Hello, I'm   Jason

A man took his PC back to Best Buy last year because the hard drive went bad. It was replaced for free as it was within warranty. However, he recently received word from someone else that they had his hard drive - not good. No wonder there are so many issues with personal information being compromised. For the full article, click here.

Scott Guthrie just posted the 2nd part of a really cool article series about DLinq and ASP.NET. You can read more about it here.

Unfortunately I will not be at TechEd to hang out with any of my friends (which I can probably count on one hand ). Fortunately, I will be sitting on a beach somewhere enjoying no cell phone or laptop. I will probably check in with the TechEd folks later in the day each day but I won’t be checking email regularly. To all who will be in Boston, have fun and maybe I’ll run into you very soon.

Wally McClure and I were talking about a blog post by Dave Rosenburg this morning. Apparently, Dave thinks that ASP.NET is a resource hog because it cannot perform using a Virtual Machine or Virtual Server. Instead, he suggested hosting an ASP.NET application on a linux/UNIX box much like the MainSoft offering. How crude is that? :)

According to Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch, Microsoft may ponder removing the Save to PDF option in the 2007 Microsoft Office System. Personally, I hope they don’t remove it. Adobe should understand that there should be other benefits to having Adobe Acrobat Standard or Professional besides saving documents as PDF. Right now, for the common IT professional or office user, there are very few. Eventually, people will stop purchasing Acrobat just for that reason whether Microsoft includes the Save to PDF option or not.

Within the past 3 years, Google has taken aim at Microsoft and visa versa. Nearly all services and/or planned services have been countered by the other. Here is a current (as of this post) list comparing Microsoft and Google products:

Sometimes on a web page you have a div container with 2 or more divs within. In many cases, you’ll want the background from one of the divs to fill the container div. Unfortunately, the div style property height does not support a percentage value as of XHTML 1.1. Instead, you can “fool” the div by repeating the background on the container control like this:

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<div id="container" style="background-image: url('containerbkg.gif'); background-repeat: repeat-y;">  
    <div id="menu" style="float: left; width: 100px;">  
        Item 1<br/>  
        Item 2  
    </div>  
    <div id="body" style="margin-left: 100px; width: 300pt;">  
        Body goes here<br/><br/>  
        Body continues here<br/><br/>  
        Body ends here.  
    </div>  
</div>

Before I begin, I’d like to apologize to all the good service and support personnel that do work at Verizon. I’ve never met you, but I’m sure you’re out there. I went online last night to do some work and noticed that the DSL was down. I checked my router and the line status said DOWN. Good enough, I figured I’d call Verizon to see what was going on. I live in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area of Northeastern Pennsylvania. A message stated that service was down from somewhere in Massachusetts to New York City (about 2 1/2 hours away) to Virginia. I wasn’t sure if I was included in the area, so I finally received a service rep. The rep forced me to do everything from unhooking my router to resetting the modem to attempting to connect via the modem. Nothing worked. The last thing we tried was changing the connection settings in the modem from bridge to PPPoE. After 10 seconds I received a message box that said “A timeout occurred while attempting to connect. The connection is down.” The service rep then said that because I received a timeout, my modem must be bad. I kid you not. The connection is down so that automatically means the modem is bad. I asked her if by chance the line is down and she said I’m not in a reported outage area and she could not test to see if the connection is down, but she’d bet that it was a modem issue instead of a line issue. <sigh>

Wally McClure and Paul Glavich, both ASPInsiders, run the unofficial ASP.NET Podcast. Each week a new “episode” is released where someone from the ASP.NET Podcast team usually interviews a few peers about upcoming technology, tips and tricks, etc. Be sure to check it out and subscribe to the RSS feed.

Major Nelson has announced the new Xbox 360 dashboard and walked through it on the on10.net website. You can see the video here.