• Forgot to say this yesterday, but I’m happy the Colts are in the Super Bowl. Well, I guess I’m more happy that New England isn’t in it. They’ve won it enough lately. I wish the Saints has made it, but at least this way I have no question who to root for on Super Bowl Sunday.
• My Gamerscore cracked 1000 over the weekend. I got 60 points in Dead Rising and 100 points in NHL 07k0%01%02). I have played ten games + three arcade games for a maximum possible Gamerscore of 10,600 and a Gamerscore “conversion rate” of 10.28%. I wonder how good that is? All the leader boards I’ve seen rate purely on Gamerscore.
• Speaking of games, Obsidian (of Neverwind Nights fame) is working on an Aliens RPG! Check out this post by Chris Avellone of Obsidian on Game Design Research (via Game Tycoon).
• Richard Grimes’.NET Instrumentation Workshop rocks. Richard also has extensive workshops on .NET Security and .NET Fusion (aka runtime binding). If they’re as good as the instrumentation workshop, they’re worth a read.
• In my SSB/WF prototypes, I’ve simply been writing to the console. The lo-tech brute force works okay for a console app, but not at all when I move my code into a shared library. So I decided to bite the bullet now and translate the Console.WriteLine calls into TraceSource calls. My prototype isn’t that big (yet), but it went pretty smooth nonetheless. I currently have three TraceSources in my solution – one for the host, one for my SSB activities & workflow service and one for the persistence engine (I just inherited from SqlWorkflowPersistenceService and added the trace calls). I’m sure in time, I’ll wish I had set up my TraceSources differently, but for now it works.
• The one feature I lost moving from Console.WriteLine to TraceSources was color support. Since I am creating voluminous tracing data, I used color coding to indicate which part of the application the trace information was coming from. Of course, the OOB ConsoleTraceListener doesn’t have any mechanism to color code the output. I hacked up a ColorConsoleTraceListener in a couple of minutes that worked great. I say “hacked” because my color choosing code is currently hard coded, rather than being stored the config file. If I get the time to change that, I’ll post the code here.
• While researching ASP.NET’s Membership system, I found this Scott Guthrie post with links to ASP.NET providers for MySql, Oracle and SQLite. I’ve wondered about the lack of a simple file-based ASP.NET role/membership provider and even started hacking together an XML based one. But the availability of a .NET SQLite data provider makes that an interesting option. XML would be human readable, but porting the existing SQL providers to SQLite would probably be easier.
• Politics 2.0 in action: Talking Points Memo is enouraging you (aka Time Magazine’s Person of the Year) to record your own response to tonight’s State of the Union. Basically record your response via camcorder, webcam or cellphone. Then upload it to YouTube and add it to the TPM SOTU group. With President Bush’s approval rating at all time lows, I’m guessing these videos will be venting some of the pent up hostility towards this administration.

I’m living in a tinder box, hosing down the roof
It’s raging all around me, and I still refuse to move
There’s a lesson I’m desperate to learn
And I’m willing to burn
“Willing To Burn” by Maia Sharp

• A warm welcome goes out to the 110th congress. Between the Democratic majority in both houses and Republicans looking to distance themselves from President Decider and his abysmal approval ratings, maybe we’ll actually get something accomplished in the next two years.
• Not as nice as USC trouncing Michigan, but I like seeing Notre Dame on the receiving end of a 41-14 beatdown from LSU in the Sugar Bowl. That’s the 9th consecutive bowl loss for the Irish.
• Actually started getting some work done yesterday. Today I’m doing some WCF STS work, but yesterday I focused on SSB and WF.
• I need to better understand WF’s faulting and compensation model. I got sidetracked yesterday when I realized that when a WF instance faults, the built-in SQL persistence service deletes the persisted instance from the database. That doesn’t seem right to me, but I was wrong last time I called out the WF SQL persistence service so I want to do more digging before I open my trap.
• I dig WF persistence. I wrote a few weeks ago about shipping a WF instance to a developer for debugging. Yesterday, I thought about having a persistence service that kept a history of the WF instance rather than overwriting it. I wonder if that would help with production debugging?
• Great quote yesterday by my boss, speaking ill of a project that will remain nameless:
  “Basically, they’ve spent the last month building an executive presentation to say we’re screwed”

With the real and serious problem we face in this country – the civil war in Iraq, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, rebuilding New Orleans, etc. - it boggles the mind that we waste any time at all on faux controversies such as the so-called “War on Christmas”. Getting Wal-Mart to use “Christmas” instead of “Holiday” in their marketing seems like a dubious accomplishment at best.

