Posts by Year

A new bird visitor that winters in Michigan - the Junco

The mental stages job seekers go through over time, and the main factors that influence movement and decisions.

Local AI/LLM goodness for Developers

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different wa...

Another of the bigger topics recently is the emergence and use of AI tools and, specifically, the use of AI tools in software development. As part of this, t...

I didn’t see this all together in one place elsewhere, so wanted to compile and share.

“Not Cal”

Water is key to survival, and to any house that people are going to inhabit. The Old House has a unique situation where it is right on the sewer for Plainfie...

Two words I never expected to be on an offer I would sign on a house are “as is”. This means, in general, that whatever might be right or wrong with the hous...

I accidentally bought a new house. “Accidentally” because we really weren’t looking. But we ended up finding a cool old house, or maybe it found us? I am tel...

Links from handouts at Introduction to Flutter talk at THAT Conference 2018

Thanks to all the people who filled the room for my session this weekend at the Beer City Code Conference in Grand Rapids. It was great to share a lot of thi...

We’ve all probably used them because they are so convenient.

The internet is a wonderful resource – more information, ideas, resources, entertainment, etc. at our fingertips than ever before in history. It can also be ...

“Because I said so.”

About four years ago we got back into Geocaching – which is basically the high-tech world-wide scavenger hunt using GPS devices or smartphones. The main goal...

I know that many that have been following the development and previews of Windows 8 have many opinions about the new operating system. And while many are ver...

I have had my Nook eBook Reader for a few month, and I am really hooked – so hooked that it bothers me when I have to resort to “paper solutions” for anythin...

“Quit Bowling” and “Start Digging Ditches” – two memorable quotes from the first day of the Willow Creek Leadership Summit (Seth Godin and Steven Furtick res...

I was able to attend Maker Faire Detroit 2011 this last weekend at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI. It was an amazingly full day from 9:30 in the morni...

Today I “graduated” from my medical weight loss program – down 70 pounds in 17 weeks. All my “stats” got better – losing 10 inches on my waist, blood pressur...

Microsoft released it’s long awaited (very long awaited) Silverlight Certification (MCTS 70-506) earlier this year. It was reportedly held up several times a...

I have been part of the Toastmasters for Techies group in Grand Rapids since starting with the group about a year ago. In fact I am Vice President in charge...

For Father’s Day this year I got a new Nook “Simple Touch Reader” so I have had it for about a month – time for a review. I figure it was time when the “ba...

I had a goal to get my blog up and running again by the end of June – so I figured I’d get a head start today

I spent last Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Festival of Faith and Writing which is a conference for authors, playwrights, publishers, readers, teachers...

It is no secret that most of my friends and family are non-programmers. When a group of us get together “in real life” and I do find someone to talk technolo...

I headed over to the Apple Store over lunch to see the new iPad, and I was really happy they had about 12 of them out for people to try out. I did not become...

About a month ago I started attending a new group forming now in Grand Rapids called “ Toastmasters for Techies”. I had heard of “Toastmasters” many times ...

If “Candyland, LCR, and Warstorm” was a Jeopardy answer, my question of the day would be “Name three games that seem really fun when you start playing them, ...

Think and Make it Happen, by Dr. Augsto Cury, caught my eye because of the catchy title, interesting premise, and seemingly lofty claims. Who doesn’t want t...

I tweeted earlier that I had now officially gone one month without fast food or drive thru, and that my goal is to keep this up. I “went public” with this ac...

If you know me or follow this blog at all you will probably know a few things about me: 1) I really like working with the latest technology and 2) I have a l...

This will be brief, it is my first attempt at typing in 4 days or so, but I wanted to get a quick post out to give anyone who wanted more details on my “adve...

I am trying to spend the early hours of Saturday morning experimenting and learning about something that interests me, with the only requirement being that i...

If you have been following along with Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, then you know we have described basically what the IFS Fractal “quest” is, how we did the r...

We are almost done with this application. What started with Part 1 (intro to Fractals and the Silverlight experiment) and continued with Part 2 (creating the...

Now that we have the idea of what IFS Fractals are from Part 1, we can move on to automating these iterations via code. Our first step is to encapsulate what...

At the CodeMash conference this year many things stuck with me, and two have been bugging me enough to do something about them this last weekend. One was the...

So there have been a few days since the iPad announcement and it is a lot of what people are talking about right now. Several people are wanting to be first...

The CodeMash conference is next week – it is a regional “software developer smörgåsbord” covering topics on a wide variety of technologies, patterns and proc...

