Personal
Wow, I can't believe I've added another 16D days to the stack...although at times it feels like 1DF1. For you geeks out there, here's another representation of the day count: Octal - 23177 Octal (byte) - 177 Binary - 10011001111111 Binary (byte) - 1111111 Well, now thinking about it...I'm actually only 267E days old since the day is not over yet. Anyway, here's to good times (and hopefully more to come)!
Well, I had a great time meeting old friends and making new ones at this year's summit. There were so many things going on and so many people to see and talk to, that it's next to impossible to consume everything at once! So, to keep things simple, here are of the highlights per day: Sunday Although, I was not there until late (way late), it was a lot fun hanging around the Westin's lobby and talk about how a chicken takes a dookie. Yeah, that's right. Keith Elder had the great intentions of recording a podcast that...
I haven't done this in a while, so I apologize. Here's my current reading list for technical/non-technical books: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Thus far is a pretty good book. When I picked it up, it sounded like a great book since it tries to answer the "how" of the unexpected. For some reason, I'm always a sucker for these type of books. Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson I love biographies because they provide a different insight on a person's life. I've only managed to...
That's right, the nice people over a Microsoft decided to award me with the ASP.NET MVP award for 2008! Just wanted to use this blog post as a Thank You! for those people involved in the program! I'm really looking forward to the MVP Summit next week and the year to come!
I'm a huge fan of RSS because it enables me to be lazy. How does it do that? Well, the simple fact that I don't have to go to your site to pull content is a HUGE time saver for me. It's nice that we have a mechanism (RSS) that allows you easily pull the content that you care about. I've been using FeedDemon for about +1 year now and I'm pretty happy with it. I actually bought the product back then, but now you can get it for free. The nice thing about FeedDemon is that it's just...
For the past two weeks our team here at work have been heads down working on getting a project out the door. I will omit the answers to the why did the project get there? and how did you let it get there? questions since, although they're important, they would deter from the core reason for this post. All I have to say that last week was just awesome because of the team synergy (yes, buzzword) that was built around this project. Essentially, last week was treated as week-long Sprint. We met on Monday morning for an hour and...
Last Thursday, I purchased a Samsung i760 Windows Mobile phone under my VZW contract. I had previously tried other phones like the MotoQ but did not like the battery life it had. I also looked into getting a BlackBerry, but unfortunately our company is moving toward Windows Mobile devices to make the integration between our laptops and our Exchange Server easier. Another nice thing about having such phone is that I can write software for it using the .NET Compact Framework. Here's what I've discovered/really like after a week of having this phone: ...
Just wanted to wish my readers out there a safe and happy new year! I'm not sure about you, but next year for me it's going to be a blast (more to come on this) ;-)!
I apologize for not being "active" on blogging for the past four weeks. Back in September 9th, I started a wellness program here in Des Moines, called Farrell's Extreme Bodyshaping (FXB). The program is Monday through Saturday for 10 weeks. You heard right, 6 days a week for 10 weeks... The program is laid out as follows:
Kickboxing (cardio) 3 times per week for 45 minutes.
Punches: jabs, hooks, cross punches, upper-cuts.
Knees: high, medium, low and side.
...
Well, it's been a crazy past couple of weeks for me (actually, it has been a couple of months). I find it humorous that about a year ago, I wrote about a new job venture I started. Unfortunately, that did not last long. Did I do something wrong? Was I fired? No, none of that. My employer just took a different direction on their project and that direction did not fit my career plans. Originally I was brought in to help them transition to .NET and re-design their legacy VB6/Oracle system. As the project progressed, I ran into a...
For the past couple of weeks, I've been looking for the "right" laptop to use for home/work/dev/play. I started to look at the Dell XPS M1330, their new slim 13.3" laptops, and was not too satisfied with their hardware/price ratio ... good hardware but too high of a price. So then I started looking at refurbished Dells and quickly came to the same conclusion. I was looking for the following things on a laptop: Fast CPU - I want to do software virtualization (aka, VPCs). Lots of RAM - (same reasons as above) Descent size HD - (same reasons...
The blog has been kinda quiet lately ... to my three readers, I apologize. I've been out of town having some well needed r&r, without the laptop. Yeah, it was a bit hard at first (since I'm addicted to email) but I was able to make it through it. My wife asked me, Are you sure you can make it a week without email? ... from the looks of it, I did a pretty good job. Right now I'm on my way down to TechEd '07 in Ornaldo. I will a TechEd posting blog with the information I acquire...
