Maybe I'm being a little picky here, but DotNetKicks seems like they have been pretty loose with their definition of what constitutes a .NET story.  I like having a feed to the site that aggregates a lot of different .NET topics, but it seems like there's been a lot of tangential sort of stories lately.  I mean stories on JavaScript frameworks, HTML or Windows are ok, but they're really not that focused on .NET. I wonder if it's just a case of people simply kicking stories that they like, regardless of the relevance.

It would be nice if there was a way to downvote some of the stories that weren't really relevant but I realize that opens a whole other can of worms.  I'll continue to support the site, but I may end up dropping it out of my feeds if the trend doesn't change.

Since I'm probably the last programmer on the web to write this post, I figured I'd finally get around to doing it.

How old were you when you started programming?

I dabbled a little bit when I was 10 or 11. My dad - a mechanical engineer - bought an IBM PC Jr. He knew a little C and Basic and I picked up on a few things. I also had some "Choose Your Own Adventure" type books where you had to write little Basic programs in order to progress in the book. For the life of me, I can't remember what they were called though. From there, I remember creating a program called "Froo" (presciently close to foo?) which was a series of ASCII art screens that told a story about an alien.

How did you get started in programming?

I started doing some HTML in college, making a website for my band, Red Earth. It was early enough that the first year I did it, I was viewing the site through a text-based browser. By the time I had graduated college with a secondary education degree, I had decided that it wasn't for me. I got a temp job doing data entry, which led to me a job doing release management. In that context, I was assisting someone who asked if I wanted to try some programming. I took to it pretty well.

What was your first language?

Basic when I was a kid, then a little VBScript/ASP when I started as a job. Perl was really where I cut my teeth though and was my first love.

What was the first real program you wrote?

Some sort of ASP website to display information entered from a VB 6 application.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Basic, VBScript, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Bash, C#, VB.NET, Ruby, PowerShell

What was your first professional programming gig?

I'd consider my first professional development gig to be when I got a few months into release management, when I started to do a lot of Perl development.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Yes. The major thing I would do different is that I would have gone to school for computer science. I've always felt that I've missed out by not getting formal training. There's no substitute for wanting to learn and taking it upon yourself to discover new ideas, but I would definitely have changed my major if I knew now what I know then.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Don't ever stop learning and trying to improve. This field moves so fast that you need to be aware of what's being discussed and what new ideas are being introduced. You don't want to be a magpie developer, but it's important to try out new things.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

Any time that I can implement a new idea successfully and the HTML renders correctly or the test goes green, I get a kick out of it. I still get a little bit of a thrill when stuff works. It's still a little bit magic to me.

I'd also say that working with Leon was always great. It was easy to get better at programming when I was sitting across the aisle from somebody who has as much passion about development as I do and wanted to learn just as much.

I really like this quote from Todd Snider. It pretty well reflects how I feel about writing songs

"Mostly, I just think I'm trying to open my heart and say what's in there, and some days that's 'I love my wife' and some days it’s about the system," he said. "I just try to think of it in terms of sharing my opinion and not that I am educating anybody or trying to change their minds. It’s just an honest representation of where my brain's at. I don’t get to share my opinion because people think I’m smart, I get to share it with them because it rhymes and I know three chords."

from Todd Snider gets Inducted into Songwriter's Hall of Fame and Keeps on Touring

If you haven't checked out his music, you definitely should. He's especially great live. He's one of those guys who spends half the set just talking and telling stories, and it's always really entertaining. He comes around to Canal Street Tavern a lot, but it doesn't look like that's on the schedule any time soon.

It's been a great weekend, but a really long one. My agenda:

• Thursday - Work, Band Practice
• Friday - Barbecue at a friends, went to Citifolk for a couple of hours, went out to dinner, went to a Friend's party, closed out the bar watching The Big Wazu at the Oregon Express.
• Saturday - Made 2 dishes, went to my brother's birthday party and then went and played with Red Earth at McGuffy's.
• Sunday - Mowed the lawn, painted some of the front of the house, went out with friends for catering planning, then came home to hang out with Tracy.

