Paul Hammond's Blog

My good friend of mine just sent me a link to "Little People - A Tiny Street Art Project" - and I love it!  It is a project by an artist called Slinkachu, where he takes little hand-painted people and just leaves them on the street in London to fend for themselves.

And "tiny" really does mean tiny!  He generally has two pictures for each scene - a close up (that looks really realistic) and a longer range shot.  In some of the longer shots, I can barely make out the characters.  Anyway, waste 5 minutes, check out the link for the pictures...

I am a little bit late on this one!

I have posted about the Outlook addin called ClearContext a couple of times before; I think it is a fantastic tool for helping you to organize your inbox.  GTDers, it can really help you guys too.  So far I think I have helped a dozen or more people unchain themselves from the labour of their inbox by switching over to using ClearContext.

Anyway, ClearContext v3 was released a couple of weeks ago, and adds some great new features, as well as native Office 2007 support (i.e. full integration into the ribbon), and it works great with Vista.

Check it out.  It continues to rock. 

Well, a few other people I know have done this - so I felt I needed to see what my maps would look like.  Since I invested the time reviewing and ticking the checkboxes, I figured I may as well paste the results into a blog entry!

Probably not all that interesting to anyone but me.  It does tell me that I need to get out more...

Visited Countries: 

Visited States:

My good gamer-friend Darren just sent me this link to Game System Wars - it is a round up of various sales statistics for the 3 games systems, with the data pulled from Amazon.  Right now, Xbox 360 leads the way in all categories (as you would probably expect, since it has been out for longer).  It will definitely be interesting to see how things change in the coming weeks and months.

I went to Best Buy and Circuit City here in Redding last night.  Best Buy had about 15 tents in a line, and Circuit City had a couple, waiting for the PS3 launch today.  One of the Best Buy employees said the tents arrived on Tuesday.  I read in the paper there are PS3's on Ebay for upwards of $2500.  People really do love their game systems...

On a slightly unrelated note, Circuit City had a ton of Microsoft Zune players available for sale.  I had a quick play with one - the screen is really bright, and the UI is nice.  When they do one with more hard disk space, I could possibly be tempted over from the dark side.

I recently got a new laptop and am running Windows Vista RC1.  I had been having a bunch of trouble getting Visual Studio 2005 to behave, particularly when trying to debug web applications.  It took me a little while to figure out, and I had to pull together a few different resources from the web in order to get things working.  I thought I would document them all together here for others to take advantage of (and so I can find them later if I need them!)

When creating web applications, I wanted to use "Local IIS" instead of "File System".  This requires the "IIS 6 Management Compatibility" option installed within IIS7.  Also, once this is installed, you still need to run Visual Studio as administrator for this to work.  Scott Guthrie has a blog post entitled "Tip/Trick: Using IIS7 on Vista with VS 2005" that includes screen grabs of these two steps.

Once this was working, I was still having trouble debugging web applications.  Brian Peek has a post with three simple steps to ensure debugging works correctly:

1) In the "Internet Options" control panel, go to the Security tab.  Add "http://localhost" to your list of "Trusted Sites"
2) Again, for "Trusted Sites", clilck the "Custom Level..." button.  Change the value of User Authentication to "Automatic login with current username and password".
3) In the new IIS manager, ensure that the web application directory is both:
a) in the "Classic .NET AppPool".
b) has "Windows Authentication" enabled in the Authentication section.

After these steps I now have site development working against a local IIS7 server, and debugging is working just fine.  There is one last issue that is apparently a Vista RC1 issue without any workarounds.  When building solutions, I quite frequently get the error "Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.".  If this happens, the only fix is to restart the IDE.  Roll on Vista RTM install!

I am spending a week in Northern California visiting my friend Dr Bert.  Boy was it a long journey to get here - an 11 hour flight (stupidly high head winds!) followed by a 4.5 hour drive North up I80 and I5 in the pouring rain.  Funny to think that it is the same I5 I drive on from SEA-TAC airport to downtown Seattle.  I guess that is why the "I" stands for "Interstate"...

SatNav saved my soul a couple of times on the trip.  I used my laptop with MapPoint 2006 and the GPS receiver to plan and follow my route.  I took a wrong lane just north of the Bay Bridge and ended up slap bang in an Oakland suburb, and I surely would have had trouble finding Bert's house on arrival in Redding.  Definintely time to consider a dedicated SatNav system (as lugging the laptop everywhere is not such a great idea!).

Anyway, the sun shone bright yesterday, and the views of Mount Shasta were pretty impressive.  I hope to get some pictures taken in the next day or so, so stay tuned...

I'm told the place to eat locally is Jack's Grill, so I'll be checking that out this week.  I also have a ton of things on my shopping list for a trip to the local Mt Shasta Mall.

Fun!