Like everyone else, I’ve now been tagged into this game. Steve Smith tagged me so now I will tell you five things about me that you may not know.
1. I have lived in one city my entire life. I’ve been living in Kent, Ohio since I was born, and I have yet to move elsewhere. I’ve lived in 3 homes in Kent. I am currently attending Kent State University, so am still not out of Kent. Not sure when I will leave Kent, but I doubt I will be living here for too many more years.
2. I’ve been a world traveler since I was 10 years old. This is when my family started going on trips. Though my travels have been much more extensive than most people of my age, I have not seen nearly everything I wish to in my life. I have been to Venezuela twice, most islands in the Caribbean, Mexico a few times, Canada more times than I can remember, Hawaii once, England twice, France twice, Corsica once, once to Italy, once to Spain, and I’ve probably forgotten something. Sadly I have not yet been to Germany. I wish to see much more though, and hope to see many places in Africa, Asia, and Australia.
3. I, like Steve Smith, am a gamer. As can be seen by the title of my blog I am obviously some type of a gamer. I enjoy playing Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, I am aware that it is the stereotypical nerd game. It is not the only game that I play though. I enjoy making up my own games. These games have their own worlds and own systems for play. I enjoy playing them a great deal. I also enjoy playing card games, board games, and video games. Most of my games are console games, but I also play a lot of PC games. The board games I play are classics as well as lesser known games. One of my favorites since I was a child is called Solarquest.
4. After number 3 this one becomes more obvious. I would like to eventually work in some type of game design. I think it would be great fun. I might be able to get into video game development with help from the degree in Computer Science I am about to earn from Kent State University. I know many people who would like to work on games. This semester I will be taking a class about designing and building game engines. I hope it is a fun class.
5. Most people don’t know that while I think this five things idea is kind of cool. I have this notion that I am merely propagating a chain letter farther along. I don’t know if others have gotten this same feeling, but it would seem to me that this, while interesting, at its roots is an attempt to see how far the chain lett……. the five things blog will go.
So now I must search for bloggers who have yet to list five things or be tagged. Such a cruel fate. Here is a group of people I have yet to see five things from, and whom I know little about. I apologize in advance if these people have been tagged already or do not want to play the game.
Alessandro Gallo ( Garbin )
Joydip Kanjilal
Ian Lipsky
David Walker
Mo Meng
With the power that search engines seem to have now, it has become difficult to design anything without considering them. Anytime I am trying to find anything I check Google first, and I often use Google to search sites that have their own searches. One reason I see for this is that all sites seem to try to optimize for search engines now.
I spend a lot of my time considering how a search engine will see any piece of code I write. When a large portion of traffic is directly attributed to a search engine, one has to keep it in mind when designing pages. A lot of times I feel that I have spent more time configuring a site to show higher in search results than I have building the site.
I am just assuming that everyone has run into the same situations. We are all trying to find newer and better ways to get our sites a little higher on those search engines. I am certain I am not the only person who spends a few seconds figuring out a way to word a link so it not only makes sense to a user, but will be seen nicely by search engines. Even in blog posts I am careful about my naming now. It is quite a change from what I was doing a decade ago.
Microsoft just released their new AJAX Libraries, so a new version of Simple CMS has now been released which uses it. I am watching for new controls especially in the AJAX Control Toolkit to add to Simple CMS in future versions. You can suggest changes for future versions of Simple CMS and also ask questions about it using the Simple CMS Forum. Let me know what you think.
I hope everyone is keeping up with all the cool features in the MS AJAX. I hope they have some awesome stuff when we get ASP.NET 3.0
So yesterday I was able to spend a long time battling with team server. It seams that source controls likes to keep track of where your workspaces are itself. So on a computer I don’t normally work on, I logged in. I set up work spaces on that machine, because Team Server didn’t specify them for me. I needed to put the code in a public place, so I did. When I went back to my normal machine, I told the server I wanted to get latest. Wow was that a huge mistake.
Five to ten minutes, and a seemingly endless stream of error messages later, team server has moved half of all of my files to another location. It seems that it noticed from the other machine that I had moved my workspaces, so it tried to do the same on my work machine. All hell broke loose when it could not get all of the files moved correctly. As should be quite obvious, Visual Studio cannot build half projects.
The best part of this whole experience was the time it took to move EVERYTHING back to its original location so I could start working again. All I wanted was 1 updated file. Never going to move workspaces again…..
Perhaps someone knows of some cool trick to stop that from happening. If you do I would appreciate knowing as well. Thanks.
Something quite horrible happened to me today. While I was working on some of my code, I accidentally hit some keys while holding the control key down. Unfortunately for me I did not see the keys I hit. Well now instead of seeing whitespace there were this little dots. I figured there was some checkbox in Visual Studio’s options. I could not find it anywhere, but I did discover a cool hack. In the fonts section, I found it keeps font information for Visible Whitespace. By changing the font color to white, I wouldn’t have to see the dots anymore or so I thought. Whenever I highlighted one of the dots I could see it again.
Now with my frustration building, what can I say I hate dots, I began trying different keyboard shortcuts. I eventually found what turns on and off white space.
The Answer: Control + E + S
Hopefully no one else must suffer through the horror that is visible white space.