I've got two 10 page papers to write by Wednesday so I figure there's no better time to write a post about the things you can find in my Swiss Synergy backpack. This backpack is rather large but its size often comes in handy (grocery store trips and school finals come to mind). I used to value micro sized bags but …

In Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation, he pleaded with the American people to "avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow." He also acknowledged the existence and influence of a militaryindustrial complex on …

In one of my earlier posts "The Software I Use Daily," I wrote

The Penton Press Master CD is a must have for any Windows administrator. It is a CHM file which contains every article from Windows IT Pro, SQL Server Magazine, Exchange & Outlook Adminisrator, Windows Scripting Solutions, Windows IT Security …

The day that Office 2007 came out, I logged in to MSDN and downloaded the ISO. A good seven hours later, I was still attempting to install the suite of apps. I run Windows Server 2003 on my laptop and wondered if that was a problem but the system requirements listing said that Office 2007 was compatible with Win2k3. My …

I recently created a plugin called currentMusic, which is derived from the WordPress plugins Current Mood and Scrobbler. currentMusic supports something similar to LiveJournal's "Current Music" functinality. The plugin uses Last.FM to see what you were likely listening to at the time that you posted. It works …

I made a decently big change tonight to Quickcode so if you use the plugin, you may want to download the updated version.

The change, adding "overflow-x:scroll;" to the CSS file (in two places), stopped IE from hiding the last line of anything that was placed within the quickcode tag. I don't use IE so I …

Windows XP and 2003 (SP1) users can now download the RDP client that comes with Vista @ microsoft.com. If you don't like it and need to go back to the original version, you can possibly uninstall it or reinstall RDP 5.2.

The new version supports widescreen/huge resolutions as well as auto-logins. There are a few other …

Below is a list of applications I use on a regular basis. I was actually inspired to write this post because I wanted a way to share my excitement for the free tools Virtual CloneDrive and visionapp Remote Desktop. After starting the post, however, I realized that there's actually a lot of really cool applications that …

SQLPrompt, also known as SQL Intellisense, is a great add-on to SQL Workbench and Query Analyser available from red-gate software. SQLPrompt is described on their website as

* Code completion for fast, accurate script building * Discoverability in SQL Server query creation * Keyword formatting, code snippet …

Wow, it was over a year ago that I met my friend, PowerShell developer Lee Holmes at PDC 05. As a fan of scripting and Unix, I was excited after attending a session on Microsoft's new shell, codenamed "Monad." After the session, I went to the Microsoft's lab to play around and there was Lee.. my dream nerd. …