Thursday, January 1, 2004

The Year in Review

Given how much retrospective material we see in the regular media this time of year, I was a bit surprised at the lack of “The Year Iin Review” material there was on the blogscene. That said, here are some personal highlights from 2003.

·        I started this weblog. Here’s my first post. It was Radio at first, then BlogX, then dasBlog, each time vastly improving on the experience. Hopefully there will be a bit less software churn this year.

·        I started my Direct3D tutorial series. Fourteen articles later, it’s easily the most popular thing on the website. It has been fun to get thank you emails from people from around the world – it encourages me to keep going!

·        I wrote the last configuration section handler I’ll ever need. This got a reasonable amount of coverage in the blogosphere, and I still get emails about it from time to time. Of course, these days, I tend to use the CMAB for industrial-strength applications, despite my initial misgivings.  

·        I shifted from doing mostly teaching to doing mostly consulting in 2003…and I’m loving it. Not that there was anything wrong with teaching, but writing real code for a living has been a blast – I’ve learned a lot about things I never would have picked up while preparing to teach in a classroom setting.

·        I got married. Twice. To the same woman both times – one ceremony in Hawaii in March, one in Taiwan in September.

·        I started a new gig at MSDN. At first I couldn’t say much, but eventually the gag was removed. The first phase of the project completed, and I’m off of it right now, but I hope to start up again soon. It’s a really interesting project working with Tim Ewald and some other very smart people.

·        I spent a few months on the no-admin wagon. It was painful, but educational – I highly recommend trying it for as long as you can manage. Of course, I’m off again now – the fact that QuickBooks flat out refuses to run as a regular user was the brick that broke the camel’s back. Still, the lessons remain with me.

3 comments:

  1. If I were to start an award for "Worst Software Developers", I'm pretty sure that Intuit's dev team would take it, hands down. I've run into so many idiotic bugs and design choices in Quicken that I'm convinced they must *try* to make terrible software, so as to coerce people into buying upgrades.

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  2. They'd get my vote, too. They suck. Someone else independently said to me today, "QuickBooks is the worst piece of software I have to use."

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  3. Craig-
    comment on quickbooks/nonadmin: I came back to this post to see if you had found a solution. Seeing that you had given up, I almost did too. But I found that if I right clicked on my QB shortcut I could get in via the "Run As" option (Windows XP) and then sign in as the local computer admin rather than a user on my domain.

    julie

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