Scott Hanselman

DISCLAIMER: I don't work for the IE Team. I don't have any magic internal knowledge that wasn't found on Wikipedia or a public bathroom wall. Any errors here are mine and any speculation here is likely nonsense. If you quote me in a news article and say something like "Microsoft's Principal Program Manager Scott Hanselman sez all your base are belong to IE9" then you're a dork, because there's like 5,000 of us PMs. We're like cockroaches. Don't imply a product or company or unit has a single PM.

I run all the browsers. Is it because I'm a techie? Because I'm a shill? Mostly because I honestly can't decide. I run IE8 for intranet sites because it's compatible, I run Firefox because I have a bunch of nice add-ins I like, I run Chrome because it's fast, I run Safari...ok, I don't run Safari...I run Opera in case I might miss something cool that those wonderful Norwegians might have thrown in when I wasn't looking.

I run the latest version of everything. I want to see the new features and I want to see what old features get removed or hidden.

I installed IE9 Beta today and noticed that a lot of stuff was removed. I saw this great graph from Jane Kim on the IE team on their blog today show what features folks use in the browser. While I find the high end numbers a little suspect (seriously, who are these 29% of people who aren't clicking the back button? Grandma?) the point is that once you really dig into the telemetry, after the basics, folks just aren't using all the bells and whistles. Why not just get those bells and whistles out of the way?

IE9 Beta's interface is extremely minimal, it seems. Check these shots of IE9b, Opera 10.61, Chrome 7.0.517.5dev, Firefox 4.1b6, and Safari 5.0.2, all with their default settings.

Looks like all the browsers are starting to get out of the way of the web and include less crap. There's interesting "pairings" in the interfaces, like the back button in IE9 and FF4.1, the colored button in Firefox and Opera, the settings gear in IE9 and Safari, and the refresh button in all browsers. There's only so many ways these metaphors can be presented, right? At least we all agreed on address bars and tabs. ;)

A number of long time IE8 users have emailed me and said "looks like a good start, but x feature is gone."

Here's...

The Ultimate Guide to New IE9 users Who Fear Change

...taken directly from emails or comments I personally got on launch day.

1 - "Does it render text blurry for you? It does for me."

It renders different, for sure. When IE9 renders in it's, well, IE9 mode, it's using DirectWrite to render the text. This means the text rendered is not only potentially hardware-accelerated, but it also means we get (directly from MSDN):

• A device-independent text layout system that improves text readability in documents and in UI.
• High-quality, sub-pixel, ClearType text rendering that can use GDI, Direct2D, or application-specific rendering technology.
• Hardware-accelerated text, when used with Direct2D.
• Support for multi-format text.
• Support for the advanced typography features of OpenType fonts.
• Support for the layout and rendering of text in all supported languages.
• GDI-compatible layout and rendering.

But when you render using IE8 compatibility mode, you're using the regular GDI rendering that you're probably used to.

OK, so what, right? Well, if you've got some CSS, as I do on my podcast site http://hanselminutes.com/ for example, that says "8pt" that means I have asked for an 8pt font. Not pixels, points. That's a typography thing, not a Windows thing.

When a page like mind asks for font-size: 8pt that converts to a 10.667 pixel font size. If you're using GDI (IE8) rendering that will round up to a nice round 11 pixels, and it'll look exactly as if I'd said font-size: 11px. Which I didn't. But, it'll snap to a pixel, right?

However, if I start to scale a page with that GDI rendered font from 100% up to larger sizes using the Ctrl-Plus hotkey, check out what happens with my text. It's breaking and wrapping differently at each zoomed text size. Those rounding errors are catching up with me.

With DirectWrite though, I get smooth transformations all the way up and down. If I ask for 8pt, I'll get 10.667px "exactly" in the sense of "you asked for it."

It's subtle, but it gives the designer more control. If you really feel strongly about it, ask for font sizes that will snap to pixels at small sizes. I'm noticing only at really small font sizes, myself.

This kind of more accurate font rendering is coming though, so get ready. It's in Firefox's betas, and Chrome's nightlies. I'm sure that someone from the IE9 team who actually knows what they are talking about will do a post on this with WAY more detail soon. Before then, here's some text for you to stare at. Note the CSS change in the 3rd shot that makes the fonts "clearer."

