Wow! What a roller coaster ride. I'm dizzy.

By James at March 31, 2009 15:31
Filed Under: Inland Empire .NET UG, Life in General, Microsoft, MVP

How many of you have watched the movie Parenthood? In one speech, Grandma makes a little statement about when Grandpa took her on a roller coaster…

“I always wanted to go again. You know, it was just so interesting to me that a ride could make me feel so frightened, so sick, so excited, so scared, so safe, and so thrilled, altogether! Some didn't like it. They wanted to go on the merry-go-round. That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it.”

I usually prefer the roller coaster as well, but for the past month I have been quietly wishing for the merry-go-round.

I have many great friends who are always there to support me. And because of my work with the Inland Empire .NET User’s Group and other .NET community efforts, several of them took it upon themselves to nominate me for a Microsoft MVP award. Thinking, and being told, it was a slam dunk, I was disappointed when I received an email last month telling me there just wasn’t any room for me, and perhaps next go round.

With development and management issues at work, supervisors reneging on their decision to let me attend Mix, so much code churn I’m going to patent C# butter, and then to top it all off, yesterday… “at our board meeting three weeks ago, we decided to cut back the IT department and eliminate your position.”  (A software company without a developer – smart decision. I’m sure they’ll be around a long time.)

Last night was rough. I stayed up till three doing the online resume thing and filing for unemployment. Carmina and I discussed if I should go into the office today, and decided I should. More along the lines of “they can’t get rid of me that easily”  than anything else.

Sitting in traffic on the 91, my phone rings. It’s one of my Microsoft friends, Daniel Egan. He starts chatting, then coyly asks, “have you read your email today?”  Nope, buddy, I’m on the road. He then goes on to start babbling about getting to a computer, not wanting to spoil the surprise, then, all of a sudden he blurts out, “you got your MVP! I just got off the phone with Suzanna.”

Ok, I like to play April fools jokes on my kids and everything, but after yesterday now is not the time. Daniel assures me its true and when I get into the office and have a chance to check my email there is this little tidbit waiting for me.

MVP prémio

Bem James, apenas não sei o que a say…. Excepto parabéns! Sei, apenas quando pensei que não era que vai acontecer, você foram aprovados! Bem-vindo ao programa MVP, conhecimentos de dev de aplicativo de cliente. Você receberá um e-mail oficial (ou dois) mas queria deixar sabe um dia mais cedo porque esse é o tipo de renegade estou;~)

Por favor manter esta notícia para si mesmo até receber a notícia oficial amanhã. Parabéns novamente e bem-vindo!

Suzanna Moran
Sr. MVP Lead, Community and Online Support

So trying to be a good sport I don’t tell anyone the news. Well Carmina deserved to know, so I called her. I’m waiting and waiting. It’s like being 12 all over again on Christmas Eve.

While at my desk at home, doing some work I start noticing some Tweets come in from @Zannabanna; “congratulations this, w00t that”. Then right about 8 pm PDT, I see the following:

Zannabanana Welcome, welcome NEW MVP @jamesLatringo :~)

Hmm… a quick little DM to Suzanna: “hey. does this mean I can shout it out now?”

The response: “SHOUT IT OUT! I figure hey, it's after 8 PM on the west coast, besides, I can NEVER wait!”

Well, what can I say? It’s still not April 1, and I haven’t received the “official” email, but boy, do I have proof!

twitterMVP2

So, is anyone in the market for a well seasoned ASP.NET/SQL Developer who just got his MVP? I’m available and ready to roll.

Thanks everyone for helping me to get to this part in my career. I couldn’t have done it without you.

Word,
James

Windows 7, iTunes and GEARAspiWDM.sys. No black turtlenecks for me.

By James at March 23, 2009 16:24
Filed Under: Technology in General, Beta Software

So after my adventures yesterday with Win7 Beta 1 and no web access, I thought things were all cleared up. Tonight I realized my DVD Drive wasn’t being recognized. Going into Device Manager I saw that Windows had disabled the Drive because the driver being used was unsigned. Digging a bit deeper I find that one of the drivers being used is GEARAspiWDM.sys. This is a pretty common driver for DVD/CD RW drives, so I was intrigued why that was the issue.

Googling for GEARAspiWDM.sys I found the following article on ZDNet by Ed Bott, “An inside look at Apple's sneaky iTunes 8 upgrade”. The article talks about how Apple sneaks in a bunch of crap during their iTunes and QuickTime upgrades and doesn’t indicate what is being installed. I followed the articles suggestions about trying to roll back to a previous version, but, of course, there isn’t one on my system.

A quick trip to www.gearsoftware.com, Support, Drivers and I download Driver_Installer_x86_x64.exe Version 4.008.5, Date Feb 4, 2009. Running the installer is a snap, and I have my DVD Drive back.

Thanks Ed! Thanks Gear Software! Screw you Apple.

Namaste,

James

Windows 7 Beta – no web browsing for you

By James at March 22, 2009 12:18
Filed Under:

I always like to try the new software, and when I was at PDC last year I installed the Windows 7 PDC version natively on one of my laptops. No problems and when Beta 1 (Build 7000) came out, I decided to install it natively on my development machine. Never had a problem until yesterday – 3/21/2009.

I was working in Visual Studio 2008 and opened the Help file. I have it set to use Online help and was confused when it wasn’t displaying any pages. I started IE 8 beta to go to MSDN and that didn’t load. I then tried Firefox and got the same thing…no web pages. Ok, so maybe a reboot is in order – no affect. I checked Windows Update and the last update was on 3/19 with a Windows Defender definition file. I turned off Windows Firewall and disabled my ESET Nod32 Anti Virus and that didn’t help either. All the other machines on my network were fine.

I lost track of all the things I tried, but here is a list of things that were occurring

in “regular” mode, I could not access http, https or mail, but could ftp and ping

in “regular” mode the Network and Sharing Center showed full connectivity

in safe mode, I had full internet access – web, mail, ftp, ping

running a VPC of Win XP had full internet access

My great friend Rich Manley is an IT god and he couldn't figure out the issue. I then twittered another friend of mine, Stephen Rose, who is on the Windows 7 marketing team. He called me right back and asked a few questions, then said he would get me in touch with some of the devs. However, I have a project I'm working on and really had to get this fixed right away. Not wanting to do an entire re-paving of my machine, I decided to do an "upgrade" to Win 7 Beta 1. After 3 hours, and several reboots, I finished up with full internet connectivity again.

As soon as I was up and running again, Windows Update wanted to install 6 updates. I nervously let it do so, thinking at least I had a baseline to go back to if it crapped out again. Thankfully, that all worked out well.

The perils of beta software...

James

About the author

James James is a five time and current Microsoft MVP in Client App Development, a Telerik Insider, a past Director on the INETA North America Board, a husband and dad, and has been developing software since the early days of Laser Discs and HyperCard stacks. As the Founder and President of the Inland Empire .NET User's Group, he has fondly watched it grow from a twice-a-month, early Saturday morning group of five in 2003, to a robust and rambunctious gathering of all types and sizes of .NET developers.

James loves to dig deep into the latest cutting edge technologies - sometimes with spectacular disasters - and spread the word about the latest and greatest bits, getting people excited about developing web sites and applications on the .NET platform, and using the best tools for the job. He tries to blog as often as he can, but usually gets distracted by EF, LINQ, MVC, ASP, SQL, XML, and most other types of acronyms. To keep calm James plays a mean Djembe and tries to practice his violin. You can follow him on twitter at @latringo.

And as usual, the comments, suggestions, writings and rants are my own, and really shouldn't reflect the opinions of my employer. That is, unless it really does.

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