Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

This post is essentially a collection of tweets about my Christmas 2008 experience of visiting wife-side family in Manhattan, Kansas for 5 days. I’m of the opinion that more than 3 tweets in succession should take a different form, so I am sticking them here in one place.  This post might also ... [More]

Thousands of 30GB Zune owners have formed a “My Zune is a Brick” club on this New Year’s Eve day after a Y2K-like issue killed their Zunes.  Some sort of clock bug related to 2008 having 366 days is causing 30GB models to reboot and then hang before completing boot-up. Brick! While I have an 80... [More]

Having access to the full cuts of millions of songs and classical performances with the Zune Pass has changed how I experience music, and at three weeks into a Zune Pass I think I can draw some conclusions. Below are the additions to my Zune Collection since I became Zune Pass Man.  My tastes a... [More]

The Best Darn Microsoft Evangelist in the biz, Chris Bowen, brought his troupe of geek freaks and coding acrobats to Vermont today for the Northeast 2008-09 Winter MSDN Roadshow. Actually, it was just Chris and fellow evangelist Jim O'Neil, but they were a forceful presence and only seemed like an e... [More]

I'm Day Two into being a Zune Pass subscriber.  Being a Pass subscriber means I can download anything in the Microsoft Zune marketplace to my Zune for $14.99 a month.  I was focused on having full play access to Zune Channels as the primary Pass benefit and didn't realize that I had full-p... [More]

I spent an hour yesterday afternoon at a local tire store where I spent the time setting up ASPNET Membership on a new development site.  This story isn't about ASPNET Membership though, it's about the good fortune we as developers have to become more skilled at our craft even while at the tire... [More]

I really wanted to do an Everyman tonight, but I have to get this political bookmark monkey off my back first. It's that damned Palin.  She drives me frigging nuts.  I feel like Jenny's angry boyfriend in Forrest Gump. He runs around frothing, treating Jenny like crap, then falls back on "... [More]

Google relaunched its Blogsearch engine and from what I'm seeing it really is a potential TechMeme killer...and Memeorandum, too!  There doesn't seem to be anything on the Google Blogsearch memes in Technology or Politics that's missing from TechMeme or Memeorandum, and Blogsearch's UI seems mo... [More]

Trend Micro PC-cillin came installed on my 2-year-old Dell XP laptop and I've been quite happy with it. I particularly like PC-cillin when it alerts me real-time to the presence of a trojan like it did earlier this evening.      Had I stopped with deleting the file, if it weren't for... [More]

Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek gave an interesting commentary on Friday's Marketplace podcast on the concept behind his book "The Numerati."  Baker used a meeting with a search engine optimization expert as a starting point to describe how we now establish our relevance and ranking to machines, ... [More]