Mom & Dad came through at Christmas time and put a brand new Cannon PowerShot S70 in our hands - our first digital camera. Explicit instructions did not come with it, but it was assumed I’d post photos of The Kid on a somewhat more regular basis.

Then the Seahawks went and had their best season ever and I forgot I had offspring.

The nice thing about the digital camera is, of course, not having to take the roll somewhere and have it developed and not having to scan the images myself. God, I hate scanning. Yeah, it was so cool in the ’90s to be able to stuff a document of some kind into a computer, but it’s sooooooo not worth it now. I am thankful for all the wonderful tech geeks who figured out how to bypass scanners. Sorry HP.

Jessica’s latest passion is playing with “Ponies”. Carrie has given her a bag full of the things and now Jess can’t go anywhere without them. She puts them in her play pots and pans, cooking meals with them, stirring them like a pot of spaghetti.

And her eyes are still an amazing blue. Pretty good for a recessive gene, eh?

The other day we finally dug out her last Christmas present, a giant chalkboard with a dry erase board on the other side. The dry erase markers were a nightmare from the beginning as Jess managed to mark herself up pretty good in the span of about thirty seconds. The caps were too sticky for her to get on and off and that lead to a tantrum, so the markers got taken away.

Chalk, on the other hand, works pretty good. I left her alone for about five minutes standing at the board and came back to catch her in the photo above. She had gone off and found her little folding chair and slapped it down in front of the board, as if standing was oh so much work. Cracked me up…

She’s also going through a bit of separation anxiety right now, so Carrie can’t wander too far or Jessica blows a gasket. There’s a lot of “see mommy!” going on, even when mommy is standing three inches in front of her nose. It’s gotten better in the past week, but she still has her moments when she begs for mommy as if one of H.R. Geiger’s Aliens was about to catch her and eat her.

Sitting at the orthodontist’s office Tuesday I saw a new Road & Track magazine laying on the coffee table. I’m not normally the type that reads magazines in waiting rooms, let alone Road and Track. My automobile IQ hovers just above dangerous - I know about enough to get myself killed changing the oil. But the car on the cover was like a snowman in the desert. I couldn’t help but be drawn to it.

Normally car magazines have to string Big Boobed Babes all over the cars to catch your attention, but not so with Chevy’s new Camaro. Road & Track just let the car sit there on the cover unadorned, and it was more attractive than a dozen of Hefner’s Hookers.

The car is a concept version for Chevy’s new Camaro, tentatively schedule for production release in 2008 or 2009.

I’ve been a big fan of Camaros since I first got behind the wheel, which in Idaho in the early ’80s was as early as age 14. I always wanted a 1984 Camaro and for months and months I searched high and low for a good used one. None ever materialized. It wasn’t until after my senior year that my dad finally co-signed on a loan for my first real vehicle: a brand new Toyota pickup. Not exactly a muscle car, but probably the right choice for me at the time.

Still, there’s always been a part of me that wanted to pull up to the high school parking lot in a fabulous looking Chevy Camaro.

But the car got old and Chevy finally did away with it. It was outdated, there’s no doubt about that. Then Ford came along and revived the Mustang with a brand new design (one that I actually like - and I have traditionally hated the Mustang). Apparently the Mustang revival was enough to get Chevy to believe the Camero could make a comback too.

But not just any Camaro. A bad one would be a waste of time. So they got some engineers together who have an obvious passion for the Camaro, and what you see on this blog is the result.

That is by far the best looking Amerian muscle car I’ve ever seen. I mean, check out that grille. Doesn’t that remind you of the Predator? Arnold would definately be back for this car…

Tom Peters, apparently one of the designers of the car, said:

“My charge to the design team was for them to do the meanest, scrappiest, street-fighting dog they could sketch…

Boy, did they ever.

According to the article in Road & Track the inspiration for the car came from the ‘69 Camaro. My wife owned one of those when she was a teenager and her cousin currently is in possession of it and I can certainly see the similiarities.

The car makes me want to rush out and buy one - today. I started staring at my two-year-old daughter and wondering if she could fall through a wormhole and turn 16 by 2009. Then I’ll have a valid excuse to go buy one.

