Note to Self (and Google):

When your Wii hasn't been played in a few weeks and won't turn on, don't panic. It happened to me this evening when the girls decided out of the blue that they had to use the Wii. The little red "Standby" light wasn't on, it didn't respond to any button pushes, and it looked dead.

After a bit of Googling, I tried unplugging it, left it unplugged for about 5 minutes, and then plugged it back in. The light came on, everything booted up, and the girls are now happy campers. Crisis averted. hopefully this gets indexed and saves some other father from 45 minutes of "Why isn't it working, Dad? Can't you fix it, Dad?"

Technorati Tags: wii , hardware , troubleshooting , power

Among my resolutions for the new year, I want to get back to blogging regularly for the three or four of you still subscribed. My goal is to post at least once a week, which shouldn't be too hard as I've got a queue of topics and ideas lined up. This isn't exactly the first time I've said "I should blog more," though.

2008 had a few high and low points but was, thankfully, less eventful for us than 2007. Among the highs would be all the work we did and had done around the house over the summer. Everything came out very nice and a number of useful gadgets had sufficient WAF to make their way into the house as part of the upgrades. Lows, of course, would have to include those quarterly 401k statements.

I'll be posting some reviews soon of various gadgets, as well as some thoughts on the usual tech and .NET topics. I'm still doing the very occasional start-and-stop thing on Twitter and finally started doing something with Facebook in 2008 as well.

Now to follow through with these resolutions.

A few months back, probably after deleting my daily allotment of 100+ spam messages per day, I decided to look into a better way of handling email. The hosting company I use for my domain (Server Intellect) provides a web-based mail client (Smarter Mail) that I often used when out and about. On my machine at home, I used Outlook 2007 to fetch that email. And while Smarter Mail's UI was fine for a web-based mail program, the spam that made it through the filters was ridiculous.

In addition to my personal email, this affected a few other family members who also use email on the domain... and let's face it, no guy wants to hear from his Mother about "how to get rid of all that male enlargement spam."

So I went in search of a better way... as a listener to Scott Hanselman's podcast (and reader of his blog), I knew that he'd recently moved his domain's mail (and other services) over to Google Apps for Domains. His recounting of the tale in the podcast sounded pretty painless, so I went to check it out.

I was very impressed with how seamless and easy the whole thing was. Google provides excellent instructions for how to make the transition, including walkthroughs for the control panels used by many web hosting companies. The process amounts to just a few steps:

1. You prove to Google that you own the domain. The easiest way to do that is to put a file at a certain URL that contains some data they provide. You create it with a text editor, upload it to your site, and let Google know you're done. Google looks for that file and then reads the contents... if it matches what they provided, you're good to go.
2. You decide which services you want to use -- GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Start Page, and public pages -- and you can turn them on and configure them as you like. This was great because I could turn on calendar, docs, and start page right away, but figure out how I wanted to transition email later.
3. You use Google's instructions for your hosting company's control panel to make some changes in the routing of traffic in your domain. For me, this was as simple as logging into the domain, adding some A records to indicate where traffic should go (i.e., sending it to special Google URLs where the apps live), and then hit that URL in a browser to see the result.
4. With email, I was originally worried that there would be an awkward transition period... not at all. First, I created all of our accounts in the Google Apps interface so that there were mailboxes in place. Google even gives you a temporary URL you can use to check that mailbox before transitioning to the URL you want (e.g., mail.domain.com), as well as a temporary email address that goes to each mailbox. Google gives nice step-by-step instructions for handling mail transitions in particular.
5. With those in hand, I logged into SmarterMail and set up Forwarding rules on each mailbox -- so that mail sent to me (for example) would automatically be forwarded to my mailbox's special email address over on Google's system. With those rules in place, I changed the MX records with my hosting company so that mail traffic would start to go to Google's servers rather than Server Intellect's.
6. After that change is made, there's a brief transition time while records get updated and the tubes get re-routed. With the forwarding rules, though, nothing is lost or in limbo. Within hours, it seemed, everything was being processed through Google and we were good to go.

