This I wouldn’t expect. I registered my domain a while ago using Yahoo! Domains. Back then in was 9.95$ a year. A couple of months ago they started offering a domain for 2.95$ a year. So you’d think I’ll be able to switch to the 2.95 plan starting with the second year, right? Wrong. They won’t let me switch, they’ll just automatically charge me 9.95 for every folllowing year. Now if I really want to switch I have to cancel my plan, which will release the domain to the wild (and we all know how many people out there want the pashabitz.com real bad), wait for some undefined amount of time until it becomes available and then register it again as a new customer.

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Background

I used to be a programmer. I guess I liked the job, but I wasn’t happy. I felt stuck. I wanted more control, I wanted to make all the decisions. I was sure I knew better than the rest of my teammates, and much better than my team lead. What can you do, I was twenty one. Then a funny thing happened: someone up there (where the air is thin, I guess) decided I should be promoted. So they promoted me to be the new team lead. I was happy and grateful.

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I forgot to tell you I got the Benq FP71G+ eventually.

It’s 17 inch, 8ms refresh rate. Works very well so far, I recommend.

I also recommend dealing with MasterPC. Had no problems with the order, the screen showed up after three days.

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I just started working on my Castellano two weeks ago. Luckily, Or is fluent, and provided for me the must-know, real-world, survival-enabling phrase list. And I just had to share some gems with you:

“no tepreocupes, conozco un rabino reformo” (don’t worry, I know a reformic Rabbi)

“cuales son mis derechos?” (what are my rights?)

“a mi me gusta Maradona, vos te gusta maradona, porque pelear” (I love Maradona, you love Maradona, why fight?)

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You now, Flickr has become really fantastic. They managed to create a sense of community over there, and they have tons of ways to stumble upon stuff you weren’t looking for in the first place.

I usually just start by searching some photo of Rio de Janeiro or something, but then I somehow follow a link to “Don Carlito’s stream”, from there to some (intentionally) blurry picture of a Moscow Subway, then immediately I find myself in the “Scary Huge Cities in the Nighttime pool”, and from there the path to some naked old guy Photoshop’ed to look kind’a like a bottle of Heinz Ketchup is very very short. Or is it just me?

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start.com is pretty cool. Also, it’s a bit similar to one idea I’ve been thinking about.

(There are one or two similar sites I’ve seen are also cool, I don’t remember the addresses now)

Of course, it’s very beautifully executed(as most things Microsoft are).

But currently it’s not very usable.

As an RSS reader - it’s nice, but there are other online readers that are a little better. (like Google’s)

As a  way to view all my important stuff at once, a portal - hmm, it doesn’t feel right. I can handle a few extra clicks for the benefit of seeing what I want in a full browser window and not in a small part of it. I may be wrong on this one.

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Okay boys and girls, read my post about the little kinky control I’m doing here first.

Today I decided to have a go at fixing problem #2, which looked like it could lead to solving #1 and #3. One may say it’s a problem-solving problem-solution. Right. So.

As you remember, I didn’t like having a regular ASP.NET page acting as my HTTP handler. That’s because it’s not (1)deployable, (2)general, probably not (3)too-well-performing, and well (4) smells.

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Troubling Thought #1 - “AJAX-enabled”, is that a word??

On we go.

At work, we have us a nice Web Control. Currently I’m adding to it some functionality that will get data from the server without posting-back the whole page.

So I started with implementing this stuff in the most straightforward and naive way possible, because I wanted to see it work. Here’s how:

1. I added some custom javascript to the control’s behavior file. That javascript catches some client-side events, creates and XMLHTTP object, builds a custom request in XML format, sends it to the server, gets an XML response back, decodes it and displays the data to the user.

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Setup:

1. You have a page with a data-bound DataGrid.

2. The page makes multiple post-backs (for example, the DataGrid is editable).

3. There are template-columns in the DataGrid.

Here’s the tip:

Make the ID of the DataGrid and the ID of the controls inside the template controls shorter.

See, the DataGrid control renders all the HTML elements it needs to display your data, and assigns them id’s based on the ID of the grid itself and the ID of the controls they represent.

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I know, Microsoft Outlook is the number one productivity-enhancement tool in the world. I honestly don’t understand how anybody got anything done before they had that stuff.

But that’s not what this post is about. See, Outlook can also be a productivity destroyer. Here’s how:

I’m a software development team lead. My job consists of doing a ton of little things, many of which require being concentrated (Well, some of them. Okay, few of them.).

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