Archive for November, 2008

Nov 29 2008

50 Gallons of Wine!

Published by John under Cider & Mead. Popularity: 1%

What 50 gallons look like

What 50 gallons look like

And by “wine” I mean “cider” and “mead.” Which is okay because, technically, cider is apple wine, and mead is honey wine. So put away your prejudices about what constitutes “wine,” lay aside your hatred of everything that is not a grape, and enjoy the awesome power of this fully operational winemaker!

Here’s a picutre of 10 5-gallon carboys in our office. This represents the sum of our latest group of cider and mead batches for 2008. Eventually, I’ll be posting my recipes for all of these batches, as well as recipes from the previous 3 years of winemaking. My notes are helter skelter, so making a WordPress template and posting them will put them in a database and force me to formalize them as well, in case others want to use the recipes.

In the picture are 4 batches of cider, 2 batches of mead, one batch of (hot) ginger melomel,1 one batch of cranberry melomel, and one carboy (the mostly empty one) that is read to become braggot2 when I must some grain tomorrow.

I really can’t express how much I love winemaking. It’s part of the creative side of me (I’m something of a Maker), along with lots of other things like writing, music, quilting, knitting, pottery, and yes, programming. I love the expression of a spirtual side in the creation of something that other people enjoy.

Scooping "sugared" honey into the must

Scooping "sugared" honey into the must

Wine is probably one of my favorite things to make because people so often enjoy it over meals of laughter and feelings of togetherness. It’s what we end up drinking when we are eating together and sharing our lives. It’s a very positive feeling to create something like that.

It’s also just rollicking good fun to make. Here’s a picture of me scooping crystallized (also called “sugared”) honey into a measuring cup to add it to hot water so it dissolves. I get my honey from a local bee keeper, a really nice family who lives between Odell and Parkdale in the Hood River valley.

This is a 5 gallon bucket (about 60 pounds) of meadowfoam honey. I’d never actually heard of meadowfoam before this, so I’m excited to try it out. It’s a dark honey with a wonderfully strong vanilla smell.

It takes about 10-12 pounds of honey to make a dry mead. which means this 60 pounds of honey ended up making about 60 gallons of mead. The cost of the honey was about $60. Do the math. 2.5 cases of wine – roughly 30 bottles- per carboy. I have 6 carboys, making that 180 bottles of very good, dry, oaked, almost chardonnay-like mead. That’s roughly $0.33/bottle. Given our start-up costs, time, and equipment, it comes to about $1.00/bottle.

Talk about cost savings!

  1. Melomel is the term for mead that has been made with fruit… I’m calling ginger a fruit []
  2. Braggot is mead that is made with malt, as in barley or wheat, about equal percentages of each. It’s sort of a meadish beer… or maybe a beerish mead. []

2 Comments

Nov 27 2008

I’m, Like, All Thankfulnessy And Stuff

Published by John under Easy Listening. Popularity: 1%

Since lists of random information are so much easier than a well constructed narrative essay, and since well constructed narrative essays are hard when your wife is gone and you starting eating your whiskey omelettes at noon, I give you a list of things I’m thankful for.

This list is by no means complete. In fact, it basically represents what I’ve been doing today.

  • Sunny days that are so cold that you can feel the air rush past your lips and all the way down your throat into your lungs.
  • The cloyingly sweet smell of honey and cider brewing in the kitchen
  • The wonderful feeling when I share mead and cider with friends over meals of laughter
  • Taking a long bike ride, even when it’s cold and you feel out of shape
  • Salmon
  • Cheese… Good Irish hard cheese
  • The smell of ginger, shredded and boiling in water, and the taste of the tea it makes after adding the honey and lemon
  • The way that cats push their heads into your hands when they want pets
  • Comedy and laughter,  and a very bearable lightness of being
  • Kindness, from both strangers and those you love
  • The sound of Jessie’s voice, especially the sound of her laugh
  • Friends, friends, friends. Even the not so good ones, which I don’t actually have any of at the moment
  • And Wordpress… for making me take 5 minutes out of my day to smile and mindfully think about how much I like cold air filling my lungs on long bike rides when I take breaks from ginger-mead making on days before I hang out with friends over dinner of salmon and Irish chees

1 Comment

Nov 26 2008

Me? A Greek God? Wow!

