Bruce's Blog
Marie Catrib’s Restaurant Review
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 Catrib's - http://www.mariecatribs.com/. I checked it out online and figured out how to...
Outliers by Malcom Gladwell
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 ... For my ADD readers: Recommended? Yes, Absolutely Audience? Amazingly wide - not...
2009 Reading List – Already out of control
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 period. It doesn’t help that that was the same period of time I was at the CodeMash 2009 conference, and...
What is CodeMash?
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 – and in reviewing a few of the more egregious posts, they are absolutely correct. So, to head off what will...
2008 Retrospective
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 read this blog know a little bit more about me. So without further ado…. 2008 Milestones Space Shuttle...
What would make a good/great Netbook?
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 PowerBook 100s with teachers in 1991 (only to have some returned to us as almost “unusable” – imagine giving...
Another reason I love Woot.
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 deals, but they also have a sense of humor which is lacking in most retail situations. The latest...
ImplicitStyleManager – Hidden Gem in the Silverlight Toolkit November 2008
Sure the AutoCompleteBox, Expander, TreeView, Charts, etc. from the new Silverlight Toolkit (http://www.codeplex.com/Silverlight ) are cool – and will make some Silverlight apps look even better. But the ImplicitStyleManager (and related Theme classes) will now...
MVC Beta – Non-GAC implementation
Another “geek post”, sorry. We’ve been updating some of our MVC apps to the beta and were relying on the non-GAC implementation of MVC (i.e. we didn’t want to have to physically install the MVC .dlls on the shared dev and live servers – we’ll do this for RTW but not...
World Animal Day – boston.com
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 that made me feel a little stupid. Many of the rest of the pictures in this article are also awe...
Silverlight IRL #2 – Fast Data Access w/ NHibernate
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 services and built up some quick models with NHibernate, in 5 easy steps I’ll use the example of the...
Silverlight IRL – Requests
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 code. I am in the process of making sure my code samples are functional under the release version...
Someone had to do it!
Reason #458 People Don’t Like Computers
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, professionally, and otherwise. I thought a “soft-launch” back into it would be sharing one of my pet-peeves of...
Silverlight Proof-of-Concept – Top 10 Questions to Be Answered
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. That being said there is a lot to prove to our customer and ourselves that Silverlight is the right choice, and is at the right level of...
Lessons from Keynote #2 – Steve Jobs
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, stronger, iPhone for the world) – which is true, but it was more than that. This was at the WWDC...
Lessons from Keynote #1: Bill Gates
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 technology, made predictions, and made announcements. So what of lasting value came out of what...
How I Got Started in Software Development
Continuing the How I Got Started Meme… cool idea, get to know the TwitterTribe better (and others) How old were you when you started programming? Wrote first program at 11 - BASIC 1.0 on Commodore PET How did you get started in programming? In grade school I was most...