That all sounds a little more involved than it actually was... someone moderately familiar with their hosting company's control panel could get the whole thing done in a couple hours in the evening. Maybe more if you had a bunch of mailboxes to go through and set up forwarding rules on.

In addition to Scott's podcast, he also had a few posts on his blog that were helpful when I looked into this. Unlike with Scott's situation, I didn't have a bunch of email to transition UP to the Google mailboxes. I do still have a large Outlook PST file locally, but I'm not convinced I'd get a lot of value out of pushing it all up to my mailbox on the server.

For now, I'm pretty much just using GMail as intended (e.g., leave it all on the server), but I take advantage of the IMAP capability occasionally to move things into some Personal Folders that I want to archive. I do see that, over time, I'll likely start using labels and the "archive" feature of Google Mail and keep more and more info on the server... but that will be a transition that occurs naturally over time rather than jamming all of my current archives up there at once.

Others in the family are using the new setup the same way they used the old one -- use the web interface to handle mail when traveling or when using a different computer, but then let Outlook slurp it all down via POP when they're on their personal machine... but they're increasingly seeing that it's useful to leave it up on the server for convenient access.

It's been a few months since the transition... and overall, we couldn't be happier with it. The service is free, fast, and has added a lot to the way we're tracking things. My wife and I frequently share Google Docs for various things (Christmas shopping lists, chore charts, etc) and we're just starting to use the calendar to keep track of household schedules.

And that spam problem? It's pretty much licked... Google's filters are great. I think the number of spam messages I've seen in roughly three months can be counted in the single digits. I did keep an eye out on the Spam folder to watch for false positives and there were a few. But those could be counted on one hand and, more importantly, I understood why Google wanted to filter them -- mostly they were messages that mentioned poker, a pastime of mine but a frequent topic for spammers.

Bottom line:

Pros

• Virtually no spam.
• Couldn't be easier to setup.
• Uptime and stability of Google services.
• Access to Google's "search" for email.
• Other services we can grow into.
• Free (unless you have more advanced needs)

Cons

• It does require familiarity with your host's control panel... but if you have one of the many standard interfaces they support, that's an easy hurdle.
• I know people will say "use labels!" and "use search!", but I still wish Gmail had folders.
• Some of the Google Apps For Domains services get new features and capabilities slower than their "regular" Google cousins. As Scott has pointed out, it's clear they're not running the same codebase in both places... so things like IMAP support, colored labels, and lots of iGoogle add-ins don't work in Google Apps until weeks after they're generally available elsewhere (if at all).
• Those differences mentioned above also mean you need to be careful when looking at 3rd-party add-ins or tools. Some that work fine with regular Google tools may require hacks, or may not work at all, with the tools available via Google Apps.

Highly recommended!

Note:   This post is the first in a series of posts about moving more of my personal data and productivity tools on to web-based services (i.e., "the cloud"). It's a process that's largely on-going (only mail is "fully" transitioned for us), but I'm working on transitioning my tasks (which Google doesn't yet support), my calendar (both home and office), as well as personal data (important docs, photos, etc) to web-based services.

Technorati Tags: google , google apps , productivity , web services , gmail

Greg Reinacker (Founder/CTO of NewsGator, a local company) and Brad Feld (of the Foundry Group and a Boulder-based VS/startup blogger) both posted recently about their first computers.

For me, the "computer geek" bug bit pretty early. When I was 12 or so (early 80s), I had a friend whose father bought him a TRS-80 Color Computer. He'd have sleepovers at his house and we'd stay up very late hacking out "games" (loosely defined) that were of the Choose Your Own Adventure variety. They were completely text-based and offered multiple choices at each turn. We learned quickly to map out the story's flow on graph paper.

