Last week I decided that there was no more hope for my laptop, and got managerial approval to order a new one (6458A17 - ThinkPad T61p). Yay! I've been so exited about this for the past couple of days that Yeondo's starting to look at me with a bit of concern when I bring it up again... anyway, thanks John!

Now this morning my desktop's graphical card died. Now I've got a broken desktop and laptop. I'm about to switch back to my old desktop and will remote desktop to the one with the broken graphical card. ugh.,....

My laptop and I are not exactly on speaking terms these days. During the last months I had to have the motherboard replaced 3 times (broken wifi, broken sound and graphics card, broken graphics card) and today it started malfunctioning again. I can only successfully connect to a projector when I boot with the projector connected since connecting it with my machine already booted causes the screen to go haywire and the machine to hang. To add to this, I just discovered that it's now required to undock my batteries, boot with the power cable in and then add the batteries again before it turns on again.

I'm really starting to consider it as a person and I want to be angry and hate it... but how can you hate somebody with such health problems? I feel said for my friend and hopefully they can cure it.

Timothy wrote a wonderful blog entry on how to create a Popfly Block that displays its content using Silverlight:

Popfly and Silverlight make it easy to show your pictures from many places in slick little gadgets. It's easy, and fun to make these "display blocks". I wanted to do a little walkthrough of creating a display block. The examples herein are actual Popfly mashups. They do use Silverlight, so make sure you get that installed.

This first blog entry will go over a couple of simple examples...

I have been very lucky to work with amazing people in my short career and some of those have somehow changed my view on one or more aspects of life. Aaron Brethorst is one of them. He was the latest addition to the group of Program Managers on the Popfly Team and I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to work with him. I'm trying to remember some of the funny things that happened in those short months... here are 2:

Number 1 (This one is a bit vague, but still very funny at least in my world):

John: Aaron, has work item # xxxx been completed?

Aaron: Well, (about 2 minutes of very advanced English, can't remember the exact words, maybe I was doing e-mail or I just saw a shiny thing somewhere in the shiproom meeting room, I was daydreaming, or I just forgot...)

Andy/Adam (I think it was Adam): Is the lawyer speak for no?

Steven: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA (This totally cracked me up)

Number 2 (Aaron hijacked my desktop-machine on my birthday and sent out a mail to the team, You'll have to read it from the bottom to the top):

From: John Montgomery
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 10:06 AM
To: Steven Wilssens; Popfly Status
Subject: RE: I'M A BIG BOY NOW!!!

OK, you’re scaring me.

-- John

From: Steven Wilssens
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 10:06 AM
To: John Montgomery; Popfly Status
Subject: RE: I'M A BIG BOY NOW!!!

NO WAY I AM A BIG BOY NOW!!!

From: John Montgomery
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 10:05 AM
To: Steven Wilssens; Popfly Status
Subject: RE: I'M A BIG BOY NOW!!!

Left your computer unlocked, did you?

-- John

From: Steven Wilssens
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 10:05 AM
To: Popfly Status
Subject: I'M A BIG BOY NOW!!!

IT’S MY BIRTHDAY, AND I AM A BIG BOY NOW!!

I'll miss having our random talks, working on texts and popup messages, sending mails in German to the team, shouting in German to each other (we are the only 2 people on the team that have a vague knowledge of the language) or hugging you in front of non meterosexual people (at work at least ;-)).

The good news is that the title for the best dressed Program Manager on the team is up for grabs again ;-) Have fun during your new endeavor!

Dan Fernandez wrote an excellent blog post on how to Build and Publish Web Sites with Popfly Explorer Beta. Check it out.

Pieter Gheysens was kind enough to take some pictures during the announcement of Popfly Explorer Beta:

There’s also a short video of the presentation available:

Click here for more information on Popfly Explorer.

Question:

We want to create a project type that resembles the Empty Website template with the following requirement:  We will add a default.htm page which is the only file that can ever exist in the project.  Is it possible to create a restriction like that?

On Saturday afternoon, I picked up Jelle and Peter from the airport.  It was really good to see them again.  I made a small mistake driving to their hotel and got ridiculed for that: 

Peter: You've been living here for a year and you still don't know where your way around town?

Steven: I got lost in Belgium all the time too!

Peter and Jelle: That's true...

When we arrived at the hotel Jelle came up with the goods:

• 1 kilo of Lionidas chocolates.  I took them to work on Monday and went around my team. It's a national pride things I guess...
• A real Brabantia fries cutter: Picture. Impossible to find in the US.

