Today Windows 7 becomes publicly available through all retail channels.  I have been running it for about a year now and I have to say that I am quite impressed with the stability and performance.

Several MS employees gathered in Times Square outside of the Nasdaq building for the launch.

Check out the rest of the set on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/susanandallen/sets/72157622685527369/

-Allen

Recently Microsoft announced that they would be closing their Soapbox video service on August 31, 2009.  What’s Soapbox?  Exactly…not many people knew about it.  It was Microsoft’s web site for user generated content, similar to YouTube.
http://video.msn.com/shutdown.html

MSN Video will remain, but all user generated content is being removed.  I have moved all of my videos to YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/allenmock

Here’s an oldie but goodie…

I might consider switching to vimeo sometime in the future, but for now, I stick with youtube.

-Allen

Today is day one of six weeks that I am taking off from work.  One of the awesome benefits that Microsoft has is something called Parental Care Leave (formerly Infant Care Leave).  Under this program Father’s get 1 month paid time off (and up to 2 months additional unpaid).  Mom’s get 2 months paid and can take the additional 1 month unpaid.

I am going to be taking my 4 weeks paid, 1 week unpaid, and 1 week of vacation.  I am looking forward to the time off, spending time with Susan and Aidan, and tackling the long list of projects I never had time to deal with.  Maybe we’ll even be able to sneak in the occasional road trip. 

-Allen

P.S.  One of the things on my list is getting through old photos and blog posts.  Keep checking the blog and flickr for new (old) posts.

The other day, I was creating a web site and I need to create a drop down list for the site with values of 1-150. 

<option>1</option>
<option>2</option>
<option>3</option>
etc…

I was faced with 2 choices, do this manually 150 times or find a way to automate it.  Thinking about this, I wrote the following one-liner and then copied and pasted the output to my HTML document.  Voila!  Issue solved in less than 2 minutes.

PS C:\Temp> 1..150 | ForEach-Object { "     <option>$_</option>"}  >  htmloptions.txt

I am the furthest thing from a PowerShell expert, but I try to think of ways to automate functions that I have to do more than 1 time. 

The 1..150 defines a numeric range where number 1-150 would have normally been displayed on the screen. 

Since I followed this up with the pipe symbol (not the letter I or L) | the output goes to the next cmdlet.  This cmdlet ForEach-Object takes an action on each one of these numbers.   This action was to write the options for the dropdown list.  the $_ took the number that was piped in and inserted it in that location.

If you found this useful, please let me know in the comments section.

-Allen

At Ignite training, I was fortunate enough to have several friends in the training as well.  We got to hang and catch up.

Butch (my roommate during Ranger training)

Tuan and I
 

Tuan, Hank, and I

Jaclynn dropped me off at the airport

On the way back to NJ, I met Ja Rule in the Airport

Also Patrick Ewing was there, but he was with his daughter and for obvious reasons didn’t want to be disturbed.  I swear this pic is him.  We were both moving and my old point and shoot is too sloooow!

-Allen