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	<title>Philosophical Geek</title>
	<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com</link>
	<description>Code and musings by Ben Watson</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:22:22 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Photos from the 2009 Seattle Rock and Roll Marathon and Half Marathon</title>
		<description><![CDATA[ On Saturday, my wife ran in the Rock and Roll Marathon in downtown Seattle. I roamed around and took pictures of Qwest and Safeco fields and snapped a few of the race itself. Bib numbers I captured (where I could read them) are: 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 15, 1275, 1347, 1350, 1356, [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/06/29/photos-from-the-2009-seattle-rock-and-roll-marathon-and-half-marathon/</link>
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		<title>First Bing.com commercial</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Working on Bing.com for the last 9 months or so has been exhilarating. Finally, we can show the world the great stuff we’ve been doing. Here is (I think) the first TV commercial about Bing.com, running as of today.

I kissed Google goodbye more than a year ago and haven’t looked back. I think once people [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/06/03/first-bingcom-commercial/</link>
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		<title>New apps and features from Live Search</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’ve been meaning to highlight a few of the cool things we’re doing in Live Search. I don’t have any direct involvement in the development of any of these—I just think they’re cool.
Answer Suggestions for IE8
IE8 is awesome, so go get it. Live Search has these things called Instant Answers where it can respond with [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/02/20/new-apps-and-features-from-live-search/</link>
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		<title>Updated CPU usage article</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I made a important changes to the CPU usage code and have updated the article to reflect it. Instead of a critical section, the code uses just the interlocked increment/decrement functions. I also updated the sample demo to use multiple threads to read the CPU usage to demonstrate the thread safety clearly.
No tag for this [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/02/04/updated-cpu-usage-article/</link>
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		<title>How to learn WPF (or anything else)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’ve recently been learning WPF. This is a huge topic that is uncontainable by any single book, tutorial, or web-site. The complexity and breadth of this framework is nearly oppressive, but the results are incredible. Or rather, I should say, potentially incredible.
From everything I’ve read, people who have suffered through the WPF learning curve have [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/01/29/how-to-learn-wpf-or-anything-else/</link>
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		<title>Determine CPU usage of current process (C++ and C#)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Updated 2/4/2009: I changed the implementation of these classes from the original:

Instead of a critical section, InterlockedIncrement/Decrement is used.
The sample driver program now demos using multiple threads using the CpuUsage class to show thread safety.

Download the C++ and C# projects that accompany this article.
Just to make it clear, there is no API called GetProcessCpuPercentage(). To [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/01/03/determine-cpu-usage-of-current-process-c-and-c/</link>
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		<title>An easy stack layout panel for WinForms</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This is a simple, but useful tip. Users of WPF are spoiled. They have all sorts of layout options. Those of us still working in WinForms have FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel. That’s it. WPF has those and more.
For my current project, I needed a panel to layout controls vertically. The TableLayoutPanel can be awkward to work [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/12/12/an-easy-stack-layout-panel-for-winforms/</link>
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		<title>Malware Detection in Live Search and Webmaster Tools</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Live Search has recently released some great new features that I want to highlight. The first is from the Webmaster center, which is the team I was hired on.
With the new Webmaster Tools, you can now see which pages on your site are infected with malware (aka drive-by downloads). The links are clearly highlighted and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/12/04/malware-detection-in-live-search-and-webmaster-tools/</link>
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		<title>NDepend: A short review</title>
		<description><![CDATA[NDepend is a tool I’d heard about for years, but had yet to really dive into recently. Thanks to the good folks developing it, I was able to try out a copy and have been analyzing my own projects with it.
Here’s a brief run-down of my initial experience with it.
Installation
There is no installation file—everything is [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/11/29/ndepend-a-short-review/</link>
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		<title>Better Find In Files results in Visual Studio</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Sara Ford has an awesome tip for Visual Studio on how to customize the formatting of search results.

