Looks like I’m getting quoted over at Hanselman’s site. Go check out this article on the Laws of Prototypes at Tim Weaver’s site and tell me I’m wrong when I say the guy hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I went in today to get this tiny mole removed (maybe 6mm diameter) from my right side. I’ve had moles removed before - from my back, from the side of my head, etc., so I kind of knew what to expect.

Let me interject here that I am the biggest pain pussy ever. I don’t fear death, I fear pain. I fear any little kind of pain there could possibly be. Even if something isn’t hurting, I anticipate pain, and that hurts almost as much. I can’t watch medical shows on TV, and any needle bigger than the tiny ones I get my allergy shots with make me a little queasy.

Keeping that in mind, I got numbed (which hurt a lot, ironically - and the needle was a little larger than I’m comfortable with) and then the doctor started the operation. I was awake, but lying on my side not watching.

About halfway through, I started to feel the pressure of him pulling on the skin on my side and cutting and whatnot… and I started sweating profusely. I mean, like, sweat rolling off my forehead, soaked down, “I’ve been working on the railroad all the livelong day” sort of sweat.

Then he started cutting outside the area a little to make sure he got it all and I started feeling it a little, so he had to numb some more, which meant they brought a needle out and it made it all worse.

By the end of the thing they had to bring me an ice pack and a cup of cranberry juice because they were all worried about my distinct lack of color. I wasn’t at “pass out” level yet, but I was definitely headed there.

I have to go back in two weeks to get the stitches removed. I’m sitting here typing this and I feel the tightness in my side (probably due to the gigantic bandage attached to me) and I don’t know how long I’m gonna be able to stand that.

I think I should eat something.

Most of the weekend was spent doing yardwork; at least, the majority of Saturday was. I bought this lawn aerator device that is basically a set of spikes attached to a handle - step on the spikes to push them into the ground, pull the handle to get them out of the ground. Like dangerous romper stompers.

Thing is, that trashes your back really quickly, so the rest of the weekend I ached. I still ache.

We also started painting the upstairs bathroom, which is already proving to be less painful than the last bathroom we painted because: a) we’re only painting two of the walls; and b) there’s no border that has to be sanded off. We got a coat of primer on there pretty quickly. We’ll put another coat of primer, then two coats of paint, then be done.

And, of course, there was the typical cleaning of… well, everything… as there usually is.

Oh! I got my L’Instant Taittinger poster back, framed, from Michael’s and it looks brilliant. That’s now in my entryway so you see it pretty much right when you walk in.

I worked a little while on my Send To project and got the framework for a mixed-mode DLL set up. I have some managed classes (my public interface) in there and it compiles; now I need to start putting in the unmanaged stuff.

I also installed Windows XP SP2 on my home computer last night. I happened to get a disc with it on there from MSDN (subscription through work) so I took it home, threw it in the drive, started the install, and walked away.

A couple hours later I came back, rebooted, logged in, and have thus far really only noticed a couple of minor changes. First, the Security Center thing pops up to tell me that Windows Firewall is enabled, Automatic Updates (to the OS) are enabled, and it can tell that I have Panda antivirus software installed but it can’t tell the version of the updates. Fair enough. Second, the Windows Firewall is a lot more configurable and I like it better than the old Internet Connection Firewall. (It did, however, fail to properly migrate my ICF settings so I had to reconfigure, which wasn’t a big deal, just annoying.) Finally, the pop-up blocker is in full effect in IE.

That’s it. That’s all I really noticed.

I think that’s a good thing. I saw all of these “get ready for SP2!” ads and all of these articles about the drastic changes to the security on the system and whatnot, but when the end user finishes installing this thing, they really won’t notice much.

Now, from a programmer’s perspective, yeah, I have to be more conscious now about the security on the system and whatever for operations my program performs. But from the end user side… no big deal. Just more secure. Perfect.

So I’m coming up with a list of all of the various programming projects I want to do and I’m finding that there’s really just no shortage. So far, the top three are:

1. Add ‘Send To’ to Solvent: I want to add the Windows Explorer ‘Send To’ menu to my add-in, Solvent. I have the part that builds the UI for the context menus done, I just need to get a decent class library to read items from the Send To folder and send them in. I found something that almost does what I need, but I need something a little lower-level (not wrapped in Windows Forms code) and that compiles warning-free (that DLL needs to be converted to mixed mode).
2. Remove Solution From VSS: It turns out there’s a very manual process if you want to remove solutions and projects from Visual SourceSafe. You have to delete certain files, you have to remove certain references to the source control from the solution and project files… ugh. I need a program that, given a solution file, removes it and all contained projects from VSS (not actually deleting them from the VSS database, just removing references to VSS from the local copy).
3. POP3 Proxy via Web Service: To get around annoying firewall constraints, I need a two-part solution: first, a web service that can take incoming POP commands and proxy them to a real POP server, then return the results; second, a client that acts like a POP server, receives requests from a POP-based mail program, and ferries those requests to the web service. That would allow you to use a POP-based mail program to get your email from, say, work, where they don’t allow POP through the firewall but have no restrictions on web access.

I’ve been working on that Solvent issue for a while now. I’ve learned (and, in many cases, re-learned) way too much about C++ while doing it, and I’m getting fed up with the way shell stuff is handled in Windows. One would think that with .NET they’d have introduced some sort of “Microsoft.Windows.Shell” namespace with some methods you can access from managed code that does all the low-level crap I’m having to learn.

I’ll get it done, it’ll just take a little longer. I tried doing the pInvoke route, but I got to a point where I was trying to marshal pointers to pointers and things fell apart (I know enough to be dangerous but not enough to fix it). Then I started doing a mixed-mode DLL (hard for a relative newbie in C++) when I was informed there’s this thing called “It Just Works” (or “IJW”) that should allow me to call the unmanaged shell functions from managed code without any of that. So that’s my next attempt - see if I can figure out how to get it done via IJW. If that doesn’t work, I think I’ll learn how to write a COM object and just suffer the COM interop overhead (which, thinking about the work the COM object will have to provide, should be reasonably minimal).

Unless someone out there wants to write it for me? I have an interface description… :)