Published by John under Easy Listening. Popularity: 1%

So, Jon Michael Bosley, a friend of mine from grad school just tagged me in this picture on Facebook.

Pretty funny. It was during a field class in the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest where he and I teamed up for a couple days of hiking, data logging and temperature sampling. I remember that as the day that I decided that Jon Michael was about the best damn field partner you could ever find.

Good summer, good times. Hell, good grad school experience all around. Jon was one of the people that made me realize that I needed to drop out of the geology program and become a geographer. They’re much more fun, do more drinking, and have more breaks for coffee, frisbee golf, and just walking and talking. I miss my geography friends.

Especially when they say that I look like a Greek God!

Thanks Jon Michael!

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Nov 26 2008

A Man Alone. Status Update: Day 2

Published by John under Easy Listening. Popularity: 1%

This is really a bunch of notes for myself more than anything. Jessica is a driven, “professional-advancement” type, so I assume she’ll be leaving me again at some point.  In general, things are going really well. Still I thought it’d be a good idea to jot some notes to myself just so that I remember some very minor issues for next time. This isn’t my normal comical post, so you probably shouldn’t read it.

Oh, and if you happen to, these are just some thoughts that are specific to my situation- and probably don’t pertain to anyone in general.

In The Mornings

  1. It’s a good idea just to leave the heated floor of the office turned on for the duration of your wife’s travels
    1. The bedroom is much more comfortable than the office when the heated floor is accidentally turned off
  2. Despite what you tell them, cats will probably not realize that you forgot to set the alarm
    1. Even if they did realize it, they will probably not care enough to wake you up
      1. Even if they care enough, you’ll be asleep, and will probably get angry and push them off of the bed
  3. Make sure you set the alarm
  4. It’s probably a bad idea to empty the cat litter box and then decide that it’s alright if you don’t fill it with cat litter
  5. Cheese doesn’t make a very good replacement for eggs… at least as a basic protein source
  6. At some point, you’ll probably regret forgetting to buy toilet paper
  7. It’s a good idea to make shopping lists so that you remember to buy things like eggs, cat litter and toilet paper
  8. Showers might be something to consider before going to bed, especially if you ever run out of toilet paper

At Lunchtime

  1. Afternoons are hard enough already, so when you come home for lunch, make sure there’s more than beer in the fridge
  2. You might want to consider doing Morning #7 at this point, in order to prevent Lunchtime #1

In The Evenings

  1. Beer doesn’t make a very good replacement for cheese… at least as a basic protein source
  2. If you’re going to invite people over, it’s a good idea to make sure there’s enough toilet paper
    1. Interestingly, if there is enough beer in the fridge, people don’t mind much about the “no toilet paper” thing
      1. It is more difficult to clean up after a party at which there was no toilet paper present
  3. In general, you should begin binge drinking after you check to make sure that the hot tub is not leaking
    1. Filling a hot tub with booze and honey water only seems like a “really good idea.” No, self, I realize that, but you have to trust me. This is your sober self talking.
  4. There are an amazing number of cracks and crevices in the floor of your livingroom- at some point those might need to be cleaned and filled
  5. Don’t ask why there are footprints of a pig on your ceiling, it’s easier to just clean them off and leave well enough alone
  6. It’s not a good idea to actually hire people to come to a party
    1. If you do decide to hire people, make sure they don’t have deep, husky, sexy Demi Moore voices
      1. If they do have deep, husky, sexy Demi Moore voices, make sure that the deep, husky, sexy voice is actually that of a female. Again, this is your sober self talking.
  7. Whiskey doesn’t make a very good replacement for beer… at least as a basic protein source
  8. “Screw it, I may as well just finish the job” is not necessarily a good thought for you to have. Ever.
  9. Some people may look for possible replacements for toilet paper
    1. The term “common sense” is not often “common,” and does not necessarily make what you would consider “sense”

Late at Night… When You’re All Alone

  1. It’s much more difficult to deal with conflicted feelings about deep, husky, sexy voices in a very quiet house
    1. Playing the radio makes for a less quiet house, where you can put off thinking about conflicted feelings
  2. The longer you lie awake, the closer you are to remembering that the radio is actually an alarm, and the alarm is not set, and you may want to roll over and turn the alarm on so you don’t oversleep again
  3. Don’t ever scream, and don’t ask what they are doing in your bed. It’s much better to suggest that they might find the office more comfortable because it’s warm.
  4. It’s a good idea just to leave the heated floor of the office turned on for the duration of your wife’s travels.