Last Thursday and Friday I attended the Microsoft Silverlight Partner Summit. This is our second year as a Silverlight Partner, but our first time attending ...

College football bowl schedule for 2009-10 season – NCAA Football – SI.com tags: no_tag **GMAC**

Anytime I answer a question from three or more different sources, I want to write it up and refer the next people to this (and update as necessary).

Catan Portable Edition tags: no_tag Catan Portable Edition™

Funny how something as simple as teaching your daughter to use a leaf blower can reinforce and confirm ideas about learning any new skill. This last week my ...

I occasionally break down and have to write about something off-topic that is wearing on my mind. One such thing is school funding, and that is all over the ...

Here’s a not-so-hypothetical situation – one night when 15 or so kids are running around the house you happen to leave your laptop in a very public location ...

My family has had a great time at ArtPrize these last few weeks visiting as many of the different venues and artists as possible. The final vote is upon us ...

So I have been looking at printers for home since my old HP multifunction printer died in the spring, and used some birthday money and a great sale at Office...

The last book on the Summer 2009 reading list was Fearless by Max Lucado. This book was very timely for me and was a nice break from technical and fiction bo...

Programming for Today’s Kids: Why NXT-G, Kodu, Scratch, Alice, Small Basic, KPL / Phrogram and others can reignite the imagination and understanding of techn...

GR Social Marketing (grsm) on Twitter tags: no_tag GRSM is tomorrow, 12pm @ the GRCF building. @[spearia](http://twitter.co...

Where’s Lou » Blog Archive » Spark output caching Potential caching option for MVC tags: MVC, ASP.NET, Caching

Free Samples!: : tags: Clip, Art, Vector

One of the other fortunate things we were able to spend some time on last week was Kodu for the XBox 360. Kodu is one of those things that is difficult to de...

I first saw the game Kubb [Wikipedia Link] [Kubbin Link] (pronounced k-oo-b) a few years ago and it caught my interest. My interpretation of the game is that...

Dell Latitude 2100 Netbook Sold in More Than 500 US School Districts – Dell sees successful launch of Atom-based netbook – Softpedia tags: 2100,...

Kidbook vs. Netbook

NECC is the National Educational Computing Conference put on yearly by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) (http://center.uoregon.ed...

Since Windows 7 was released to developers last week I have installed it on my two personal machines – laptop and desktop. In the short time I have used it i...

I’ve been wanting to post this for going on two weeks, but also wanted to blog details and more info. I wanted to get this posted now with a link to the pres...

I had the opportunity to attend Keith Brophy's 10th Annual "Tech Trends" Wednesday last night. It is great to have regular events like this to bring people t...

For Valentine’s Day this year, Laura wanted to have a lunchdate at someplace new. After a littlesearching she found a place in East Grand Rapids called Marie...

I just got done reading Malcom Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success" and I want to make this as little like a middle school book report as possible. So …

I don’t know how it happened that all of the books that I requested from the library, and pre-ordered from Amazon, all seemed to show up in the same 7 day pe...

I get regularly chided by some friends on Twitter and Facebook when my updates and messages seem to include things that are quite foreign to many people – an...

I wanted to write a 2008 post for a couple of reasons: 1) for “historical” reasons to look back on later, and 2) to let new (and old) people who actually rea...

I’ve been hoping and watching for a great portable computer that would be ideal for students (and others) for many years – at least since we tested some Powe...

You may or may not know about the www.woot.com site where they sell one item per day until it is gone at really good prices. That’s cool, and there are great...

Sure the AutoCompleteBox, Expander, TreeView, Charts, etc. from the new Silverlight Toolkit (http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight ) are cool – and will make s...

Another “geek post”, sorry.

This was such an amazing and surprising picture – Narwhals in Arctic Bay, Canada – that I had to share it. I honestly didn’t know if it was real or not and t...

This wasn’t specifically Silverlight-related, but you really can’t have much of a Silverlight application without some kind of data access. We chose WCF serv...

This is the first in a series of posts that I promised to do after my presentation to the User Group on Tuesday. These will be details, link and some sample ...

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After a really busy summer I am making an effort to get back into a routine which includes posting about some interesting things going on personally, profess...

I am getting a chance to do something I’ve wanted to do for a while – that is, get paid to do some Silverlight development.

If you ask most of the world about Steve Job’s keynote this week, they will basically tell you that it was the iPhone 3G announcement (new cheaper, faster, s...

