Winding Down, Weekend Brain Dump

Randomness ensues.

I taught a 2 hour session at work on COM scripting.  Everything from COM itself, to the DLL-ProgID-GUID-HKCR relationships to standard OOP stuff (classes, templates, properties, methods, all of it), and into invocation and interface processing.  Small group, so that went very well, and we had breathing room to explore questions, yet without falling off the wagon along the way.  It was good.

After that I taught another session on using a web application that I developed for a different (still small) group, which went very well.  I love face-to-face discussion.  Web/remote is ok.  Phone is lame.  E-mail is lame-er.

In that second session, I gathered more input for bug fixes, enhancements and new features in one hour than I received in months via web, email or phone.  Big corporate development teams:  You don't know what you're missing.  Focus groups are not the answer.  Direct, immediate, personal contact is the best.  It's the only real way to get quality input and have a quality, high-value discussion as well.

I switched the blog over to use the newest Blogger features with dynamic views, the new rendering layout, and the new analytics tools, and I have to say I absolutely LOVE it.  You might not be as impressed with the new look as I am, but behind the scenes, the administrative changes are fantastic.  Too nice to ignore, so I followed my typical "beta-tester" mentality and dove in head-first.  I am aware that the sidebar doesn't play well in Internet Explorer 9, but that's because IE9 doesn't handle HTML5 and CSS3 consistently with Chrome or Firefox (or Opera, I'm told).  I use IE9 and Chrome 16 at work about 50/50, but at home it's Chrome 16 100%.  I only fire up Firefox 7 to test page rendering and that's about it.  DISCLAIMER:  I'm not saying one browser is "better" than any other.  Everyone is free to like what they like.

I'm still a bit fried from three-plus hours of talking and pointing without a break.  I got home and hadn't eaten in six hours (not good, and not usual for me), and immediately gave into a cold glass of beer.  That wasn't a good idea either, but it seemed like it at the time.  Heh heh.

Still listening to Adam Carolla's podcast show every day.  Today he again brought up how suck-ass most 80's songs were, and I have to say that I now listen to them with new ears and most of them do in fact suck holy shit.  Not so much from a musical aspect, but lyrically they are bankrupt.  Those folks were not writing shit down back then, they were winging it and most of it sounds like a recorder was left on during a Narcotics Anonymous session.

Randomness ensues.  Enjoy your weekend!