It didn't take long to decide that I needed a computer of my own, so I started saving. Eventually, I got a paper route for the San Jose Mercury News and that helped me reach the savings goal pretty fast... I was pretty excited to purchase a Commodore 64 with my own money. My parents helped out by buying me the cassette tape drive (so I could [painfully and slowly] save my work) and a dot matrix printer. The following Christmas, my grandparents bought me the 300 baud modem for it (funny story: I learned years later that my grandparents argued over whether to get this because they'd just seen the film War Games). A year or so later, I bought the disk drive for it... which was both more expensive and physically larger than the computer itself!

I spent a whole lot of time hacking on that thing, including punching in program after program from "Compute Magazine". You'd punch things in by hand and try to run it later... but it was guaranteed not to run, so you'd have to go back through and try to find the typo.

In high school, I got in trouble once in a History class and was given some "extra" homework -- I had to write "I will not cause a disruption in Mr. Whatever's class in the future" a hundred times. I asked the teacher if it would be alright if I typed it a hundred times because A) I had a lot of homework and B) I needed the practice typing. Not having any idea what he was agreeing to, he said it was alright.

I went home and wrote something like this:

10 FOR I = 1 TO 100 
20     PRINT "I will not cause a disruption in Mr. Whatever's class in the future." 
30 NEXT I 

Fire up the printer, run it, and I was done... I remember this because it was the first time I realized that I could make a computer work hard so I wouldn't have to. Thus, a career was born.

That computer was also my first experience with the online world. I had to borrow my parents credit card to make it happen, but I got my first Compuserve account with that C64. Between cruising forums and writing code to peek/poke sprites on screen, I spent hundreds of hours on that machines.

Later (shortly after high school), I got an IBM PC XT 8088 clone that had two 5.25" floppy drives in it. One was the system (the OS and whatever app you ran) and the other was for data (to save your documents or whatever). Later, my uncle hooked me up with a 10MB hard drive... it was a beast and sounded like a jet taking off. I still remember messing around with jumpers to get it all working.

That 8088, with an amberchrome monitor, was the computer with which I first combined my other hobby -- music. I bought a serial port MIDI adapter and the original release of Cakewalk for DOS. Connecting a synthesizer to a computer opened up an amazing new world to me. I've been a Cakewalk (now SONAR) user ever since, despite dabbling with other products. It just "feels right" to me.

From there, it's been a series of 286, 386, and so on... I've never owned an Apple computer (though the MacBook Pro is sure tempting these days) and have been a PC junkie for over 20 years now.

Technorati tags: commodore 64, first computer, cakewalk, trs-80

What a month June was... Ugh. Among the highlights:

• Getting acquired.
• Taking a vacation to California.
• Coming home (alone) to oversee having the house interior painted.
• Going to the ER for stomach/GI issues (while home alone).
• Getting admitted to the hospital for three days.
• Learning that I need surgery to resolve the issue (second in 2007?!?).
• My new laptop goes belly-up (again).
• Next-Day service from Dell takes several days.

And the first calendar month without a blog update in a while.

From a health perspective, I'm ready for 2007 to be over. I've not had any major health issues since I was a kid (ruptured appendix) and now it'll be two surgeries in one year. Ridiculous... but at least both were/are fairly simple and won't have any lasting effects.

On the tech side, I've been slowing working my way through Adam Nathan's WPF book, experimenting a bit with Virtual Earth, made some incremental improvements to iTunesExport, and have enjoyed watching all the hype (and hyperbole) over the iPhone. On the iPhone, I think it's hilarious that people camped out to be among "the first" to get one, while others walked into an AT&T/Apple store the next day and walked out with one 5 minutes later.

While I've been going through this adventure with my Achilles rupture, there are a few apps/utilities that have been especially useful. I thought it'd be worth expressing some gratitude to these folks...

