Toys and Thanksgiving

So here we are the day after we try our best to gorge ourselves on turkey, stuffing, and many other foods. Hopefully everybody had a good holiday. Today is the traditional start of the shopping spree for the Christmas holiday. Me, I got my shopping done early. Usually the day after Thanksgiving I lock the doors and don’t leave the house, trying to avoid all the traffic and people going nuts trying to get the latest, greatest toy.

I got all my shopping done last week. For Christmas 4 years ago I built a computer for my parents and brother, but last week it stopped working. So I went out to the Dell website and ordered them a new one – so they got their present a few weeks early.

Of course, I also needed to buy myself a few toys. Tuesday I signed up for the new Audiovox 5600 cell phone. There have been some problems switching from my old provider to the new one – they said it could be 6 hours to port my number from the old provider to the new one, but after talking with customer service they said it could take up to 6 days. So right now I need to carry 2 phones with me, the old one and the new one. They also pro-rated the number of minutes I have available, meaning I only have 60 minutes left this month. I also got a Bluetooth headset, which is very cool. Clamp it onto your ear, press a button, and say “Call name in your contacts list”, and it dials. I also connected my Bluetooth GPS receiver to the phone, and I was able to see on the map where I was located.

Last week I got a new Tablet PC for work. Actually, I got it about a month ago. When I first took it out of the box I noticed a small scratch on the screen. So I started testing out the inking features, as I was moving the pen across the screen I noticed the scratch getting bigger. The screen was cracked and it was getting worse. It had to go back to repair the screen.

So how does these new toys relate to VS? Well, I have some ideas for small projects for the phone. I have not done too much with the Smart Device tools in VS, now I will get a chance to play. Also, I have been looking at writing an inking tool for VS, allowing you to make notes in source code using the pen. I have not written anything substantial yet, just some early prototypes. But I will let you know how it goes…