That's right, it's that time again...yep, when I post my currently reading list so you can get a closer look at my thought process. Here are the books in no particular order:
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership - John C. Maxwell
One of my friends from work let me borrow this book from him so I get more acquinted with the qualities of a leader. I'm at chapter 8 and it's pretty good...it takes me a while to go through the book since I have to pause and re-think of the different times when I had such "leader" experience...whether if it was me...
Thanks to the MVP Award Team and my lead Steve Dybing for recognizing me for another as a ASP/ASP.NET MVP. I'm thinking of a lot of good content to present/create this up-coming MVP year. Once again, thanks!
That's right, my son Dominic turns a year old!! Well, his actual birthday was yesterday (3/28) but we were pretty busy going to the zoo and getting him presents that I couldn't blog about it. It's really hard to believe that a year has passed by. As you can see by the pictures below, a lot has changed with him: Dominic 1 Year Dominic 6 Months Dominic 1 Day Dominic 9 Months Dominic 3 Months Dominic In Utero Christa and I are very proud...
I've decided to give Soapbox on MSN a try to host some of the videos of Dominic. Check out the first video of many to come on my soapbox: Video: Dominic First Snow Experience The video was taken using our Sony DCR-HC48 MiniDV Camcorder and re-rendered from AVI to MPG-2 using Vegas Movie Studio+DVD. Reason for the re-rendering? Well, the AVI file as 587 MB and Soapbox has a limit of 100MB for uploads, so the file format had to change to accomodate this requirement.
So, I was playing around with Outlook 2007 last night and noticed that the calendar feature of program supported the publishing of calendars to My Office Online. Pretty interesting feature, I must say.
Currently, I'm using Google Calendar for keeping track of my scheduled events (private & personal) and I have publushed it for people to see. It works pretty good and I've been happy with thus far. The thing that got me interested with Office Online is the fact that it offers a web interface and that I can use Outlook as a Windows client (that's one feature that I would like...
Here's the list of books that are currently on my nigh stand: Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid Douglas R. Hofstadter Yep, it's that time again. I read GEB once a year to keep in touch with my inner ComSci geek. If you're interested in theoritical concepts of Computer Science, then you definitely check it out! Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters that will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity Joel Spolsky I've been...
That's right, I've traded my 30GB Video iPod for a 30GB Zune. Why? Well, since I'm running Vista Ultimate with Media Center (I'm working on a blog post) the Zune made it easier for me to sync up my recorded shows.
To convert from Media Center format to WMV (MPG, MP4, etc), I'm using Roxio's MyTv ToGo. When I had Media Center 2005, this product worked great with my iPod. However, after upgrading to Vista, the software was unable to transcode the recordings to MP4. I don't know, I guess it's just cool to see my Futurama, Family Guy, The Simpsons, The...
Just wanted to wish my readers (both old and new) a happy new year! I'm sorry I haven't had the chance to blog more but I've been quite busy at work. I've been doing a lot of working with interop with VB6 and VB.NET. I've also added some MVP and WCF to spice things up as we slowly scale and re-write our application. My main task it to finish my Extending ASP.NET article series on Code Project.
I'm planning to have a couple of C# “syntactic sugar” posts. While working on our framework at work, I'm been using some of new features of C# 2.0 that help...
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
As you can see, Dominic has decided to take after his father:
Next step: Learn C# & ASP.NET!
That's right! It's been two years since I messed up my first blog setup! And from the stats from FeedBurner, looks like I grew from a year of 1 (me) in 2004 to 50 (hey, bots count!!). During this time, you've stuck me my rants, some-what-useful posts and most of all, my poor writing skills (I'm a web developer, not a writer!). In all, I would like to thank you my three readers (including myself) and 47 bots for sticking around and listening. I promise that this next blogging year will be even better!
It's hard to believe that it's been six months since Dominic joined our family. Man, have we really gone six months without sleep? In these past six months, we've (my wife and I) have learned that although we love each other very much, it's nothing compared to the love we have for him. I count the hours until I can get home from work to spend time with him...just to see him smile, or say 'goo'. I just can't wait to find out what the next 6 months will have in store for us. Hopefully in a couple more weeks,...
