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Replacement straws for Thermos Bottles

Sorry this has nothing to do with coding.

But if you have kids and have the Thermos aluminum straw Bottles such as the Thermos Funtainer or Foogo Straw bottles, you can get replacement straws directly from Thermos for $1 a piece. My kids like to bite the straws and they get destroyed pretty quickly. If you need just the top part of the straw, that would be $0.50.

imageThermos Funtainers Disney Cars sip bottle

Apparently, people are reselling these straws on Ebay and other sites for $7-$10 a piece! So Thermos is limiting each order to 5 straws. I am putting this out there to hopefully direct people to the source.

Call Thermos directly at 1-800-831-9242 to order your replacement straws. If outside the US, try 1-847-439-7821.

Bag of Links #2

.NET/C# Programming

PowerShell

Apps and Tools

Other Stuff

Finds of the Week – Nov 28, 2007

I took a break from blogging last week for the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday. Here are the Finds for this week.

.NET

  • Just in case you have not heard, Visual Studio 2008 has been released (ScottGu). I installed the released version earlier this week and everything looks good so far. The first thing I noticed was the very quick load time compared to 2005.
  • Silverlight 1.1 is now 2.0. By Tim Sneath.
  • Dan Fernandez listed the top 15 things to love about Visual Studio 2008 Express.
  • Service Pack 1 for .NET Framework 2.0 is available. By Guy Barrette.
  • Aaronontheweb shared 5 Hot ASP.NET Tips and Tricks for the week of 11/20/2007. By Aaronontheweb.
  • bloggingdeveloper wrote a nice article on how to compress ViewState.

Software and Tools

  • Odiogo can make your blog talk. By Mads Kristensen.
  • I have been a long-time user of MSN Money Porfolio and stock charts but lately I really liked the stuff Yahoo! has been adding to their Finance section. Their new Flash-based stock chart is the best in its class. My favorite feature is the ability to drag left/right to go back/forward in time. Also their quotes are now streaming (AJAX)… meaning anywhere you see a price quote, it will be automatically refreshed. Real time quotes are available for as an optional service as well.

    Yahoo! Finance Stock Chart

  • To track disk space usage, my tool of choice is Windirstats. Windirstats is Open Source.

    Windirstats

Tech, Windows Mobile, Gadgets

  • Google has just released the beta version of My Location, a service that allows GPS like functionality with Google Maps on your mobile device without a GPS. It doesn’t work for me on my Samsung i760 though. I always get this error message: “Your current location is temporarily unavailable”.

    Google Maps My Location

    Looks like many others are getting the same error as well.

And Now, Something Different

Be careful where you put your cellphone.

Finds of the Week – Nov 2, 2007

Here are the finds for this week.

.NET

  • Mike Duncan wrote a nice article on 3 hot uses for HttpContext.Current.Items “They” won’t tell you about. Wish I had thought about this 6 months ago when I was trying to implement a "static" variable that only lasts for the duration of the page request.
  • Too busy with real work to read up on the soon to be released Visual Studio 2008 (by end of November)? Daniel Moth has put together a summary the top 10 things to know about VS 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 here.
  • For Oracle developers, check out Gojko Adzic’s article on the new function result caching feature in Oracle 11.
  • Java and .NET to drive double-digit wage growth. Yes double-digit wage growth! That should happen more often. By  Gavin Clarke via regdeveloper.co.uk.
  • Doug Stewart wrote another comprehensive article on new features of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.
  • There’s something slow, in your program flow. Who you’re gonna call? Profilers of course :-). M has put together a detailed article of how to use the ANTS profiler. Also check out Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability by J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, and Alex Mackman.
  • Marquee de Sells has several interesting points on the consequences of working for Microsoft remotely.

Software and Tools

Vector Magic is the probably best bitmap tracing tool currently available. Check out the amazing samples. Free!

Resharper is a great productivity and code analysis add-in for Visual Studio. It’s the only add-in I currently use. My top 5 favorite Resharper features are:

  • On the fly error/warning checking (squiggly lines). See problems with your code as you type them.

    Resharper On-the-fly Error Checking

  • Refactor (Rename, Extract Method, Introduce Field, etc. )
  • Goto Type/File/File Member. Fastest way to navigate. Every class, file, or method is only a few keystrokes away.

    Resharper Navigation

  • Find Usages. Find what is using a class/method/property. Great for finding code dependencies. Indispensable for learning a new application you are not familiar with.

    Resharper Find Usages

  • Reformat Code.
  • Enhanced Intellisense.

Windows Live Writer is a windows editor for blog posts. Your drafts are saved locally. Works with WordPress. I like it. This post was written using Windows Live Writer.

Gadgets

Miscellaneous

  • At my work it was announced that we will be switching to "Outlook" from Lotus Notes. We are currently on Notes 6 and it’s the most atrocious of a program I have had the pleasure of using on a daily basis. Some of the most basic features like Search does not even work. Argg! I had to create my own Notes index by periodically exporting all messages to text files so that Windows Search will index them. I can’t wait to get back to Outlook/Exchange.
  • Have you wondered why Windows Explorer doesn’t show the size of a folder? Here are the reasons (Raymond Chen via blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing).

And Now, Something Different

I’ve always been skeptical whenever I hear people say or write that we only use 10% of our brain. Well, it looks like there is no scientific evidence to suggest that. Read more here.

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