5 Comments

Nov 25 2008

My Wife Ran-off And Left Me! (Well, good!)

Published by John under Easy Listening. Popularity: 1%

You believe that? Here I am, slaving away at my day job- fighting the good fight by letting kids get their daily recommended dose of benzene in the groundwater. In short: working. And she goes and leaves me.

Walked right out the door1

Isn’t that just like a woman. When the going gets tough, they go and visit family so they can eat Thanksgiving dinner.

Well, I’ve got my own life. I don’t need her. And just to prove it, I’m not going to write a post enumerating all the reasons why it sucks that she walked out on me. I could complain and wallow in self-pity, but I’m going to do something positive instead.

I’m going to give you a David Letterman style: Top 10 list of the reasons why it’s good that she’s gone.

  • Number 10: Finally, I get to wear wool socks to bed. Been wanting to do that for a while now, but miss hotpants always complains that it’s already warm enough.
  • Number 9: I can spend hours at night programming and working on my book. There’s no need for stupid, hokey wastes of time like dinner, and togetherness. No, it’s just me. Me, and a computer. I can finally get something done. Yay me.
  • Number 8: One word: “Macaroni and Cheese.” And not that Kraft comfort food crap that she likes- no way. I’m talking about real, full on, oven baked (with the occasionally over dry macaroni piece that crunches in your mouth) macaroni and cheese. I don’t want something with “real” cheese, dammit. I want unquoted cheese- and I can have it, too.
  • Number 7: I can sleep in the office. Yeah, that’s right, I can sleep on the futon in the only room that has a heated floor. No longer will I be forced to slog all the way across the house to that big ugly queen-sized bed in the cold bedroom, only to be subjected to the pointy elbows and cold feet of somebody else all night. Not me, I can sleep in warmth and comfort right next to my computer.
  • Number 6: Hell, I don’t have to sleep at all! Just thought of that!
  • Number 5: Did I mention Macaroni and Cheese? Everybody say it with me!
  • Number 4: I’m the Mead maker now! There’s a nearly full five gallon bucket of Meadow Foam honey just waiting to be turned into mead. I’m the one who finally gets to warm the honey, I’m the one who finally gets to add the yeast and take the specific gravity. Me. Not her. For years, she’s stolen the mead-making glory. Not any more!
  • Number pi: Well, personally I don’t think that there are quite enough songs written containing the words “liquor” and “gasoline,” but that’s just me.
  • Number 3: I don’t have to be subjected to her mother’s (veggie)sausage cheese balls- or to the morning lox and bagels with cream cheese. I get to eat what I want: Dry white toast that’s cold because I forgot to eat it while I was dealing with the cats spilling a vase of water. Yeah, baby. Breakfast. My way.
  • Number e: Okay, everybody on the left side of the audience this time: Macaroni and Cheese!
  • Number 2: Can you even imagine how many episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 I can watch between now and Saturday? Or how many times I can watch the entire Star Wars trilogy AND The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (across the 8th dimension, mind you)! HA! Shows you!
  • And the number 1 reason why it’s good that she’s gone (complete with drumroll): I get to write ridiculous blog posts whenever I want!

What do you think, sirs?

  1. Well, actually she walked right into the door, cause I dropped her at the airport, but it didn’t sound as good. []

7 Comments

Nov 25 2008

The Great Syndication Debacle

Published by John under Software & Media. Popularity: 1%

Wow, everyone. Let me apologize for what can only be described as a disaster. Apparently, you were all deluged with random articles flying through your RSS feed. I’m sorry, they’re gone now.

