As I’m thinking about getting a PS3 soon, I know I’m going to want to control the Blu-ray portion with my standard universal remote. Unfortunately, PS3 uses Bluetooth for its controllers and doesn’t support standard IR remotes.

IR2BT to the rescue. It converts IR signals to Bluetooth specifically for this purpose. I can get one of those instead of yet-another-proprietary-remote.

Great site that generates custom AJAX progress indicator graphics.  Select your colors, select the indicator type, and generate it. Free. http://ajaxload.info

Sunday we went to the Shrine Circus and saw Circus Gatti perform. It was very interesting and brought back some childhood memories as I watched some kids getting an elephant ride. (I didn’t think they did that anymore.)

There were some neat acts and I particularly enjoyed the “Extreme Metal Riders,” a group of guys who ride motorcycles around in a metal ball. I’d seen three motorcycles at the same time, but these guys do five and six at once.

The thing I thought was most interesting was truly how small the production was. They had several acts, but there were only like 20 people in the circus. You’d see one of the acrobats was also one of the guys riding motorcycles and he was also the juggler. The lady doing an act with a bunch of hula hoops is also the one who does an act on gymnastics rings and was a “cheerleader” for the motorcycle guys.

I had to show some respect for them, out there making their way doing things I know I can’t do, but at the same time, having just seen Cirque, it felt so small and… well, cheap. I feel bad saying that, because you could tell these folks were doing the best they could with what they had, and if you throw Cirque sort of money at something, of course it’s going to be bigger-better-faster-stronger. Ticket prices reflected that - Shrine Circus ticket: $9; Cirque ticket: $85. You do the math. It was a good time all the same and fun was had by all.

Plus, I had no idea the Shriners had a giant fez mascot. That thing is the bomb.

My ninth treatment was Saturday morning. They got a new laser at the facility and I think it’s more powerful than the previous one, because it hurt a little more and when I was done I had little red welts all over my face that looked like bad acne. I had this same sort of reaction the very first time I went in for treatment and they tried the laser on me, so it’s not like I’d never seen it before and I definitely wasn’t worried. That said, it was sort of painful and the technician put some ointment on my face and told me not to shave or otherwise irritate it for a day.

My chin is really the only really dark hair I have left on my face, and that’s patchy at best. The rest of my face has small hairless patches among sparse hair patches where the hair is growing, but is much finer and more manageable. My upper lip still has a decent amount of hair on it, but the tech is really jumping in on that to make sure it’s taken care of.

I have three more treatments in this “package” (they sell treatments in packs of six). I’m looking forward to where I’m at when I end this set. Wondering if I’ll need more or not. I don’t know if I’ll be totally hairless, but it’ll be considerably thinner. I’ve definitely enjoyed the results so far - I haven’t ruined any shirts, sheets, or pillowcases for quite some time now (my beard used to just destroy these things).

In this Two Minute WF, we’ll talk about the WorkflowRuntime.

The WorkflowRuntime is the service that coordinates the execution of workflows and the services that workflows use. Once you’ve defined a workflow using the various activities you need the workflow to perform, you tell the WorkflowRuntime to create an instance of that workflow and start it running. The WorkflowRuntime uses the various services available to it to start the workflow instance running on a thread, persist the workflow when it becomes idle, and generally manage the execution of the workflow.

The WorkflowRuntime provides events you can handle to let you know when significant things happen like when a WorkflowInstance is finished running, has thrown an exception, or has been terminated. You can also use the WorkflowRuntime to enumerate the list of currently loaded workflows or retrieve references to workflow-related services.

You can only have one WorkflowRuntime per AppDomain (generally this means you get one per application), so in more than the simplest application it can be kind of tricky to manage your WorkflowRuntime.

For example, say you have an object that needs to know when a workflow completes. You might have that object subscribe to the WorkflowRuntime.WorkflowCompleted event. Later, you might no longer need that object so you stop referencing it and assume the garbage collector will clean it up for you… but it won’t. Why? Because it’s still subscribed to the WorkflowRuntime.WorkflowCompleted event so there’s still a reference to it. This sort of thing becomes a little tricky particularly in applications like an ASP.NET web app where a page instance might need to know when a workflow it started is done running. (There are other issues with using workflows in ASP.NET that I’ll get into in a later topic.)

There’s a lot to consider when working with WorkflowRuntime, but it does a lot of the work for you. Once you get your head wrapped around it, WorkflowRuntime is your best friend in Windows Workflow Foudnation. You’ll be seeing a lot of each other, so get to know it.