There have been two interesting keynote speeches in recent memory: Bill Gates at TechEd, and Steve Jobs at WWDC. They both reflected on the current state of ...

Continuing the How I Got Started Meme… cool idea, get to know the TwitterTribe better (and others)

I’ve been committing to get back to occasional blogging, in addition to following Twitter, so I wanted to see if I really could get out a 10 minute idea-to-b...

Over the next week or so I plan to have individual blog posts about my “favorite” demos in this presentation, but I wanted to get the PowerPoint stack and co...

Well it has been quite a day – more than I ever expected. But a little background first. Every two years (i.e. the “even” years) since 1990 there has been a ...

I don’t have time to post much this morning, but I wanted to get this out.

Another tool I use almost daily for documentation and presentations is Window Clippings, by Kenny Kerr. There have been screen capture utilities out there si...

I know Spring Breaks are coming up (or in progress) and people are heading for Florida. Having just gotten back from a great trip there, I wanted to share a ...

I occasionally run into some cool software tools that I end up using a lot, and wanted to blog about them.

Looks like at least one announcement got out before the MIX’08 conference even started – and it is a big one.

I wanted to make a quick post to say things are still moving along, but we’ve been in a period of sickness in our house, which is never fun and depressing bl...

Last night was about as perfect as a lunar eclipse can get (other than the cold). The skies were completely clear. The total eclipse was at a late enough tim...

Well we had our first ‘Bots on the Rock (LEGO Robotics club) meeting last night and things seemed to go really well, all things considered. We didn’t advert...

So say you are a poor college student who wants to program computers or write games for the XBOX 360. You’ve already spent all your money on tuition, room-an...

When I first heard about Twitter in late 2006, I thought it was the latest example of just another social experiment that seemed trivial and an amazing waste...

Well it is easy to say that one of the highlights of my Florida vacation was the launch of the Space Shuttle (STS-122).

Posting images has been troublesome because it is as if I am working over a 56k modem right now, but should have better access later today.

Very limited Internet access (and even more limited bandwidth) than expected, but a few ideas/issues from the road (before they leave my short-term memory).

When was the last time you heard someone say, in real life, that something “delighted” them, or it was “delightful”. If you are like me it has not happened i...

We’ve been in Florida since about midnight yesterday after having the wrong size plane show up, then having a “unscheduled maintenance opportunity”, and then...

Interesting.

Well the last “missing piece” of our vacation arrived today – the passes to view the planned Space Shuttle launch on February 7th. I was worried that there w...

Admittedly when I first heard they wanted the Cub Scouts to do a “craft” at the Planetarium event on Astronomy I was a little disappointed. A paper-mache pl...

So I assume this happens to many people, every so often – you need to retire a fire extinguisher as it is past its “last good date” (sometimes by almost a y...

So I’ve wanted to try out a “non-DRM” music purchase on Amazon to see how it works. I have purchased several iTunes albums and singles that are forever lost...

I’ve had a long-term discussion/debate with a few people about the market reality of a full-time profession for computer help in the home. Sure there are Gee...

I’ve been taking spare time every few days to keep learning about the LEGO robotics. I figured since we’d talked a lot about the recent LEGO Sumo Building Co...

Sure the Consumer Electronics Show has all the latest gadgets – but if you don’t need a new phone, camera, or TV it is mostly just a bunch of noise.

I have to get 7 cub scouts started tonight on creating a mousetrap car. This is in addition to the pinewood derby car they are already working on, and some a...

New 2008 Goal #5: Get better at foosball

So what do I want to publicly set at goals for 2008?

I’ve been reading and listening to other people’s review of last year, and setting goals for the next year. I’m not typically a “resolution setter” but I do ...

A friend (who shall remain nameless) sent a link to an article after we had several discussions this season about Christmas and Santa (yes we both have kids)...

Sure, plan a trip to Florida and watch the record cold weather creep in.

For various reasons we haven’t taken a vacation (of more than a long weekend) in several years. When looking at the calendar late last summer, it looked like...

Before I forget this with all that is going on, I came across a new resource in town when I was talking my certification test last week (or was it the week b...

Well we’ve officially amassed >15,000 digital pictures since 2002 – that’s ~8 a day so it isn’t a crazy amount. I used to be able to back up to a DVD and ...

I know this will get discussed a lot in the coming year (and is waaay off topic of my usual posts), but this new law in New Jersey bugs me – lets look just f...

Waaay back in high school (circa 1985/86) I got a chance to spend 2 hours a day working with computers and robotics. One was just a robotic arm that integra...

