Scott Hanselman

Not only do Type I Diabetics not produce insulin, the hormone that helps takes sugar out of the blood by delivering it to the cells, but we also don't produce amylin, a hormone that controls "gastric emptying." That's the speed that food leaves the gut.

Take a look at the chart to the right. The white line is a diabetic's blood sugar after eating at a buffet and taking insulin. The blood sugar raises dramatically as the diabetic gut digests and empties very fast. The insulin can't react fast enough.

The black line is insulin injected along with Symlin, a synthetic amylin analog.

I just started on Symlin this last week and so far, it's the bomb. I continue to wear the insulin pump to deliver insulin 24-hours a day to my system, but when I eat now I not only program the pump to provide insulin for the meal, but I also take a manual shot. (You can't mix insulin and amylin...yet)

This might sound horrible to you. You have to have a pump AND still take shots? But let me tell you that it's 100% better than having crappy blood sugar. I recently went to the funeral of a friend from high school who was the same age as I, except he'd be diabetic 15 years longer than I. I'd like to stick around as long as I possibly can.

The side effect so far is nausea, because my system hasn't seen amylin in over 10 years, so it's a little surprised. It's like a vegetarian eating meet for the first time in a while; the system reacts and rejects.

Here's some links. Ask your doctor about Symlin if you're a diabetic.

• FDA Approves Symlin
• Amylin Pharmaceuticals + Development Pipeline
• Medication Guide
• Nice Charts and Graphs about Amylin

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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 finally got around to renting Star Wars III. I'm a fan, but movies I and II were so egregiously bad that I got turned off on the whole thing. Plus, watching the 30-year-old geek stand in line got tiresome. Anyway, this holiday after watching "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" (one has to trade one movie for another) we started Star Wars. My wife was asleep within about 10 mins, before anyone had even landed a ship. At the end, as is our routine, I woke her up and started to bring her upstairs. In a sleepy half-conscious place she said:

"Did we ever find out how Anakin becomes C-3PO?"

I love my wife.

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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This is a little late, but Joe Stagner has finally uploaded a Podcast that Omar and I did with him. The subject is largely DasBlog, but we chat about lots of stuff. Joe didn't have time to edit it, so it's very rough, and there's a number of places where we actually talk about "oh, you can edit that out, right?" However, it's still interesting enough

I've added the interview as an enclosure to this post, so if you're using FeedDemon or other RSS Readers that automatically download Podcasts you may already have it waiting for you. Joe's original post is 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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I just bought Acronis TrueImage for disk/parition image backups to my Iomega Rev Drive. It was between TrueImage and Ghost, and I just liked the feel of TrueImage better. It runs (not sure how) without having to boot off a CD, possibly using the Volume Shadow stuff?

The receipt included a 20% of coupon that's good for the next 3 weeks. Feel free to use it. The coupon makes it only $39! It might be a one-time use, but the receipt said "You can even send this offer to a friend." So, n number of your where n could be 1, or 1 or more will get this discount.

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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Travis was talking about using the ASP.NET Cache object/subsystem outside of ASP.NET. I found it a little creepy as I've had all sorts of trouble trying to to Mock testing with ASP.NET outside of IIS and ended up using Cassini back in the day.

He convinced me though, check out the sample code on his site. I also started a conversation on a list server and here's what came of that:

Rob Howard said:

Yes, it's fairly common (and easy) to do. You just have to include a reference to the System.Web assembly in non-web applications; which may have led to your "creep out" – for what it’s worth it used to do the same to me :) 
FWIW, I believe (from memory) the recommended way you grab a reference outside of a web application is:
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Caching;
…
Cache cache = HttpRuntime.Cache;
<snip>...the Cache is just too important of a feature to only belong to ASP.NET.

Scott Stanfield said:

The biggest problem you'll run into using the cache outside of a web app is simply the namespace: System.Web. People freak out in code reviews. We got a lot of trash talk from the J2EE world on PetShop because of this.

Chris Kinsman said he seemed to remember some trouble with the Cache not sticking around in memory when used outside of ASP.NET, but that hasn't been substantiated. I'm going to dig more.

Adding System.Web to your non-web project is a good way to get folks to panic. Another is adding a reference to Microsoft.VisualBasic in a C# application. Both are reasonable and darned useful things to do, though.

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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