So, you would think a computer geek like myself would have had some sort of decent phone, maybe a smart phone of some sort, or even better, an iPhone, since I am a big fan of Apple. But, that wasn't the case. My phone was a basic, run-of-the-mill, phone. No camera, no keyboard, no fancy operating system, a very basic WAP web browser; it was pitiful. I'm not a big gadget geek, so I never needed much more than I had. The biggest thing I would like to have is a keyboard, because I text message on my phone more than I talk. It's a pain typing messages with a phone keypad.

That all changed earlier this week. I used to be on Sprint. I never had a problem with their service, and their coverage was always good. I've heard bad things about their customer service, but I never once had to speak to their customer service over the 6 years I've been a customer. The biggest problem with Sprint is their selection of phones; it really sucks.

Paige has an iPhone, and I think it's a great phone. The design of it, the touch screen interface, it all rocks. I'm just not a fan of AT&T, so I didn't want to switch over to them. I ended up going with Verizon wireless. I've heard good things, plus we get a nice 22% discount on service through Time Warner. Along with switching over to Verizon I upgraded to a nicer phone. I got the LG Voyager VX10000.



As you can see, it has a touchscreen and it opens to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. That right there is enough for me, but it also has a couple other features that are nice

• 2 Mega-Pixel Camera/Camcorder
• Full web browser
• Stereo Sound with VCast support for Music, Movies, TVShows and Games
• Navigator - Built in GPS with turn-by-turn directions
• Not a Microsoft Operating System

I've been super busy at work, so I haven't had a chance to sit down and really get a feel for the phone yet. I loaded in my contacts, made a few phone calls, and sent a couple text messages, that's about it.

My phone bill went up around $35 a month to have all these luxuries, but that's not too bad.

Tags: phone

One of the upcoming features of the application we are working on is called the online experience. We want to provide the higher ups, the directors and managers, with an easy, intuitive look into what's going on at the moment and in the future, in our company. One thing my managers are fans of, which I'm happy about, is eye candy. I don't mean having lots of bling for no reason. But, from working on a Mac, you come to like the eye candy that makes the operating system and it's applications a pleasure to use. I suggested we look into using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). I've been pretty impressed with some of the demo applications I've seen, and hopefully we have waited long enough since it's introduction that a lot of the bugs have been ironed out. One thing I really like is this gives us a chance to have a business application that doesn't necessarily have to follow the usual boring business application look-and-feel. It does get boring sometimes working on an application that's just filled with grids displaying information, will be a welcome change to introduce something new.

Tags: development, .net, wpf

If you use WCF you may encounter an error with the following text: 'The underlying connection was closed: The connection was closed unexpectedly.' This has to rank up there as one of the most useless error messages you may receive as a developer. It's sort of a catch-all error message. We encountered it twice today, and the only thing in common between our two issues is it was looking like a serialization issue.

I spent about 4 hours or so trying to figure out why one of my classes was having trouble serializing. It finally came down to one of the fields being of type System.Type. Apparently you can't serialize a type of System.Type, because it's an abstract class that inherits from an internal System.RuntimeType class. Now, wouldn't that be a good error message, 'Unable to serialize type: System.Type', instead of the message above that gave no indication as to what was wrong?

The second instance of a team member receiving this error was their serialized object containing more items than is specified in the maxItemsInObjectGraph. Again, wouldn't it be nice to receive an error message, 'Unable to serialize: number of items exceed maxItemsInObjectGraph.'?

If you receive this catch-all error, you should look into anything which can cause a serialization issue.

Tags: development, .net

If you don't count my car loan, which I tend not to, once todays payment on my credit card balance clears, I am debt free. We got our bonus at work, and I put the full amount to paying off that debt. Sucks I had to spend it on that, but I'm happy to finally have it paid off. I've been working at it for a while, and now it's finally gone. This is great, especially with the way the economy is going these days. No mortgage and no credit card debt, pretty good state to be in at the moment. The big thing will now be to make sure I don't rack up that debt again, which should hopefully be easy now that I've gotten my life down to where I can pay all my monthly payments with 1 paycheck, so I always have money going into my savings account.

Tags: money

I finished Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles earlier today, or at least I've finished as much as I'm going to. Once I completed the game I went to a website that provided a walkthrough and I see there are a couple more chapters I could play, if I were to replay a couple of the chapters I've already completed and get a better rating. While I enjoyed the game, I don't feel like going through it again trying to do better to unlock those chapters, so I'm not going to. The game was fun, it made good use of the gun control. I'll concentrate on Tomb Raider anniversary now.

Tags: video games