Hello, I'm   Jason

I just read an interesting article talking about how flies walk on ceilings. The article wrapped up by talking about how scientists and engineers are looking into this with robots. You can read the article here.

Now that Bill Gates has decided to step down, Mary Jo Foley from Microsoft Watch has put together a list of the “Top 10 Flops of the Bill Gates Era.” You can read about them here. I think the two that stand out the most in everyone’s mind (even Microsoft employees that worked on or around these teams) are numbers 1 and two.

One of my colleagues, Steven Smith from ASPAlliance, pointed out an article to me involving an “unpreventable” security exploit. In short, a group of consultants were hired to assess security at a credit union. They planted some USB pen drives with a white trojan providing information to the network. Employees then found the drives, picked them up, and plugged them into their PCs [FULL ARTICLE]. Not good. This is one type of an “unpreventable” security exploit. I say its unpreventable because IT cannot prevent this. Rather, its the employees responsibility to learn what is acceptable and what is not. This is just one of the hardships that many IT professionals run into. It’s not always a hole in the operating system or a virus in an email.

Sure, I’m gone for a week and I miss a ton! I’ll be sharing details about my vacation, my new toy, and my yard over the next few days, but I figured I’d provide a highlight reel from the past week in technology. Probably the most interesting announcement is that by July 2008, Bill Gates will no longer be a full time employee at Microsoft. I have a tough time believing that he will ever stop influencing that company. Another individual, Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft as well but in a more “permanent” fashion ;) . I also missed all of the cool and interesting presentations, releases, and talks at TechEd 2006 in Boston. However, from the sounds of it, the event location was not a good one. Then, Microsoft decided to change the name of WinFX to .NET 3.0. Can you believe that 2.0 hasn’t been out for a year yet and we already know 3.0 is on its way? Blinq was released by the ASP.NET team at TechNet as well. Blinq is a prototype application that will create add/edit/delete/select statements in LINQ based on your database schema for your app. Stephen Walther, Dave Sussman, and Alex Homer released their ASP.NET 2.0 books. All three of these guys are probably the top authors for ASP.NET. Finally, I saw that someone created a GoogleMaps control.

Google released Google Spreadsheets on June 5th. One of the features of Google spreadsheets is to export and import Excel (xls) files. Google has accomplished this rather easily by using the Java Open API for Excel. After messing with it in my test account, its a pretty cool utility for uploading and creating spreadsheets in a pinch, but its definitely not a replacement for Excel.

I’ve added a new section to my website called the HTML Guide. It’s really nothing more than a reference guide for HTML. I’ll slowly add items to the site there. You can check out my first installment which is a listing of web safe colors by clicking here.

Scott Mitchell, a Microsoft MVP and ASPInsider, has a very good blog and website. His latest installment demonstrates how to modify the ASP.NET 2.0 login control to include a CAPTCHA control. To read about it, click here.

I kid you not. The Wilkes-Barre Bicentennial will host the Beach Boys on July 3rd at Kirby Park. If you’re a Beach Boys fan and plan on attending this event, more information can be found at the Wilkes-Barre Bicentennial website.

I was browsing through some old posts and came across this: http://www.cafepress.com/kissmyrss. I don’t know what I’m going to purchase yet… ;)

Ironically, my DSL problem was solved before I received my modem. I guess that I’ll just have to use my nice new modem now since they still believe its a modem issue. Isn’t it funny how they’d trade $160 modem for a full month’s DSL credit (at a max $29/month)? They could have given me the next 3 months of DSL for free and would have saved them $70. Unbelievable. Oh wait, yes it is – it’s an “infamous” telco. Other than this issue, I’ve never had a single issue with my Verizon DSL. I just wish they’d start “upgrading” their support!