Thanks a lot for the chocolates and the fries cutter buddy!

In the meantime some members of the other Belgain delegation had arrived.  They had already assembled in the bar, I guess it's a national pride thing.  Saturday afternoon I dragged the jetlagged Belgian boys to the bite of seattle.  It's a bit of a food festival where you've got a bunch of food stands.  It was OK, not great and was a bit too crowded for Jelle and Peter, they just got off the plane ;-).  Afterwards we ended up having drinks and food with Olivier, Theresa, Thomas, John, Cecille, Anna and Andy.  I dropped them of at the hotel and that was the end of their night.

I'm going to stop giving out detailed descriptions of how we ended up sending the reset of the week.  Paramesh's remarks, which are totally great by the way, have made me concerned about my falling reputation ;-) or is this how far I got when I started this post on Tuesday and am I just too laizy to write down what happened the rest of the week? 

Anyways here's an interesting hall way conversation:

Paramesh: So are you going out again tonight?

Steven: Euh yes, I'm meeting up with my friends tonight.  I have to, they are only in town for a week.

Paramesh: Yeah right, it's not that you are ever at home when they are not here.

Steven: hahaha... I have to admit that the last weeks have been really busy...

Jelle Druyts and Peter Demeyere and a bunch of other Belgians are coming to Seattle for TechReady. Jelle is giving a presentation on the Guidance Automation Toolkit the following week and he’s sticking around for my birthday. This makes me incredibly happy. When I first started working at Microsoft Jelle and I were the rookies and Peter Himschoot and Peter Demeyere were the experienced scary people. After about 2 years a couple of things went pretty wrong at Info Support and in a not to long time span we all left the company but remained friends ever since. I always considered Peter Himschoot to be my mentor, Peter Demeyere an incredible smart guy and Jelle… Well Jelle and I have got a very interesting history. Even when switching jobs in the years after InfoSupport we always ended up at the same company and ever since InfoSupport people always created some kind of competition between us and I’m glad it never got the upper hand. By the way Jelle is also the guy that would lend me his couch when I broke up with a girlfriend (The stories he could tell ;-)). Anyway one of the biggest tests of our friendship probably was when we did our Devdays presentations together. I had just moved out of the house me and Wendy had been living in for the last years, Wendy still lives there so you kinda know what went wrong and I really wasn’t up to giving or preparing any kind of presentation. We ended up in a sprint and finalized the presentation a couple of hours before we went on stage. I don’t think it’s that much different from a lot of presentations but anyways… It was still early days for Visual Studio Team System back then and the prerelease version blew up a couple of time in never before seen ways but … at least Jelle and I had a lot of fun!

http://tastelikepizza.com/index.php?itemid=5181

No words needed!

Just another random office conversation:

Steven: I know how the new harry potter book ends

Suzanne: Don't you tell, me! I will beat you up and I'm very serious about that!

Besides the fact that I absolutely love my Zune, there's one thing that could be better ;-).  When you reinstall your machine to which your Zune is bound, you can either reconnect as a guest after the installation or just erase everything that is one your Zune and start all over.  It's dissapointing... 

I've been planning on writing a post on my shoulder operation but I just haven't been up for it.

Before Suzanne brought me to the hospital, Murali (one of the developers on our team) detected serious performance degradation on popfly.com.  This caused me to file a high priority ticket to the operations team, just before I left.  One of the implications of filing a high priority ticket is that the coming 24 hours, you need to be available to work with operations team on getting the problem resolved.  Since I was undergoing surgery in about 2 hours that was going to be a bit of a problem, but I asked Murali and John to act on my behalf, and they handled it perfectly.

I made it clear to everybody in the hospital that I get nauseous when I have anesthesia, so eventually I got 2 anti-nausea injections.  My surgeon is, just like me, a man of few words when it comes to getting his job done. 

Doctor Castle: "Do you have any questions?"

Me: "Am I going to be ok?"

Doctor Castle: "Yes"

Me: "That's all I need to know, we'll talk later..."

Doctor Castle: "Sounds good"

He was running a bit ahead on his schedule, and before I knew it I was laying on the operation table. 

Lights out...

When I woke up again, I was feeling pretty nauseous, ant-nausea medication suck everywhere around the world.