IE9 running in 8 document mode:

IE9 running in 9 document mode:

IMPORTANT: IE9 running in 9 document mode but with the font-size changed to 11px:

Firefox 4 Beta 6:

2 - "My bookmark bar is gone and I'm freaking out. I get that Microsoft is making it simpler, but stop moving my cheese."

You can right click in any of the 'whitespace' (it's actually transparent) and get your precious Favorites Bar and/or Command bar back.

Personally, since I DO use bookmarklets (see my links?) but I also like minimalism, I have decided against showing the Favorites bar ("bookmarks bar") and am clicking the little Star/Favorites button. My stuff is still there, it's just one more click away. Your call.

3 - "I'm using to selecting Print from the File Menu but the whole Menu Bar is gone."

If you click the Gear icon, you'll find most interesting stuff that you'd want is duplicated in there.

See that Print is the first thing? Also, if you're used to Hotkeys, as I am, know that the Menu Bar is actually there, hidden until you use a key, like Alt-F:

4- "Pinned site features are great when you want them - but...[I want to] prevent IE9 from creating a pinned site every time you drag the icon into a folder"

Right now in IE9b, if you start dragging from the "favicon.ico" (that's the websites little icon in the upper left there) you’ll get a pinned site and an icon like this mid-drag, and a pinned site when you drop.

However, if you already have shift down before you start the drag, you'll get a regular internet shortcut that is NOT a pinned site.

5 - "I can't find the Quick Tabs feature and I think I'm going to die."

You could remove "Quick Tabs" and insert just about any feature out there that folks get attached to. Most of the obscure stuff that no one uses (refer back to the chart above, 1.1% guy) is still buried in the settings but turned off. In the case of Quick Tabs, I think Aero Peek is a cooler feature.

If you really want Quick Tabs back, go to the Settings (Gear) menu, then Internet Options, General, Tab Settings, and turn it back on. Ctrl-Q is the hotkey. This is an IE7 feature, so don't get all excited. It'll get you this:

But forget about it because you already know that Aero Peek gives you this by just hovering over the Taskbar Icon. And, remember that these peek thumbnails are live. That means videos, animations, everything keeps running and you can see it in the thumbnail.

Enjoy, and I hope this helped you find your cheese.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Site Specific Browsers aren't a really new idea. In 2005 there was an app called Bubbles I ran for a while that would let you run a website with minimal "browser chrome." Mozilla Prism (né WebRunner) is a Firefox add-in that does a similar thing. Google Chrome includes the idea of Application Shortcuts. The idea of all this is that some web apps are really applications and you think about them as applications. For me, I think of Gmail and Facebook and Twitter and Basecamp as applications not necessarily as browser tabs. The notion of Site-Specific Browsers is definitely arriving.

Internet Explorer 9 Beta (IE9) is out now and includes a featured called "Site Pinning" which is a effectively Site Specific Browsers. It's integrated nicely with Windows 7. It's easy for you as a developer or site owner to add these features to your site.

Here's the basic idea from a markup perspective from a Channel 9 example:

<meta name="application-name" content="Channel 9 Audio Player" />
<meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="Channel 9 Podcasts" />
<meta name="msapplication-window" content="width=1024;height=768" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Msdn Flash Podcasts;action-uri=./?topic=msdnFlash;icon-uri=Images/channel9_logo.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=IE Podcasts;action-uri=./?topic=connectedShow;icon-uri=Images/channel9_logo.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Other Podcasts;action-uri=./?topic=other;icon-uri=Images/channel9_logo.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=All Podcasts;action-uri=./;icon-uri=Images/channel9_logo.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-navbutton-color" content="#FF3300" />
<meta name="msapplication-starturl" content="./" />

You add meta keywords (you don't need to add them all) to represent Jump List Tasks. Here's what Twitter added:

<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=New Tweet; action-uri=http://twitter.com/home; icon-uri=images/ie/tweet.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Direct Messages; action-uri=http://twitter.com/inbox; icon-uri=images/ie/dm.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Mentions ; action-uri=http://twitter.com/replies; icon-uri=images/ie/mentions.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Favorites; action-uri=http://twitter.com/favorites; icon-uri=images/ie/fav.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Search; action-uri=http://search.twitter.com; icon-uri=images/ie/search.ico" />

If I visit Twitter with IE9:

Then either drag the TAB or the FAVICON to the Taskbar:

Then I'll get a Twitter icon in my Windows 7 Taskbar that looks nice like any other app. If I right click on it, I'll get a jump list like any other application. Compare this screenshot to the meta tags above:

If I run Twitter, the Twitter app icon will show up to the left of the back button. The back and forward buttons also change color (it's subtle here because Twitter's icon is blue like the default blue, but you'll see later) and the home button is gone from the toolbar. Note that you CAN change the color (see the code above) if you don't like the automatically calculated color.

