Mark Arteaga

I have been recently awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional in Device Application Development.  What is an 'MVP'?  Here is an excerpt from the site:

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community's best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.

The other thing I've noticed is I'm the only Device Application Developer MVP in all of Canada (if I'm wrong please let me know also).  If you feel you fit the description of an MVP specifically in the Device Application Development category let me know.  See here for the selection criteria for the MVP Award.

When the iPhone pricing was first announced by Rogers the lowest cost you could get was $60/mth for 150minutes of talk time and 400MB (yes that's MB) of data with a minimum commitment of 3 years.  Oh and if you go over your talk time it's 0.35/minute and if you go over your data it's 0.50/MB.  Compare that to AT&T which offers the same phone for $70/mth, unlimited data and 450minutes.

With outrage from Canadian consumers (for some reason everyone wants an iPhone but me :) Rogers decided to give $30/mth for 6GB of data until August 31.  The best part about it is it's available on *all* smart phones including Windows Mobile.

The only thing I like about the iPhone is the effect it's having data prices in Canada.  I went from $100/mth for 1GB to $50/mth for 500MB to $30/mth for 6GB of data all within a span of 2.5mths.

So if you have a data plan with Rogers be sure to call them up and get this deal even if you don't have an iPhone. 

My wife sent me this video and I thought I would share.  It is a very inspirational lecture given by Randy Pausch a Professor at Carnegie Mellon.  It's his final lecture not because he is quitting or retiring but because he is dying of cancer.  Just reminds me when something goes wrong that it can always be worse.  Very inspirational and it's worth the 12mins.

I've been using DiskKeeper 2008 for a while now and is a pretty good defragmenter utility. 

Previously I was running on XP and it I did realize a ‘responsiveness’ difference on that machine more than I noticed on my new machine (Dell XPS M1710).  On my new box I installed it probably 3-4mths after I got my machine so that might be a reason why I did not notice much.  On my old box I installed it probably 1.5yrs receiving the box so that’s probably why I noticed a bigger difference.  Looking at the stats in Diskeeper it’s been running everyday without a problem and is defraging files (currently I'm at 10% fragmentation) everyday.  If you hard drive seems to be thrashing instead of re-formatting try a defrag first with DiskKeeper. Get a trial version here.

<note>NONE TECH POST</note>

Some of you may or may not know that the majority of my work is done from my home office.  There are lots of advantages to this like saving on transportation cost (especially now since gas prices are so high) to being able to work either during the day or at night (coding mainly happens at night!). 

One of the biggest advantages I find is the amount of time I spend with my family like having lunch with them, walking my kids to school etc. Every so often I get little surprises and since it's Friday afternoon here is today's surprise I thought I would share

My son's favorite characters from the movie Cars sitting on my laptop.  Here is my favorite car

And now back to our regularly scheduled program.