Thursday, December 01, 2005

Riding in the rain and cold

Just read and commented on a post from the fat cyclist. One thing lead to another so here are some more thoughts.

The question comes up now and again: why do you ride in the rain? Why do you ride when it is so cold? The simple answer: because I can and I want to.

When I started commuting by bicycle 8 years ago, I only do it 2-3 times a week when it is not raining. I don't have the appropriate rain gear nor was I prepared to deal with cars and splashes and other problems. This went on for about 2 years. Then a new colleague who also commutes showed me what gear to get and soon I ride more and more. Now it is just natural to wake up, check the weather report and outside conditions, put on the right gear and go.

Riding in the cold is actually not hard. The body just naturally generates heat to keep you warm. The next issue to deal with is keeping your fingers, toes and ears warm.

Ice remains my biggest enemy. I generally stop riding for about 10-15 days during dead winter to avoid hitting ice. A few years back I spilled a few times. That's why I haven't conquered it. I still see commuters on the road and sometimes wonder how they can do it. Then again I watch racers go and also wonder how they can do it.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

riding in Seattle

Finally got a chance to brag about this. I went to the Devscovery in Redmond. The conference was great and insightful. The best part of the trip was riding around Redmond with Eric G! We even skipped a trip to the Microsoft employee store in order to ride!

Monday, July 11, 2005

new use of computer fan

Well it's July 11th and it is still raining in Vancouver. When I leave home this morning there was no rain. Well a few peddles on the bike and voila, pouring rain. I took a chance and didn't put on my shoe covers and by the time my ride is over, my socks are shoes are totally soaked. I put my shoes to a strategic spot behind the computer and after an hour or 2, my shoes are totally dry. All thanks to Intel making a cpu that needs multiple fans to cool down. I finally found a way to reuse the heat generated! :-)

Friday, May 27, 2005

Visual Studio 2005 beta 2

I was asked to do a prototype of a new UI based on new features from VS 2005. I started with the thinking that it should be relatively simple to upgrade stuff from .Net framework 1.1 up. We actually had a good experience with VS 2002 beta 2. Boy was I wrong this time. Things I encountered include:

- the new partial classes with aspx pages blows up the previous implementations of inherited code behind. See this blog entry.
- custom controls not showing up. Haven't even logged this yet.
- using master pages changes how controls are hooked up under the Page object. I always thought the FindControl method goes iterative into the hierarchy, but I guess I was wrong.
- XML serialization problems with datasets. A patch is needed for framework 1.1 but not available yet.

So my advice to the reader is that check early and don't assume anything.

Monday, April 04, 2005

Mark's blog

Comment from this blog:

"Nor did anyone blog the conversations that took place among the thousands of attendees as they interacted during sessions, labs, meals, etc."

I agree the interactions are useful if you are there, but even attending doesn't guarantee you are to be at the right place to participate or listen in to these conversations. I feeling I got after going to PDC 2001 and 2003 is that it is like drinking water from a firehose. There must be a better way for these interactions to happen.

PDC was good for me in 2001 and 2003, but that doesn't mean I will be going to the one this year.

Thursday, March 10, 2005

PDC 2005

track back from Robert Scoble's blog:

Having attended PDC's 2001 and 2003 I can't really find any good reason to justify going. Whidbey? Read quite a bit and I am waiting for beta 2. Unless there are late additions like Indigo into Whidbey I don't think I'm going.

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

scalability

Comment from Larry Osterman's weblog:

"you can't speed up hard disk copies by throwing more threads or overlapped I/O at the problem, because file copy speed is ultimately limited by the physical speed of the underlying media - and with only one spindle, it can only read or write to the drive one operation at a time."

I thought with RAID, byte striping, SAN and the like you can't really assume what your underlying physical reality is anymore. I once heard this from a technical staff of a high-end RAID provider: "that anything you can throw into the SCSI bus, their RAID box will be able to write". Not really sure if it were true but their disks are really fast.
 
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