Fear and Loathing

Well that went well. Checked into the Calgary airport at 4pm for a 6pm flight. Hey, it's Calgary. Expect to show up about 20 minutes before the flight for domestic and an hour (or so) for international. I don't know what it is with our airport, but waits are pretty short and it's actually a pleasant experience (at least as far as airport experiences go). Spent about 25 minutes waiting in line then 5 minutes telling the attendant where I was going, what I was carrying, etc. etc. Another 15 minutes or so getting through customs and I was ready to go. The take-off worked which was a good thing. It's pretty cloudy here in Calgary (which comes directly from it raining the last 3 days straight) so got some pretty cool shots as we were taking off. Of course check out below how those pictures are probably gone into the ethers of the tangent universe forever now.

The flight is longer than I thought. I keep forgetting I'm going over the great imaginary line of "set-your-watches-ahead-an-hour". So it's actually 3 hours cramped in my 18F seat (note to self: next trip I'm going Executive Class so I have some leg and elbow room). At least I was 1 seat away from the emergency exit so in the case of unexpected meteor strikes (I was watching the skies) I'll be pretty good. Just a quick hop over the seat in front of me and I'll be boucing my way to freedom.

We landed in L.A. with relative ease but the dude in 17D (you know who you are) kept staring at the hot German babe as she was getting ready to leave. I kept looking at him as if he was maybe finding a good thing to say to her, but he just stared at her boobs. After a few moments he glanced up to see me looking at him (at which time I shifted my glare to his 60ish old wife). He smiled briefly but knew he was caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Yes, that was the most eventful thing of the trip. Two things I noticed on the way down here (and I haven't flown for a few years, so bear with me) but a 3 hour flight with no dinner? And no movie! I got to watch a crappy episode of That 70's Show, a bunch of PSAs for various services, and (yes, I find it hard to believe to) a documentary on Lemurs. Yeah. Lemurs. And they wonder why people commit random acts of violence on flights.

I'll also admit that I guess I'm not as clever as I think I am sometimes. I was taking some time last night as I got my crap together and realized a few cool things I stumbled across. First there's a pretty slick .NET app that will download the PDC sessions to your PocketPC and download various notes and whatnot. I tried hooking it up but I'm running Windows Mobile 2003 on my Dell Axim and it keeps yelling at me like an angry housewife about it not being compatible. It runs however but the login didn't work for me. Sometimes I wonder how I get my laptop booted some days. Second the PDC guys have come along with a wicked night at Universal Studios for all attendees. Free of charge (of course).

So I finally get to the hotel after a bitchin' ride that shaved all but a few years off my already dwindling soul. The driver seemed like a cheery fellow (telling us how Paris Hilton takes shuttles too) but then proceeded to burn rubber throughout LAX with 9 people in tow (and me digging my fingernails into the seat in front of me). He said at one point that it took him and hour to get somewhere the other day. I'm a calm guy and will believe a lot of things that are fed to me but if that dude ever took an hour to get somewhere I'll eat this blog posting in public. The hotel I'm staying at (the Miyako) isn't bad but I got a bit of a shaft on the Internet site and comments from it. It's fine and all. Clean. Quiet. On a side-street so not a lot of traffic. However it just seems plain. Next year it's the Wilshire Grand or something a little more upscale.

And to top the day off, I seem to have lost my digital camera. Yeah, stupid me must have lost it in the shuttle or when I tripped getting out of it (trust me, I was running as fast as I could from them once it came to a complete and utter stop). So now here I am, a day away from PDC and I'm going to have to go find me a new digital camera to carry me through the conference. Bummer. Didn't really want to drop another few hundred on something as silly as that but my poor camera phone just doesn't cut it and I doubt I'll get my old FinePix back. Oh well, off to shoppping in the morning.

I'm still struggling with what to do with myself off-hours but I'm heading out to the PDC Underground event and the Universal Studio night is going to rock. Otherwise I'll just wander the streets of L.A. hoping to find something fun to do. Maybe I'll roll a homeless person, start a small racial-based riot, or just stand on the corner waving a sign "Will code for food" and see where that takes me. With losing my camera, I might change that sign to "Will code for electronic equipment" so take pity on the poor Canadian boy.