	Tags: Tips, visual studio
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		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/11/25/better-find-in-files-results-in-visual-studio/</link>
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		<title>Girl from Mars &#8211; Magneta Lane</title>
		<description><![CDATA[



I first saw this video at the Microsoft Company Meeting 2008, and looked for the song everywhere, but couldn’t find the Magneta Lane version. They recorded it just for Microsoft. Nevertheless, the original Ash version is great too, so get that in the meantime. 
Magneta&#8217; Lane’s MySpace page does mention the song, and maybe a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/11/22/girl-from-mars-magneta-lane/</link>
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		<title>On the importance of ignoring your problems</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’ve been having a great time at Microsoft over the last couple of months, but the ramp to full productivity is very steep. Recently, I’ve been working on an important improvement to some monitoring software, which requires a fairly good understanding of part of the system. It can be a little overwhelming trying to design [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/11/20/on-the-importance-of-ignoring-your-problems/</link>
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		<title>Consequences of a Star Trek-like computer</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Star Trek, along with other science fiction futures, has given us many things, apart from a vision of humanity that is hopefully a little better than we prove to be, but also a taste of what technology can be like when it is integrated so fully into people’s lives that it’s nearly taken for granted.
The [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/11/17/consequences-of-a-star-trek-like-computer/</link>
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		<title>Software Creativity and Strange Loops</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of technology and scientific understanding that would need to go into a computer like the one on the Enterprise in Star Trek, and specifically its interaction with people. It’s a computer that can respond to questions in context—that is, you don’t have to restart in every [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/11/03/software-creativity-and-strange-loops/</link>
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		<title>I&#8217;m a PC</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Judging, by the blogosphere’s reaction, I’m one of the few people who liked the Gates-Seinfeld ads by Microsoft. They were odd, sure, but it got people thinking, talking, going WTF? – and that can’t be bad.
But I definitely like the I’m a PC ads better. I was at the company meeting when they debuted, and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/10/24/im-a-pc/</link>
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		<title>My universe rebalances</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Do you ever get the feeling that when things are going too well, something has to give?
I think sometimes the universe decides it needs to humble you, remind you just how thin the thread is from which we all hang. Months of comparative ease and happiness demand a balance.
Yesterday, we were rebalanced. Now, I realize [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/10/20/my-universe-rebalances/</link>
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		<title>On the importance of having a good haircut</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Note to future self: Don&#8217;t get haircut the week before important events take place. 
After my last day of work at GeoEye, I went to get my haircut at a nearby salon. I asked for it a little shorter. Between the time I gave this brief instruction, and the time she lifted her hands to [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/10/11/on-the-importance-of-having-a-good-haircut/</link>
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		<title>Goodbye Google Ads</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Given that I&#8217;m now working for its major competitor, I&#8217;ve decided to take down the Google ads from this site. I hope this leads to less clutter and intrusiveness. My goal for this site has been (and still is) for it to be self-sustaining, and I hope it can continue to be through Amazon referrals.

	Tags: [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/09/28/goodbye-google-ads/</link>
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		<title>First two weeks at Microsoft</title>
		<description><![CDATA[It has been an insane first couple of weeks at Microsoft. In actuality, though, I don&#8217;t know if I can count it as two weeks of experience. I&#8217;ve had two days of orientation, one day for the company meeting (which was awesome, by the way), and two more days for training in Live Search specifically. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/09/28/first-two-weeks-at-microsoft/</link>
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		<title>Converting OLE_COLOR to System.Drawing.Color</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
I&#8217;ve been working on a project using Visual Studio Tools for Office 2008 (VSTO) and at one point I needed to get the colors for categories in Outlook 2007. There are actually 3 colors, and they are returned as uint&#8217;s&#8211;why the .Net wrappers don&#8217;t convert to colors for you, I don&#8217;t know (to avoid linking [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2008/09/13/converting-ole_color-to-systemdrawingcolor/</link>
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