Now, this browser is site-specific. The Pinned Tab will effectively become a Twitter app.

Rather than dragging the site to my taskbar, I could have click the Tools icon (the gear) and clicked File|Add To Start Menu:

Now my app is in the Start Menu, as are my jump lists:

If you want, you can also use Javascript to push overlay icons to your pinned app. For example:

Via code like this:

//show
window.external.msSiteModeSetIconOverlay(iconUri, toolTip); 
//hide an Overlay Icon: 
window.external.msSiteModeClearIconOverlay(); 

There's also the ability to add and remove jump list items dynamically to keep track of a search history or favorites, for examples. You can even add taskbar buttons like this:

Here's a little code for the example:

document.addEventListener('msthumbnailclick', onButtonClicked, false); 
var btnPlay = window.external.msSiteModeAddThumbBarButton(iconUri, toolTip); 
window.external.msSiteModeShowThumbBar(); 
function onButtonClicked(e) { 
    switch (e.buttonID) { 
        case btnPlay: 
            play(); 
            break; 
        } 
}

Adding Basic Jump Lists to your own Site

I'll add some jump lists to this blog. Here's my site visited in IE9. See my big head in there? That's just my favicon.ico that I made with IcoFX, a great free icon editor.

You can't TELL me you haven't always wanted my tiny transparent head on your taskbars, Dear Reader. Come on! ;)

Here's the code I'll add..

<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Complete Archives;action-uri=/blog/Archives.aspx;icon-uri=/blog/images/archives.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Speaking/Videos;action-uri=/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Speaking;icon-uri=/blog/images/videos.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Weekly Podcast;action-uri=/blog/CategoryView.aspx?category=Podcast;icon-uri=/blog/images/podcast.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Scott on Twitter;action-uri=http://twitter.com/shanselman;icon-uri=/blog/images/twitter.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Scott on Facebook;action-uri=http://facebook.com/scott.hanselman.public;icon-uri=/blog/images/facebook.ico" />
<meta name="msapplication-starturl" content="./" />
<meta name="application-name" content="Scott Hanselman's Blog" />
<meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="Scott Hanselman's Blog" />

Then when I drag the favicon or tab to the task bar (or select File|Add to Start Menu) you'll see:

And the top of the browser  changes:

Pretty slick! While I don't see the world considering my blog an app, it was minimal effort to get this little bit of integration.

The more interesting ideas would be:

• Adding a podcast player for Hanselminutes.com so the site could be an app
• Keeping a separate list of recently searched for terms

Enjoy. Download IE9 here.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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When we moved into the new house and setup the new home office a few years back, I posted about wiring the house for wired Cat-6 ethernet. I've never liked or trusted wireless, so when we started building the place it was always in the plan to wire everything and focus on speed.

Fast forward to 2010 and the Wii is wireless, the iPad and iPhones are wireless, the Windows Phone 7 is wireless, my wife's laptop is wireless, and it's all slow. It's slow because I'm using the standard Verizon (now Frontier) FIOS wireless router to cover all corners of a two story house. Over the last few weeks it's been especially irritating as the wife has moved her laptop into another room and I've started watching streaming Netflix from the corner of a room I'd never had a wireless device in.

I tried using the standard admin interface to boost the power of the wireless router a bit, but that didn't work. Then I bought an aftermarket external antenna for the router (it just screws on and replaces the standard antenna) and while that helped a little, I was still getting 1 or 2 out of 5 bars in the two rooms we used wireless devices the most. Streaming video or news (audio or video) or downloading podcasts was impossible.

I found an extra Verizon Router in my pile of tech junk while cleaning up and then got the idea to make a second wireless network upstairs. Sure, I could set it up easily with another SSID (service set identifier - a wireless network name) but that would be cheesy and my devices wouldn't roam smoothly between networks.

Here's the trick, thanks to some friends on Twitter and a little thought.