But where I rail against such stupidity, my brilliant wife writes poetry. One of Julie’s conservative friends sent her an insipid poem that’s been making the rounds on the Internet called “How The ‘Left’ Stole Christmas”. I must have missed Wolf Blitzer changing his name to “Wolf Blitzen” or the Senate passing legislation to take away Christian’s faith and forbid them to speak of salvation and grace.

My response would have simply been “Read the First Amendment, idiot!”. My wife, however, wrote a poem of her own in response. Check it out.

I’ve had a few days to savor the Democrat landslide victory this past Tuesday. I was half right about the razor thin majorities. Democrats have a slim two seat advantage in the senate, but a fairly significant thirty-four seat majority in the house (with ten races undecided). Given that the Republicans had a twenty-eight seat majority in the last congress, that’s a pretty significant turnaround for the Democrats. Frankly, I’m pretty excited.

Here are a few short takes on the election:

• We can close the book on Rove’s “permanent republican majority” pipe dream. America isn’t a conservative country. It isn’t a liberal country, either. It’s a moderate country. Liberal and conservative are the words we use to describe the direction one diverges from the middle ground. This election was decided by the moderates in this country, which isn’t surprising as the bell curve tells us that it’s the moderates who are in the majority. Political parties ignore the middle at their own peril.
• Democrats didn’t win the election on Tuesday, the Republicans lost it. Hard working moderate Americans have limited tolerance for ineptitude and corruption, as the Democrats found out in ’94 and the Republicans found out this week. There are those on the left howling for elephant blood, but spending time exacting revenge on the Republicans won’t solve any of America’s hard problems. The Democrats are talking like they realize this, but actions speak louder than words.
• Speaking of actions and words, President Bush talked a good talk Wednesday, but I’ll believe President “The Decider” Bush honestly wants to “work with the new Congress in a bipartisan way” when I see it. Trying to push John Bolton’s confirmation as well as retroactive authorization for the warrantless wiretapping program through congress before Democrats officially take control isn’t a promising start.
• There’s no such thing as a political party that actively works for limited government. It isn’t that surprising, as it violates my Numero Uno theory. Individuals may want limited government, but there’s no way a government entity like a political party will actively work to reduce their own importance. Republicans claim to be for shrinking the federal government, but their actions contradict that claim. Republicans like Reagan and Bush cut taxes, but they never actually cut spending to match. As such, the Federal Debt / GDP ratio has about doubled in the past 18 years, with the only reduction coming while Clinton was in office. Claiming to cut taxes without cutting spending is like claiming you’re making more money because you’re not paying your mortgage. Republicans aren’t cutting taxes, they’re deferring them. It’s time to realize that you can’t starve the beast and move on to more pragmatic policies. Better a tax-and-spend liberal than a borrow-and-spend conservative.

Update: In the interest of bipartisanship, here are some less than reputable Democrats poised to take key positions in the new Democrat controlled congress. Making someone with a congressional impeachment or under FBI investigation the chair of a congressional committee isn’t a promising start to “draining the swamp”.

I came in this morning to discover my boss and next cube neighbor Rick had decided to spruce up his cube with camo netting. He’s ex-Army, so it’s not like it’s out of character for him. Of course, the camo netting has the exact opposite of it’s indented effect, making Rick’s cube very easy to find in the farm.

Unlike my last team, most of my teammates are conservatives. But apparently we can find common ground in our opinions of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Rick called him an abysmal failure. I couldn’t agree more. Dale joked that Rumsfeld was joining our team and moving into Rick’s newly camo festooned cube. Rick countered that Rumsfeld was actually joining the Enterprise Architecture group. Heh.

Update: Dale points out he made the joke about Rumsfeld joining EA, not Rick. My bad Dale.