I am starting to get some comment spam.  Seriously people, get a life.  I will have to implement something like image verification.  Anyone know where to find this for .Text blogs?  Stay tuned.

I just finished the book Million Dollar Consulting and I highly suggest it.  I have always thought that there was not that much money to be made in a one person consulting business but Alan Weiss has proved me wrong.  He has successfully built his consulting practice into a multi-million dollar business with only him as the main contributor.  I thought that you could not make this business grow too much being on your own because you are always just trading dollars for hours.  That idea still holds true but Alan's take on it is that you should be charging by value and not by the hour.  This is how he lands hundreds of thousand dollar contracts for six months.  He is adding a lot more value to the company he is consulting for.

This book has really opened up my eyes and it has given me a lot of great ideas.  Get ready for Innovativ Studios consulting practice to take over the world.  If you are interested in building a very successful consulting practice, you should pick up this book.  It is a lot of knowledge for under $15.

I purchased the DVD Aardvark'd: 12 weeks with geeks from Fog Creek Software and I got it in the mail today.  This documentary got my attention because a.) it was about Fog Creek Software which is a company that I admire and b.) because it was a documentary about creating a software product.  This is exciting to me because I am a geek and creating software is fun for me.  I wanted to see how others did it.  Its almost like nerd voyeurism....

The video is about how four interns hired by Fog Creek Software and their task was to create a software product from start to finish in one summer.  If I had a chance to do this during an internship, I would cream.  That would be a lot of fun...a lot more fun then the year 2000 COBOL fixes that I did.  They ended up completing their task and came up with CoPilot, which is an application to allow people to connect to another person's computer in an easy way over the internet and control computers. Dammit, thats another great idea I didn't think of...

I just finished watching it and it is alright.  I thought that they would have more coverage on the actual creating of the software.  The steps they went through, problems that came up, etc.  They had some of that but not enough.  Some people may think that would be pretty boring but I think that it would be interesting to the people who are buying the movie.  It was very, very well put together.  It had nice cover art, a nice soundtrack, and very good editing.  Props to Boondoggle Films and Fog Creek Software.  The content was the only thing that was ok.  They some stupid subplot about some damn tomatoes that didn't fit in there.  I know it was supposed to tie in with the timing of the internship but they could of found a better way to do this.

I would recommend it overall since it is only $20 with shipping.  I wish that Netflix would of had it but they don't yet.  I am jeolous of Fog Creek's offices.  They had pretty cool offices with plasmas, etc.  I will copy some of there ideas when its time to get my own offices....Anyway, you should pick up your own copy.

So I have a habit of making t-shirts from some funny photos or inside jokes with some friends.  I just use Photoshop and some t-shirt transfers you can get from Avery along with some cheap white t-shirts from Target.  I think this problem stems from when I used to be a screen printer in high school and my need to make sure everyone sees embarissing pictures.

I made the one shown below from a picture we took at a bachelor party at Put-In-Bay.  For those of you who don't know about Put In Bay, its the closest you can get to Mardi Gras near the great lakes....Anyway, we come back to the hotel about 3 in the am and what do we find?  Nothing else but Scott “hot dog fingers” Stachowiak (it's Russian) and his pizza....enjoy.

The t-shirt didn't turn out (they rarely do when you're in a hurry) but I still have the photo and some brand new white t-shirts....Nolan The Humanzee is up next.

One of he podcasts that I listen to is Mobile Tech Roundup since I am such a gadget geek.  The guys (David Ciccone, James Kendrick, and Kevin Tofel) over there are given away anything from the Battery Geek website if you link to their site....so go visit Battery Geek and start listening to Mobile Tech Roundup.  I could use a cool battery for my tablet pc.  Now show me the geek stuff.

I would like to sign up for an internet broadband phone service.  I currently use my cell phone for all my calls and I am sick of the $250 cell phone bills from Cingular.  I know that I could up my minutes but that is more money than offloading some of my minutes to a home phone line.  I could get a regular phone line but the plans are more expensive and I don't want to route stupid phone wire around my house.  So, I want to get a broadband phone and service since I already have a cable modem.

I need a broadband phone service with availability for the 419 area code.  I have been checking Vonage on a regular basis but they seem like they are never going to get the 419 area code.  I went looking for other broadband phone services but none of them have 419 area code availability.  I know I can get a number with an area code in another area but that will be long distance for people trying to call me and I just want a 419 area code (represent!).  I found that ZingoTel has availability for the 419 area code but I have never heard of them before and I don't know of anyone that uses them.  Anyone out there heard of them or better yet, use their service?

Microsoft's Patterns and Practices group created an application block called the Composite UI Application Block (”CAB”) and I have been trying to implement it on my project at Urban Science.  The application block is a class library that allows developers to architect user interfaces the correct way.  It is currently geared towards smart client application development but I believe their intent is to use this for both windows and web clients in the future.  They have broken up the assemblies so that all the architecture classes are in the base assembly and then they also have a windows forms assembly that implements some windows forms specific items and such off of the base assembly.

The assemby is great because it breaks out each piece of you entire application into “work items”.  Each work item is suppose to represent a use case within your application.  Each work item can then have multiple user interfaces (views) and controllers for the user interfaces.  Each of these can be compiled into their own “module“ assembly.  The shell application can just be a blank windows forms (there are other shell types such as console shell type and you can extend it as well) that defines “workspaces”.  The shell loads the specific workspaces with modules based on a configuration file.  Moving your interface around or swapping out modules is just a change within a configuration file!  Other super duper highlights include:

• Publish/Subscribe events between interfaces without them even knowing about each other
• Handle the same command in different interfaces and dlls without them knowing about each other
• Keep state within controllers with a simple attribute

Here is a architecture diagram of two of the assemblies talked about above:

They have several quick starts to get you started.  The problem I have with the quick starts are that they all have the views (user controls) compiled in the same assembly as the rest of the stuff (work items and controllers) in the module.  This should really be broken out so that the views are in their own assembly.  That way it is easy to swap out views if you want a different view to perform the same function.  We have that requirement at Urban Science.  To get around this issue, I wrote a view loader service that reads a configuration file in order to get the view to load.  You can expand this service to load a different view based on some criteria such as user name or role or something else.

You should give this application block a look if you are implementing complicated UI stuff in a windows client application.  You can go download the C# source code here and the VB source code here.  They have just dropped a December release.  You should plan on taking at least a half a day to get familiar with the CAB object model.  More information about the CAB is available on a gotdotnetworkspace here.  I also found this webcast to be very helpful.  I will continue to blog about this as I develop more in it and more for it.

I have added a web sample and updated the site a little over at Innovativ Studios.  If you don't know yet, Innovativ Studios is a business that I have been running for a year.  We have some great product ideas as well as a great consultancy.  If your business is in need of some contract work, please contact us.  The updates are explained here and here.  Check it out if you dare!