After some tinkering with their terrible controls, on this the anniversary of the Rubik’s cube, I was able to solve the Google Cube.  I’ve recorded the last few minutes, and run the video at triple speed so that you can see what happens when it is solved:

Not bad, certainly not my fastest time… In real life I can usually finish the cube in less than a minute.  For this one, I did have to break out one of my real cubes to get my bearings in3D VR space.  Hey, it was fun for 5 minutes.  

Thanks to my friends at TechSmith Camtasia for providing a great screen recorder that I was able to publish this video with.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve run into a nasty slowness issue on my laptop. Now, I don’t have an ancient device, nor do I have a machine loaded down with spyware and other crap. I’m running with an SSD and have my background processes tuned to keep the performance nice and quick. I’m running Windows 8.1 with all of the updates applied, and yet… there is a strange slowness every now and again.

The slowness I found was during the use of explorer resources. Every time I opened the file explorer to look for a file on disk, or clicked an open file dialog in an application, the system would just grind to a halt. I had no idea what was going on with the disk, as Task Manager never reported that I had any disk utilization issues.

I did however notice that the issue didn’t happen while I was connected to my corporate VPN. When I would disconnect the VPN, things would run smoothly and this was the clue that I needed to solve the problem.

In my windows configuration, I had several drives mapped to resources across the corporate network. When I was not connected to the VPN and my machine was unable to find those network locations, explorer windows were trying to connect and show information about those drives no matter the operation I was trying to accomplish.

Solution

I disconnected these mapped drives, and now my windows file explorer is running just as fast and snappy as ever. This seems like a simple problem, as the mapped network locations should be able to detect that they are not connected to the corporate network and shouldn’t try to access those resources every time I access an explorer window.

If you’re having this same problem, check your mapped drives. Perhaps you have the same problem that I had.

In 2008, I visited my first TechEd conference in Orlando.  The event was huge, I met a number of people there who still influence me to this day, and I learned about the buzz that comes from speaking at conferences.  I knew on my way home from that event that I wanted to be able to speak at a TechEd conference some day.  It immediately became a career goal to be a TechEd speaker.

Over the past two years, I entered and competed somewhat successfully in the Speaker Idol contest at TechEd 2012 and 2013.  After being a finalist twice, and a runner-up in 2013, I knew I couldn’t compete a third time.  After I didn’t win the contest and automatically become a TechEd speaker ,I resigned myself to not appear again in the competition.

I earned a recognition as a Microsoft MVP in July of 2013, and thought this would give me just the right amount of additional boost to put me in the conversation to be a speaker at TechEd 2014 in Houston.  When the call for speakers went out in December, I immediately began writing presentation abstracts and outlines for possible sessions to present at the conference.

This afternoon, after two months of waiting to hear the results of my submissions, I learned that I would be going to TechEd.  I have been accepted as a speaker, and will be presenting one session on Modern Web Forms Development with HTML 5.

I am so excited to have earned this opportunity to present at one of the largest shows in the software industry.  As I get more information about my speaking slot and links to my place on the agenda, you can be sure that I will share them here, twitter, and Facebook.

I hope to get a lot of pictures at this monumental event in my career.  You can bet I’ll share them as well.

Finally, I want to thank a few people who really helped me realize this goal:  Bill Wolff – leader of Philly.NET where I learned a LOT about .NET development, Ralph Julius, Chris Sells, Stephen Forte, David Giard – my nemesis from Speaker Idol 2012 who showed up at all kinds of events I was speaking at, Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin – hosts of .NET Rocks and Speaker Idol, Dora Chan, and of course my wife for supporting me as I traveled to all kinds of crazy places to present lectures on .NET and web development.

This past weekend was Code Camp New York, a fun conference that I enjoy riding the train to and speaking at.  I met up with some friends and learned some cool new things.  I spoke at length with Nick Landry about the NFC tags that Nokia was giving out at the conference, and how I can use them with my phone.

NFC stands for “Near Field Communications” and is a technology that allows stickers or cards that have very small wiring in them that is activated when in the presence of a reader that emits a very small power source to read the content stored in that wiring.  The Nokia Lumia phones have these readers embedded in them.

I came home from the conference with a handful of these stickers and was looking at various ways that I could use them.  In the Lumia phone, you can use these NFC tags to automate tasks on the phone.  After tinkering with a few ideas, I hit on a good one. 

if you’re like me, you use the GPS on your phone… A LOT.  When I’m out driving, especially recently when I am travelling for Telerik, I use my GPS to help me get home.   Its always a pain to have to locate the HERE Drive app on the phone and enter my home address… so I decided to automate this.

Writing an NFC tag is a pretty easy thing to do.  I used an app on the Windows Phone called NFC Interceptor to read and write my stickers.   I selected a Geo Tag NFC tag type to write, and was prompted to enter a latitude and longitude for the location.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t know the precise geographical location where I live… its just a few houses down from the corner where the stop sign is.  Ok?

I found my exact latitude and longitude of my location by using Google Maps.  I navigated to my home address and right clicked on “What’s Here” to see my latitude and longitude output in the Search box of the screen.  In the screenshot below, I’m using this technique on the Liberty Bell pavilion in downtown Philadelphia:

With the GPS coordinates handy, I entered them into the NFC tag fields on the phone and tapped the sticker I wanted to write these driving directions to.   I then took this sticker and put it in a place that was VERY convenient:

Now, when I get in the car at some strange location, I can always find my way home by tapping my phone on the sun visor.

What innovative ways have you used an NFC tag?  Let me know in the comments below.