AKA the weekly summary. Yes, it’s time I was more … regular … shall we say. In fact that brings up topic 1. Yesterday it was colonoscopy day for me, the last one being 12 years ago. Yikes! It’s supposed to be once every 10 years! Oh well. Of course, when I say “day” I really mean two days, since I had to drink the sulphate/bicarbonate solution in two big batches, 12 hours apart, 24 hours before going to the gastroenterology center yesterday afternoon. And also I couldn’t have any solid food a good 24 hours before the visit either. Let’s just say my intestines were very well flushed by the time ..read more

Time to turn over a new leaf. Because of changes in my life (and my wife’s) over the past 4 or 5 months, I’ve let things drop here on my blog. I’ve had time to recharge — at least I hope so — hence it’s back to regular updates. Let’s see how this goes… A couple of weeks back we were in Paris for the Marathon (well she was, I’m just the spectator waving from the sidelines), but it was a bit of a mess. Our flights there were originally Denver to Chicago and then Chicago to Paris, but United had to cancel the first flight. After some kerfuffle I managed to get us rerouted with a direct flight to ..read more

So, in general, every day I get in my car and drive somewhere. It could be taking the pup to doggy daycare, going shopping, nipping out to get some lunch, whatever. In doing so, because we live in a built-up area of Colorado Springs, there’s traffic lights and, if I’m unlucky, I’ll hit a red. At which point I can look at the cars around me and play my game of looking for expired registrations. A couple of years ago, there was a change in what the traffic police could do with respect to pulling people over for expired registrations because it was found that the majority of cars being stopped fo ..read more

At the beginning of September we were in England to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. What we do on these England trips is to (a) go to North Yorkshire to visit my parents graves, (b) go see my sister’s family in Lancashire, (c) go somewhere we haven’t been before, and then (d) end up in Windsor for a couple of days as it’s close to Heathrow and the flight home. The unknown is made more interesting by visiting National Trust properties, especially those with some old house you can wander around, and that also come with large gardens within which you can go for a walk and get some exercis ..read more

Just over 4 weeks ago, we had a problem. Our internet connection went down. I’m sure, like many people, this is pretty dire: after all, I work from home and therefore need it to connect to work. And that’s before you even start to consider getting system updates, emails, Netflix, etc. At first, I thought it might be some general outage with CenturyLink, so didn’t worry too much about it until the next morning. Nope, still no internet. Time to reboot the modem and try out various things. Weirdest thing: the modem would connect to CenturyLink’s servers, but I couldn’t access any sites. Hmm. Cent ..read more

Well, OK, not quite. But today is the anniversary of my arrival in the United States, or, more specifically, Colorado. Yep, I’ve now lived for 30 years in the US. Originally, I was going to stay for possibly three years, but it turned out that after those three years I’d sold my flat in Hammersmith and bought a house in Colorado Springs for my future wife and I (and, as it turned out, three kittens). Still makes me laugh: selling a one-bedroom flat in London to buy a three bedroom house in Colorado Springs. So, I’ve lasted ten times as long as I’d originally thought. And it goes without saying ..read more

There are days when I just want to give up, there are so many scams going around. Yesterday, it was getting this in the mail: Oooh, list me, baby! Yep, a company I’ve never heard of wants to make sure that one of my websites is, er, properly listed. To quote: “Annual Website Domain Listing on internet directory”. Nothing to do with registering my domain, making sure it’s visible and accessible. Nothing to do with the usual scammy ones that promise to make one’s website appear in the first page on Google for some unknown search term. Nope. They’ll just list domains “to enhance their Website e ..read more

A quick bit of catching up… First, a week ago on March 15, it was my 17th anniversary of becoming CTO at DevExpress. Thinking back on all those years, it’s amazing how things have changed along with the platforms we support. Silverlight, anyone? As always, the problem is essentially a toss-up: do we support X, or should we concentrate on Y? Anyway, at the moment, it seems that the main Microsoft-centric development platforms are WinForms (because Windows apps in the corporate world are still very much at the forefront of app development), Blazor (because JavaScript is so hard to learn when wri ..read more

So, of late, I’ve been having real issues with my main laptop. Basically BSOD City. I’d be getting blue-screened ten or more times a day. Even to the point of when it auto-rebooted I’d get a “hard drive not found” error. Missing hard drive? Yeah, not great. The BIOS diagnostics passed thoroughly and it would eventually reboot, so I’m guessing it’s some kind of weird hardware issue. So, I bought a new laptop and have been installing all those indispensable programs and apps I really can’t do without. Of course, there had to be one where I needed the CD-ROM for it (don’t ask) and the company c ..read more

For some stupid reason, I got the following two texts within 12 hours of each other, the first yesterday evening, the second this morning. Nope, not PayPal Nope, not Amazon For a kickoff, both have grammar/spelling errors, and then they both use onlinehome.us with a random subdomain as a link to press. This particular domain was created just under a year ago, with the registrant seemingly coming from Chesterbrook, PA, but whose 403 page is in German. As for the From addresses, I just laughed ..read more