The first is NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile... As I've mentioned here before, I'm primarily a FeedDemon user, but I really like the entire NewsGator Online service for keeping my feed subscriptions in sync across FeedDemon instances at home and in the office. I added NewsGator Go! to my phone (Samsung i730) shortly after it was released, but have used it sparingly... mostly because it takes time to sync 300+ feeds over EVDO and I don't often find myself with that THAT much "sitting and waiting" time.  

I've worked with Kevin Cawley (primary developer of Go!) in the past and he's a top-notch mobile developer. His work really shows in the Go! product, as it's got a number of nice touches that I've come to appreciate this week. With all the time I've spent in various emergency rooms, waiting rooms, and exam rooms, there's been plenty of "down time". Reading my feed subscriptions on the phone is a much nicer way of spending that time than going through months-old issues of Newsweek or People magazine. Putting Go! through its paces over the last week or so has made me appreciate that common sync platform all the more... and has also brought to mind a few enhancement requests I need to send off to Kevin and the NG folks. :)

The other product/service I've come to appreciate over the last week is Xbox Live Arcade. I'd played Marble Blast Ultra with my daughter in the past and it became a regular favorite for us. I also picked up the Texas Hold'Em game when they offered it for free during its initial release (though playing for funny money is a far cry from "real" poker). Beyond that, though, I didn't play many of the Arcade games... I just found the elaborate retail games to be more enjoyable.

This week, though, I've obviously had lots of time on my hands so I downloaded some demos for other Arcade titles. Some of the games I've purchased and been playing more regularly now are Uno, Backgammon, and Bankshot Billiards. Uno was an inexpensive no-brainer and is an easy one to play when on pain meds... Backgammon requires a bit more thought (and I had long forgotten how to play), but is a lot of fun. And Bankshot Billiards is a little steep at 1200 Microsoft Points, but it's got enough variety in it that it's been worthwhile.

I also got Crackdown this week, which is a lot of fun. And while I'm enjoying that game a TON, it's not something I can play all the time (violence)... the Arcade titles fit the bill nicely for a change of pace that I can play with the two little ones around. And in a few cases, can enjoy playing along with my older daughter (7 yrs). She had a blast playing billiards for a while earlier today and was starting to get the hang of the angles and consequences for hitting the cue ball too hard.

I've got a bunch of options for passing time while I'm off my feet -- napping due to meds, a laptop and wireless broadband, lots of books/magazines, the Xbox 360, and regular games with the family. But I still find myself battling restlessness and boredom. I just want to be able to walk outside!

Heaven help us if our power should go out for some reason...

Technorati tags: xbox, xbox live, crackdown, arcade, newsgator, feeddemon, mobile apps

I mentioned that I'd be doing this in an earlier post, but I underwent Achilles tendon repair surgery just a few days ago. It's been an adventure, with several new constraints added to my daily life... primarily, I have to stay completely off my right leg. It can't bear weight at any time and should be elevated as much as possible. When I do move around for the occasional personal-hygiene break, I'm on crutches.

It's been this way since the surgery on Tuesday and will continue until March 5, when I have the post-surgical followup with the surgeon. At that point, he'll take the splint/bandages off and check things out. From there, it'll either be a hard cast for a few weeks or more of this splint/bandage thing that I'm currently in.

The surgery itself went very well (I'm told -- I was out)... I was given the option of a "nerve block" just prior to the surgery. Basically, the anesthesiologist (try typing THAT on pain meds) shoots an anesthetic into the back of my right leg, just above the knee. That completely numbed it from the knee down for about 18 hours. It made the period immediately following the surgery a little more bearable as I only had to deal with the grogginess of being completely under and not the additional pain in my leg. The surgeon told me that the rupture was up a little higher on the leg than is normal, but the repair went well and "the fibers look good."

Once the nerve block wore off, though, it was time to make a dent in the pain prescription. It still hurts pretty bad when those wear off. The pain is mostly a combination of sharp pain and swelling. When the leg's wrapped up as tight as mine is and then needs to swell... well, there's nowhere really for it to go.