The Starting Point

In my case, I had a standard Verizon (ActionTec) router with the IP of 192.168.1.1. That's a static (non-changing) address. The router has DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) turned on, which means that this router hands out IP Addresses to my devices. It hands out those addresses in a certain range, specifically 192.168.1.2 through 192.168.1.254.

Your router will likely vary, but on this one you navigate to My Network, My Network Connections, then click on the Edit icon on the main network interface. You'll end up here:

Notice the Start IP Address and End IP Address. You'll want to change this to 192.168.1.3 because we're going to use 192.168.1.2 as a static address for the second router when we set it up.

As an aside, you really should make sure your wireless router is using WPA2 for wireless security. If you're using WEP, it's about as effective as tissue paper, so change it to WPA2 with a strong password or find a techie nephew to do it for you.

Next, turn off your first (primary) wireless router completely. Routers aren't expecting folks to do what we're doing, so when you turn on the second router it will also default to 192.168.1.1. You're turning off the first so the second can be changed.

Turn on the second router and set its static IP address to 192.168.1.2. Under IP Address Distribution, set it to "disabled." It's important that you don't have TWO devices on your network passing out IP Addresses. This second router will only be bridging the wireless and wired world at your house. It has no responsibilities around IP addresses.

Here's an unnecessary diagram:

Make sure the wireless settings of the second router is the same as the first router. Same SSID, same security type, same password. The only difference will be the channel. Moreover, we'll want to make sure the channels are sufficiently far apart.

Of course, if you're rich and famous and have a  HUGE area to cover, you can add a third wireless access point and just make sure that third AP uses a channel that's sufficiently far away from the other two. Try to make the second router be 5 away from the first router's channel. The guidance is channels 1, 6 and 11 are a good guideline. I used 11 for the first and 6 for the second.

Here's a great chart showing the channel spread from Wikipedia. I used channels 11 and 6 for my two routers.

Of course, you'll need an ethernet run going from a LAN port on your first router to a LAN port on your second router. In my case, each room has ethernet in the wall goingn to a gigabit switch. I pluged the second router into the wall from its LAN port and it worked.

Reboot everything, plug them all in and there you go.

Just thirty minutes later and I'm happily streaming video to my wireless portable devices in parts of my house that were previously useless.

Technical Summary

• First Router
• 192.168.1.1
• DHCP to use the range 192.168.1.3-192.168.1.254
• A wireless channel like 11
• Second Router
• 192.168.1.2
• DHCP is disabled
• Identical wireless security setup as First Router
• Except the wireless Channel. Try channel 6 if the first is 11.
• Plug hard-wire into the LAN port, not the WAN port.

Related Links

• Wiring the house for a Home Network
• Wiring the house for a Home Network - Part 2 - Design Q&A
• Wiring the house for a Home Network - Part 3 - ISP Hookup
• Wiring the house for a Home Network - Part 4 - Thank You Cat 6 Gigabit Ethernet
• Wiring the house for a Home Network - Part 5 - Gigabit Throughput and Vista
• New Job, New House, New Baby, and Designing a Totally New Home Office
• How To: Use Google Earth or Virtual Earth to Visualize a New House Lot - Part 1
• How To: Use Google Earth and SketchItUp to Visualize a New House Lot - Part 2

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'm definitely a software person. I took EE in school and made an LED class, then a small computer like everyone else, and I know my volts and my amps for the most part, but that's about it. The limits of my skills are somewhere around adding an LED and some resistors to leech power off a USB adapter (which I recently did while working on the Hanselcade retro arcade build).

I look at hardware guys like Clint Rutkas in awe. I mean, seriously, who builds a T-shirt cannon from scratch for fun? Amazing.

Clint sent me a "Netduino" board today. It's similar to an Arduino board, except it uses the .NET Micro Framework. Micro you say? That's techie-speak for "tiny ass framework." I spoke to Colin Miller about this earlier in the year on video at Channel 9.

Remember my SPOT watch from 2004? That's Smart Personal Objects Technology, which is marketing-speak for "tiny ass framework." That watch is six years old (and still running nicely, sitting on my desk, in fact) and ran .NET.

Fast forward to today and I find myself plugging in this Netduino board to my computer and following Pete's Hello World Tutorial and I'm looking at this namespace.

using Microsoft.SPOT;
using Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware;

It's back!

