Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

I want an RSS reader that supports toast!. Luke or Dare, are you listening? [Don Box's Spoutlet]

Don and company want an RSS reader that makes blue toast.  Simon, when will BlogToaster be back?  I was hooked on the junk...or, perhaps, Greg, can you make Toast vs. Balloons an option?  I'd like a summarizing toast like "145 Posts received from 13 sites.  Note: 7 were from your favorite sites."

...sitting down to your Xbox after a 2 month absence, noticing that the "Download Levels" button in Splinter Cell is flashing, and downloading a completely new after-the-game is-complete level.  You have to hand it to Microsoft, they really executed smoothly with the Xbox.  The new level is called Kola Cell and it's stunning.

I came to work a few days back and was told at 9:45am, "You're ready for the analyst presentation, right? Didn't So-And-So tell you it's at 10?" 

Crap!  I checked my Work Outlook, my Home E-Mail, my Work Voice Mail, my Home Voice Mail, my Mobile Voice Mail, my PalmPilot, my PocketPC, my MSN Messenger, my Yahoo, my AOL Instant Messenger, and my CrackBerry...nothing.  Had I completely flaked an important meeting?

Now, I've got a pretty good relationship with So-And-So, so it wouldn't be like them to not let me know there's a meeting.  What's disturbing is that rather than going with my first assumption that noone told me - I instead checked everything.  Heck, the only place I didn' t check was the comments on my blog!

Conclusion for today:  I'm far too freakin' connected.  If someone REALLY needs to communicate with me, I'm available.  I no longer will believe anyone who says to me "Waa waa, I couldn't get ahold of you" or "I couldn't find your email address.   It's only my firstname at my lastname, .com.  How hard is that?  I need to disconnect for a while.  CrackBerries are VERY addictive, people, but there's a special kind of Connected Headache that occurs when you are 1 degree of separation from the Global Village.

Here’s a useful tip I thought everyone should know:

When a slide is selected in PowerPoint (either in Normal or Slide Sorter), while F5 will start the slide show at the FIRST slide, pressing Shift-F5 will start the slide show at the CURRENTLY SELECTED slide.

If I see one more person using that TINY slide show button in the tiny lower-left-corner of PowerPoint…:)

Also, just for fun, here's the famous PowerPoint that Abe Lincoln used at the cemetary dedication at Gettysburg.

Looks like Charlie Poole is speaking the Portland Extreme Programming (XP) Users Group on Tues, May 6th.  Charlie will be talking about NUnit 2.1.  Charlie's a fun guy, and the folks in the XP Users Group are hardened, battle-tested engineers.  If you want to know how Test Driven development can change your world, you should check it out.  If you're in Seattle, Charlie will present on Thurs, May 8 at the Seattle XP Users Group.

 Charlie says:

"NUnit is an open source unit test framework for .Net. We're about to release version 2.1 and I'll talk about new as well as old features. Some of the new things include a much cooler and more responsive gui, various option settings, the ability to load and test multiple assemblies, the ability to save and reload test projects with support for multiple configurations, opening Visual Studio projects directly and more accessible information about individual test results in the gui.

Once you grasp the idea behind it, unit testing as used in test-driven development is a beautifully simple concept. But some things present hard problems: GUI, multi-threading, etc. What can we do about these? This talk is based on material that's part of my tutorial "Advanced Unit Testing Techniques for .NET" being presented at XP2003 in Genoa this month and also for the book I'm working on. I'll outline some key tricks that apply  everywhere and show some code for specific issues."