

Very cool having the prospect of 1:1 coaching with a guy who has won a bunch of club and national championships.  Part of me wants him to get a factory sponsorship.  The other part doesn’t because then he’ll be too busy to offer coaching.

And yeah, I’m being a traitor to CSS this year.  I just don’t see having the time to travel somewhere to do level 4 a couple more times.  Real bummer too because I love Keith's program.  Actually, CSS ought to get Ty to be one of their coaches.  That would be freaking awesome.

GRS asks “Is It Unethical to Work a Second Job?".

Simple answer: no.

Simply put, if you are willing and able to then working a second job, regardless of the environment, is not unethical.  I’ll even go so far as to say that under certain circumstances it is unethical not to pickup a second job.

The circumstance I’m thinking about is being deeply in debt.  In the current environment the last thing you want to be toting around is a bunch of extra debt.  Actually, any debt in any environment isn’t a good thing, but if you are at all concerned about your main gig disappearing then getting out from under all the debt you can and having money socked away to bridge you over to a new gig is the right thing to do.  So go pickup a second job if you have the time.

We all want things made easier. Google has made knowledge fairly easy to access in some cases. Amazon has made products accessible like never before. You can jump on youtube and catch the best parts of movies, you can read blogs to get summaries of speeches or the news. No fuss no muss.

Seth Godin points out that this isn’t necessarily all good:  Which Parts are You Skipping

Reading the cliff notes version of “Atlas Shrugged” won’t drive Rand’s point home. Sometimes you have to knuckle down and dig in for the long haul. Getting fast on a motorcycle is not something that happens overnight. It takes a lot of practice, work and patience.

Seth points out how our new rapid access to information is causing problems for marketers. If they can’t hook their audience quickly then the audience will move on. My point of view as a technician is that I don’t see a problem. My specific context is technical writing, consultant’s reports, technical books. The stuff all these authors are pumping out to Barnes & Noble, Amazon and occasionally on blogs.

Technical people, particularly programmers, suck at communication. Which is really funny when you look at what we do. As a programmer, or in my case an architect, our job is communication. For programmers it is talking to computers. For architects it is talking to programmers about how to talk to the computer. We suck at it.

Go to B&N and start flipping through the latest “C# 4.0 for Genius Savants”. It is probably three hundred pages long. Half of it is actually written prose, the rest of garbage sample code that is completely useless outside of the book. Focusing on the prose – for every ten pages there is maybe a full page of useful content. The rest? Burn it for all the value it delivers. The problem is: which nine pages do I burn? The page of useful stuff is scattered throughout the ten pages.

We take to long to make our points. Hour long user group presentations that contain five minutes of good content.

Why is it this way? Same reason those stupid “Consultant’s Reports” are three hundred pages long. We went to college and the professor told us he wanted a lab report that was thirty pages long talking about our titration experiment that took us a whole thirty minutes to do. Or English literature papers that were ten thousand words long talking about Princess De Cleve and the great chain of being. Huh? All that stuff had maybe two or three pages of interesting content. The rest? Filler.

So in response to Seth’s point – most of the stuff can be safely skipped. Authors (and marketers) have two choices:

1. Learn to come to a point quickly and deliver the details quickly

2. Learn how to tell an interesting story while doing #1.

Learning to tell interesting stories is too hard for most people. So learn to be brief.

And to drive the point home: this entire post could have been chopped down to the paragraph above.

I went out and spent the day as a guest at Eagles Canyon.  I’ve been there once before, but it’s worth repeating: what a great track!  Lots of nice elevation changes, plenty of turns both way.  It fits in nicely with my other local favorites. 

In fact I like it so much I’m probably going to spring for a membership in a few months so I can get out there more often.

My last track day was in August and that was the first track day following my low side at Cresson.  So needless to say I have a lot of confidence to build back.  We can ignore the bit of unpleasantness from October*.  Anyway, I was seriously slow.  My friend Jim was managing to lap me once each half hour session.  I’m not pleased, but he’s been working his butt off and has become respectably quick.  He also has managed not to do anything stupid like break an elbow or anything else unmentionable.