Lemme ’splain.

So, I grabbed a fully functional and supposedly stable syndication plugin to use as an initial concept proof. I went live with it on Positively Glorious! because, well, it was supposed to be fully functional and rock solid. It was supposed to do a number of other things that were the reason I’d chosen it. It was supposed to do things like:

  1. Make all syndicated posts link back to the original site (Fail)
  2. Make all syndicated posts dump to one single category that can be selectively excluded (Fail)
  3. Keep syndicated posts off the front page (Fail)
  4. Keep syndicated posts out of the RSS feed (Fail)

Well, it failed on all counts, thus making people angry at the fact that they have a dozen posts dumped into their feed that have nothing to do with cyborgs, 80’s movie characters or secret agents. I’m sorry Jon!

Okay, I will trust no plugin before it’s time. Before I put them on the front page, I’ll test them at an undisclosed location far out in the desert somewhere in the vicinity of St. George, Utah. Then I’ll strip out the algorithms and concept that I like, write my own plugin, widgetize it, anesthetize it, tissue type it, amputate its leg and run away with it.

Only then will I subject you all to further testing.

2 Comments

Nov 24 2008

What Do You Want From Syndication?

Published by John under Software & Media. Popularity: 1%

First time trying out a pretty powerful syndication tool that results in the “What I’m Reading” widget in the bottom of the sidebar. Initial impressions are pretty positive, but one thing that I note is that Author and Blog title need to be present and smartly formatted. I’ll have to work on that. Currently, the algorithm is a bit silly- I’d like to maximize at 1 post per link rather than have 7 posts all by Cami Kaos.1

So, I wonder what other people would want in a blogroll syndication aggregator community linker tool thingy. Things I want are:

  1. Configurable number of posts shown
  2. Configurable limit of posts/author
  3. Configurable amount of text shown- some selections/combination from the following:
    1. Author
    2. Blog title
    3. Post title
    4. Post excerpt
    5. Post text
    6. Post comments
    7. Others? (like maybe one link from their blogroll?2
  4. Some kind of smart traceback system. It’d be nice to automagically re-syndicate as an option.

Can’t think of any more right now, but that’s a good bit to work on. What would you like if you were going to use such a tool for community connectivity? Leave a comment and let me know.

  1. Actually, I’ll make that an option- there are probably lots of people who’d want the entire syndication to focus on one blog- especially one like Cami’s []
  2. Talk about feature creep! []

3 Comments

Nov 24 2008

No Longer Less Than Blog

Published by John under Software & Media. Popularity: 7%

Yesterday, my wife and I were discussing someone and I mentioned that if I had that much time on my hands, I’d have developed a company by now. Her response was “That’s you, you have lots of crazy ideas and things that you try to make happen, but that’s not true for normal people.”

Well, as much as the term “crazy” seems a bit harsh to me,1 I do admit that the number of ideas floating through my head is at times a bit daunting. Recently, I was thinking about the original intention of my blog, and realized that I’d forgotten it.

Despite the number of readers I have, I designed my blog not actually to write, but to test and house the development of a social connectivity plugin. Thus, I’m ditching my separate Less than Blog widget on the front page of Positively Glorious! so that I can work on what I thought would be a relatively quick plugin framework. I realize now that it might not be relatively quick, but it’s ORBlogs.org-centered, community-based, and a good idea.

Oh, and it’s why I started this damn blog in the first place.

  1. I still think that a hike-in restaurant on top of Dog Mountain would totally work! []

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Nov 24 2008

Finding Ways to Help Bloggers Help Bloggers

Published by John under Easy Listening, Software & Media. Popularity: 2%

Those who are ridiculous enough to follow this blog know that I have a category called “Less than Blog” that has it’s own section, and separate RSS feed. It was designed as a way to post quick blog entries that are significantly less than my usual Mitchner-esque essays. When I developed the idea mere weeks ago, I decided to post the Less than Blog entries in the sidebar, so that they have their own home on the blog’s frontpage. Recently, I’ve re-thought that on the grounds that my “friends” deserve, and can have, better. Continue Reading »

3 Comments

Nov 19 2008

I Talk Smack, But I’m Really Just a Secret Microsoft Sex Slave

Published by John under Software & Media. Popularity: 1%

Look, I’ve got to come clean on something.

