I feel liberated. I’ve moved back to XP and I’m a happy camper. Although I virtually pulled an all-nighter, which turned out even longer since the clock went back due to daylight saving, it was worth it.

I tried Vista with the first betas and the then RC’s. I eventually installed it on my Fujitsu that shipped natively with XPSP2. I hated it. Gave me a lot of problems. I then purchased a new laptop that shipped with Vista Home Premium. I upgraded  it to Ultimate (only thing I needed that home didn’t come with was Remote Desktop). I still had a lot of problems, despite being a laptop "designed for Vista".

I’ve now moved back to XP and it runs SO MUCH FASTER, despite having the same setup, all the same startups, applications etc. And to be honest, I don’t miss anything about Vista so far.  Aero I never used so I’m not going to miss it at all. The only thing I did like was the fast search for starting apps, but Launchy replaced that. UAC is a relief to be without! And for search, nothing beats Google Desktop.

So unless something drastic happens I hopefully will be staying on XP for a long time.

A OS that has a 6GB footprint just on install…something is seriously wrong with it.

Going to conferences is a great chance for you to not only gain technical skills and go to parties, but to also do some networking. We all know that meeting different people or being introduced to influential personalities can contribute to your professional career. It might not be at first instance, but it can have an effect in the long run. However, for it to be somewhat effective, you need to follow-up with the future opportunities. Unless you make a big impact on someone you meet at a conference for the first time (something that excludes embarrassing yourself or that person), chances are you’d need to meet them again or somehow stay in touch to be able to get something productive out of it (before anyone jumps at my throat, I’m talking about a "professional network" and not a social one, so the aim is to get something out of it other than friendship). In other words, networking is not usually a one-time thing. It takes time to build up a relationship, a network of people you get to know and collaborate with, one way or another. And as I mentioned, conferences and events are great opportunities for this.
Then there are social and professional networking infrastructures (i.e. web sites) that claim to serve the purpose of promoting networking between your peers. One of these is LinkedIn. I can’t remember when I even signed up to this network. It was quite some time ago. I was really chuffed to receive my first request to join someone else’s network (that is, the first real invitation that didn’t come from some weirdo that thinks sticking things in a steering wheel is a good pass-time). Currently I’m 90% complete on my network and according to LinkedIn, that’s a good thing! In fact, I have over 46.000 people on my network. Wow! Now, not all of them are direct contacts. They are people that are contacts of people that are contacts of other people that are contacts of mine or of my people. However, the important thing is that we’re all linked in.

This seems good. I’ve got a reputable number of direct connections. I’ve got several thousands of indirect connections and I’ve nearly completed by network. What have I accomplished? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. LinkedIn is useless. Actually that’s not entirely correct. It’s not useless for those who run it. I’m sure they get some sort of revenue from Google Ads and other advertising they have. However, for me, it’s useless.

Let’s analyze a little bit my personal situation. On my network I have a whole range of people. There are former and current workmates. There are classmates, customers, both past and future, colleagues, etc. To date, unless it’s been someone I’ve never heard of, I’ve never rejected an invitation request that’s been sent to me. I have a bunch of people that supposedly I’m related to, one way or another. What purpose does this serve? Well, one of the ideas behind LinkedIn is to build up a network of contacts that can serve at a professional level, i.e. I used to work with Joe at Company X.  So if John wants to hire Joe and he knows me and that Joe worked with me, then he can either base his decision on that or ask me about Joe. That’s one of the multiple uses LinkedIn might provide. The number of ways in which you can supposedly use LinkedIn is directly proportional to the types of contacts you might have in your network. If I have past customers linked to me, this should serve me to recommend these customers to colleagues, or for customers to know that they worked with me in the past and would do so in the future also.

Well that all sounds great, but it doesn’t work. I’ve never used LinkedIn for any of those purposes. I’ve never used LinkedIn to find a job either. I’ve never had anyone contact me based on them knowing me via LinkedIn or in regard to someone that is connected to me on my network. And I have +46.000 connections. Don’t forget, my network is 90% complete. Maybe I’m impatient. Maybe I should wait two or three years and then questions and offers start pouring in. I doubt it.

If the principle purpose of this "professional network" is to connect people on a professional level, they have it all wrong. If someone wants to hire one of my co-workers because they are MY co-worker, this person probably knows me well enough to know that the guy works with me and therefore contact me directly. Some might argue that it’s about keeping in touch. That doesn’t work. First of all, not everyone keeps their profile updated on LinkedIn. Secondly, if you want to keep in touch with someone, you need to have some sort of continuous flow of interactions with. If you don’t have a constant communication, and you pretend to contact someone because of past interactions you have, such as being their customer, you don’t need LinkedIn to remind you of that person. You should know him/her well enough to know if it they will serve the objectives you’re after. In other words, a customer I have currently is not necessarily going to be a future customer based on them being on my connections. They’ll be my customer if my future business suits their needs. And they’ll base (should) this decision solely on having had some sort of personal contact with me at my previous job. Having done that, it’s most likely that they know me so as to not forget who I am. I don’t see LinkedIn acting here as a reminder of who I am or was or where I used to work.