Well I waited until the last week of the year, but I did pass my 70-536 exam last week ….

I’ll post more about this soon, but I wanted to see if this “virtual chumby” worked on the blog. My “geek present” this year was a “Chumby” (www.chumby.com)....

Well, as of 7:45am I upgraded to v1.3 of BlogEngine.NET.

I can’t imagine posting again before Christmas, so I wanted to wish everyone a safe and blessed Christmas.

I don’t know why images are getting to me so much today, but I laughed out lout today (while trying to get some software projects “out the door” by the end o...

This is really creative – with all the people using Google Maps and Google Earth to view directions and satellite images from space, what would it have been ...

Advice from Bill Gates is worth noting – full link / transcript below – here are the highlights.

This will certainly take a few months to really understand and process, but today’s public preview release of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions is really a big deal.

While clearly not nearly as fun as “Talk Like a Pirate Day”, this still struck me and kind of interesting. Some creative ideas at the link below.

Now that’s something you don’t hear every day.

I’ve got to try this out soon – if it works it could really be brilliant. The idea is that you take a number of pictures (3+) of something touristy (i.e. som...

He he – kind of on the “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” theme …

I spent most of Saturday at the regional FIRST Lego League Robotics competition in Grandville (pics). It is a competition of 9-14 year old kids who have spen...

I wont spend much time rehashing this because Chris does a great job of it in his post, but there is a Add-in for Word 2007 that does much more than just equ...

I like to stay generally positive about things here, but sometimes a news item or discussion just gets the better of me.

Thanks to Chris for the heads-up on the $50 (after rebate) “cyber-Monday” memory deal at NewEgg – arrives on Thursday, can’t beat that.

Today’s post from ScottGu contains some really good news.

Sometimes a picture does say 1000 words. This outlines the problem many American schools had with $1000 laptops – could easily be the same thing with “$100” ...

Yes, I subscribe to one of those “daily quote” widgets – but today’s just seemed to strike me as funny (having dealt with health care a lot in the last month...

I didn’t get up early for shopping on Friday, but there were some really good deals (including percent off coupons) that helped buy even the basics. If you ...

Locavore …. clearly like carnivore, or omnivore …. something you eat …. a habit more than a diet …. but what’s a “Loc”?

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Last VS2008 post, I promise ….

VS2008 install notes: Took about 1 hour and 15 minutes to install (not bad really – way less than the Visual Studio 2005 SP1).

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Each year we have been taking a driving vacation out of Grand Rapids. It is typically 10-14 days with some final destination (turn-around point). We’ve found...

a.k.a. when that cough isn’t “just a cough”

Straight to the point – I am on a bowling team next Wednesday in the 22nd Annual Coconut Bowl Bowling Classic to support Junior Achievement (no we don’t bowl...

In September, Mac Fowler asked “I wonder how many mouse clicks there are across the world per day?” – a Random thought, sure, but valid. So many questions ar...

I was reading through the latest Despair, Inc. catalog when this shirt caught me off guard.

I had forgotten that I preordered this book from Amazon but it came in the mail on Friday and I read through it over the weekend (also got a LEGO Droid Devel...

There is no imminent purchase decision, but I did start thinking about this over the last month. My car is a 2000, and will cross 100,000 miles soon, but it ...

I laughed audibly when I saw this – had to share. Some days you just need a little laugh (even geek humor).

Just a quick note out to say what a great day Saturday was at the Ann Arbor “Day of .Net”. Where else can you see and talk to a lot of people doing great wor...

I read about this show in passing a few weeks ago so I asked TiVo to get it for me, and watched the first Episode (101) over the weekend. I have to say it is...

For the next three weeks, 20 university teams from across the country will be competing in Washington DC to “design, build, and operate the most attractive a...

I have been using Google Reader (www.google.com/reader) to follow all the blogs I am interested in for quite a while now (and highly recommend it). You will ...

This is really interesting news. Yesterday the University of California at Berkeley launched a YouTube “channel” offering full courses on video to the public...

This news seems to be all over the place today (http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&q=sputnik&btnG=Search+News) and it is something to really ...

Just a general note to let anyone that cares that (1) BlogEngine.NET 1.2 is out!!! and (2) I upgraded over lunch and it was relatively painless. I have to re...

I feel like I am getting old – there is “nothing good” on TV, the movies lately are uninspiring, and the music is just too loud (you can’t even hear the word...

I just learned a new trick.