Washing up in the morning is a trick, but we're getting a routine down... mostly, it's just really hard being confined to either a bed or a couch for this long (and over a week to go). There's only so much a guy can do to occupy his time when one leg has to be at nose level all the time.

I can't imagine going through this alone and my wife has been absolutely wonderful, helpful, and supportive for me. I'm really NOT a very good patient. 

Technorati tags: surgery, achilles tendon, achilles, orthopedic

I've mentioned several times here that I've played soccer off and on for most of my life. I played outdoor soccer year-round as a kid in California, then checked out indoor soccer after we moved to Colorado and also started coaching youth soccer several years ago. Last weekend, my soccer-related activities came to a screeching halt as I ruptured the Achilles tendon in my right leg.

It happened during an indoor game with our company team last Sunday. About 30 seconds into the game, I received the ball, turned toward the goal, and suddenly felt like I'd been toe-kicked right above my right heel. I also felt a "pop" and stumbled forward. I limped/hopped my way off the field, not sure what had happened but it was clear that something was very wrong with my foot. I could mostly control it, but not well and it wouldn't hold weight. I learned later that a couple other guys on the team heard the "pop". Yikes.

I managed to drive myself home and then we went to the ER to have it looked at. They didn't even need to take any images of it to know what had happened... apparently, it's that obvious when it happens. I was splinted up, given pain meds and crutches, and referred to an orthopedic surgeon.

So this week has really sucked... As if the pain in my lower right leg weren't enough, I'm using crutches for the first time in my life. Short distances aren't too bad, but a few longer ventures this week have left my wrists and armpits very sore. And I really don't like being so dependent on others for simple things.

Anyway, I've got surgery scheduled for this Tuesday afternoon. It's an out-patient procedure that takes a couple of hours or so. After that, I have to stay off it for 10 days and will be in a cast for 6 weeks or so. Then comes the torture physical therapy... but, I'm told that I can be back on the field later this year (end of summer or fall). Assuming, of course, that I feel like I can trust it... maybe the trust will come back as it gets stretched and strengthened this spring. We'll see.

I learned that this is a very common sports-related injury for men as we get older, especially those who play sports with a lot of start-stop motion. I stretch pretty regularly and my calves are fairly strong, but it's "just one of those things". The more interesting fact is that it almost never happens with women. I'm told that the only time Achilles problems occur for women is when they frequently wear high-heels.

So... if this weblog gets some really wacky posts over the next couple of weeks, blame it on the meds.

Technorati tags: achilles, achilles tendon, orthopedic, injuries

2005 is over and it was a bittersweet year… on the one hand, I got a promotion at work and our second daughter (Elizabeth) was born in June. She’s gorgeous, all smiles, and is probably the happiest baby I’ve ever seen (her big sister, Allie, was also a happy baby but knew how to get your attention when she wasn’t happy! She’s 6 and that hasn’t changed).

On the other hand, my grandmother passed away this year and that’s been very hard for me. We were very close and I’ve always felt that she’d just “always be there”. My grandfather, is doing as well as can be expected given that they were married for 59 years.

We ended the year with our annual holiday pilgrimage to northern California. It was Elizabeth’s first time flying and she did just fine. Both the girls travel well, but it’s very hectic travelling with two little little ones – especially around the holidays. Whether we make the trip next year or stay home and start our own holiday traditions remains to be seen.

In any case, I’m excited about 2006. Things are good at work, at home, and we’re all healthy. I certainly can’t ask for anything more than that.

Whew.

Elizabeth Rosslie Donnici was born on Tuesday, June 14 at 3:27pm. She was born via c-section and came out screaming. She weighed in at 6 lbs 11 oz, and is just over 19” long. She looks a lot like her older sister did as a newborn. All is well with her and Michelle and both are now home and getting lots of rest (in 2–3 hour blocks, that is).