Ok, putting it all together in context. The Netduino is a board that's mostly Arduino compatible and has a published schematic (PDF here) so you could make one yourself, if you wanted. The .NET Micro Framework (or TinyCLR as some folks have called it) is literally that - it's a tiny CLR that runs .NET byte code. You can write C# and it'll run on tiny CPUs with tiny amounts of memory (like 64k or something similarly smallish.) It's been with us all this time, and there is an enthusiastic community built around it.

The .NET Micro Framework 4.1 source is available, it's Open Source under the Apache 2.0 License. (Ya, the new Microsoft is freaking me out also. There's a lot of source that's quietly making its way out under increasingly liberal licenses.) There's lots of great details at Pete's blog.

Here's what a Netduino looks like:

I'm going to think of some hardware ideas that I can build with this. I also have a more capable and fancy Tahoe II with a touch-screen, accelerometer, buttons and more. If you're looking to prototype something quick, or even build a complete system with an off-the-shelf board, do check it out! Here's what a Tahoe II looks like. Remember, all these boards use C# and .NET. It's amazing writing something for hardware using a language and framework I already know how to use. It literally gets me 80% of the way there from a learning curve perspective.

There's also the GHI Electronics EMX Development system, so there's a lot of choices.

With each of these boards (and others) you just need to get the Micro Framework 4.1, then the SDK for that specific board. It integrates into Visual Studio 2010. If you want to change the product, they are taking proposals in the .NETMF Forums.

Directly from Pete's blog:

Getting Started

What you'll need:

• Netduino (Scott: or some other .NET Micro Framework board)
• USB Cable (early Netduino units come with the USB cable) (Scott: Usually a micro- or mini-USB)
• Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Micro Framework 4.1 SDK  (you can use C# Express 2010 if you don't have Visual Studio)
• Netduino SDK in 32 bit or 64 bit, depending on your host OS.
• Optional: shields and starter kits to do cool things with netduino. Existing Arduino shields are compatible. A shield is just an add-on card that fits the pins on the board.

The SDK installs a device driver for talking to the Netduino. Make sure you select the one with the appropriate bitness, and that you install it before connecting the Netduino to the PC. I installed the VS2010 bits before the SDK, but it shouldn't matter.

Once you plug in the Netduino, using the USB cable, you should see the device driver get installed, and the power LED on the board light up.

Hello World with Morse Code

Now I just have the Netduino for now, so I haven't got any attachments. If I was a hardware guy, I'm sure I'd go try to take apart a toaster or remote control and declare something like "this toaster just needs a one OHM resister on pin-out 5A so I can invert the voltage and it'll toast bread over Bluetooth" but I have no idea what that means. All I can do with the Netduino out of the box to flash its LED, as Pete points out:

public static void Main() 
{ 
   OutputPort onboardLed = new OutputPort(Pins.ONBOARD_LED, false); 
  
   while (true) 
   { 
      onboardLed.Write(true); 
      Thread.Sleep(500); 

      onboardLed.Write(false); 
      Thread.Sleep(500); 
   } 
}

Let's make it fancier. How about outputting string using Morse Code? Wikipedia says a dot is 100ms long and a dash is 300ms. How hard can it be?

I could go to StackOverflow as they had a contest to see who could make the SMALLEST implementation that would take a string and output Morse Code. They have an extremely optimized (for lines of code) solution. But it's extremely silly. Certainly no more silly than me making an LED blink Morse Code as well, but I'd like to be able to actually read my code. ;)

So, here's a naive 10 minutes solution using this guys' two arrays because I'm too lazy to type up the Morse myself. I could have use a Hashtable also, but two parallel arrays was fine too. The .NET Micro Framework, being micro, doesn't have everything the full framework has. However, being open source, it has taken contributions and version 4.1 includes a Hashtable implementation.

I can even debug directly connected to the board!

