's cold.

It's like -15 outside today. My wife opened the front door this morning to get the paper, and said "damn, it's freezing out!" I looked at the thermometer and said "nope - it'd need to be over 40 degrees warmer to get to freezing." Or maybe she didn't mean freezing *water*, she meant freezing *skin*.

Way cool recommendation site

This site is doing some damn spiffy graphics. music plasma
Damn shame that DaisyCutter isn't on here...

.NET plumbing bitch

Why must I write

MyClass[] anArrayOfMyClass = ArrayList.ToArray(new MyClass().GetType());

???

It would be so much easier if classes knew about themselves - for instance, something like:

MyClass[] anArrayOfMyClass = ArrayList.ToArray(MyClass.type);

-- followup a few days later
OK - it turns out that C# has a keyword for this. I can say:
MyClass[] anArrayOfMyClass = ArrayList.ToArray(typeof(MyClass));
which is cleaner, but still feels - I don't know - wrong somehow.

Laurel's first spam

Wow. So sad. My 3-year-old daughter has an email account on the server in my basement. I've not publicized her email at all, other than to a few friends and family.

Today, she got her first spam. For viagra, naturally.

It was to her username, but to a different domain name that's hosted on the same box. I don't think they were scanning for valid emails using SMTP vrfy, because that doesn't show up in the sendmail logs. 'tis a mystery...

MSFT Longhorn

My old friend Chris Sells was in town this week, and among other things, he gave a talk at the Minneapolis .NET user's group about what's coming in Longhorn, the next version of Microsoft Windows.

Lots of neat stuff is coming in Longhorn. However, you can't have it until 2006, and you probably won't want to have it until Longhorn SP1 is out in 2007. :-)

Some of the ideas aren't new - a GUI that uses the 3D accelerator is part of Mac OS/X, and XAML looks like it might be an XML version of the ascii format for NeXT Interface Builder .nib files. On the other hand, there are some deep ideas that are pretty new - WinFS is long-overdue. An OO datastore as part of the file system will be an enabling technology for some pretty nifty stuff. The query language needs some work, though...

Even so, it's good to see that the good ideas explored elsewhere are finding their way into the dominant OS - if we have to suffer Windows, at least let's make it so it doesn't suck.