PDC05
Flickr (no pics today as Mr. Fuji has going MIA)
Moblog

Here we go. We're counting down to PDC and we're at Day -02 (PDC doesn't officially start until Tuesday and I'm a 0-based counter just like C#). I'm sitting here going through my sessions, getting my papers ready for the evil border police (waving the Canadian flag at them just doesn't cut it anymore), and otherwise panicking as I'm sure I'll forget something. Here's my checklist for the event:

• Passport and money to bribe border officials, needed to get past the security drone at the airport (note to self: don't use Monopoly money this time round)
• eTickets for flight, pretty necessary if I want to get onto the actual plane (other than waving a bar of soap that might work but it's raining in Calgary so it might sud up, 10 points to Gryffindor who can name the movie that's from)
• Extra large bag with minimal clothes so I have room for all the geek toys I'll pick up in L.A. and the conference (or whatever else I pick up, homeless people, small marsupials, etc.)
• Earthquake-proof Presario R4000 laptop with enough games and music on it so I can keep myself occupied (or at least look that way)
• Laptop case for said laptop so I can take it on the plane with me. After all it's been days since I was last at CPR so controlling safety critical software with a computer is just in my blood.
• More USB flash drives than you can shake a stick at so I can quickly steal any content that happens to be lying around at the booths.
• 80GB USB external drive with my virtual machine images and various other stuff (porn of course) so I can show off whatever we geeks show off at the conference.
• Official Microsoft "I'm an uber-geek" clothes and badges so everyone knows how nerdy I really am
• Canadian flag on pretty much everything just in case America is invaded by misplaced Peruvians. I figure they'll put us Canucks in hotels because they pity our lack of indecision/responsibility/whatever with the NAFTA.
• A ton of AA batteries for my MP3 player and digital camera (no, nothing else is battery powered so don't even go there!)
• My name written into my Spiderman Underoos just in case I get lost. If you see a nerdy looking guy wandering the streets of L.A. next week, check the tag and return to sender.

One thing about PDC sessions. They have a nice feature online to launch a calendar object so you can add it to your Outlook schedule. However my Outlook is on my desktop so I'll be syncing with my PDA. When you launch the iCal file, it automatically adjusts the schedule to whatever your current time zone is so all my sessions are 1 hour off. I only realized this after adding them all to my calendar but for those that are doing it this way, just keep an eye out for that.

You can track me through this blog everyday from now until I last (or I come back to Calgary). I'll be posting through three different mediums:

1. Through this blog (which will become part of the bigger PDC05 tagged posts)
2. Through my own Flickr page here (which will also appear on the official PDC Flicker tagged photos here)
3. Through my photoblog on textamerica.com if I catch anything with my camera phone that I can't with my camera (lower res but handy for those public police beating type events that come up)

Well, it's off to bed shortly and a new blog tommorow as I face my annual full body search event at the airport. Cheers!

I've been testing a new add-on for SharePoint called 80-20 Compliance Server (hey, I don't make these names up) for some time now and it's a pretty nice package. The team responsible, 80-20 Software, has been quite voracious in getting new builds together, responding to feedback, and keeping the product up and stable in the last few weeks.

The package is made up of a few components that site next to SharePoint (including a server, Web Parts, admin tools etc.) and is primarily targeted at managing the retention lifecycle of content in SharePoint. It does this by applying business rules that you define to handle the retention for you. This is a little more than just archiving as it has search and other goodies for the documents and just doesn't offload something to a tape farm but applies business processing against them like what should be retained, how long they should be kept, etc. It's quite nice and has some added value if you're looking for this sort of thing that SharePoint doesn't provide OOTB. It also has a SDK (unfortunately I haven't had a lot of time to play with yet) which allows you to integrate their system with your own CRM, ERP, or whatever you want.

The official release of the public beta is for Monday but you can check it out now on their page here and join the public beta program.

Also I'm leaving Cowtown on Sunday for PDC all next week. Can't wait to meet everyone out there so be sure to look for the big geek spouting SharePoint goodness to everyone. Stay tuned to the blog for daily blow-by-blows, pics, and of course the infamous Whack-a-Fitz videos (subject to participation and state and federal export laws).

The blog has been pretty barren the last while but last week I made a pretty big decision and submitted my resignation to my current employer, Canadian Pacific Railway. I had been with CP since 1996 (my 10 year anniversary would be April 1, 2006) and it was the longest I was with an organization (previously I was at H&R Block for 3-4 years). Many opportunities came up over the years, but I stayed loyal to the railway. Finally an opportunity and circumstances came up that I couldn't pass on. It was a tough and hard decision but the right one for me.

