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December 2003 - Posts

Sunday, December 28, 2003 8:05 PM

New Toys

For the holidays, I picked up: A Taiyo edge R/C hovercraft . A real-live hovercraft with all the maneuverability and controllability of a real hovercraft (ie not a lot). Lots of fun, but it's really hard to drive. Though the drive fans reverse, if you
Posted by ericgu | 2 Comments
Saturday, December 27, 2003 8:25 PM

Holiday Letter

Every year, I attempt to write a humorous holiday letter. Here's the 2003 edition, for your perusal - and with any luck, enjoyment. Holiday Letter Reloaded – Gunnerson 2003 Now with 30% fewer laughs! I hope you are well during this holiday season.
Posted by ericgu | 4 Comments
Thursday, December 18, 2003 9:13 PM

LOTR Review

This afternoon, the C# team went to see LotR: Return of the King. I should preface this by saying that I'm not a big Tolkien fan (or a fan of fantasy in general). Note: There are some spoilers in this post. It's not a bad film, but contrary to Scoble
Posted by ericgu | 7 Comments
Wednesday, December 17, 2003 2:30 PM

SpaceShip One breaks the sound barrier

Burt Rutan is a national treasure. Scratch that. Burt Rutan is a global treasure. Rutan, the designer of the Voyager aircraft that circumnavigated the world on a single tank of gas. His most recent project at Scaled Composites is an attempt to with the
Posted by ericgu | 2 Comments
Sunday, December 14, 2003 8:49 PM

My lights are done...

delta a few miscellaneous strings that will go up in the next day or so, my holiday display is complete. I think I'm up to about 4000-5000 lights so far. There are three main displays: Santa and the Sleigh An animated Santa, run by an 8-channel homebuilt
Posted by ericgu | 9 Comments
Sunday, December 14, 2003 8:24 PM

Garden d'lights 2003 - Bellevue Botanical Gardens

Every year, the Bellevue Botanical Gardens bring out the lights. They do a wonderful job of creating plants out of lights. Recommended.
Posted by ericgu | 2 Comments
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Sunday, December 14, 2003 8:18 PM

Review: Space - A Journey to our future

Today, I took my 9 yo daughter and a friend of hers to the Pacific Science Center, to see the “ Space ” exhibit. The girls liked it, but I'll only give it a C grade. Highlights: A functioning IR camera with a display screen, but with no useful
Posted by ericgu | 1 Comments
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Friday, December 12, 2003 12:39 PM

Here there be tigers - operator overloading and conversions

I came across a discussion in the last few days that I thought I would share with you. It concerns the following code: class Utility { public void Process(object o); public void Process(string s); } and then a call to Process that passed in a string.
Posted by ericgu | 5 Comments
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Friday, December 12, 2003 11:16 AM

Lost our lease - Everything must go!

As part of a consolidation move, my blog is migrating to http://weblogs.asp.net/ericgu  ( RSS ). The new blog is up and running, so I'm going to start posting there instead of here. The existing content will get migrated over at the end of the month.
Posted by ericgu | 1 Comments
Friday, December 12, 2003 8:32 AM

A Devil's Chaplain and courteous disagreement

I just finished reading “ A Devil's Chaplain ” by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is one of my absolute favorite science writers, both because of his perspective (it's easy to like authors you agree with) and his phenomenal writing style. Dawkins
Posted by ericgu | 6 Comments
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Tuesday, December 09, 2003 2:57 PM

Welcome... Again...

My blog is now in its new home on asp.net. I have mixed feelings about the move. While it's different, it's already clear that .Text is a better solution than BlogX was, and has people actively supporting it. But I'm unhappy about two things: I lose my
Posted by ericgu | 5 Comments
Tuesday, December 09, 2003 1:46 PM

Strong AI, and back to the moon...

Rory wrote a post about strong AI and whether we should spend money there rather than going back to the moon . I started writing a comment for his blog, but then decided to write my own entry. I don't know if you were around during the 80's, but there
Posted by ericgu | 4 Comments
Monday, December 08, 2003 7:59 PM

Troubleshooting holiday lights

I spent a fair bit of time putting up my lights this weekend, and had to do some troubleshooting sets that weren't working. This can be tough to do without a bit of help. While many bulbs have shunts that prevent the string from going out, they don't
Posted by ericgu | 2 Comments
Monday, December 08, 2003 4:33 PM

Unmanaged objects and memory usage

I few years ago I wrote a small utility class named Win32Window, so that I could write an automated tool to close down some of the dialogs that would appear whenever outlook lost a server connection (which was often, since it happened whenever I opened
Posted by ericgu | 6 Comments
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Thursday, December 04, 2003 12:27 PM

How do you look for code?

Another question, this time from one of the other PMs on the team: The C# team is trying to understand how you look for code when stuck or trying to learn some new technology. Currently the solution we provide is in the documentation – you can find among
Posted by ericgu | 58 Comments
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Wednesday, December 03, 2003 12:13 AM

The Mad Scientist's Club

The year is 1974. Disco was at it's height (or depth, depending on how you look at it). And I was reading a book by Bertrand Brinley called The Mad Scientist's Club. I has a story of a bunch of boys who have various adventures and make their townspeople
Posted by ericgu | 3 Comments
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Wednesday, December 03, 2003 12:02 AM

Floating Point Arithmetic

Waaaaaay back in college, I spent some time on queueing theory (you know, Poissan distributions and all that). The most surprising part for me was that a random distribution of arrivals pretty much ensures that you will have clusters that are very
Posted by ericgu | 3 Comments
 
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