It’s a big something.

It’s a something that’s going to require significant historical context to fully appreciate. Knowing how I write, that’s a really big something.

In fact, this something is big, so painful, so cathartic and wonderful all at the same time, that I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to get through the process of full disclosure. It’s a something that any self-respecting UNIX geek would feel so ashamed of that they would probably do penance in the form of 15 kernel builds on a 386 followed by 5 days of fasting in CDE. It’s just that damn big.

What’s the something? It’s the honest confession that every time I use Microsoft Visual Studio, I have to keep a towel nearby so that I can wipe up afterward.

It’s the confession that I am a whore to Microsoft.1

The Geek Within (skip this part)

In order for you to appreciate how troubling this is, we have to go back in time. This is a story that I rarely share, so feel privileged. This is a secret part of me- I have a wife to keep, after all.

That wife, Jessica, is just flat-out hot. And she was also one of the cool kids. She was pretty, she was popular, she was loved, she was a cheerleader. She was cool.

If she can’t see that line between my tricep and my deltoid, she starts looking around.

Consequently, in order to convince her that I’m cool enough to deserve to bask in her glory, I look the part of a long-haired, motorcycle riding rebel. I eat right and I work out. I fret about my weight because if she can’t see that line between my tricep and my deltoid, she starts looking around.

But it’s all an act. If it wasn’t for her, I’d be living in a basement in front of a 32 inch flat screen and I’d see the sun only when I need to pay the pizza delivery guy or bike to BiMonSciFiCon.

Jessie doesn’t know this, so keep it on the down low, but her husband is a total geek. He’s such a geek that he used to program his own games on his Ti99 4/a as a kid.2 He’s such a geek that he actually lost a friend because the idiot wanted to just play video games instead of program them. At 14, this guy was programming daily in BASIC.3 At 37, this woman’s husband still thinks that the best class of his high school career was PASCAL. The only reason why I don’t have the hard-copy, leather bound edition of the original Dune series as a centerpiece in my living room is because she would never, ever , ever have sex with me again if she fully understood the reality of my dorkiness.

Where am I going with this?

Nowhere, actually. That background story was entirely so that I could use Dune, Simpson’s references and sex in the same thought.

Look, man, I told you to skip the damn part. Don’t be mad at me.

Microsoft Sucks

So, because I’m big Mr. “Uber-no-one-can-pull-my-geek-card,” I’ll say that it was the early 90’s when I gave up on Microsoft. When Windows 3.1 hit the scene and the PC started becoming seriously ubiquitous, I turned my back. Couldn’t deal with it. That’s when I started being a dedicated, fundamentalist, unapologetic, flame-throwing UNIX user. I’ve hated Microsoft ever since.

Windows as a Marketplace

The problem is that Microsoft just can’t do one damn thing right. Well, they do one thing right. They sell. In fact, the fundamental purpose of the Windows operating system is to sell software. They sell the operating system, but that’s not the end of it. The operating system and their entire software suite is merely a computer-based marketplace. The whole thing is set up to build a framework so that other people can sell their software.

Windows is about selling you someone else’s solution to the problem that they are telling you that you have.

This is important, and something that most people don’t really appreciate. There’s all this talk about productivity, about getting things done, yada yada. The problem is that all breaks down when you realize that Windows is not about getting things done at all. Windows is about selling you someone else’s solution to the problem that they are telling you that you have.

At 3.1, I figured that out. There was actually no way to get something done unless I bought some software. This software would invariably do something close to, but not quite, what I wanted to do. When I bought that software, there was really no way for me to make it do exactly what I wanted to do. It was fast, granted. Pay money, install, have convenience of an instant- if sub-optimal- solution.

Windows was created with one single word in mind: Marketing.

UNIX as a Workplace

When I realized this, I looked for another solution and stumbled onto UNIX. UNIX was everything I wanted. It was geek central- there wasn’t a greasy-haired dork in the room who didn’t have a 20-sided die right there in his pocket. It was geeky, it was unforgiving- and it worked.