It's been a great time with CP and I've done a lot of amazing things over the years and moved the IT department in some pretty interesting directions. As CPR is primarily a railway, it's hard to actually get the business to buy into this whole technology thing (don't even ask me about introducing Agile to a Railroad) but I was pretty instrumental in getting the organization to adopt new versions of software the same year it was released (yes, sounds silly but it actually was a challenge). CPR was the home where I was exposed to and introduced SharePoint (I'm sure they'll hate me for that) and it was a fun place to write software that controlled 120-ton trains and the track they run on (yeah, you can feel worried at railroad crossings now that you know who's software is behind them).

Anyways, I'm off now into the wild after almost 10 years to bigger and better things and will be working in the private sector doing SharePoint and .NET Architecture and Consulting for a variety of clients. New daemons to battle, new technologies to conquer, new Microsquishy people to badger, and new expense budgets to blow. Hope the next 10 years are as fun as the last 10 were (at least I won't be crashing any trains anytime soon).

Seems like a lot of people are posting the sessions they're attending at PDC this year so why not join the lemmings. Here's my picks that I think I'll stick with. Going to be a busy week but looks like nerd heaven. Mostly slanted towards SharePoint (well, duh!) but some Architecture sessions thrown in and I'm sorry, but no geek can miss Anders Hejlsberg talking about future directions in languages. After all, he is the father of Delphi and C#.

Caught a posting by Michael Greth on a new (at least I think it's new) release of SPToolBar, a tool put together by James Milne. James is the gent responsible for his only SPSkin tool that lets you build your CSS files for SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services sites. SPToolBar is a nice Web Part that provides some features that you can add to your otherwise bland pages like creating a printer friendly version of the page, sending the page as an email message, adding to your Favorites, and other goodness. You can download it directly here. Also check out James' other projects on his home page as they look pretty interesting!

The Channel 9 guys have made their decision and the decision is good. Bonk has won the Blog'n my way to PDC contest with his excellent entry with his plans to use Avalon (Windows Presentation Foundation for all you zealots). Very cool stuff and check out the impressive video on his site. I'm looking forward to seeing what he does with WPF and .NET so he's on my blogroll now. I'm just hoping I can find some time in the next couple of weeks to do some cool stuff to show off at PDC at the Show Off event. Time to break out my DX toolkit and dust off my aging graphics skills again. Congrats again Bonk for a well deserved win (and Happy Birthday!).

Ever wonder what you can do with the horizontal navigation bar in a WSS site? Yeah, keeps me up at night too. There are two ways to modify it:

1. Modify it using a custom site definition via the ONET.XML file
2. Crack open the site in FrontPage 2003 and modify it that way

Both are valid and I'll leave the modification to ONET.XML for another day. Here's a visual walkthrough of how you can change it with FrontPage and about 5 minutes of your precious time.

First here's our glorious site before we're about to go Dr. Frankenstein on it. Just a plain, ordinary, everyday, simple team site that we're all familiar with.

Now let's launch FrontPage 2003 and get dirty. Click on the Edit with Microsoft Office FrontPage button in your IE toolbar. After you open the site in FrontPage there's a section of code that contains the navigation bar. It's just a FrontPage web bot. You can see it highlighted in the split-screen view below. Note that the links and names are not kept in the source code of the page.

So now we want to modify the navigation. Hover over the navigation bar in the Design view and you'll see the icon change to a small hand. Double-click it to launch the Navigation Bar Properties dialog. Here's where we can screw with what gets displayed to the users, the order of the links, the style, and even the ability to add new links.

Select a link (Home in this example) and click on the Modify Link button. This takes us to the Modify Link Dialog where we can change both the title of the link and the url it takes us to.

Okay, so go nuts. Feel free to make whatever changes are appropriate for your needs. Add a link, change one, reorder them, whatever. Here's the "After" effect after we messed around with the navigation bar. I changed "Home" to "My Home", removed the "Documents and Lists" and "Create" links, renamed "Site Settings" to "Administration" and added a new link called "Google" that took me to, well, you know where. Oh yeah, and the beauty of this is that it doesn't unghost your page as the information is stored in the site and not the page. Cool huh?

In a future release I would really like to see this web bot hooked up to the security of the site so you can choose an invidual link and attach it to a security group that's in your SharePoint site. Actually since it's a web bot, you might be able to create a custom one that does this. Never created one before but maybe I'll take a look at what that's like and go down that road (or if someone out there has the time feel free and let me know what you come up with).

Enjoy!