My primary workstation has dual 19" Samsung flatscreens. They are not widescreen. I really like that setup, especially in conjunction with RDC (remote desktop). They have really thin bezels all around and they work great butted up against each other. I primarily use the right screen for one or more, fullscreen RDC windows for other computers. Most of my work is done in the left screen. I rarely stretch a window across monitors (maybe because the separation of the screens makes that awkward). My taskbar is attached to the right side of my left screen which puts it right in the middle of my workspace. I like it vertical because I can see so much more on it than when it's horizontally across the bottom.

I really like and am really used to my setup. That is until I ran across this blog post by Scott Hanselman, which shows the use of 3 huge monitors to make a single workspace. I'm jealous!

He says they run the center, 30" widescreen at 2560x1600 pixels with the 22" widescreens on the sides running at 1050 pixels wide. That's a total of 4660 pixels across the screens. It would be cool to see a shot of this with actual programs running.

As some may know, my dad and brother own and operate HR Weaver Building Systems in Annville, PA. They sell and build anything from wood-frame, residential garages to huge, steel-frame commercial buildings to custom homes. Last year they were a Parade of Homes Winner for a couple homes they built.

Last night I attended an awards banquet where their company was awarded the 2006 Builder of the Year for the Northeast Region. Their company is a dealership for Butler Manufacturing who presented the award. Congratulations!

Excuse the crappy cellphone picture.

Here is an interesting idea I read on a recent web site. This is a tip for anyone owning a cell phone and have locked their keys in their car.

Does your car have remote keyless entry? This may come in handy someday. Good reason to own a cell phone: If you lock your keys in the car and the spare keys are at home, call someone at home on their cell phone from your cell phone. Hold your cell phone about a foot from your car door and have the person at your home press the unlock button, holding it near the mobile phone on their end. Your car will unlock. Saves someone from having to drive your keys to you. Distance is no object. You could be hundreds of miles away, and if you can reach someone who has the other "remote" for your car, you can unlock the doors (or the trunk).

See more Cell Phone Secrets Revealed

One of the web services I've been working on has the requirement to send out formatted emails to internal user and external customers. In order for the service to go live we needed to take any day-to-day maintenance duties away from the developers of the project. One aspect of those duties is to keep the email messages that go out up-to-date. We store the addresses, subject and body of the various emails in the database. With the message bodies, we've designed it that the author can insert various macros that will get replaced with contextual values.

For example, when a new account is created a new email is fired off to our customer. That email needs to list all the specific details of the new account. The email message will have macros available like $AccountId$, $ContactFirstName$ or $InitialPassword$. When we generate the email, we call a simple function that uses reflection to pull the properties out of the Account object and replace the macros within the email message. Below is the VB.Net function that does that.

Public Shared Function ReplaceMessageMacros(ByVal Msg As String, ByVal Obj As Object, ByVal ObjType As Type) As String
    Dim objectType As Type = Obj.GetType
    Dim pi As PropertyInfo()
    Dim i As Integer
    
    ' get the property list from the object passed in
    pi =  = objectType.GetProperties(BindingFlags.Public Or BindingFlags.Instance)
    
    ' loop thru all properties of object and see if a macro exists in the Msg
    For i = 0 To (pi.Length - 1)
        Dim val As String
        Try
            val = pi(i).GetValue(Obj, Nothing).ToString()
        Catch ex As Exception
            val = ""
        End Try
        
        ' replace the macro with the property value
        Msg = Replace(Msg, "$" & pi(i).Name & "$", val)
    Next
    Return Msg
End Function

Make sure you import System.Reflection

Not to be outdone by the World's Largest Bulldog, I've had an actual sighting of the World's Smallest Bulldog. I could barely get him to stand still much less pose beside a free-standing Duracell battery. This is one of those rare, one-in-a-million, chance of a lifetime photos. 

Actually this is just a stupid little experiment to see if I could draw as much attention as I did with my World's Largest Bulldog post. I had just posted that one from an email my wife forwarded me. Turns out that it is responsible for over half the traffic for my website. So we'll see if my traffic doubles again with this photo.

I use a Cingular 8125 Pocket PC as my cell phone. I run an Exchange server at home that I connect to for email, appointments, etc. The connections to that Exchange server run over SSL to keep communications secure. I use the cheap SSL certificates from GoDaddy.com. The problem with these certificates is that they aren't recognized by default on my Pocket PC. This meant that I was not able to sync my email with my phone -- the horror (my wife is rolling her eyes right now)! What I needed to do was install the GoDaddy Root Certificate on my phone.

I thought it was pretty simple, i could view the certificate in my browser and export the root of the certificate chain as a *.cer file and run it on my phone. The Pocket PC recognizes files of that type, but when I ran it the cert wouldn't import.

Fortunately I found a blog post about installing certs in a cabfile. By following those steps I was able to get the GoDaddy root cert installed andCheck out the Windows Mobile Blog for the step-by-step instructions.

A co-worker of mine sent out this amazing PowerPoint slideshow. Not sure where it's from or when it was done, but the pictures are crazy. The inset picture shows someone standing by their car which was buried by the snowfall.

I complain about shovelling when we get a few inches around here (eventhough my neighbors always help out with their snow blowers anyhow). This snow appears to be several feet deep. Forget your snow blowers with that much.

There are a couple pictures from the inside of a house in the slideshow. It shows the snow covering their windows. A different set of pictures shows the result of a heavy ice storm.