Becky, Jenna and I went to the zoo today.  The Woodland Park Zoo to be exact.  It was a very nice zoo, with a great variety of animals, fairly good habitats, and not so big that you feel like you have to rush through it. Jenna really liked the penguins. I'd write more about it, but I'm pretty tired.  Enjoy the photoset.

I just got an email saying that the September CTP for Orcas (That is, the next Visual Studio-centric release of what most people think of as ".NET") was just released publicly!  Go get it!  It's packaged as a Virtual PC image, so you need that or virtual server to run it, but I think that's a great deployment vehicle for these CTPs that are traditionally "difficult" to uninstall due to the nature of them being "early".

This release has some of the C# 3.0 support as well as some of the LINQ support (over objects) as well as lots of other goodies like the managed add-in model and some timezone goodness.  Unfortunately, most of these bits were baked before I got here, but it's cool to see them ship anyway.  Have fun.

Everyone run over and vote for my suggestion of adding APIs for webcam support in the XNA framework.  Do it now! Even if you don't know what I'm talking about!  Ha ha.

Seriously though, I think that would be sweet, and would make homegrown games that much better.

UPDATE: OK, evidently, you must first go to the Microsoft connect homepage and sign-in/register with a Windows Live ID/MS Passport account.  Then, the link above will work.  That's kind of frustrating.  Sorry.

Wow, lots of posts materializing today.

This is just a short one. Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, I now can receive mail at Microsoft from the marklio alias! So, put marklio together with microsoft dot com, and I'll get it!  No need to attempt to remember my other weird alias that I discussed earlier.

Basically, I just created a global distribution list called marklio and put myself in it.  Simple, eh?

This is somewhat old news to some of you, but due to the nature of the process, I delayed making an announcement in this public place.  But, now that all the ducks are in a row, we're marching toward closing within the next 3 weeks on a house here in the Seattle area.

Becky and I are super-excited about it.  We were really worried we would have to settle for something that we didn't really like due to the crazy housing market here, as well as the deadlines surrounding our relocation benefits.  But, we were able to jump on what we feel is a fantastic place for us to be.  I've chosen several of the exterior shots to make public in the set, since most of the interior shots contain the previous owner's things.  And, since I like them so much, most of the shots are panoramas.

I just got "direct to Flickr" functionality working on my phone through a small utility that runs on Windows Mobile 5.  Now, when I take a picture, it immediately and transparently sends it to Flickr.  The camera on my phone is now actually useful without jumping through alot of hoops. Yeah.  Here's a picture of the drink I am currently drinking.

I've got lots of other posts in the works, but this one's a quickie.  I finally got ahold of the camera for the 360.  In just seconds, I had a video chat going with my brother.  For families that are far apart, buying a 360 just might be worth it just because it's so dang easy to set up video chat.

What was more surprising is that I plugged it into my PC, and just as quickly, it was set up as a webcam.  That was lucky for me because my fairly new logitech webcam seems to be having some driver issues with the latest build of Windows Vista.

One drawback is that there is no built-in mic, which gets a little annoying if you trying to show someone that Jenna can say "apple", "meow-meow", "ma-ma", and "da-da" on command.

Another drawback is that there is no fullscreen, or even large screen option.  Hopefully that will be rememdied with a software release.  Or perhaps I can write a video chat program with XNA express.  Oooh, that's a good idea.  I hope the APIs support that.

I haven't been to a Baylor football game since I graduated about 7 years ago (before that having gone to almost every single one), but something about them playing within 10 minutes of me now that I'm almost 2000 miles away made me want to go.  That, and our good friends Jeff and Bethany were going to be there.

In a bizarre kind of coincidence, Baylor played Washington State University today, something that hadn't happened since the Alamo Bowl in San Antonio in 1994 (or so Jeff tells me. I could have sworn it was the University of Houston...also Cougars).  Oddly enough, Jeff, Becky and I were at that game as well.  In another twist, they were playing at Qwest Field rather than at their home stadium in Pullman, WA.  So, we just couldn't pass it up.

