I realized that I hadn't posted any update on my Xbox Live DRM problems or the dashboard update issues I was having, so here you go. The DRM Issue Back in October, I got my third console replacement and ran into the same stupid DRM trouble I had the previous two times: Content I purchased could not be played unless I was logged into Xbox Live - not just signed in, but signed in and online. This isn't as much a problem for a one-gamertag household, but when you have a two-or-more-gamertag household (like my wife and I have), it means that...

I just recently stepped into the now and got a phone with a camera on it. I'm not really a big cell phone user for the media capabilities, but every once in a while I've felt that a camera would have been nice. ("Hey, honey, which of these two things do you want at the store?" *snap* *snap* send...) I also do a lot of mailing to myself - reminder notes and such - and all of my stuff is organized in Outlook. When I got my camera phone, I immediately took a picture and sent it to myself. But I...

This is the best email I've received all week. A date, and some images: I'd best be scheduling my time off now. Oh, and I...

In an effort to save some money and get some faster net service, Jenn and I signed up to switch to Verizon FIOS. A couple of friends of mine have switched and like what they're getting, so we're hoping we like it, too. That said, one of the primary reasons a lot of folks I've talked to have switched is that they don't like Comcast for one reason or another. I've only ever had good customer service with them, so the company affinity thing isn't really an issue. The converse is actually true - we've had horrible customer service experiences with...

Okay, I thought this was pretty funny: I noticed that if you access your voice mail through the Comcast web site and delete it, if you later call up your voice mail from a phone, deleted messages show up as "skipped." Looking at the FAQs they provide, they say something about having to empty your "deleted items" folder on the web site. But there is no "deleted items" folder. So I got into a live chat with a support rep. Turns out there's something weird going on, so the rep wanted a technician to look into it. That's when this little blurb...

Design for testability vs. API as a deliverable (or test-what's-designed) is something I've blogged about before and it does sort of boil down to a religious debate. I'm currently on the "test what's designed" side because, for me, API is a deliverable. I'm also not a big fan of some of the sacrifices you have to make when you design for testability, like losing your encapsulation. Regardless of your views, mocking is still something you can most likely take advantage of in your unit tests. You could use one of the open source frameworks out there like Rhino.Mocks. It'll work. If...

I went in on Saturday for my sixth laser hair removal treatment on my face. Just like last time, I went with the MedioStar laser on the entire face (with the exception of the areas immediately around my lips, which is still a little too harsh). While amazingly intense, the pain was actually less than it was last time. You can tell that as the hair thins out there is way less pain. In some areas where the hair is super thin, you can barely even feel it. That's not to say it didn't hurt, but I didn't sweat through my shirt this...

I've been writing a lot of build scripts and custom build tasks in both NAnt and MSBuild lately and, based on this experience, I've decided I like NAnt a lot more than MSBuild. Here's why: NAnt lets you run tasks before any targets run; MSBuild doesn't. I commonly have some "setup" actions that need to happen before anything else in a build script happens. Stuff like registering NCover or starting up TypeMock. It's stuff that needs to happen once, before any other target runs. In NAnt, I can put all of that stuff at the top of the...

I am, I'm sure, somewhere around the last person to get on board with this, but still. I got The Orange Box for Xbox 360 for Christmas and, after hearing about Portal from a lot of folks, I finally got a chance to play it this weekend. It's awesome. I'd played Half-Life before, and Counter-Strike, and all that, but this is way, way different. Basically, it's a first-person puzzle game, which is something I'd never come across before. The idea is that you are in a testing facility for a company called "Aperture Science." You've got a gun that shoots, basically, "holes." You...

When I was setting up multi-user iTunes on my new Windows Vista box, I also came across the need to set up Picasa for multi-user support. Like iTunes, Picasa is really a single-user application so you have to do some special work to get it to share a single library across different user accounts. Fortunately, you can use many of the same principles as in multi-user iTunes to get Picasa up and running without much issue. (Enough so that I can do some pretty easy copy/paste modification to the iTunes instructions and get Picasa instructions.) IMPORTANT NOTES: This is all...

A fairly popular article I posted a couple years back is on setting up iTunes for multiple users on Windows. I just updated that article so it shows how to do it in XP and in Vista, and I fleshed out the steps so they're easier to understand and follow. (I just had to do this on a new laptop we bought, so I figured I'd offer it up to folks and see if I could spread the joy.) If you're into the multi-user iTunes thing, check it out.