I'm worn out but pretty happy with the way I spent my time. I had a great variety of activities and really enjoyed hanging out with a lot of different people.

The show last night at McGuffy's went really well. The only bad thing that happened was that I broke a string halfway through the set. It really kind of threw me off. My Samick - an old Tele copy - wasn't cooperating and shorted out. I borrowed Bobby's Fender Strat for the last part of the show, but it always sucks when you've got gear failure. It's just one of those things where you have a familiarity. When's that's removed, it takes you out of your comfort zone. I know my guitar. I've been playing it for about 10 years now. When you've got a different guitar, it's like driving somebody else's car. You know how to operate it, but it's a little uncomfortable.

Overall though, it was pretty good show. There was a decent size crowd who were into at and everyone seemed to have fun.

So... at the start of this weekend, I was not an amateur caterer. After this weekend, I am. I've got a couple of friends getting married soon and they were having problems with their caterer (some shady things happened...). So at a party on Friday, while hanging out with the groom I made a comment about me doing the food. I thought about it and realize that if I could get my friends Josh and Chris in on it, it could actually be feasible.

So, I made a couple of phone calls the next day, and everyone was in. So, I get to barbecue for a few hundred people. We've largely worked out the details and I feel suprisingly good about it. It's going to be a big challenge, but it's going to be great. It's definitely going to be the most people I've ever cooked for, but it's going to work. I'm happy that I'm going to be able to help out with my friends wedding, but also to do something that I really enjoy on a larger scale.

I ran into a few problems with dasBlog when trying to get it set up.  Even though most of it worked, the HTTP Handlers weren't working.  I kept getting a message that one of the handlers "has a bad module "ManagedPipelineHandler" in its module list".

I moved some things around and tried to change up some things in the config  based upon this article.  That helped get the site up and running, but the handlers still work working.  Googling the error, I found that things could fix using some commands against IIS, but I don't have that ability since this site is hosted.

However, the good folks at DiscountASP did have an option that worked for me.  I could change the application pool from integrated mode to "Classic Mode" and everything worked smoothly.

Moral of the story, if you're trying to run dasBlog on IIS 7, try to do it in classic mode until the team makes the changes to run it under IIS 7.

Now to do some hunting for some different themes. I found a good article on creating your own dasBlog themes, so I may try to get to that eventually.

On an unrelated note, does it seem like Twitter is working as it should lately? The last few times that I've been on there it's been pretty good.  I don't want to jinx things but....

So I'm busy these days and I've quite frankly just not had any time to work on the blog project that I've been plotting for a long time.  Rather than just simply abandon my site (as I have been), I've decided to go with a 3rd party solution - dasBlog. While I'm not particularly in love with any of the native themes that I've seen so far (to be fair, I haven't seen them all and I could just make my own one...), it's been a pretty impressive experience setting this up. All I had to do was change a few config settings, upload the files and go.  I had one issue with an incompatibility with the web.config settings and IIS 7, but that was easily fixed with the information I found here.  I'm looking forward to poking around under to hood to steal get some ideas for my project.

I've put a hold on Tremolo, the ASP.NET MVC site engine for musicians that I was working on, for a few reasons.  The number one is just time. My dance card has been pretty full.  The other reason is that I want to do it right. I got a really good start on it and have solidified how I want to build it, but it wasn't coming out the way I want.  I really want to write really good tests (with MbUnit and RhinoMocks) for the project and have it structured so that it's easy to customize and extend.  Given that it's going to be open source, I know it doesn't have to be perfect out of the gate but I wnat to build a better foundation than what I started with.

Even though I'm a little bummed about having to delay working on Tremolo, I've been really busy in a good way.  I've been playing a lot of music and working on new material.  I've got 3 or 4 songs in the works that are pretty close to being done - a couple of them are older ones that I'm reworking.

Also, Red Earth is playing at McGuffy's on Saturday. We start at 9:30 or so. I'm not sure who we're opening for.