We had procured the tickets several weeks ago and so we all just met at the stadium.  Jeff's twin brother Joel and his wife were on vacation visiting with Jeff and Bethany, and so they joined us as well.

Unfortunately, the Bears lost, but by an astonishly-small margin of 15-17.  In fact, they led for a large portion of the game due to a first quarter safety.  Anyway, I'm not huge into sports at all, much less football, so we had a good time reminiscing about college life and making fun of the bizarre traditions of WSU, all the while thinking about our own bizarre traditions and how they must be viewed.  We got a big kick out of making fun of their band.

Here's a panorama of the view from our seats.  As the sun set, it was blazing in our face (I have the sunburn to prove it), and as Jenna got cranky, Becky and I decided to leave early, in the tradition of Baylor fans through the ages.

I got my internal blog set up yesterday. At my old job, I found having an internal blog was very useful for lots of reasons. Here, due to the size of the company and confidentiality concerns, it may not end up being as useful, and I may have to leverage other resources like Sharepoint to accomplish similar things. For now, other "softies" can catch me at http://blogs/markmil. If you're not on the Microsoft network, don't expect that link to take you anywhere.

For some reason, it really bothers me when I see this pattern in code (using no particular language):

This can, of course, simply be specified as:

Now, I understand that as code is refactored, this pattern can appear due to simplifications...but still...come on. It's even worse when someVar is used only as the condition of another if block.

UPDATE: This seems to occur most often in code whose ownership has changed hands several times. New owners seem to fall into either trying to edit the code while maintaining the structure as closely as possible, or by heavily refactoring. Many times, the former choice is made, especially if the original owner is still around somewhere. Usually my first instinct when I inherit code is to massively refactor. I'll post a more in-depth view on this later.

We took advantage of the day off and drove up to Bellingham to see Jeff and Bethany.  We started with a delicious lunch.  Jeff grilled some burgers and corn, while I let Jenna crawl around on the lawn, which she seemed to enjoy quite a bit.  The burgers were great, and the corn was so good it didn't need butter.

 While we ate our dessert of ice cream and cookies, we talked about our options for the day and finally decided to head toward Mt. Baker on the Mt. Baker highway.  Due to the distance and our time constraints, we knew we probably wouldn't make it all the way there, but they knew of some cool spots on the way that were a bit closer.

One the way, we decided on our actual destination, some falls near the mountain that they had visited before.  It was spectacular.  The whole area was amazing.  The scale of everything was staggering.  We hiked down some trails to get a better view of the falls.  Becky and I traded off carrying Jenna and the camera so I could carry Jenna down the steep parts, then trade off so I could get some shots.  Some of them turned out really well and really look like postcards.  I got a huge panorama of the waterfall itself (right).  For some reason, I like to leave the jagged edges on there.  I might make a cleaned-up version though since it turned out so well.  I'm pretty sure most of you will want to move here after seeing some of these pictures.

I really wanted to just run wild through the forest and become a feral human.  I found a huge stone in the woods that was turned upright and covered with moss.  I'm pretty sure it had something to do with the plot of Halo 3.  I'm also pretty sure that there were many sasquatches watching us from the woods.  I'm fairly certain that they are hidden in a few of my pictures.

I also experimented with a technique called wiggling which uses 2 shots with different perspectives to provide a semi-3d effect to give you some depth that I don't think is conveyed through the photos.  I think my 2 perspectives are too exaggerated.  It kind of gives me a headache.

On the way out, we visited the ranger station where there was the usual ranger station information and a really big cross-section of an extremely old tree. I don't remember how old it was, but it was old.

So, visit my Labor Day 2006 photoset to see all the pictures. (be sure and click through the various links above as well to see some cool new features of Flickr that allow you to see where pictures were taken. (as well as some other neat links))