I took a break from work and posting last week to go to Mexico. I kept hearing so much about this swine flu thing that I had to check it out for myself. Turns out the place is full of sun and beaches and fun people. Not sure why the news kept saying not to go there.

I went to attend an epic wedding, but since my 30th birthday happened to be Cinco de Mayo, I also invited a bunch of friends to hang out for a week afterward in a big house right on the beach. It was miserable, obviously.

On the first day back, we shipped the first version of a big Surface app we’ve been working on. I get to hang out in Seattle for a week, but next week I’ll be in the SF office. May will be busy, and then two more launches in June. Then… maybe another vacation.

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.

I’ve been struggling to find motivation to do things, so it’s been a pretty unproductive week. I kind of half-heartedly worked on the physics engine some, followed all the PDC announcements pretty obsessively, and tried to teach myself a few things. On Friday I pulled up though and made a proof-of-concept which shows how to use a mobile device as a secondary display for Surface. Hopefully I’ll get to refine that a bit more this coming week.

I’m not much of a Halloween person, but the weekend was alright. Friday was drinking too much with friends, Saturday was sleeping a lot to recover from Friday, and Sunday was a great brunch, a trip to the gym, and now some quality coffee shop time.

I’ve been kind of unmotivated and grouchy this week, but I got some cool stuff done anyway. The Surface music app was pretty much done, til Darren asked me to fix a minor visual glitch with it. It was something small but a fix required reworking a lot of the layout code. In the end it was worth it, and that inspired me to redo some other things to make for smoother and better animations.

Then Nathan reminded me of TouchOSC which got me percolating on ways to make the app controllable via iPhone, so I hacked that together as well, which was surprisingly easy considering I hadn’t touched any of the .NET networking APIs before.

If it were up to me, I would have gotten the basic concept down, made it work in an ugly sort of way, and called it good once the major problems were solved. It’s great to be working with a team that pushes me to take it from “it works” to “it’s beautiful.”

I think the plan is to show all of this off next week with videos on both our blog and the Surface blog. I’m hoping we’ll be able to distribute it to other Surface users soon after, but we’ll see how that goes.

Aside from that, we’re ramping up on some other cool projects for both Surface and Silverlight. The Silverlight one has a really interesting UI component that’s probably going to kick my ass, but if it works it’s going to look awesome. Unfortunately it’s going to be a long time before that one launches.

Wow, that was all really vague. It’s unfortunate that I can’t share more details.

The weekend has been cool. Got together with some friends on Fri and wandered the hill a bit. Drank some expensive bourbon. Saw lots of police but didn’t know what happened til later. On Sat a bunch of people came to my place for some social madness including lots of Wii Fit skiing, then it was off to the Doc Martin show, then chatting at a friend’s place til much too late. Today, some hacking, catching up on Fringe, and reading about LINQ.

Another short week full of brainstorms, a client dinner, and work on a fun music project. Things will be kicking into high gear at Stimulant soon. Wish I could talk more about it here.

Only 100pgs left in the book (animation and bitmaps), and then I’ll know everything ever. I’ve had to skim a few parts, such as the 20pgs that go crazy-deep into the math behind Bezier curves. Interesting stuff, but honestly I hope I never need to know that.

Wii Fit showed up and it’s a lot less lame as a game than I expected it would be. Hopefully I’ll have time to put the balance board to nefarious hacking purposes this week.

The weekend has been chill. A friend is in from out of town for a few weeks. Went to a really fun birthday party. Getting pumped for Decibel.

My entertainment options for the moment consist of reading more about WPF or going to the gym. WPF can wait til tomorrow.

I had a pretty slow Labor Day weekend filled with lots of reading, fancy cocktails, and a lingering dread of all the Burning Man stories I’d have to hear in the week to come.

Just when I thought the curved text control was ready to go, I showed it to our designers, one of whom noticed a pretty serious issue that’s proving tough to fix. It’ll get worked out, but I think we want to use it in a real app before publishing it someplace. So, that’ll be a while.

I’m 680 pages into the Petzold Bible and learning a ton. I’m working to finish it up so that I can move on to the next one, and also because some other projects are starting to heat up.