This was on the front page of MSNBC this evening.  I am glad that they are on top of things.

Dell said that the PC would be here today, but it didnt come.  Now fedex says it will be here TUESDAY.  Bastards.  My current machine feels verrrry slow now.  I think it is mad at me beacuse it knows that I am going to get rid of it soon.

I bought a computer a few years ago (it was a PII 266, so it was quite a while ago), and then UPS went on strike before it was delivered.  It was awful.

Jim, I need to take a vacation day on Friday....

(from SNL -- has some adult language, but nothing really bad)

Every time my wife goes away on business (or for any other reason), I joke that I am going to buy a new computer, to "punish" her for leaving me alone with all of these children.

Well, this afternoon, I finally did it.  Hopefully, it will be here before she gets home, and then I don't have to tell her I got it.

Here is the kit I ordered:

Intel Core2 Extreme processor QX6700 (2.66GHz,1066FSB) w/Quad Core Technology and 8MBcache
4GB DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz
768MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX
250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/ DataBurst Cache
16X DVD+R/RW CD-RW CombinationDrive

I have a 500GB and a 750GB drive on the machine I currently use that will move over nicely.  Supposedly, the machine will run Vista just fine, but not all of the drivers are baked yet.  Hopefully, this will keep me from having to buy another PC for 6 to 8 months <g>.

And I REALLY NEED a quad core computer to run Vista on.

First, a friend at work fell down and broke his leg while skateboarding.  He's about my age, so I don't have a lot of sympathy; old people shouldn't ride skateboards.

Second, I have been arguing with another group at work about some bureaucratic trivia.  I have come close to flaming them a couple of times, but then I remember that anything I put in an email will be used against me.  I am considering flying to Seattle so I can argue in person.

Third, Jennifer went to Washington.  She is doing a really great job, and is pretty busy.  Her mid year review was today, and it went very well. I hate it when she's gone.

Fourth, one of the people who works at my customer who I worked with a lot during the Vista beta got laid off.  Luckily, he's really smart, so he shouldn't have a hard time getting another job.

Fifth, while we were at home this afternoon, Izzy decided to draw all over her legs with a purple (permanent) magic marker.  She also got the floor,  but I think I will be able to get that up with a little elbow grease.  Jennifer will be pleased.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be better.  Jennifer is scheduled for the 7:00PM flight from Dulles, but she is going to try to get an earlier flight.

I have been using powershell exclusively for the past week or so (so long cmd.exe!), and I wanted to use a syntax-highlighting editor to write scripts.  Syntax highlighting was really neat when it was first invented, but now I can't live without it.  As such, I made a wordlist for UltraEdit; now I can see code in pretty colors.  The word list is here. Powershell is here, and UltraEdit is here.

I have only tested/used the wordfile on version 13 of UltraEdit.

We went to New York City last weekend (just like going to a foreign country:  hardly anyone spoke English, they take all of your money, and the weather sucks) and we saw this in Times Square:

I don't even want to think what a 50' billboard in Times Square costs.

"Shorts Day" is the first day of the year that it's warm enough to wear shorts to work.  This year, Shorts Day is on March 14th.  There are a couple of people at my office who never get around to wearing long pants, but hypothermia isn't my thing.

A year or so ago, a note was sent out by our facilities team reminding us that we had to wear shoes to work.  People complained about how that was an example of the 'old' Microsoft dying out while the 'new', more rigid Microsoft was crushing all of our souls.

This is another example of why I will never be able to work anywhere else.  The other major technology employers in Charlotte are mainly banks, and they are a bit more conservative; I bet they make you wear shoes AND long pants to work every day.  Bastards.

Quote

Zune me
I now own a brand spanking new Zune.  Actually it is a Zurd since I got the brown edition.  

I knew that he would eventually join us. 
 
 

Creative finally released an X-Fi driver for Vista.  Now all of my devices are on released drivers.  Get the file here.

