Yesterday’s drama was enough to push me over the edge.

I worked from home for a few hours, and then when I was done, I had some documents in an e-mail that I needed to print out. So I downloaded the documents and tried to print them out, and nothing came out of the printer. I checked the print queue, and found the ever-so-helpful message: “Print - error”. Oh…yeah…duh…of course. There was a print error. So all I have to do is fix it, right?

Well, to make a long story short, I spent the next four hours trying to get my computer to print those documents with no luck at all. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. I will deal with this Dell PC (piece of crap) no longer.

So tonight I did it. I called up MacMall and ordered a MacBook Pro. I hope to have it by the end of the week. When it gets here, I’m fairly seriously considering sending this laptop back to Dell and challenging someone there to actually use this thing for one month, and then try to tell me that there’s nothing wrong with it. I can’t remember EVER having more problems with a computer than I’ve had with this one…and I’ll NEVER deal with Dell again.

So yes…I’m flippin’ the switch. From everything I’ve heard and read in coming to the decision to do this, the grass really is greener on the other side. I can’t wait to feel it under my feet.

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. — from Self Pity by D.H. Lawrence

At a previous job I was on, we made pretty heavy use of a tracer class that was really helpful for debugging and performance tuning. By injecting some trace commands in your code at the beginning and end of operations that you wanted to analyze, and flipping a switch in the application config file, the tool would generate a nice, indented/formatted output to your Visual Studio output window that would give you a nice, easy way to see exactly what was going on in your code at runtime. Since I left that job, on several occasions I’ve thought how nice it would be to have something like that available to use again.

I recently downloaded and installed a nice little utility that I’ve used off-and-on for a long time now called the Snippet Compiler by Jeff Key. That guy just cranks stuff out left and right. He’s got all kinds of little time-saving utilities for monotonous tasks that a lot of developers do all the time. So, after I downloaded the Snippet Compiler (recommended), I was browsing through all of the other stuff that he had, and lo and behold, he has a tracer assembly available for download. From the looks of his write-up on it, it looks to be just like the one I’d used previously, only better…as it looks to output even more details about what’s going on in the code. Very, very nice. And of course, like most of his other utilities, its free and source code is provided in case you want to see how it works or do any tweaking to suit your own needs. Thanks Jeff. Keep up the great work.

The iPod/iTunes experience just gets better all the time. I’m pretty excited about this.

In searching for a photo sharing solution for my web site, I recently stumbled on dfGallery. If you’re not familiar with it, think SlideShowPro, only better. Why better? ‘Cuz you don’t have to fork over any of your hard-earned cash to be able to use it. Its free. True, it doesn’t have anything like SlideShowPro Director available for gallery management, but managing albums manually using the XML-based configuration file is pretty simple for even semi-geeks. I especially really like the fact that you can point it to RSS feeds from Flickr and Picasa Web Albums and it will display all of those photos for you as well (Fotki and Photobucket are also supported). Very nice feature.

A few minor drawbacks: its Flash based, which some people don’t like. I myself don’t see that as much of a problem because Flash on the web is much like Windows on the desktop…just about everybody has it. Due to the fact that it is flash-based though, you don’t get the ability to link directly to a specific photo though. Again, to me, this is a minor problem. If I want to show a specific photo, chances are, I’m going to embed it directly into a blog entry anyway.

So, if you’re looking for a nice, free solution for displaying photos on your web site, and you’re OK with using Flash for it, you might consider checking out dfGallery.