OK - today was one of the strangest days in my working life - at least if you look on what I did…

Avega is doing a makeover of our website - which, if we are honest was needed for a while. On the site the want to show some of our consultant. Also they wanted to show their hobbies and activities from outside of work.

So I have been posing in my “working outfit” - that was quite a bit more formal than I usually have - and in the Salvation Army uniform and euphonium.

I pictures was actually quite nice, surprisingly with me on them… Nothing naked (as IF??) and just nice pictures. I post them and a link to the pictures on the Avega - site as they are released.

Also I found the whole experience quite nice - might strike up a new career here…...

Whoa - in the next version of Visual Studio (2008) they have put in a lot of work into the build engine. And if we are honest the version that exists today is not excellent…

But these introductions promise a lot, and a lot of good, good stuff too. I can’t wait to read and see more about this.

I found a, what I thought was, hilarious sign in one of the major stores in Stockholm.

Above one of the cashiers a big sign hung that stated (roughly translation here) “No candy-exposure in this cashier”

How is it with the self-control of the people asking the store to up that sign:

• “I’m sorry but I am on a diet and if I see a candy-bar I just must have it. Could you please have a cashier with no candy in it and put a sign above it so I know which one it is?”
• “(smack) Yeah, I know I should not (chew, chew) eat these - but hey (munch) it’s not my fault. Did you know that they put candy IN THE CASHIER??!! (smack) I stand helpless to that.”

For your information the rest of the store (as all stores) is cramped with candy and candy-exposure. I...

As many might know there are not many bands in the Salvation Army left. In the Stockholm area we have four that is functioning every week.

And now there have been considerable moving from one band to another; it is in reality only two families that has moved from the Södertälje Band to the Stockholm Southern Band. But that makes up about 8-10 playing persons so it will make a impact.

Since Södertälje is my home-band I really feel for them loosing so many players at once. But in one way that makes it all much easier - there is now only one way forward: lets start building something from the ground up. Build the band as the christian fellowship it is supposed to be instead of clinging to old merits that the band did 15-20 years back.

Build the group not the reputation.

It reminds me of...

As I’ve written before the refactoring support in Visual Studio 2005 is non-existing (or at least very very bad) for Visual Basic.

So we have to settle with third party products. The best I’ve found is Refactor! but it’s not very good either (my studio hangs from time to time after installing Refactor!).

But now there are new hopes; a new version of Refactor! is highlighted when the studio is started. Download the new version here for free and see a movie about its use here.

Refactor! still has the coolest GUI I’ve seen for a long time. Not that usable maybe but cool.

I am keeping my fingers crossed for the product to be better than earlier versions… which is pretty hard when you are programming ;)

In the brass band one of the most neglected instrument is the tenor horn. It’s however very important for the sound of the band to have good horn players. But since the horn players seldom get the opportunity to “shine” not many player plays it and there is the dilemma.

So it’s rare and really fun to here really good horn players and the best one around right now must be Owen Farr. He is featured this week on Listen To The Band in finale of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto.

It’s simply breathtaking! I can’t believe some of the sounds and technique he produces. I am for the first time in my life thinking of buying a CD with a tenor horn player.

I am doing it! Now!

From one of the Visual Studio videos I got this tip: http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/

It is a site that holds a lot of free templates (CSS and XHTML) that you can use to build websites with. So now you have something to start off with instead of hacking it all by yourself.

Especially good for me since I don’t have any design-related brain-cells at all.

Found some introduction videos about Visual Studio 2008 that look quite promising: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb655906.aspx

Do you remember a year back when we all was so happy to start using Visual Studio 2005 - it’s old, my friend. Old I tell you.

Microsoft is releasing Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 which usually means that they are about half a year from releasing a stable version of it.

This time even I feel that things are moving quite fast in our world… I read this white paper about it yesterday and it doesn’t seem to be any big revolutions in the release, such as the 2.0 version of the .NET framework was.

OK - something has happened on the net when I was on vacation. The new site www.facebook.com has suddenly exploded. With people, with functions and foremost with activity…

I just heard about before leaving but suddenly everyone has a account and is writing in guestbooks and adding photos.

There are some quite cool functionality in there but all in all I am getting a bit annoyed by all these stay-in-touch-sites. I mean, who really has the time to maintain a work-network on LinkedIn, friend network on facebook and a network of old schoolmates on whatever.com.

Well, well it’s always fun to meet friends so I’ll tag along