There wasn’t a greasy-haired dork in the room who didn’t have a 20-sided die right there in his pocket.

You see, while Windows was selling, UNIX was actually working.4 There wasn’t a thing you couldn’t do in a shell. There were millions of software programs that were free, and already on your system. Each one of them was designed so that you could type 2-3 little letters and instantly have something accomplished. It was exactly what you wanted to have accomplished- and if it wasn’t, you could modify the code- or pipe it through another 3 letter program.

In UNIX, everything was free, everything was modifiable, everything was possible.

In short, UNIX was created for one single purpose: To get shit done.

Microsoft Strikes Back

But things change, and people with heavily fundamentalist viewpoints that refuse to look around them are often blindsided by the complexity of the real world. In the mid-90s, I went to college. For stupid reasons that I might outline in a later post, I did not seek a Computer Science degree. I went into science- social and physical.

I was happily living in my dark little basement and curling up each night with my sweet little Alphastation.

Now, the whole time in college, I was basically programming, but I was doing it in isolation. I was happily living in my dark little basement and curling up each night with my sweet little DEC Alphastation. I was purposefully ignoring and denigrating all Windows users everywhere. I did this all through college and for much of graduate school.

At some point during grad school, after floundering and actually dropping out of one department, my engineering advisor sat me down and said something to me. The actual words are lost, but it was along the lines of “Look, stupid. You’ve been screwing around, pretending to dig hydrology for nearly two years. I’ve got some hydrologic programming I really need done. You love programming. What’s the fucking problem?”

Yeah, sometimes really smart people smack you upside the head and make you realize how dumb you’ve been.

So, I started working for him as a programmer. But I worked only grudgingly he was working in <shudder> Windows. He was working in Windows and the program was a monolithic spaghetti monster of more than a few tens of thousands of lines of code, all one single “class,” programmed by someone who taught themselves a heretofore unknown version of C++ while they were building it. It was a nightmare. And it was something that required me to use, to my nightmarish horror, Microsoft development tools.

It was ugly, it was not what I wanted to do, but it would pay the bills. I bowed my head, bent over, and took the whippings.

Microsoft Rocks

It was the worst day of my life. It was so bad because, with the exception of jumping on a research computer here or there at school, my only experience with using Windows on a day to day basis was pre-Win95. My concept of their entire framework was “build a place where people buy/sell crap and nobody really gets anything accomplished.” Because of this, I thought that the only thing I was going to accomplish by trying to program a highly complex engineering model in Windows was to seriously consider my weight… and the drop necessary to make the noose snap my neck properly.

I thought that the only thing to was to seriously consider my weight… and the drop necessary to make the noose snap my neck properly.

But as soon as I installed that old, now crappy, version of Visual Studio I knew something had changed. You see, while I was in college and grad school standing on street corners and streaming at the top of my lungs while holding up a copy of The Cathedral and The Bazaar- Microsoft was sitting down and, well, getting shit done. They were doing something revolutionary. They spent months, maybe years, doing nothing more than re-defining what it means to develop software. From the tools to the management framework to the work environment, they were focused on one thing: Give developers every goddamn thing they need to develop software.

Looking back, I see it as one of the most important, and beautiful, steps in the history of computers. I mean, Microsoft still sucks in many ways, I still prefer Ubuntu any day, they still fundamentally sell software. But they’ve done something wonderful. They’ve defined software engineering in a way never before dreamed of. This company built crap and sold it really well- and afterward they stepped back and spent considerable time and money teaching themselves how to do the former better.

And because of this, they have these tools, these frameworks, these strategies that are all focused on one singly efficient, inexorable goal: Kick-ass Software Development. If the Borg were looking for a company to learn strategy and efficiency from, that company would be Microsoft.

Secret Microsoft Sex Slave

In a lot of ways, I missed my calling, and my chance. I was hitting college right as many things were happening, and had about 10 years of programming experience at that time. I chose the science path instead. But even though I didn’t jump into a programming career and ride the wave, I’ve always been, and will continue to be a programmer. It’s also evident that I will continue to appreciate Visual Studio and Microsoft’s development prowess, even if I go home to my Ubuntu laptop.

