Scott Hanselman

A big week indeed for the Hanselman Family. My mom, Franci, age 60 (she doesn't mind saying) graduated from PSU with a Master's in Education. An amazing accomplishment at any age I say. She held her own against the 20-somethings and graduated Magna Cum Laude.

Correction - Dad says a 3.82 GPA is Summa Cum Laude, my bad!

She's been working at this for a very long time and we're all very proud of her. Congratulations Mom!

And speaking of life-altering forward motion, in a fantastic sequel to the Hit Video "Z Rolls" today Z created a soon-to-be-hit Z Crawls! Now we're frantically running around baby-proofing the house. Just kidding, it's been baby-proofed for months. ;)

Tip: We put a number of sheets of clear plexiglass in front of the multimedia/stereo equipment. These plastic pieces are L-shaped with one side sitting underneath the component with the other side shielding the front. This lets the remote control continue to work while preventing Z from inserting a sandwich into the VCR.

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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A number of folks have asked about the "flare" on my site that appears at the bottom of each post. This is possible via a number of things.

First, the current version of DasBlog (get it via SubVersion) supports FeedBurner directly. FeedBurner will host your RSS Feed for you and DasBlog will automatically redirect folks who ask for your original feed to the new FeedBurner one, like http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman. This will allow you to manipulate your feed in a number of new ways, including the addition of "feed flare."

Gavin Joyce kindly created a FeedFlare for DotNetKicks.com that I put up at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/kickitflare.xml. I told FeedBurner, via their web-based configuration interface to use this new flare and it now appears automatically at the bottom of each of my posts along with a few other bits of flare.

Then I added this line to my itemtemplate.blogtemplate file in my DasBlog specific theme folder:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman?flareitem=<%PermalinkUrlRaw%>" type="text/javascript"></script>

This includes a bit of JavaScript from FeedBurner that creates the flare. I can have different flare in the feed and the site.

NOTE: Apparently there's some kind of known bug in FeedBurner on their side related to DasBlog's correct usage of the Description element in the RSS Feed, but they know about it and they are working on it. This causes, it seems, flare to not display in some aggregators.

I've been VERY happy with FeedBurner and it's cut my bandwidth in half and added a host of new abilities like more detailed statistics on the number of subscribers, where they're from and what aggregator they use.

So, the combination of DasBlog's auto-redirect, the FeedFlare API, modifying the DasBlog item template and their FeedFlare JavaScript make it so.

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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Mo went to United World College 92-94 before her undergrad at Linfield and MBA at Willamette. This week we went back to visit for the first time since she left twelve years ago. She came to the states as a 19-year-old who'd never left Zim and returned to New Mexico a business person, wife, and mother. It was a blast - pics here. We flew into ABQ and rented a car and drove to Las Vegas (Montezuma), New Mexico. We also visited a number of friends and host-families who took Mo under their collective wing.

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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And a lovely time was had by all at TechEd 2006 this year. I did two talks, one with Patrick Cauldwell, who I've been speaking with for darn near ten years now, and one with Keith Pleas, this being my first time with Keith. Both talks went over pretty well considering the hard drive crashes and laptop LCDs dying that the audience didn't see. Thanks so very much to Simon Guest and Marty Collins for having us and for the privilege of speaking in the Architecture Track.

• I got to hang out at the Vault booth and talk to Ian Olsen and Eric Sink. I may have talked to enthusiastically to them and given the wrong first impression, though. ;) Thanks for putting up with me!
• The RubyCLR Birds of a Feather went well I thought, and I encourage those of you who are getting into Ruby to check it out. I may do a whole Hanselminute podcast on Ruby soon. Thanks John!
• Hanging out with Jeffrey Snover (PowerShell Architect) and Marc Van Orsouw (PowerShell MVP) was awesome. Jeffrey was kind enough to let me do his lunchtime talks on PowerShell at the Technical Learning Center. I LOVE demo'ing PowerShell and I hope we convinced more people to jump onboard.
• Had a blast talking to the folks at Beantown.NET. Thanks to Ben Day for hosting and to Chris Jackson for driving me back to the conference! We also happen to tape (Camtasia) the session for Wrox, so Jim Minatel should have that up soon. Thanks to Jim for being a great editor and host as well and be sure to check out the MVP Hacks book. There's an excerpt published up on the Wrox site.

See you next year!

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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My twenty-first Podcast is up. This episode is some off-the-cuff, on the show floor interviews from TechEd 2006 this year in Boston! Thanks to John Lam, Patrick Cauldwell, Jeff Atwood, Shy Cohen, and everyone else that I hung out with and met at this year's conference!

We're listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, so I encourage you to subscribe with a single click (two in Firefox) with the button below. For those of you on slower connections there are lo-fi and torrent-based versions as well.

NEW COUPON CODE EXCLUSIVELY FOR HANSELMINUTES LISTENERS: The folks at XCeed are giving Hanselminutes listeners that is Coupon Code "hm-20-20." It'll work on their online shop or over the phone. This is an amazing deal, and I encourage you to check our their stuff. The coupon is good for 20% off any component or suite, with or without subscription, for 1 developer all the way up to a site license.

Our sponsors are XCeed, CodeSmith Tools, PeterBlum and the .NET Dev Journal. There's a $100 off CodeSmith coupon for Hanselminutes listeners - it's coupon code HM100. Spread the word, now's the time to buy.

As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)

• The basic MP3 feed is here, and the iPod friendly one is here. There's a number of other ways you can get it (streaming, straight download, etc) that are all up on the site just below the fold. I use iTunes, myself, to listen to most podcasts, but I also use FeedDemon and it's built in support.
  • Some other clients are Doppler (also suppose Windows CE), FireAnt, Nimiq, and PrimeTime Podcast.
• Note that for now, because of bandwidth constraints, the feeds always have just the current show. If you want to get an old show (and because many Podcasting Clients aren't smart enough to not download the file more than once) you can always find them at http://www.hanselminutes.com.
• I have, and will, also include the enclosures to this feed you're reading, so if you're already subscribed to ComputerZen and you're not interested in cluttering your life with another feed, you have the choice to get the 'cast as well.
• If there's a topic you'd like to hear, perhaps one that is better spoken than presented on a blog, or a great tool you can't live without, contact me and I'll get it in the queue!

Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?

Now playing: Rent - I'll Cover You

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.

About   Newsletter

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