Public Transit FTW

Today is the first day that I'm taking public transportation to/from work. It takes longer than driving, but it's LOADS cheaper. I'm leaving my car at work during the week so if I need it for anything while I'm at work, I'll have it. It takes about an hour on the train, so I'm going to try working, reading and blogging.

But right now, I'm listening to This American Life, which has me thoroughly distracted. It's about cryonics, which is both fascinating and frightening. It seems the first cryonics group was run by "some guy" and all of his scientific advisors quit early on. Quite an auspicious start...

Countertops are looking good!

We're using a product called Paperstone, which is an eco-friendly material made from recycled paper and a resin. It cuts like wood, but it's incredibly strong and non-porous... If you nick it, you can just break out some sandpaper and sand it out.

This doesn't really show it, but we have an egregious amount of counter space - which is awesome. I can't wait to cook again!

Powershell Prompt

With my recent re-dedication to working with UAC, I find myself constantly wondering if I'm running Powershell in Admin mode not. After a little poking around, I found that the "SESSIONNAME" environment variable is missing when running as an administrator. Odd, but whatever. The upside of this is, I can now tell if I'm running in Admin mode and throw up a different prompt. So! Here is my new, revised Prompt function for Powershell:


function Prompt
{
  if (($env:SESSIONNAME).Length -gt 0)
  {
    $host.ui.RawUI.WindowTitle = $(get-location)
    "$>"
  }
  else
  {
    $host.ui.RawUI.WindowTitle = '[Admin] ' + $(get-location)
    "#>"
  }
}


The gift of music

If you were going to rickroll a mix CD for someone, would you do it at the beginning, middle or end of the CD? Assuming, of course, that you don't put the song on the track list. I see merits to all three, but I suppose middle makes the most sense.

This is completely hypothetical, obviously...

The front yard

Looking good! This is before the application of bark dust. I took the pic now because the sun will soon disappear for God knows how long. Ahh Portland!

Mobile blog test

Trying to send a mobile blog entry with a pic..

I'll be damned.. It worked - and without signing up for MMS from Sprint. This is our cat Celeste and some of our new bamboo floor. Not terribly exciting, but unspectacular test results are sometimes the best kind, eh?

Big Day Out!

With the sun a'shining as it is, it's time to get outside and start deweeding our insanely overgrown front yard. I'll try to take some pics and post them when I'm through - if it looks reasonable. Before that, I'll probably work on a logo or something for ze blog. I've got an idea - I'm just not sure how it's going to pan out... Then tonight - it's bookstore and Fry's time! Woooo!

Oh, and the cat has stopped coughing, which is great. But she's taken to shedding, which is not. We're going to be able to build another cat with all of this fur...

Books I Want

LINQ In Action
Consider Phlebas
Broken Angels
The Ghost Brigades

Less Annoying UAC For Vista

When I first got Vista, I ran with UAC fully enabled. I did so to fully experience what users would experience when running UAC and thus, avoid being part of the problem when writing user-land code. It drove me completely bonkers.

When I switched to 64-bit Vista, I decided enough was enough and I turned it off altogether, but I always felt a little guilty. I tried the "elevate without prompting" approach, but it felt like cheating - although I guess it's good that you still get file and registry virtualization. Plus, it seems a great many of MS bloggers insist on keeping UAC turned on for the same reasons that I originally left it on.

Now however, I think I've found the best of both worlds. I leave UAC on, set to "Prompt for consent", but I turn OFF the Secure Desktop. It saves just a fraction of a second when UAC prompts appear, but it makes all the difference. And it's much less visually distracting. Give it a shot if you hate UAC (who doesn't?).

Run the Local Security Policy application and change the "Local Policies\Security Options\User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation" policy to "Disabled".

Reunion Time!

Alright! Alright! Keep it down in here you three! And send me links to your blogs, eh? So *I* can put you in *MY* Google Reader! EDIT: It's too late - I've already found you!

Oh, and I'm on twitter too.. twitter.com/xinmyname

Still need to do more work on the blog. I'll probably do that tomorrow morning whilst the missus is sleepin'.