I’ll continue to appreciate it because, to put it bluntly, Visual Studio makes me wet.

I’ll continue to appreciate it because, to put it bluntly, Visual Studio makes me wet. Seriously. For the past couple months I’ve been thinking of an Outlook app that I simply can’t believe is not native. And for the past couple months I’ve been too scared to even start on it. I’ve been scared because I sometimes feel as though I’m not a good enough programmer- loss of self confidence after years of programming as a hobby instead of a job. But I’m also scared because Office is a big programming world. You may not think it’s that big if you just use it, but even the core Office apps probably have more code than the entire Windows 3.1operating system did. Seriously. Jumping into that was just plain daunting. I didn’t even know where to begin.

Last night, finally, I took the plunge.5 I took the plunge and fired up Visual Studio 2008. I had no idea how to build anything in Outlook. I’d spent hours, days actually, trying to read everything I could on the .NET infrastructure in Office, on Outlook programming, on the Interop Assemblies. I just couldn’t get it. I stood there looking at Visual Studio’s black start page as if it were a precipice into despair. At some point, I decided to just start writing code.

And magic happened.

It was wonderful. In an hour, I had a working context menu in Outlook. Days I spent reading, trying to grok libraries. Days wasted. In 1 hour. 60 minutes, I was able to fire up Outlook, right click on an email message, see my little context menu item pop-up (only when it was appropriate), and close down quietly. 1 hour. From paralyzing fear of failure to a decent beginning in 60 minutes.

That’s just magic.

After one hour, I was done. Exhausted. I laid back, smoked a cigarette, wiped myself up and went to sleep.

After one hour, I was done. Exhausted. I laid back, smoked a cigarette, wiped myself up and went to sleep. I shamefully gave my Linux box a kiss goodnight. I actually said “I love you Ubuntu.” I was cheating, and my laptop never even knew. I didn’t sleep much. Part of it was that my head was swirling with feature creep and I was trying to focus on core functionality. But most of it was because that was the moment that I realized that I’m a whore.

You know that moment when you discover sex? No, not that moment. The real moment. The time when you have it and think “Holy shit! I just never knew it could be like that!” That’s what I feel when I program with Visual Studio.6 I’ll continue using Ubuntu daily. I’ll keep going through the motions of pronouncing Microsoft “bad at everything.” I’m a *NIX user to the core.

But I have to be honest with myself. Late at night,  when I want to feel it. When it’s dark, and I’m all alone and I just want to do it and have it feel so good… I’m going to sneak away. I know I am. I am going to cheat on Linux. I am going to program in Visual Studio.

I may talk smack, but I’m really just a secret Microsoft sex slave.

  1. BTW, this entire post is really just a shout-out to @missburrows and @camikaos. I don’t think they’ve posted a single Twitter update that’s not about geeks, sex, food, whippings or shoes. They don’t know it, but my entire writing strategy has become a struggle to be as humerous as those two (too) crazy women. Let’s see if I can pull this off. []
  2. Believe it or not, that computer is  on display at a museum. Crazy. []
  3. unlike some crazys, he never thought assembly was fun. []
  4. It’s not lost on me, the fact that marketing is why Microsoft took over the world. []
  5. This time it was only because taking the plunge may make us enough money that we keep our house. I’m enough of a chicken-shit that if it wasn’t for the layoff, I may have put it off longer. []
  6. Okay, it’s not anything like that, I mean really. But Melissa Lion used a similar analogy for meat, and I thought it was funny enough to run with. Besides, I’m enough of a geek that sex and programming makes a funnier analogy to me than sex and meat. []

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John Metta

Greetings! I’m John Metta, writer, hydrologist, programmer, and a digger of all things tech nestled snugly in the Columbia River Gorge (i.e. Heaven). This blog started as a test bed for programming social media apps, but eventually became something that, for whatever reason, people actually read. In fact, people read it so much that I had to create a whole other blog called Mettaprogramming for the geeky stuff I write. Feel free to email me at or contact me on Twitter @mettadore.

A Glorious Day!

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