I was curious the other day and decided to see how many other "Dominic Lozano"s are out there. So, I Googled for it. To my surprise, my five month-old son is the first Dominic in the list! When I asked him what he thought of it, all he could say was: "goo". ;-)
For the past two years, I've had the pleasure of being involved in the world of consulting. Being a consultant has allowed me to learn about how businesses utilize technology to make their processes more streamlined and automated. In particular, I've been able to develop my "business analyst" skills by being more involved in the overall process rather than just the coding piece. During the past year, I was heavily involved in the design and implementation of an enterprise-wide solution for one our clients. (NOTE: I've stressed the words enterprise-wide solution because these words tend to have different meanings to different...
By now, you've all heard about the battery recall Dell is doing for all laptops sold from October 2004-2005 (approx.). Well, my Dell Inspiron 6000 was bought in early 2005 so it could contain one of these faulty batteries. After login into Dell's Support site and providing my battery ID, I hit the jackpot...if you can call it that. I get a new a battery in about 20 days! For the mean time, I'm running my laptop without it just in the case that something goes wrong (I've had this laptop for over a year now and nothing has happened. ...
Months, that is! It’s hard to believe that Dominic is now four months old…where has the time gone? Has the lack of sleep skewed my reception of time and space? Maybe I’m just going insane…oh well, such is life.
The one thing about him turning 4 months is that he now sleeps through the night. YES!! OURN PRAYERS HAVE FINALLY BEEN ANSWERED. The funny thing about it is that we still get up and check on him…I guess, it’s our turn to get used to start sleeping through the night.
Tonight we had our first Post-It discussing meeting. Here’s the jist of it from our member’s email
We're trying something a little different for this month's meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, you will be given a post-it note and asked to write down 3 topics that you're currently interested in and would like to discusss.
We'll collect the post-it notes and form discussion groups based on their content. Anybody interested in the related content is encouraged to discuss/learn/share within the group. Also, each discussion group will have a recorder that will write the ideas discussed within the group. These ideas will...
I know it's been a while since I've last blogged, but Dominic has been keeping my wife and I pretty busy. He's a great little guy and we're very fortunate to have him. A couple of days ago, Dominic turned 2 months old. Now, that might now sound impressive, but for us it is. In that time, he's managed to grow two inches and double his body weight! (Imagine yourself doing that right now!)
Also during this time, we've learned to read his signals. Which is a big plus at 12, 3 and 6 AM when he wants to be feed. For those readers out there...
That's right, a while back, I bought a domain name for my son, Dominic Lozano, so I can share pictures and other info with relatives. Granted, all of his pictures are nicely stored in Flickr, but the URL is a little long. Don't get me wrong, I love Flickr and all of its features, but it's hard to relay such information to people that are “everyday” web users. To bridge the two worlds, I've incorporated Flickr.NET to pull set information from his Flickr set to his photos page. It only took me a couple minutes to write up (after I got a an API key).
Any way, I've...
Earlier today I was notified that I've been selected for the Microsoft MVP Award in ASP.NET for 2006. All I can say is that I'm deeply honored in being selected as a member of this fine community. I can't wait to collaborate with the rest of my fellow MVPs and continue to help out the community both online and offline.
My MVP Lead, Ben Miller, keeps a blog here, if you want to check it out. I can't wait to help him to make the ASP.NET community better!
Once again, thank you all for this great honor.
My little brother was born! Happy 20th Birtyday, Jon! Hope you have many more to come!
Those of you that know my brother or just want to wish him a happy bday, use the comment section below.
Dominic Andrew Lozano
He was born on March 28th, 2006 @ 10:06 AM. He weighed in at 5.6 lbs and 19 inches. He’s quite the little guy, but his Mom and I are very proud of him and anxious to take him home. If you want to see more pictures of him, check out Flickr.
Today I finally took the 70–229 exam to finish my MCSD certification. What can I say, it only took me a year++!
Just received this old driking prayer from Ryan on response for a small change of plans for his bachelor party this Saturday:
Our lager,Which art in barrels,Hallowed be thy drink,Thy will be drunk,At home as I am in the tavern.Give us this day our foamy head,And forgive us our spillages,As we forgive those who spill against us,and lead us not to incarceration,But deliver us from hangovers,For thine is the beer,The bitter and the lager,Forever and ever,
Barmen.
Finished painting the nursery yesterday and today my wife and I put the crib together. The only thing it needs it’s the baby! Here’s a sample of the border around the room