Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

Brad Feld wrote about his trip to Europe about a month ago.  He was in Munich for some time, and he mentioned some “wackadoodle surfers practicing in the small river under a bridge with a water pipe”.  Well, Erin and I were in Munich last October on our honeymoon, and I’m pretty sure we saw the same guys surfing near the English Garden, check it out:

Imagine just to the left of this picture a large concrete pipe that the water is coming out from, it looks very weird to see this in the middle of the city. These guys stay in the exact same spot while they surf side to side on that one wave.  The other guys standing on the side are next in line to surf after this guy falls.  He’ll float downstream a bit and then get back in line, its pretty funny to watch.  We saw this towards the end of our Mike’s Bike Tour of Munich, which I highly recommend.

Has anyone noticed how MSDN2 has that nice fade effect when you leave one of their pages? Thats a pretty spiffy effect, except for when I want to get shit done.

MSDN2 is basically a dictionary/encyclopedia site; I go there to look up specific things dealing with Microsoft frameworks and apis.  I don’t need to be wowed with the cool dhtml eye candy, especially if it slows down the page loading (which it does).  This page about the DataTable class is 616 kb, which is about the size as the shareware games I used to download in junior high.

I typically browse through MSDN as I find what I want and it sucks to have to wait even a few seconds to get to the next page.

All that said, I do like some of the features of MSDN2, namely the fact that the tree view works in firefox and the language filter, those rock!

A feature I’ve just recently discovered in Visual Studio is the concept of going “Back” like you would in a web browser. I use the context menu option “Go to definition” a lot, and after using it 5 times in a row as you navigate through a codebase, its easy to get lost in the code.  Luckily, they thought of this and added some Forward and Back functionality.  Its under the View menu, “Navigate Forward” and “Navigate Backward” (Ctrl+-, Ctrl+Shift+-, respectively).  Now I can jump around all I want and with a few keystrokes be back to where I started.
I thought of this feature awhile ago and was going to post about how they should implement this feature, not realizing that the feature already existed. I’m glad I eventually found the functionality, rather than declare Microsoft stupid for not implementing it and looking like an ass

For the past 2 weeks or so, all I’ve been listening to in the car is the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, Stadium Arcadium. This album is effing good, and its a double disc, so its twice the fun.  Theres a good mix of music on the album, some rock, some rap, slow, fast, its very diverse and its awesome. There are 14 tracks on each disc, heres a list of the “good” songs from each disc.

Disc 1:

• Track 1 - Dani California
• Track 2 - Snow (Hey Oh)
• Track 3 - Charlie
• Track 6 - She’s Only 18
• Track 7 - Slow Cheetah
• Track 8 - Torture Me
• Track 9 - Strip My Mind
• Track 10 - Especially in Michigan
• Track 11 - Warlocks
• Track 12 - C’mon Girl
• Track 13 - Wet Sand

Disc 2:

• Track 1 - Desecration Smile
• Track 2 - Tell Me Baby
• Track 3 - Hard to Concentrate
• Track 5 - She Looks to Me
• Track 8 - Make You Feel Better
• Track 10 - So Much I
• Track 11 - Storm in a Teacup
• Track 12 - We Believe
• Track 13 -  Turn it Again

Sadly, I can’t think of any other new music that I’ve come across lately that I like…………

Ha! I just now learned the term “JFGI” from Jason Bock, which I agree should replace RTFM.  I can’t even tell you how many times this pops up on mailing lists
There was no wikipedia entry for this, so I created one.