Photo of David Gardiner
A blog of software development, .NET and other interesting things
  • Sep 7, 2009

    Catching up

    It's been a little while between posts, and there's been a couple of reasons for that..

    • That back injury has been persisting a lot longer that I'd hoped
    • My Grandma (Nanna) Jean was hospitalised and then passed away recently

    Nanna was 96, and had pretty much been living independently in her house right up until she suffered a massive stroke. She hung on long enough for the family to travel interstate to Geelong Hospital to spend time with her before she died.

    I flew over to say goodbye to her (she wasn't able to speak but was alert and had limited movement), and then returned to Geelong a week later to attend the funeral service. Then last week her body was brought back over to Adelaide where she was buried.

    My back injury seemed to be healing well initially but a work field trip (spent largely sitting in a car) was not helpful and things seemed to plateau for too long. I've taken to avoiding sitting as much as possible – including standing on the bus to/from work and even standing in some meetings.

    Some more "enthusiastic" (aka painful but effective!) treatment from my Chiro and a follow-up remedial massage session seem to be helping. I'm sure my work colleagues would prefer to see me being able to sit down for most of the day rather than doing yoyo impersonations :-)

    Ironically my iPod Shuffle appears to have succumbed to the dreaded "flashing LEDs of death" – annoyingly on the flight home from the Geelong funeral service, so all those podcasts will have to wait until I come up with a replacement plan.

    And to top it all off, tomorrow I'm heading off to the Microsoft TechEd Conference 2009 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre. I well may be the conference delegate who stands up in the sessions rather than taking a seat.

    Oh, and additional congratulations to LobsterPot Solutions, as they are now a Gold Certified Partner. Was it that long ago they were just plain Certified?! I'll be proudly wearing a LobsterPot shirt at TechEd and lending my support to raise the profile of Rob's company.

    No doubt I'll be posting more about TechEd in the next few days..

  • Aug 19, 2009

    Media Browser for Vista Media Center

    I came across this useful Media Center plugin recently. As well as providing an alternate interface to browse media files it also includes an RSS reader which I've successfully configured to watch some interesting video podcasts:

    • dnrTV - .NET Rocks TV
    • 10-4 – New features of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0
    • TED – Talks from the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences
    • Scrap Time – A Scrapbooking video podcast for Narelle

    It is free, and is being actively developed on Google Code.

  • Aug 19, 2009

    Podcasts I'm listening to

    For a long time now I've been listening to podcasts – first on on the iPAQ rw6828, then a HTC TyTN II, and more recently my iPod Shuffle.

    My original subscriptions were:

    At the suggestion of Ben and Nigel I added:

    And I've also added:

    • Radio TFS – Team Foundation Server
    • SQL Down Under – Greg Low's interviews with SQL experts
    • SQL Snapshots (broken link, was originally www.sqlsnapshots.com/SQLSnapshotsMP3Feed.xml) (coming soon) – Also from Greg Low, I found out about this via Rob after mentioning to him the idea of a podcast for a "Talking Books" version of the SQL Books Online.

    The best way I've found so far to get the podcasts onto the Shuffle is to use WinAmp and the ml_ipod plugin. WinAmp does come with an built-in iPod plugin, but I've found ml_ipod provides superior support, including synchronising podcasts – something iTunes won't do for a Shuffle at all.