What's wrong with being a hairdresser?

OptionsScalper's kid got a 3.93GPA on her report card and he feels relieved she won't be a hairdresser. I once heard a computer programmer testifying in his bankruptcy hearing that his ex-as-of-last-month-wife was a hairdresser in Palo Alto and made \$160,000 per year. (I was there under the …

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XBox360 as a media extender: Failed to stream DivX

Tina's been a little, errr ... skeptical ... about how enjoyable it is that our living room now reverberates to the sound of up to 8 Ferraris simultaneously trying to negotiate a corner in downtown New York City (in surround sound!). So I thought I'd investigate XBox360 as a media extender.

First …

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Stream Music via FM

A few weeks ago I bought a Griffin RocketFM Transmitter, a super-clever USB gadget that allows me to stream music from my desktop machine (in my office) to my living room stereo system. It works perfectly -- I can listen to KEXP, podcasts, what-have-you. The fidelity, I'm sure, isn't what you'd …

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XBox 360 Experiences

So my determination "not to open the XBox 360 until I finished my month's work" lasted about 24 hours. Yesterday was Thanksgiving, for heaven's sake! A holiday! Heck, I wrote 700 words in the morning. Only 3,500 to go before next Wednesday. I'm cruising, for heaven's sake.

The first …

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Hardcore throwaway line of the day

::: {.Section1} [“]{style="font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Arial"}[so I had to author my own handwriting recognition engine to distinguish between "X" and "O"...  ” ]{style="font-family:Arial"}

[ ]{style="font-family:Arial"}

[Shawn van Ness discussing his WinFX Ink-enabled Tic Tac Toe game. ]{style="font-family:Arial"}[ ]{style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial"} :::

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Scored an Xbox360

Much to my surprise, my local Costco had 23 units. When I arrived an hour before opening, I was 9th in line and, when I left the store they still had at least 4 units sitting in the cage. (Ah, the joys of living in a small town!)

Now, in …

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I bricked my SMT5600 Smartphone

I decided to switch to an official Cingular calling plan now that it's been a year since AT&T Wireless went away. I took in my year-and-change-old \$300 SMT5600 Smartphone and was told I'd have to get it unlocked before it would work with Cingular. (But it already works with …

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The Multicore Revolution And Language Design

The software development community is about the fall off a cliff.

  • Single-threaded programs will never run faster than they run today

Think about it: clock speeds have maxed out and no mainstream programming language is automatically parallelizable. Pissing matches about Java versus CLI generics are irrelevant. The Intel and AMD …

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Waiting for other technologies to rev to 2.0 release...

The recent release of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server, and .NET 2.0 is all good news, but it seems to cripple me a little. My next two articles on Avalon / WPF and Tools for Domain Specific Languages, neither of which can I get to install on top of the …

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Programming the Realtime Stylus

My latest article on DevX implements a packet filter and custom selection tool using the Tablet PC RealTime Stylus APIs.

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