I'm also turning off comments here (since I won't really ever respond to them anymore).  If you want to stop by and say hi on the new site, feel free to leave a comment on the hello world post there.  You can point from friendly neighborhood RSS client here.

This was not an easy decision to make. My dream when I was a college student at MSOE was to one day work for Microsoft and I got to live that dream for six and a half years I’ve had the chance to work with some of the smartest folks I’ve ever run into anywhere and working with them day to day will definitely be missed.  I also got to work with a ton of great customers doing amazing things with Microsoft technology.  It was actually these folks who planted the seeds of jealousy - they got to use the new tools and techniques to create real, living and breathing stuff while I had to settle for churning out sample code.

My options in the Microsoft field to get back in the game (so-to-speak) were limited. My choices were to go back to MCS (where I spent my first three years here), or look at getting a SDE job with a product group and move my family to Redmond.  The MCS life is nice if you can hack the travel, but I'm not the spring chicken I used to be and it is nice to see the family at night.  We've set down some pretty deep roots in the Milwaukee area, so heading west wasn't really an option either.

I’m around for the rest of the month mainly transitioning accounts and tying up loose ends. Going forward, this blog will move to a more permenant home at https://www.hirlpoo.com/ though for prosperity sake, the stuff here on MSDN will stay. That URL points back here for now, but I'll post a final entry once the new site is up and running so you can update your bookmarks and RSS feed.

 At least now I have an excuse for a low post count.

Andrew Photoshoot, originally uploaded by ddysart.

We decided against going the mall portrait route for Andrew's four year old picture this year in favor of making use of all the crap I've bought over the past few months. Here is a mosaic of the the ones we're considering to make into a print.

That said, this contest came accross an internal alias.

The contest is called Develop without Borders.  It challenges developers around the world to design Office business applications that support non-profit organizations.  It was developed as a joint effort between both the Information Worker and Developer Platform teams with support from HP and offers over $160,000 in prizes. I'm fairly sure I'm not eligilbe for the prizes, but seems like a cool way to help out.

Inserting that took a couple clicks, though on Flickr itself, getting the HTML to insert a photo elsewhere isn't too difficult.

BTW - the above shot is one of my first "keeper" photos I've taken using the awesome techniques outlined by David Hobby on the Strobist blog.  David is a photojournalist for the Baltimore Sun and has been sharing load of techniques for doing off camera lighting (all for real cheap, assuming you already have a DSLR).

Since a fair number of my customers are in the Eastern Time Zone, and I'm in the Central, this could be handy.  I've long used the "show additional time zone" on my calendar, which has been in the past few versions. (In the Outlook Calendar, right click the time bar, choose "Change Time Zone..." then tick the "Show Additional Time Zone" box and pick the time zone.  I also add labels so I remember which is which.)

The cool thing with the feature Hank mentions, is for putting airline flights on you calendar.  Flying home from somewhere like Grand Rapids, MI, I can leave at 3:15 local time, and arrive at 3:00 local time.  Scheduling this is super easy now.  Just enter the start and end times in local times, including time zones.

Seems to me I'd probably want to lay off using a laptop in bed too.  Any magentic field strong enough to hold my fat butt up in the air, let alone the matteress has got to be strong enought to affect the harddrive.