Forays in Finance

After IT, my other passion is Finance. My love affair with financial statements, number crunching, and the stock market started about 3 years ago. The first thing I realized back then was how little I knew about this area and so began an intense learning process that still continues. Of course having a Finance major as my girlfriend helps.

I make a point of consuming financial news and tidbits at least once a day. Yahoo has a great selection of columnists who post articles on a weekly basis. One of my favorites is Ben Stein and his current article titled Success Is All In A Days Work really got me thinking. It’s the first time I actually heard someone openly say that in order to achieve great success, we must work ALL the time i.e., make work our life. Yep, sounds scary, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that all the people I know of personally who I would label as really successful do make work their life. This does not mean that they *WORK* all the time, instead, tasks that an outsider may see as work , they see as life. They are so passionate about what they do, that they enjoy incorporating their passion in everyday non-work tasks. They bring work to lunch (pair programming, peer discussions), to the gym and the car (books, pod-casts), they hang out with like-minded people who love to discuss what they do, and they don’t waste a single moment but are always looking for opportunities to multi-task. Such is the life of a person who will achieve mad success in their field of passion.

Now how can you compete against such people who are so gung-ho, driven, and ambitious…well you CAN’T.

Over the past month or so, I have been on a mission to enhance my Visual Studio IDE experience. I have been trying out all sorts of add-ins with the end goal of being more productive and cutting down on un-needed laborious tasks. Here I share with all what I have found and love in the hopes of helping someone else utter the same words I did; “Coool!”.

Get it while it’s hot. Apparently takes a while to install, so grab a good book while it does it’s thing.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=BB4A75AB-E2D4-4C96-B39D-37BAF6B5B1DC&displaylang=en

Ok…so I may be the only idiot left who was still using the standard setting for font edge smoothing. And then while searching for an alternative to the default New Courier font for VS2005 I stumbled upon the ClearType fonts. All I can say is Wow! Here’s a before and after:

Man..it was like someone Windexed my eyes. If you aren’t already trying it out, do it NOW!! 
To enable ClearType on your Windows XP machine (Vista has it on by default) follow these steps:

Don’t thank me…just send cash!

Xmas is around the corner and between my girlfriend and I, we have been out just about every week at various Xmas parties and gatherings. Having moved to Calgary about 6 months ago from Victoria, I am often asked if I enjoy it here and how my job is. Of course, the answers to both these questions are related to some extent. I’ve had some interesting conversations with my friends as to what makes for a good place of work and how it could affect one’s quality of life. Then I read this interesting article about Google. Worth a read.

So I attended the Launch event today at Chinook Center. It was good to see a lot of familiar faces and get a chance to hang out with fellow geeks :o). It’s amazing that I have been in Calgary for only about six months and have already made some strong friendships.
The Launch event itself was a 6 out of 10. I attended the developer track and had a chance to see John Bristowe and Joel Semeniuk in action. They are both excellent speakers and provided a good overview of WCF, WPF, WF, Office 2007, Vista gadgets, and SharePoint 2007 webparts. My favorites by far are the Vista Gadgets and Office 2007 Open XML file format.

Yes, for the time being we must make do with the lousy HTML/Javascript combo for gadget creation, I still think that we will see some ingenious apps come out as Vista gadgets. For a current list of Gadgets available visit Gadgets. There’s a couple of other cool gadgets that they previewed including one from The Weather Network which could be out early next year, and another one from Workopolis that displays new job postings.

The second favorite is the open xml file format that office 2007 uses. Thank good for MS finally moving away from proprietary file formats. I still have nightmares about  a previous project in which I had to extract information out of Word documents and man was it ugly. The new file formats make it really easy to programmatically create office documents as well as extract information out. If you are interested in delving deeper into how the new .docx file works, rename it to .zip and then open it. You will see all the individual files inside including the xml file containing document content.

Words every developer dreams of uttering as often as possible.
So I'll kick off my first ever blog entry with the perils of getting dasBlog to run at GoDaddy.com. Here's the short of it:

'Everyday I feel as if something is missing in my life; love? money? a fast car? nope..none of that. I come to the realization that my inner soul can no longer take the absence of my very own BLOG. I must have it...NOW!
Perfect timing for my Calgary .Net User Group president Daniel to detail me his love affair with dasBlog and what a cake walk it is to set it up at the 'best' hosting service of them all...yes...the infamous 'Go Daddy'.

DAY 1
20:30 PM - Call made..deals done...$75/year...ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server, tons of space and I'm the proud owner of sharymudassir.com.
21:00 PM - Download dasBlog 1.9, fire up a new VM using VMWare Workstation running Windows Server 2003 SP1, and the configuration begins.
22:00 PM - Girlfriend's starting to give the evil eye...will I spend the entire evening at the computer once again?
22:30 PM - Honey, 15 more minutes plz....
22:42 PM - Success, configured to my initial liking, let's upload! Fire up FileZilla.
22:55 PM - The famous words are uttered: "This should work" but maybe I missed something.
23:15 PM - Another version of the above quoted phrase is uttered which shall remain out of this blog.
23:45 PM - Half an hour with GoDaddy multi-tier support ranging from SuperIdiot to The Incredible Moron, and I'm no where better. By this time GF is thoroughly unimpressed.
00:00 AM - I find out that dasBlog requires FullTrust and GoDaddy doesn't buy my request for granting escalated privileges for a measly blog.

Now it is at times like these that a developer must look deep within and ask himself the most important question of all, "Do I have the courage to continue or should I abandon the task at hand and blame it on the first reason that comes to mind". And before I can figure out an answer I must go to bed and make up with a very annoyed GF.

DAY 2
Read some more posts and realize that dasBlog may have issues with ASP.NET 2.0 even if properly configured. Decide to give it a try and also drop the entire directory structure under a BLOG virtual directory instead of the root. PRESTO...it works. Persistence pays off.