I was just filing away some of last year’s Cub Scout information, and I couldn’t help but look through two of the books. The first is the book we went throug...

Ok, this is really brilliant.

Quick post, but I wanted to share some info about a few gifts I got for my birthday on Tuesday. The two “gadgety” things I got this year were a new iPod Nano...

Back in the early 80s I learned about a pen pal program where you could write to kids in other countries and they would write you back – what a concept. Ther...

So I was looking at the change in my pocket the other day when I came across this weird looking coin. I caught the back of the coin first or I may not have e...

This is an interesting find (if you are in Michigan and interested in what goes on in the Legislature). I was trying to get to actual source material on the ...

Yes, it can be said that I learned to program at the community college – at least my first computer classroom experience that is. It was one of those enrichm...

So I have been slowly moving back into my house since we decided not to move – we basically “moved out” when we painted, carpeted, and boxed up everything th...

Well it has been almost exactly a month since we started growing the “Alum” crystals, and about two weeks since we harvested the first one – now we have a co...

It’s been covered well enough in the blogs – but this could change quite a bit in the next 6 months. Let’s see how Silverlight and developers take off with t...

I’ve been wanting to find the right time to try out some of the HOWTOONS ideas (if you haven’t seen them, they are well drawn fun ideas for cool construction...

I learned a couple of interesting new things over the weekend. (1) Wal-mart carries pretty cool Meade telescopes and (2) my camera phone actually takes decen...

Ooooh, our first crystal from the “Dangerous Crystal Experiment” (from Dangerous Book for Boys).

Nice. As Dan put it – “Why didn’t I think of that?”

OK, for those brave enough to have moved to Windows Vista, and had some of the more noteworthy issues with it, they announced today on the Windows Vista Blog...

Now on to games – I love games, I love playing games – games that involve two or more players. A game you play by yourself is really more of a “puzzle”, ski...

Now if you don’t work in a cube, congratulations – you have made wise choices in life. If you do “get” to work in a cube, I’d want a cube like this one.

I realized that in re-reading my last post I did not tell the whole story, and wanted to add a quick follow up to say where I am still struggling.

We would decide to try to move during the most difficult real estate market in recent memory. It is depressing going to open houses just to find out the prev...

Some say that Open Source != Microsoft, and that they are even polar opposites. I disagree and this nice recap from the “Programming Resources’ blog basicall...

Many folks find themselves nowadays having to learn something new nearly every day – so keeping your brain in working order is quite important. Over at “Shar...

I have seen some lists to encourage developers to stay current with technology, but none as complete or innovative as this post from Scott Hanselman. I’ll on...

There was Google Earth, Moon, even Mars, now Google Universe. Now we just need a fancy Star Trekish LCARS interface… I guess if 95% of the world’s population...

NASA, China, and now Germany all looking closely at the moon – it’ll be mapped with more accuracy than the Earth soon. The next space race is on … – Bruce

It isn’t a country or lightly baked desert, but a new search engine concept from Microsoft. You will need to install the beta of Silverlight to experience it...

How knowing less about a skill or topic gives the impression that you know much more than you really do.

The skill levels people go through - from Advanced Beginner, to Competent, to Expert, and Master.

If you aren’t running (or thinking of running) a 64-bit Vista OS (or don’t know what that means) stop reading this post now, and have a nice day.

I have to admit, I’ve never done the “grow the crystals on a string” experiment before. Seems like everyone I talk to is saying “oh,yeah, I remember doing th...

I’ll be the first to admit when I am wrong. There is a laptop (coming) with similar specs to my quad-core desktop. It even has 30% more disk space, and a sec...

I’m all for realistic expectations for shipping dates from online sellers. But this order recently from a popular online bookstore really got me wondering.

No, not some weird ritual – but about the most fun you can have with latex tubing and surgical clamps! I hope you’ve all had the chance to tie off the end of...

I have spent the last 15+ years going back and forth between laptops and desktop machines for work and development.My first laptop was in 1991, a PowerBook 1...

I just want to see if I can actually do a blog post using Jott, let’s see if this works.

I have to admit the geek in me thought immediately of how the Wii remote could be used as a cheap 3-axis bluetooth-enabled accelerometer. Until now such a th...

Sure it is a really neat example of modern development and user interface, but it is also a really nice program. I tried it out for 20 minutes or so and had ...

This could end up being a really great site – Microsoft has been really going after the student developer and releasing a lot of good tools (e.g. Express ver...

A new job, a new blog – seems like a nice fresh slate to get some good work done.