I started playing around with Windows PowerShell a couple of years ago, back when it was called "Monad".  It was released last year, and things have finally calmed down enough at work after the Vista surge that I was finally able to start switching away from cmd.exe.  To use an SAT analogy, PowerShell is to the old NT Command Prompt as a ferrari is to my seven year old's bicycle.  It is much more flexible, feature complete, and powerful.  It's just about my favorite product that has released in the past 6 months or so.

One thing that the default install of PowerShell doesn't do, though, is tell you when you are running an elevated console.  The command prompt included with Vista will change the titlebar to let you know when you are running as admin, and that's very handy.  I wanted to make PowerShell do the same thing, so I looked around and found that I could create a profile and modify my prompt.

Another cool thing that PowerShell can do is to use .NET components, which made it fairly easy to determine if I was running elevated, and change the prompt to let me know.

After a bit of fiddling, this works:

function prompt{

$CurrentUser = [System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()
$UserPrincipal = new-object System.Security.Principal.WindowsPrincipal $CurrentUser

if ($UserPrincipal.IsInRole("BUILTIN\Administrators") -eq 1)
{
     $return = "ADMIN $(get-location)>"
     $host.UI.RawUI.WindowTitle = "Administrator PowerShell"
}
else
{
     $return = "$(get-location)>"
}
return $return

}

I was really proud of myself, until I looked around the Internet and found a bunch of other people have already solved this problem.  Luckily for me, I did things about the same way as the experts did, so at least I am not a complete idiot this time.

The only complaint I have is that "PowerShell" sounds suspiciously like a marketing name.  What was wrong with "Monad"?  At any rate, it's nice that windows's command prompt can now hang with the 'real' shells that the other OS's have had for years.

I need to find an editor that will do syntax highlighting for monad scripts....hopefully UltraEdit, which is my editor of choice, will add support soon.

It starts out all sensitive, and then quickly gets Not Safe For Work

Show Them To Me on URGE

Show Them To Me on Zune

(People on iTunes are way to hip to laugh at stuff like this, so I won't bother with a link)

Yesterday I had a meeting with the architects at my customer, and had a good discussion on WPF/E vs their proprietary cross platform dev environment (so I guess it was a discussion on OUR proprietary cross platform dev environment against THEIR proprietary cross platform dev environment).  Anyway, that was tons of fun.

We finished about 12:30, and I had a 5:00 flight out of Dulles.  To kill time, I went to the National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center.  It was free, although "parking" in a nearly empty parking lot was $12.00.  It is amazing what they have there.  I have been to the NASM in downtown Washington, but this is the first time I have gotten to the new place.  It was nice to be there on a Friday afternoon, because it was pretty much empty, and I could wander anywhere I wanted, without waiting for anything.  There were a couple of female Air Force officers walking around, and I was struck at how young they were to be Captains.  I guess I am getting old when people who are one rank higher than I was when I got out of the Army look like teenagers.

Anyway, references to my mortality aside, the center had lots of historical gems.  One of the coolest things was the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan to end WWII.  They also have the first space shuttle, the Enterprise on display.  When you see a shuttle launch, its easy to forget how big the shuttle is, and how amazing it is that something that big can be thrown into orbit in less than 10 minutes.  It's funny that they were originally going to call the first space shuttle the "Constitution", but the outcry from all of the star-trek geeks in the world led them to change their mind and call it the "Enterprise".

There were lots of other more esoteric planes on display, from weird Japanese night fighters to weird American night fighters to weird German night fighters.   They have a Concorde, a MIG-15 and an F-86 Saber, a Hawker Hurricane and an FW-190.  They even have the trailer that the Apollo 11 astronauts were quarantined in after the moon landing.  One of the neatest things they have is an SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest reconnaissance plane that the US Air Force has ever had.

The thing I like about the Udvar Hazy center as opposed to the downtown museum is that there is more space for full sized airplanes, and while the downtown place has alot of the "big names" (i.e. the wright flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 capsule, etc), the Udvar Hazy center has some stranger, interesting stuff.

I only had my phone with me, so the pictures aren't the best.  Next time, I will take my real camera.  I was only there for an hour or so, and I will have to go back to spend some more time taking everything in.