Here are 5 tips I use to make it feel like I'm traveling in luxury for just a few more bucks.
#1 Private Car Service
Your trip starts and ends with how you get to the airport, so you might as well make this a good experience. Private car service (usually a black towncar or SUV) gives you a luxurious ride to the airport. In most places there's a good car service company for about 20-25% more than taking a cab, and much less than parking your car at the airport for more than a few days. For that little bit extra you get more leg room, a more comfortable ride, plus you can skip the taxi...
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It's a good problem to have to be forced to take a vacation. That's the situation I found myself in when I noticed my 200,000 United miles were going to expire at the end of the month. I had to figure out where I wanted to go and fast. I've always liked this whimsical type of travel. So I kind of left it up to a spin of the globe to figure out where I was going. I knew that United is notoriously bad about availability for reward bookings (that's part of the reason I still have 200K miles sitting around from 5 years ago), so I decided to pick a few places and leave it up to United roulette...
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If you'd like to make a report in TFS that compares the estimated time to complete a task with the actual time, you've probably come across the problem of Microsoft.VSTS.CMMI.Estimate not being reportable. This is a real pain and very surprising that this wasn't done correctly in the first place considering that Work Remaining and Work Completed are both in the right place. A lot of people (http://blog.nwcadence.com/2008/10/why-is-the-estimated-work-field-not-available-in-tfs-reports-2/) recommend just creating another field and using that instead of Microsoft.VSTS.CMMI.Estimate, but you can change...
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Brandon, Adam, and I took a guys trip to Mammoth for the weekend. It was a blast! We're getting old though, a few hours on the mountain was enough to wear us out. We could still hold our own at the bar though where we watched both NFL playoff games and still had a few hours left in us. Having a weekend to just talk about guy stuff (business, technology, politics, etc) without needing to change the subject after 30 minutes was really refreshing. I think we'll have to schedule a couple of these a year.
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Tracy and I took the dogs to Yosemite National Park, and they got to see their first deer. Pacaya loved it, and K'eyush could care less. I guess I could have predicted that. Overall I was very impressed, Yosemite Valley is really breathtaking.
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This is a video that Tracy made of our safari in Tanzania. The photos were taken by both of us, and special thanks to our guide Baraza who was amazing.
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I have been doing a lot of work on globalized applications lately and I have learned a lot. I thought I'd try to share some of what I've learned with everyone. One of the first issues we ran into was managing formatting of data for different scenarios. Educating developers on which culture to use when is challenging and you end up not having a unified formatting. The pattern we came up with was to create a class which defines the culture to use by scenario.
public static class Cultures
{
public CultureInfo UserFormatCulture { get { return Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture; } }
public...
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