I think if I can get out there another 2 or 3 times in the next two months I’ll recover most of my former ‘speed’ and be ready to start developing my skills again.  I’m hoping to do a few coaching sessions with Ty Howard.  I think that will help me get my times down further.

Couple of things that were really cool:

1. There were only two bikes on the track!  The entire day!  Two bikes!  If you’ve ever done a track day you know what its like to have 20 or 30 other bikes of varying skill on the track with you.  It can be a real headache.  Just imagine only having one other bike.  Plenty of space to just work on your own skills.  It was paradise.

2. There were 4 Porsches and a Ferrari in the car group.  5 cars!  The Ferrari driver was seriously fast.  And what a sound.  It was really nice seeing those cars used for what they were made for instead of being driven my some shriveled up yuppie snot on his way to Starbucks or the golf course.

3. My other friends in the TSBA came out to visit me.  Biggest SMR I’ve seen to date.  Actually, the came out to see how many times Jim could pass me in a session.  Luckily I kept it down to 1.  But they still managed to get some shots in.  They’re all heart.

I wish I had brought out my good camera.  All I had was my cell phone, so these will have to do:

First: this is the only way to load and unload a bike.  The parking lot in the upper pit is split level so I can backup to the upper level.  The back gate is about eight inches off the ground so the ramp is almost flat.  Easiest load up ever.

Jim’s bike has the gold wheel.  If you enlarge the image you can see the boogers.  My tire did not have any.  The difference is Jim is getting really good drives out of corners.  It causes the tire to get hot and the rubber starts to ball up and make boogers.  Right now I’m really not twisting the throttle very hard on the way out.  Heck, I’m not twisting the throttle very much at all.  I was being passed by grey haired old ladies in Lincolns.

The TSBA crowd on their way to BBQ after a quick parade lap around the track.

And last: this is the crowd for our track day.  You could lay down in the pit area and take a nap and not worry about being run over.

So my year is off to an excellent start.  I’m super exhausted, I got in a bunch of laps but had no surprises.  I’m really looking forward to getting out more this year.

*if you don’t know what I’m referring too: good. 

I usually do two or three user group presentations or conference presentations a year.  Or at least I try to.  I usually keep things as simple as possible.  Even so, things still manage to go wrong.

But reading Scott' Hanselman’s post makes what I do sound like a cake walk.  I’m not sure I’d want to try coordinating that big of a 3 ring circus.

I also look forward to pumping my friends in MCS to find out what is in store.

Disclaimer – I did not read the docs before hand.  I was just working in VS.  Maybe this is an RTFM moment.

I’m writing a page that needs to dynamically load a few user controls.  Should have been easy enough.  However, after calling LoadControl none of the child controls in the user control had been setup. 

I was calling Page.LoadControl and passing in the type of user control.  After 3 debug sessions with the same results I changed the code.  Now I’m passing in the path to the user control instead.  It works.

What?  Why did they do that?  Why am I getting different results from the same API based on the type I pass in?

Reading over the MSDN docs there is no indication that there should be a difference in behavior.  The only thing they call out is how events are processed based on when the control is loaded.

I’m on twitter and I’m really getting to like it. 

My police is to follow anybody who follows me.  However, there is a rule: I want a friggin profile.  No profile, no follow. 

I keep getting followed by people, when I go look at their page I two or three tweets.  They are following a billion people with ten people following them and no profile.  To me it smells like spam fresh from the can.

Seriously, if you are a real person fill in the bio.  Let me know who you are.  In some cases it is really useful.  I keep coming up with work I can’t handle, so I’m interested in meeting people who have skillz I can use.  If your bio isn't filled in I don’t know what you do so I won’t bother.

You would think this would be obvious.

Everybody else probably already knows about this, but the Telerik Trainer is pretty cool. 

In my book I spend some time talking about training and recommend that you learn one GUI toolkit.  The tools that come with Visual Studio do a good job, but there are things left to be desired.  The toolkits from ComponentOne, Infragistics and Telerik can help you be more productive.

For my own reasons I’ve picked Telerik’s RadControls for ASP.NET.  So today I’m going through their stuff trying to ramp up as quickly as possible.  Their trainer tool is a nice feature that hopefully will speed things up.