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	<title>Philosophical Geek</title>
	<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com</link>
	<description>Code and musings by Ben Watson</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:29:36 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Measure Amount of Data to Serialize with a Null Stream</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you’ve got to serialize some data, especially in a binary format, it’s common to output the length of the data. This is useful for versioning, random access, knowing when you’re done reading the records, among other reasons. Therefore, you need to know the size of the data you’re going to serialize. There are a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2010/07/26/measure-amount-of-data-to-serialize-with-a-null-stream/</link>
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		<title>Get a Free, Autographed Copy of C# 4.0 How-To!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[To celebrate how well C# 4.0 How-To is doing, I’m going to give away two free copies of the book! Here’s how it’s going to work: 1. Leave a comment on this post describing a project you’d like to build with C# 4. 2. I’ll pick two people from those comments at random. (Make sure [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2010/05/10/get-a-free-autographed-copy-of-c-4-0-how-to/</link>
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		<title>Interview with Me</title>
		<description><![CDATA[InformIT has just published an interview with me where they asked me a bunch of questions related to C# 4.0 How-To. We got into the multicore future, Internet versus books, why C# programmers need to know about UAC, and a lot more. Check it out!]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2010/03/19/interview-with-me/</link>
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		<title>Blog moving hosts this weekend</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I looked at my site’s settings in Google’s webmaster center and it told me that my site was in the top 5% slowest sites on the Internet. Wow. That really sucks. I’m sorry, dear reader. In any case, this was the final straw, after a string of outages and other general unhappiness. So I’m moving [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2010/03/12/blog-moving-hosts-this-weekend/</link>
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		<title>The Book is Made Real</title>
		<description><![CDATA[These arrived in the mail today.]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2010/03/09/the-book-is-made-real/</link>
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		<title>C# 4.0 How-To Available Now!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Well, it’s finally out! Amazon no longer lists the book as available for pre-sale, and it should be shipping to purchasers today or tomorrow. If you’re a B&#38;N shopper, you can also order it there, or grab it in stores within a few days. From the product description: Real Solutions for C# 4.0 Programmers Need [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2010/03/08/c-4-0-how-to-available-now/</link>
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		<title>How to position windows correctly at 120 DPI in WPF</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you want to place a window at a specific place in WPF, it will work pretty much as you expect—unless your DPI is 120 (the default is 96). Here’s a sample that shows how to put it where you want. In this case, I want to put a window just under another control, aligned [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/11/21/how-to-position-windows-correctly-at-120dpi-in-wpf/</link>
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		<title>A WPF Numeric Entry Control</title>
		<description><![CDATA[When WPF first shipped, there was a noticeable lack of certain controls we’ve become used to in Win32 and WinForms: Calendar, DateTimePicker, and NumericUpDown. WPF 4 adds Calendar and DatePicker, but not anything for numeric entry. For my solution I wanted something that behaved very similarly to the WinForms NumericUpdown control. Some of the specifications: [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/11/16/a-wpf-numeric-entry-control/</link>
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		<title>Review: The Code Book &#8211; the most entertaining book on cryptography you&#8217;ll ever read</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I recently wandered into a thrift store and as is usual in these stores I headed to the book section.(I live by the maxim that you can never own too many books.) The only thing that really caught my eye was a hardcover edition of The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/11/03/review-the-code-book-the-most-entertaining-book-on-cryptography-youll-ever-read/</link>
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		<title>Bing LEGO mosaic</title>
		<description><![CDATA[This is a simple project I’ve been working on during the weekends lately. It’s the Bing logo done in LEGO plates. I’ll be moving it into my office soon. It took maybe 6 hours of work and is about 3.4ft (1m) wide. Feel free to leave comments at flickr, or check it out at my [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/24/bing-lego-mosaic/</link>
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		<title>C# 4.0 How-To now available for pre-sale!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[For the last year, aside from starting a great job with Bing, I’ve also been working on a book about C# 4.0 and the upcoming .Net framework. The news: it is finally available for presale! This book is not your typical C# reference. It’s designed to be an easy guide to how to accomplish specific [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/15/c-4-0-how-to-now-available-for-pre-sale/</link>
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		<title>Lots, and lots of tiles</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Over in my flickr account, I’ve posted a picture of&#160; part of the destruction of the LEGO shuttle. I just wanted to show the amount of tiles used in the project—it was a lot, but I didn’t count. The shuttle is sadly no more, but new projects are coming…]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/07/lots-and-lots-of-tiles-2/</link>
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		<title>Lots, and lots of tiles</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Over in my flickr account, I’ve posted a picture of&#160; part of the destruction of the LEGO shuttle. I just wanted to show the amount of tiles used in the project—it was a lot, but I didn’t count. The shuttle is sadly no more, but new projects are coming…]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/07/lots-and-lots-of-tiles/</link>
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		<title>BrickCon 2009 this weekend&#8212;get your LEGO fix in Seattle!</title>
		<description><![CDATA[If you’re in Seattle this weekend, BrickCon 2009 is going on, and I’ll be participating for the first time, displaying my Space Shuttle model. The convention has more space than ever this year: 35,000 square feet. The public hours are Saturday and Sunday, 11am-3pm. It’s only $7 per person (or max of $20 per family) [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/10/02/brickcon-2009-this-weekendget-your-lego-fix-in-seattle/</link>
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		<title>More Photos</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I finally logged back into my flickr account and uploaded some recent photos from an evening trip to Mercer Island. It was around sunset, the light was beautiful, and I had about two hours to myself to just shoot what I could. This hand was part of many holding a chain along some docks. The [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/08/15/more-photos/</link>
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		<title>Some photos of Pine Lake</title>
		<description><![CDATA[We went down to one of the many local lakes and I snapped a couple of shots of the lake during sunshot. It’s a small, beautiful lake with a tiny public beach, a dock inhabited by fishermen and a small swimming area. No motorized boats are allowed. I’m sure there are hundreds of places within [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/08/12/some-photos-of-pine-lake/</link>
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		<title>LEGO Space Shuttle</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Over the last year, I’ve (very slowly) been working on a LEGO model of a NASA Space Shuttle. It’s finally finished, or as much as it will be. I need to move onto other things now. It’s about 38” long. I have no idea how many pieces—many thousands because every surface is tiled over. The [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/07/19/lego-space-shuttle/</link>
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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, 1412, [...]]]></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 [...]]]></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 [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://www.philosophicalgeek.com/2009/02/20/new-apps-and-features-from-live-search/</link>
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