Good Support

I had a couple of excellent tech support experiences this week. I had a weird connection issue with Digsby that was easy for me to reproduce, but tough to explain. I sent a bug report through their tool and expected it to vanish into a bug tracker somewhere, but I actually got a helpful response from someone there and managed to sort out a workaround. Digsby is the best.

I also managed to trigger a really weird edge case in the Surface SDK’s ScatterView control. The issue was difficult to describe, but I did my best in a post to the Surface Community site. Surprisingly, someone got back to me and was eager to help. I worked up a simple test case and got it looked at by people who work on the SDK. Awesome.

Aside from triggering weird bugs, this week I’ve been working on one of the controls that will be in a future version of the Surface SDK. I’m just doing pretty production-level stuff, porting the design to sensible XAML code, but it’s cool to actually contribute to the source code of the product.

The image above is a photo of something I’ve been working on for the past few weeks in my spare cycles. More to come on that soon. (Art by Michael Paulus.)

The weekend’s been kind of blah, but the highlight was last night’s screening of Let the Right One In. If you like vampires, go see it. I didn’t know anything about it going in, and I think that might be the best way. Don’t watch the trailer online; I did just now for the first time and I think it sort of ruins it.

Obvious idea: Theaters should offer to sell you the DVD of the movie as you leave the theater. Just swipe your credit card on the way out and it’ll get shipped to your billing address whenever it’s released.