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Well this is a first for me, sitting on a train in this lovely weather, going to Brighton with my laptop out, and doing work. I feel a bit strange, because as far as I can tell, no one else is here with a laptop, but no one looked at me strangely for having one out and working on it.

It took me a bit of time to get IIS setup properly (you can see it in the background), but I did in the end, and spent a good 45mins debuggering asp.net errors and html/css issues. Was alot more "fun" than just reading a book, then again I am a geek. 

In the last 3 months, iv had to setup 4 diffrent development environments, and I always keep forgetting things, so hopefully this is going to be my definitive list of things that are needed, I will try to link in some of the more obscure things later:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional
  • Jetbrains Resharper 3.x
  • VS.NET 2005 "Paste As" plugin - Smart Paster Addin 
  • "ProFontWin" Font - size 9
  • CoolCommands
• SQL server 2005 Developer edition / enterprise edition
  • Preferably on a Virtual PC, if not, on your local box.
• Tortoise SVN (Or any other tools used for source control)
• Taskbar Shuffle - Very good util for rearranging stuff on the taskbar
• Cropper for screen captures
• Daemon Tools for mounting those extremely large Microsoft Images
• Mozilla firefox, with a boatload of plugins, such as Web Developer toolbar, FireBug, IETab, Gmail Checker, FasterFox, Download Statusbar, Colourzilla)
• Microsoft Expression Web - very very good standards compliant html editor, the same editor is used in vs.net 2008!
• Microsoft Live Writer (must be installed AFTER Expression web, as exweb will throw a really obscure error)
• Microsoft Office (Excel/Word/Outlook/Powerpoint at the minimum)
• Microsoft Visio 2005 "for programmers" - or whatever its called, basically you can design the database in visio, and then get it to create the tables and the relationships for you.
• CodeSmith 4.0 with the latest version of Dot Net Tiers - this is my favourite ORM, its really fast and takes all the faff out of creating db objects etc...

Ill probably think of more things as I continue to go through this system to get it ready for tomorrow!

Well iv gone ahead and jumped into the deep end, and bought myself a lovely shiny new Sony Vaio laptop. Its got a meaty dual core T7100 processor, 2gbs of ram, 15.4" Widescreen, and a 120 gb hdd. Sofar I have installed Visual Studio 2005 on it (With Resharper 3.0.2, obviously), and it runs like a dream. Im planning to install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and run SQL Server 2005 off that, so I can run multiple databases without having to worry about screwing up my current environment.

Overall I like this laptop, although im not used to the keyboard, after spending 3 years typing on a Natural Keyboard.

I start my new freelance contract tomorrow hopefully, at MyKindaPlace.com (MKP) - and this is where the usage of this laptop will come into play...who knows, I might cheat and turn this into a semi desktop with an external mouse and keyboard...im tempted to!

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Tom and everyone else at Media Burn for making my 6 week stay there (contracting has its down sides) very welcome, and helping me gain alot of knowledge, and get to work on a big client (Sky). Although, admittedly, im not going very far, and probably will end up working with some people from Media Burn in the future, as I know some of them have worked for MKP.

Iv just done my first bit of hacking around with CSS and PHP on a WordPress site - one of my clients, SkateFresh. I started off by having a look at the current template, then working out how to steal the stuff from the main page, so I came up with the following:

Which gave me the following:

Hangon a second! That doesn't look right! There aren't any list items for that thing! It turns out the WHOLE of the left hand side bar isn't supposed to have any item bullets, because of the navigation. I think this is a bad design idea, but im not a CSS guru, there might a good reason to do this, so with a bit of hacking:

It now works properly:

And all this took me was a few hundred years about 30mins, including saying hello to my brother / sister in law / their 2 kids, and having lunch! Another job well done!

On the way home today, I remembered a conversation I had with a colleague from my last place. It went something along the lines of:

Me: I want to do XYZ. Its faster both on the database and in the code, less code.
Him: XYZ is alot like ABC. ABC was on The Daily WTF, which is bad. Therefore XYZ is bad.

In other words:

All dogs have 4 legs. My cat has 4 legs. Therefore, my cat is a dog.

Lady, and gentleman, that's called an Association Fallacy. Just because a property of one thing has the properties of another, it does not mean that ALL properties are the same. The code maybe horrible because it has featured on the daily wtf, but it does not guarantee it. Infact, the code that I would have written would be alot cleaner, and faster than the code you wanted me to write.

But, its not my problem now :)

Yesterday was the strangest day on the Northern Line. In the morning, a muslim, dressed in "The full Afghan" (turban, white clothes etc) boarded the train, with a large rucsac, then pulled out a high spec Sony Vaio laptop, and started typing away, for 40mins.

Strange.

Even stranger, this woman at Elephant and Castle, Northern Line south bound platform - she was pretty ish blonde, and was really smiling and looking at people and smiling back. When she boarded the train, she would be really happy. Then a few mins later, she would look like she was just about to cry. Then  back to really happy. Repeat for about 5-10 mins, till she got off at Clapham Common st.

Wierd.