After about 10 minutes in the recovery room, my ride home arrived to pick me up.  Well,... I wasn't really in a state to be picked up to be honest.  Nauseous and still pretty much under the influence of the anesthesia but I was in a lot of pain.  After another half hour I stared to become more human again, and the nurse told me that I should try to get my clothes on.

I forgot to mention that I got my surgery on the hottest day of the year and I was just burning up while I was resting on my couch. Thomas came by to say hi and I fully thought I was engaged in a conversation with him and was answering his questions without him even needing to speak. At one point I realized that I was going nuts, which was a strange sensation.

At the end of the day I own a couple of people a very big thank you:

Suzanne: Thanks for driving me to the hospital

John: Thanks for taking care of me when Anna left, and getting the cookies I wanted

Thomas: Thanks for popping by, checking up on me, and having a non-existing conversation with me.

John: Is there anything else we should be worried about?

A couple of people: Global warming!

John: I just love this group.

I’m on lucky streak of getting my ass kicked in English:

Wes: Why don’t you shut your mouth

Steven: Why don’t I shut it for you? (Thinking I was being tuff)

Wes: Yeah, you do that.

Steven: Crap, I suck at this language ;-)

Next time…

I got Thomas to give a demo on Data Dude today. Vinay and Murali are excited about the product and I'm excited because by using Data Dude we’ll overcome some of the concerns I’ve been having with regards to our database development and deployment. The Popfly team has added Data Dude to its tools today. YAY! 

Thomas and I went out for some Chinese food on Monday and this is what my fortune cookie had to say: “You will be made stronger by adversity”. Ugh… I think I’ve had enough of that by now! I’m strong enough stupid fortune cookie.

A couple of months ago, I went climbing with friends and at one point something really popped in my shoulder. It felt like a muscle shifted but after a couple of doctor visits, the diagnosis was that I had sustained a Labral Tear. The labrum is analogous to the meniscus in the knee. It is a ring of cartilage that attaches to and extends the effective area of the glenoid (the socket of the shoulder). The labrum helps to stabilize the ball-and-socket joint (glenohumeral joint) and serves as an attachment site for ligaments around the shoulder as well as the biceps tendon.

I was planning on continuing to do sports during this summer and get the operation afterwards but the pain was just unbearable and I ended not exercising so there really was no point in postponing it any further. On Wednesday the 11^th of July, I’ll be undergoing surgery on my shoulder to fix the tear. During the surgery, the doctor will examine the rim and the biceps tendon. If the injury is confined to the rim itself, without involving the tendon, the shoulder is still stable. The surgeon will remove the torn flap and correct any other associated problems. If the tear extends into the biceps tendon or if the tendon is detached, the result is an unstable joint. The surgeon will need to repair and reattach the tendon using absorbable tacks, wires or sutures.

According to literature my shoulder should be in a sling for about 3 weeks, by my surgeon told me that I should be freed of that thing after a week. I’ve been practicing on typing with 1 hand and driving my car with 1 hand, so don’t be scared if you happen to be in Seattle and you see silver Volkswagen Golf in your rear view mirror. Apparently I should be able to start doing some minor sports-specific exercises after 6 weeks, but I won’t be climbing before 4-5 months. I’ll be glad if I’m able to go cycling again after a week or 6.

Although I have got some really good friends that will take care of me, I have to be honest and confess that I’m really scared…

Weston, Matt, John and I went to see the transformers movie last night.  It started at midnight, and we got out of the movie theater at about 2.45.  We had 3^rd row seats, which really wasn’t optimal, to make an understatement. I absolutely loved the movie, it was like my childhood fantasies came to life and I remembered how I much I loved the Transformers cartoon as a child.

It really is a good movie, and if you’re a Transformers fan you will definitely love it.

A couple of weeks ago, I forgot to renew my hosting subscription a couple of weeks ago and my provider took down my website.  When I called them, provided them with the needed currency, they reactivated my account… but my blog wasn't working anymore.  Apparently some configuration settings were reset to their default values and I finally felt like fixing it today!  So yes, I'm back baby!

Lots of things happened: not all good, not all bad and when I have the time I'll tell you about it! 

Ah and just to make you jealous, I'm seeing the Transformers movie tonight!

Autobots roll out!

Since my office mate Wes is actually younger then my younger brother, I’ve been calling him little brother lately.

This is the kind of talk these young kids have these days:

I'm not little brother… There's a rage inside of me. A rage of which you've never seen the likes before...

I call him scary little brother now ;-)