I used to think no American made muscle car could ever surpass my love for Ferraris. Well, I was wrong. This car is that cool.

Encouraging news for Seahawks fans came out of the Seattle PI yesterday. Jim Moore, A.K.A. The Go To Guy, pinged ESPN’s John Clayton about the Shaun Alexander situation. Clayton is one of the ESPN guys I respect and admire - he really does his job well and seems to be building a rapport with coaches and players in much the same way Chris Mortenson has done. You get the feeling that folks trust Clayton because they know he’s not going to take phrases out of context on national TV.

Anyway, what Clayton had to say about Alexander was really positive for Seahawks fans. Moore writes:

Good news: Clayton expects the NFL MVP to remain with the Seahawks for $7 million to $8 million a year.

“He’ll end up here,” Clayton said. “You’re not going to see any other teams step up.”

Arizona and Minnesota have cap room to make it happen, but Clayton doesn’t think either team will. Carolina, a supposed suitor, does not have cap room.

That last bit is what I liked hearing the most. If you followed the Pro Bowl week shenanigans then you know about the Panthers trying to woo Alexander to their side of the field. Nice try, but apparently the players weren’t aware of the Panthers’ cap situation. Alexander is only leaving Seattle for cash - greenbacks, and lots of them. As of right now it doesn’t sound like any team in the NFL is going to pony up more than Seattle. And keep in mind - the Seahawks may not have the highest total dollar figure, but they have intangibiles that I hope Shaun is thinking about, like running behind the best offensive line in the NFL.

One of the really cool things about the Component Application UI Block is the ObjectBuilder. The documentation for the CAB describes it as:

… a generic dependency injection system that can be used to manage complex object dependencies and help to decouple objects in complex systems. It is a new project that was created and inspired by the requirements of the Composite UI Application Block (CAB).

The impact of the ObjectBuilder system can be seen everywhere in the CAB. Use a [CreateNew] attribute to inject some dependent object and you’re using the ObjectBuilder. The really cool thing about the ObjectBuilder though is not that the CAB uses it (duh) but that you can too, either for your own reasons or to extend the functionality of the CAB, which is precisely what Mariano Szklanny has done.

Mariano has a pair of great posts here and here about using the ObjectBuilder to improve the injection of the State into child WorkItems. Not only is his final solution elegent, but it is exactly how the CAB uses it as well. His final solution is so seemless it might as well be part of the released CAB. That’s cool.

(It’s also cool, I think, that we’re finally seeing some good blogging about the CAB)

It appears that an annoying error in Visual Studio 2003 has cropped up again in the 2005 version. Above is a screenshot of my IDE after reloading a project using the CAB. It doesn’t appear to be a problem specific to CAB though, as I can replicate this error with just about any UserControl.

This problem wouldn’t be annoying if there was a fix available in a patch, but determining the availability of a patch from Microsoft is like trying to figure out where the next route marker is on the Amazing Race - in Japanese.

Search MSDN for visual studio patch and you will get everything under the sun except links relating to Visual Studio or a patch. Seems every software developer in the free world uses the word “patch” to designate a fix for broken code, but Microsoft bucks the trend and uses softer, more confusing language like Service Pack and Update.

I thought I’d be smart though, and skip the MSDN treasure hunt by hitting the Check for Updates button directly on the Visual Studio Help menu. I figured that would get me only the patches relating directly to Visual Studio and that maybe the darn thing would update itself without requiring my intervention. After all, I’m writing an app that is deployed with ClickOnce and none of my customers have to update their application. This is simple stuff, right?

This is how Microsoft earns their reputation. I’ve played a lot of computer video games in my time and nearly every one of them had to be patched, some multiple times. This process is almost always easy. The developers make their websites easy to navigate and finding the latest updates is simple and straight forward. Patches are labeled sequentially and come complete with release dates so everyone knows what the latest version of the patch is and what language/release version of the game it is specifically meant for.

This is simple stuff that every game developer in the world gets right, but Microsoft can’t.

Visual Studio 2005 is absolutely critical to me and my work. This is what I do all day long - write code. I need this IDE. Why does this bug exist in the first place? And how come I can’t easily find a fix/patch for it?