The worst part of this is that as your network grows, the less productive the whole idea becomes. You end up having people on your network that you don’t even know, but are connected to you because someone you’re related to has them on their connections. Where LinkedIn fails is that for networking to be productive you have to stay in touch and have a continuous flow with those you are trying to "connect" to. With LinkedIn you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t need it to begin with. You would have all those contacts in your Outlook or see them once a year at your favorite gathering. You wouldn’t need a infrastructure to remind you who your "connections" are.

If something is broken, get it fixed. Don’t delay it. Don’t try and leave it for when you have time. This is a completely off-topic post, but I had to vent my frustration somehow. The control for the driver side window of my car had broken. The button had cracked for some reason. Instead of getting it replaced, I decided to rip it out and fix it myself "when I had time". This left me with a little hole where the button was. The only way I could pull down the window was to use something that would act as a lever. What did I have that was like that? The top part of a nail-cutter.

This seemed to solve the problem temporarily. However after about 2 weeks, the lever broke. This actually worked out even better. I didn’t have to "load" with the whole nail-cutter but just the lever. I could delay fixing the problem at hand even more. Insert the lever in the hole where the button was, push it down and down came the window. Pull it back and up came the window…..until today.

Today, I was waiting in the car, and of all things, I took this lever to "play with". Now that sounds innocent, unless playing involves sticking things where you shouldn’t. In my case, I stuck it in the gap between my steering wheel and the honk

I don’t need to explain what happened next. Oh you want to know? Well, the lever "slipped" in. Hmm, oops! Crap! Start to turn the wheel, hear a sound of the lever having fun inside. Ok. This is not good, but what’s the worse that can happen? I just end up with a sound every time I turn the wheel right? Yes! I do, but not any old sound. I end up with the honk going like crazy. Suddenly I’m turning round a roundabout and my car starts honking at me. Huh? WTF???

So I call the BMW hotline and after explaining to the mechanic why I had a broken nail-cutter in the car and why I was playing with it near the steering wheel (these are the time I’m glad my five year old doesn’t know he’s taking the blame for something), he confirms to me what I was scared of. Do NOT try and undo the wheel. Best case scenario you’ll have the airbag explode in your face. Worse case scenario, I’ll break everything and we’re talking about a 1.200 euros part here. He said my other option was to disconnect my battery. Unfortunately that will screw up all the programming of my radio, alarm, etc. He also showed concern about the honk going off. He said it’s most likely a mechanical issue (lever doing what it does best and push on something), and not an electronic issue. But he wasn’t sure. So my best bet was to call a pick-up truck and get it delivered to the dealer.

So, it’s Friday night. I’m stuck without a car. I have to wait until Monday to call a pick-up. In the best case, I’m looking at it being at the dealership for at least a couple of hours and probably end up paying 200 euros (if I’m lucky) to get something fixed that was broken. Instead, I could have just fixed the original problem for less. Alternatively, I could have kept my hands somewhere less destructive.

The good news is that we’ve got a bottle of wine somewhere in the kitchen. It’s a famous Spanish wine. It’s sweet, from the Malaga region. It’s from a company called "Quitapenas", which translates into English as "get rid of your sorrows".

Once in a while, along comes a program or utility that really is impressive. Launchy is one of these. Neal  told me about it a couple of days ago when I was mentioning the cool app launcher that you can get for Mac OSX (called Quicksilver it seems). Launchy is Vista’s quick launch + Google + Calculator + a whole bunch of other things like killing processes, restarting services, looking up weather info, etc. all in one. It’s small and it’s FAST. In fact it’s faster now to look for applications than Vista. And pretty soon, unless the upcoming Vista SP doesn’t fix my network problems, I’m definitely going back to XP, now having this utility.

It’s been a hectic 1’5 months. Apart from all the work I have, I’ve been flying around Europe speaking at conferences and at the same time organizing the October Conference. It was the first time I was running the show. It was a LOT of work, but I think it’s paid off and I would (will) do it again. We had 12 speakers, 20 sessions, all distributed in two days. We tried to plan it so that people could always pick between an English and Spanish session concurrently. Considering 90% of the attendees were Spanish, it actually went pretty well since at all times all sessions had good attendance figures. I’d like to thank the sponsors, speakers and of course the delegates, without whom the conference would not have been a success.

For more information about the event, pictures and see what we have planned for next year, make sure you tune into the site and check my blog for more info too.

Only five days remaining for October Conference and we still have some space left. You can register here. Since it’s free, the cost of one or two days hotel + tickets still works out to like 1/3rd of the registration fee for similar events. So, why not pack your bags and head to Spain for a couple of days?

There will be .NET, Architecture, Delphi and more. See you all there!

Scott G. used ALT.NET conference to announce support for MVC natively in ASP.NET. Read more on Jeffrey’s blog