Benz Blog

Love that hole in the title bar. Isn’t it divine?

Everything was going relatively smoothly on the first leg of the 2010 PCA Sunrise to Sunset Rally from Melbourne to Clearwater, in spite of our lack of sleep thanks to a screaming baby and people partying out by the pool at the Crown Plaza Hotel. Then we got horribly lost. But we just didn’t get lost: we didn’t know we were lost.

Click the map in order to view it in its entirety while reading this section next section…

We were headed south on S Bay St, also called SR 44 / SR 19, and Step 69 in our instructions was “Right turn onto Lakeshore Dr CR 452″. Now you’ll notice that comes up right at the top of the map, and that’s the road we wanted, but if you happen to miss the sign as we did (which was partially concealed behind some trees), you’ll continue going south and you won’t realize it but S Bay St turns into W Old US Hwy 441. Now as the road bends to the east, you’ll pass the Tavares Rd. intersection, and then lookie here: Lakeshore Dr CR 452! We initially went too far on W Old Hwy 441 into Mount Dora (not shown on the map), and so we backtracked and found that 2nd Lakeshore Dr.

Now here we are tooling along the wrong Lakeshore Dr, and step 70 says “Right turn onto SR 19″. The only thing that wasn’t adding up was that Step 69 also said that “Lakeshore Dr becomes Lake Eustis Dr”, but in our case, Lakeshore Dr became W Main St. However, we did eventually get to Rt 19 and made a right. At this point if you go back to the first Lakeshore Dr, follow that to SR 19, you’ll see that making a right onto SR 19 takes you south, but our right onto SR 19 took us north.

Now we were utterly confused. Also not helping were the ridiculous road names. Look at those white numbers near the middle of the map. That’s right, folks, that one stretch of road is known as SR 44, SR 19, CR 441, and SR 500! We pulled over, broke out Google Maps on my iPhone, and then discovered our mistake. Overall, we lost about an hour and a half, and were in no mood to participate in the lunchtime autocross event. In fact, we decided that we would skip the dinner in Clearwater and head straight home after finishing the route, but then about 30 minutes after departing the lunch area, a voicemail popped up on my cell phone. I looked down to see who it was from, and I said out loud: “voice mail from Chris Bienick?”. Chris gasped: “Oh my God, I left my purse at the lunch area!”. So we wound up having to go to Clearwater after all to meet up with the very kind gentleman who picked up Chris’s purse.

We spent a total of 9 1/2 hours in the car that day. When we got home I felt like driving the car into the lake.

Big, big changes happening. No more whining or complaining. I’ve decided to take a year off and focus my efforts on Mac/iPhone/iPad programming.

I’ve been asked to relearn my career again and make a modification to an in-house application written using ASP.NET/C#. When I last used Microsoft’s development tools, the Java tools of the day weren’t in the same league. My how times have changed. A few quick impressions:

1. Constantly, while editing code, the Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger pops up. It seems that the typelibbuilder.exe is crashing. I quick Google search reveals I am not alone with this problem, and I’m not sure if completely disabling the JIT debugger is the answer. Needless to say, this is most annoying.

2. JavaScript, oh – wait – excuse me – JScript (assholes) support is pretty bad. It’s due to be improved in VS 2010, but – hello? What year is this – 1998? This is incredible.

3. Spend one hour with IntelliJ writing Java code – witness how it automatically manages import statements, then come back and laugh at how this is handled in VS.

I’m sure it’s not all bad, and I’m sure that once I got used to it, I would really like C#, but I expected much more from Microsoft’s flagship development tool.

My VM refuses to shut down from time to time, and I traced it down to dexplorer.exe. If I kill this, I can shut down. Guess what this is? It’s part of the MSDN help system that Delphi uses.

Seriously, this is the most convoluted, useless, pathetic help system I have ever encountered.

No really – thanks, guys. Great job on forgetting the bookmarks when closing a project. I really hate being able to quickly navigate to sections of large source files, and would much rather search and reset the bookmarks each time I open the project.

It’s just the high quality of the XP user interface that I find so appealing.

Leave it to Microsoft to get ALL THREE steps wrong:

1. The information bar is NOT located just below the address bar.
2. There is no option to “Install ActiveX Control” in the right-click menu.
3. There is no Install button in the Security Warning dialog box.

Pathetic. (click the images to see them in full)