… to the 2005 resolutions, huh?

Thus far, 2005 has sucked pretty mightily. Illness in my extended family, illness here at home, Allie catching pneumonia, Michelle and I both being sick… yuck.

On the upside, not all is lost with those resolutions. I am reading more and I have taken some steps on that personal project I mentioned. I got a good book on Vegas Video, which has given me some ideas for that video project I mentioned. And while I haven’t exactly taken a ton of pictures, I have been to two different Nikon classes in the last month and picked up some great pointers.

The downside… exercise has suffered (been sick), blogging has suffered (sick, lazy, busy, whatever), and this site still looks the same.

Still, my Firefox bookmarks include a “Blog This Stuff” folder that’s jammed with links, article ideas, and other possible blog entries.

I’ll try to do better.

Oh… and we have a 20–week ultrasound appointment this Friday. That’s gotta be good for a blog entry, right?

… is hard. It’s easy to come up with a list of all the things I want to do, change, start, finish, or otherwise commit to. It’s hard to make a list that has a chance at getting done. After all, a year is a long time and who can say how things will move up or down in importance.

Instead, I think I’m going to try to come up with quarterly resolutions. This way, the timeframe is smaller and I can take on more manageable goals. That’s my approach to development projects as well… make a list of components. Prioritize them. Take the top few and break them into tasks. Prioritize those. Get to work. That’s how you eat an elephant.

So here’s my list of goals for Q1 2005:

• Exercise at least 3 times a week — using the bike when I have to be indoors, playing soccer more when the weather’s good.
• Read more fiction, starting with Cryptonomicon.
• Begin development on a side project that’s been kicking around in my head for a while. I’d like to have the database done, the DAL created, and start the framework.
• Take more pictures with our new camera, particularly with the camera in Manual mode.
• Improve this site, including a new layout, a photos section, at least one article, and more useful links.
• Blog more — at least 4 times a week.
• Complete another retrospective video for Allie (I’ve got lots of raw footage).

With luck, I’ll make a good dent on all of these… maybe posting them here will keep me honest.

I took Friday and today off to make the Labor Day weekend even longer. After some chaotic times at work, I figure five days at home just hanging out with my family would be great... and it has been. But I'm now halfway through day five and can't believe how quickly it's gone by. But... but... I'm not ready to go back...

So let's get this party started. I've been using a firewalled corporate blog for a while, but decided it's finally time to get something publicly-accessible up and running.

About Me

I'm your basic mid-30s software geek, currently working with .NET (primarily WinForms) and keeping busy at work. I'm the proud father of a 4-year old girl, Allie, and try to spend as much time as possible with her and my wife, Michelle, when I'm not working. For fun, I play soccer weekly (when my knee will let me), coach a youth soccer team, and we're season-ticket holders for the Colorado Rapids. I'm also a musician, primarily keyboards and drums, and I enjoy home recording as a hobby.

I've been doing software development in one fashion or another for nearly 13 years now, with forays into a number of languages along the way. I was a 6-time Microsoft MVP for Visual FoxPro and also wrote a monthly "Best Practices" column. Later, my development focus changed over to Java around 2000 and then to .NET in early 2003. I specialize in reusable components, framework development, and distributed software architecture.

About This Blog

So, what can you expect to find here? Well, if you read the two paragraphs above, it should be pretty easy to guess. A wide variety of technical ramblings, some code, miscellanous family/personal shout-outs, maybe the occasional book/music/movie review, and even a rant now and then. If any of these aren't your cup of tea, you'll be glad to note that you can view/subscribe-to the web log entries by category.

As far as frequency goes... we'll play that by ear. It'll probably be several a day sometimes, other times once a week, but one thing's certain -- it'll be irregular.

Want to send me email about something? Use the Contact page, or jeff@THE-TRASHdonnici.com (just take out THE-TRASH for it to work).