irritatedVowel.com

Fellow Silverlight enthusiast (and great author) Chad Campbell called me out on this, so now it's my turn :) How old were you when you first started programming? That was either 6th grade or 7th grade, so I was around 12. I often question the people who tell you they were hacking systems at the age of 6, but who knows? :) How did you get ...

I like to mess around with computers. Every primary computer I've owned since my first 486 has been built by me (my previous computers, a 286 and a Commodore 128 were purchased). I also run a moderately complex network at my house which I realize I have never fully described anywhere. So, thought I'd tell you about it here. Why My first server ...

One of my other hobbies is woodworking (my whole upstairs is one big project right now). Thought this was funny, but I doubt I can wear it to any client sites <g>:

I hope you all have (or had) a Merry Christmas! I just finished up helping Santa put some presents under the tree for our boy (he'll be two in February). Now I'm down here removing all the old alphas and betas and installing the latest VS and Expression tools, as well as the latest Silverlight bits. A full uninstall ...

My main website is pretty disjointed from my blog here, and with one exception, is rarely updated any more. I do plan to convert the main site over, prune out old stuff at somepoint, and make it as easy to update as my blog (WSS will likely be part of that solution) Anyway, the one part of my main site that does get updated on a fairly regular ...

I'm in the middle of a never-ending home renovation project. As such, I tend to use my two Bosch drills a lot. My son (20 months old now) was obsessed with the "brrrumba" (his name for the drill, based on its sound), and would go nuts whenever I used it. So we bought him a toy drill. Unfortunately, because it had googly eyes and ...

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had won an APC Netshelter server rack on eBay.  I just put in a dedicated 20amp circuit to power the computers on this rack. So far, 20amps seems to be more than enough. If not, it's easy to run another as the rack is in the same room as the main panel. Here are two photos (click for larger ...

Last year, I started getting into Festool tools. Festool is a German tool company that manufactures the tools in Germany. Almost all other popular tools these days are made in asia by the lowest bidder. You pay a premium for the tools, but like nice German cars, you just can't quite match them for less. Festool is squarely targeted at ...

I've updated the kitchen cabinet plans several times over the course of construction. Here's the latest set (click to zoom):  

I installed the base corner cabinet over the weekend. I assembled this in the kitchen as the cabinet is pretty huge. As of now, the two installed cabinets are the oven cabinet and the corner cabinet. The others in the photos are the temporary cabinets. Like all the other cabinets, the toe kick was  assembled separately from the ...