danielwoolston.com

Ok..so this is not a New Years resolution post. I missed that timeframe by about 4 weeks. I’m hoping to project a bit into the year and envision what will pan out this year.

Changing jobs! My contract with Amway ended with 2009. So now I’m looking for work. Technology spending is down in West Michigan so this might be the dark at the end of the tunnel. I’ve had a few leads and lets hope that something lands soon. Otherwise…goodbye Michigan!

www.banditsportal.com - Side project that I’m hoping to deploy in the next few weeks. What is it? In a nutshell…facebook for goalies. Its a silverlight site that is a central community for hockey goaltenders. As many of you know, I’m very passionate about hockey. This project was a way for me to connect my love for silverlight with my obsession for ice hockey. Screenshots and stuff later this Spring, following launch.

www.drillshare.com - Another side project thats been shelved for far too long. I have a great Flash based drill drawing utility on there that I would love to convert to Silverlight 4 this year. Again…hockey site combined with Flash, Asp.Net and a ton of JavaScript.

www.hawkhockey.org - My son’s hockey organization. I volunteer a lot of my time there. Its a great father-son activity and has become an identity point for our family.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/danwoolston - My flickr photo page. I yearn to be a better photographer. I’d love to move into wedding photography, goaltending photography (yes its different from typical hockey photography) and portrait work. Check out the flickr page to see the progress I’m making. So much more to learn, but thankfully I have a network of very talented peers that can help get me to the next level.

And yes….I may be writing a third book this year. More details to come, if indeed the publisher accepts the proposal. Thats another post for another day.

Skills to add this year:
More Silverlight - as always.
Lightroom  proficiency - primarily photo workflow.
PHP - Its come up way too much when talking with potential employers. I’ve played with it before and maybe its time to come back to it.
.Net 4.0 - Its new, so therefore I must have it. Shiny.
Entity Framework - Need to get deeper. Nhibernate has been a delightful distraction, but I need to come back for some EF goodness.

Well thats about it for this post. Will keep writing as the year moves on….

Guess the English translator was on vacation during error message development day:

off to bed now. time for my brain to be ‘abooted.’

Yeah..I’m just sitting here minding my own business, when all of a sudden the windows 7 sidebar heads to Vegas for vacation. Which is unacceptable. I use my sidebar (build 7000). Some of you, and you know who you are, humiliate your sidebar with image rotators and other fu-fu butterfly fluffy things. But me…power user. I need my app launcher, as I’m deeply disturbed by having to dig through the convoluted Start menu just to start up Word. You been in there lately? Its a mess. And I dont keep icons on my desktop. I like a nice clean desktop. Some of you have desktops that look like an Icon monster drank a gallon of ‘Red Bull App Launcher’ and then violently barfed all over the screen.

So yeah.. sidebar app launcher at the ready, until TODAY! Not sure if an Auto Update or UAC killed it or if it just got peeved and left. Hell, for all I know, it could be part of an elaborate April fools joke that I was unable to recover from with proper dignity and well being. Regardless….it was gone like Wozniaks cool factor after his dancing career successfully drained every nerd-worthy point from his otherwise illustrious career. But I digest.

So how do you fix a disappearing sidebar?  You in the back? “Buy a MAC?”…oh you’re so damn funny. You know that joke got old back about, oh I don’t know, forever ago when Abel told his brother Cain to buy a Mac. And we all know how that turned out.

So heres how I fixed it..maybe it works for you, maybe it doesn’t. Either way, back up your registry before you start as I won’t be held responsible for your inability to follow instructions and the pending disaster that you’ll be weaving by f’ing with regedit.

I found this on another website, not sure where and don’t really care cause it worked:

If you have Windows 7 Beta installed with UAC disabled you might run into problems while trying to load gadgets onto your desktop.You can enable the UAC in order to use Sidebar.But if you don’t wanna turn on that nagging UAC and still love those tiny useful gadgets you can bring them aboard by following these steps:

* Click on Start button, type regedit in the search box and hit enter.
* In regedit, go to :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Sidebar\Settings

* In the right pane,right-click and select DWORD Value from the New menu.
* Rename the DWORD Value to AllowElevatedProcess. Double-click on it and type 1 in the Value data field.

* Close Registry Editor and try to load the gadgets.They should work.

You may or may not need to restart your computer.

I realizing that rebooting your computer may drain you of the precious 3+ minutes that you would otherwise spend chasing some goblin wizard thingy in Warcrack, but it might just fix the sidebar problem.