Here's my sad little program (it was very easy!)

using System;
using System.Threading;
using Microsoft.SPOT;
using Microsoft.SPOT.Hardware;
using SecretLabs.NETMF.Hardware;
using SecretLabs.NETMF.Hardware.Netduino;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections;

namespace NetduinoApplication1
{
    public class Program
    {
        public static void Main()
        {
            OutputPort onboardLed = new OutputPort(Pins.ONBOARD_LED, false);
            
            while (true)
            {
                onboardLed.Write(false);

                foreach (char c in " hello scott hanselman ")
                {
                    string morse = ConvertTextToMorse(c);
                    Debug.Print(c + " = " + morse);
                    TransmitDotOrDash(onboardLed, morse);
                }
                
            }
        }

        private static Char[] Letters = new Char[] {'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g',
          'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u',
          'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z', '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8',
          '9', ' '};

        private static String[] MorseCode = new String[] {".-", "-...", "-.-.",
          "-..", ".", "..-.", "--.", "....", "..", ".---", "-.-", ".-..", 
          "--", "-.", "---", ".--.", "--.-", ".-.", "...", "-", "..-", 
          "...-", ".--", "-..-", "-.--", "--..", "-----", ".----", "..---", 
          "...--", "....-", ".....", "-....", "--...", "---..", "----.", " "};

        public static String ConvertTextToMorse(char c)
        {
            int index = -1;
            index = Array.IndexOf(Letters, c);
            if (index != -1)
                return MorseCode[index];
            return string.Empty;
        }


        public static void TransmitDotOrDash(OutputPort port, string dotordash)
        {
            foreach (char c in dotordash)
            {
                TransmitDotOrDash(port, c);
            }
            Thread.Sleep(300); //gap between letters
        }

        public static void TransmitDotOrDash(OutputPort port, char dotordash)
        {
            if (dotordash == ' ')
            {
                port.Write(false);
                Thread.Sleep(700); //gap between words
            }
            else //it's something
            {
                port.Write(true);
                if (dotordash == '.')
                    Thread.Sleep(100); //dot
                else
                    Thread.Sleep(300); //dash
                port.Write(false);
            }
        }
    }
}

Here's the debug output as I flash "hello scott hanselman" from the board.

All it all, it really couldn't be much easier. Next I'll try to get the Tahoe II working and maybe make a game for the boys. Perhaps hook up a speaker and a proximity sensor and see if they can sneak up on it.

Related Links

• .NET Micro Framework Community Hub - http://www.netmf.com
• http://netduino.com
• Build Your Own T-Shirt Cannon
• Build Your Own Retro Arcade

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Over the last few months I've blogged and tweeted about diabetes (in between my regular stuff) and you guys, Dear Readers, have be so kind as to donate over US$32,000 to Team Hanselman via the American Diabetes Association. We haven't hit our arbitrary $50k goal, but I'm totally amazed we made it this far, using only and entirely social media.

If you're interested in learning more about Diabetes and Type 1 Diabetes (what I have) then check out some of the stuff made this summer.

• I recorded a podcast with Type 1 Diabetic Marathon Runner Gary Schmidt from runningwitht1.com
• I posted a number of times in my Diabetes category showing new technology and hardware that helps me manage.
• I recorded a video on YouTube showing what I go through in managing my diabetes

As a point of interest, in 2007 I tweeted every single time I had to manage some aspect of my diabetes in a day. You might be surprised how often we diabetics have to think about diabetes. I hope YOU think about it as you enjoy that cookie! ;)

Also, check out "Diabetes: The Airplane Analogy" for a clear explanation on how blood sugar, insulin, and all this equipment works together.

This next Sunday the 12th, as a culmination of all this, we'll be walking as Team Hanselman in the ADA's StepOut to Fight Diabetes. If you are in or around Portland, you are welcome to join our team and meet us at the Team Hanselman tent.

We'll be walking with many thousands at the Rose Quarter in Portland. We'll be doing the three mile walk.

General Schedule:

• 8am: Registration opens w/ light breakfast
• 8:40: Opening ceremony begins – Red Strider Ambassadors, ADA Researcher Dr. Michael Harris, Warm-ups, NAYA Youth Dancers and NARA Drum Group
• 9:00: One, three and six mile walk begins through Irvington District
• 10:15ish: Lunch, entertainment, bouncy houses, basketball hoop, music from the River City Ramblers, Health Fair Tent, face painting and more.
• 11:15: Kids Race Walk w/ Coach Carmen
• 12:30: Portland Step Out: Walk to Fight Diabetes Finishes

Thanks to EVERYONE for all their help and support! Remember if you donated to please make sure your company matches your donation. Also, there's still time to make a tax-deductable donation and get it matched. Also feel free to give to your local country's diabetes organization as well!

Feel free to spread the word on social networking sites with this short link: http://hnsl.mn/diabeteswalk

You're a wonderful bunch of Dear Readers and I truly thank you for your support.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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