Jelle Druyts

A free ticket to PDC05 just by blogging, you say? Try and stop me!

Apart from the obvious reasons why I think I should attend the PDC (me being a consultant and blogger, focused on pretty much all things Microsoft, and .NET more specifically, which basically means I help sell your platform, e.g. by developing widely distributed end-to-end sample applications on .NET 2.0 Beta 2, for which I require all the information I can get as soon as I can get it, in order for me to generate money for your company and ultimately your paycheck, dear judge - think about that for a minute, I'm doing you a favor here dammit, so giving me a ticket is the least you can do... but I digress), here's the real deal:

• I'm from Belgium, where, as you may or may not know, we make incredible chocolates and fantastic beer. I'll take as much with me as I can smuggle through customs, and throw a party for all you Channel 9'ers out there.
• I was at PDC03 but forgot my undies after the most excellent "Women Who Code" BOF session, so I really need to get back and pick them up before they start to tear down the L.A. Convention Center on grounds of "asbestos smell".
• I tipped my cab to wait for me at LAX when I flew out, and I'm anxious to see if he's still there.
• I didn't get to show my weewee to Don Box at any conference yet, and I feel I'm just as entitled to show off my manlyhood as Rory is.
• I'm planning on speaking at PDC07, so I'd like to check out the locations of all the electric outlets for my talk's setup. You don't expect me to fly out just to do that, do you?
• I'm also planning on speaking at PDC05, but unlike last time, I'll try to wait until the guy with the mic has finished his talk.
• My boss just bought a Porsche (really) so now he can't afford to buy me a ticket anymore. Do you think it's fair that I'm a victim of his mid-life crisis? (Hi Peter! Good thing my annual review is just over, eh?)
• I missed the gig by the Band On The Runtime at the Standard Hotel last time, but I've been preparing a replacement Channel 9 drummer (sorry 'bout that Carl).
• Despite popular belief (and the picture on my site), I'm actually a gorgeous young female with perfect measures, an IQ of 0x9D and a higher libido than the average rabbit on viagra. Where do you want to meet up?

Right, that should do. See you there!

I just installed the new MSN Toolbar 1.2 to check out the tabbed browsing that's been the talk of the town lately. But boy does it suck.

It looks and feels flakey, my screen flickers like crazy when switching "tabs" (which in fact just seems to do some hidden window magic, looking at the jumping taskbar items), it messes with my IE window (hey, suddenly it's not maximized anymore), it makes the IE window actually lose focus sometimes, and it can't be used without enabling the MSN Search Toolbar (which I don't even want, the Google Toolbar still kicks its behind with the clickable search words and everything).

So there you have it: boo! If I want tabbed browsing, I'll use Firefox thankyouverymuch. It's just so much cleaner, and you can tell it's built into the product - not patched on. Let's hope IE7 does a better job at this...

Furthermore, what's up with the installer for this new release? Apparently I need to uninstall the previous one, making me lose my indexes, settings and my list of shortcuts? Geez, thanks for the smooth upgrade.

And what happened to the advanced query syntax that rescued me before? It stopped working for me ever since the toolbar went out of beta.

Come on guys, you were on a roll with this product, but now you're losing my trust. I wish I hadn't upgraded to anything beyond the beta, who says I will next time?