My wife couldn't find a skin that fit her “skin”.  So she put together a great looking design and then we worked to together to get it into dotText.  There are still a few minor changes to be made but all in all I really like her design.

>> Scribblings by Blair.

My wonderful wife made me a cool looking header logo (picture included) and it just happened to match the WinXPSlate skin.  If reading in an aggregator, please come take a peek.

Now to try and make one for her.  She's got all the design and layout setup for me...now to implement.

Last night I installed ReverseDOS and I've not had one referral feedback since.  Now, I don't know if any others are being incorrectly blocked...based on my normal trackback pattern (basically none) it will be a while for me to notice.

I've also went through the blog_content tables and manually deleted all of the bogus feedbacks.  I think I'm clean at this point...including my wife's blog.  Now I'm just going to sit and watch to see if it stays that way and for how long.

During my regular reading of tool lists (like Scott's) I've seen this tool called Cropper.  My first thought was that it was a scaled down version of a image editing tool.  I was wrong...way wrong.  It does just was it says, it Crops screenies and that's about it.  Not to downplay it at all.  It's a great little tool that does the job very well.  I especially like the options of copy to clipboard or output to an image file and that's after assigning a shortcut-key.

If you do any documentation where screenies are required then this tool will help you a ton.  Just crop what you need and you've got it.  No more alt-prtscn and pasting to something else to only get the piece you need.

Thanks Brian!

I installed CAPTCHA and that has really helped with regular comment spam.  That doesn't help with referral spam though.  If you use dotText check your feedback tab and see how much spam you have that you didn't even know about...it was a shocker to me.

Reading David Hayden's  blog today he was discussing this exact issue.  Except that he read about how Chris Frazier was dealing with it using ReverseDOS on his dotText blog.  They both say it is working like a champ and can be setup pretty easily.  Just drop the DLL in your bin directory and make a few (3) changes to your blog's web.config.

Looks like I'll be downloading and intalling it tonight.

Code snippet that takes in a long (normally from FileInfo.Length) and returns a clean string for display.

private string FormatSize(long fileSize)
{
   if (fileSize < 1024)
   {
      return string.Format("{0:N0} B", fileSize);
   }
   else if (fileSize < 1024*1024)
   {
      return string.Format("{0:N0} KB", fileSize/1024);
   }
   else
   {
      return string.Format("{0:N1} MB", fileSize/(1024*1024));
   }
}

Don't you just love those kinds of e-mail that make you wish that you had never opened it?  Most of the time I get frustrated when I get e-mails that are just a forward of another e-mail or the other person doesn't really participate in the communication.  We end up swapping 3 or 4 more e-mails just to get things resolved.  I mean, if it were a face to face conversation, they wouldn't just give you a half answer and then walk away like the conversation was over..would they?  How about e-mails where the person always requests a read receipt.  Come on, if it is that important call me on the phone.  I normally don't send the receipt unless I think it is important that they know I read their message.  I still like to be courteous.

My point?  Open Loops has two posts on "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People With Email".  Part 1 discusses the bad e-mails we get and deal with while part 2 gives suggestions on how to retaliate.  ;-)  Both are good reads and quite humorous too.  Below are a few that I liked and can relate too.

The Bad

• Have a long signature line – The longer the better.  Ten to fifteen lines would be right in this case.  Use it to publicize your uncle's life insurance agency or to tell every one about your grandmother’s real estate company.  Think of it as a billboard.  You might even be able to sell advertising space in your email signature if you send enough.
• Don’t tell the recipient why you’re sending the attachments – This is even sweeter when the attachments have strange names that give no clue as to what they are.  Big fun!
• Write your email to one person and send it to someone else – This works great when you are talking about the person you sent it to.  You write to Tim about what a [explicit removed] John is.  Then, send it to John.

Getting Back

• Use the “Reply to all” button — Use this if the email is sent to a lot of people and the subject is sensitive or confidential.  If the sender is doing some damage control on a mistake, capitalize on this now while everyone can know it.
• Misspell their name – No other word, in any language, is more important than one’s own name.  Use it and misspell it often.
• Ignore the topic when you reply — When you finally get around to replying to the person’s email, ignore the topic of the original email.  Even better, just send the reply but don’t write anything.  Later, send an email back why the person hasn’t replied to you.  For more fun, mention the deadline they “missed”.

I hope you went and read the posts.  You'll see a lot there that I'm sure you've rolled your eyes at when you see them in your inbox.

Trying to catch up on my blog reading last night and boy, everyone that went ot TechEd has a lot to say about it.  Not that I'm not interested in reading those kinds of post, but most are the same.  Sorry guys.  :-)

Joel did post about the CodeZone portal.  I've not seen it before but it I registered and now I've got some cool listings about my local .NET user groups, on demand events, and news taylored to my personal preferences.  Hey wait, sounds like Plumtree.  But it's actually a Microsoft site running a Sharepoint portal.  That's ok with me if it stays useful.