Philip Richardson

Update: As you might have noticed I’ve now moved to WordPress.

Until a few days ago I was using BlogEngine.NET a popular ASP.NET based blog app from Codeplex.com. While running a routine upgrade I
encountered a few issues. Digging into the source code of the app I found too much bloat for my liking. For now I’ll run a slimmed down ‘pure RSS’ feed. Most modern browsers
apply a stylesheet to RSS so the reading experience should be OK. The old BlogEngine.NET URI format has been preserved (thanks to some handy HTTP handlers).

Here is the password policy for American Express’ web site:

Your Password should:

• Contain 6 to 8 characters – at least one letter and one number (not case sensitive)
• Contain no spaces or special characters (e.g., &, >, *, $, @)
• Be different from your User ID and your last Password

Max 8 characters with no non-alphanumeric characters?!?! Are they freaking joking? Sadly not….

Please American Express: give me the option of having a secure password.

BTW: Actually finding the ‘change your password’ link on their site is an exercise in futility.

Check this out. It looks cool but I’m not sure I’d like to actually go to work at this place every day (although it is better than the alternative: going to work in a beige underground cube farm).

via the ever passionate cloud-warrior: Dave Lemphers

I’m OOF until the 12th of January. The term OOF is one of the classic Microsoft slang words and we use it constantly. It basically means you are ‘out of office’. The original was from the old Microsoft Xenix mail server. Read more here.

While I’m OOF I’m spending most of my time at home with the family (it after all supposed to be paternity leave). I also hope to squeeze in some work on a little technical project which has been ‘itching away at me’. I’ll also be using the time to do some career/’country I want to live in’ thinking.

I’ll be pretty slow to respond on my @microsoft.com email during this time – but at can be reached at my @philiprichardson.org account pretty easily.

I took the plunge this morning and went on to a recent build (day old) of Windows 7. I was so impressed by the M3 version that I was ready to try something a little more raw.

Now that I’m using a non-public version I can’t really discuss any of the features. However I can definitely saw it’s the best OS I’ve ever used and a lot of people in the company are getting very excited about Win7.