[Most of the info here is deprecated and no longer applicable to Visual Studio 2005]
The developers at Microsoft can’t program their way out of a paper bag. For whatever lame reason, they have never offered a way to fork a project in Visual Studio.
The following was copied from another blog’s comment section. Giving credit the comment was written by “flapdash”. I have reformatted and corrected some minor errors.
On summer weekends, many car clubs will tour along the peak-to-peak highway. This morning I saw about 60 cars mostly made up of Porsches. But mixed in were a few others such as a Lotus and a DeLorean.
I became familiar with most of these high-end cars when I was a kid and seeing them at car shows. For whatever reason Porsches never grabbed my fancy. Cars such as the Lamborghinni Countach, the Lotus Espirit, and the DeLorean were my favorites. And even today, 30-40 years later, these cars still look beautifully futuristic.
.jpg "Countach LP400 1974")
Countach LP400 1974
Lotus Esprit S2 1980
DeLoreans were a favorite of mine even before a modified version appeared in Back to the Future. Not only was I intrigued with the engineering and design, I like the idea of brushed stainless steel instead of paint for the body finish. The chassis of the DeLorean was designed by Lotus. The style was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, who also did designs for Lamborghinni and Maserati among many others.
I can’t help but wonder how much the US Federal government was responsible for the demise of the DeLorean. The original high performance design of the DeLorean was sacrificed in order for the car to be sold in the US. The car had to be raised to meet federal bumper guidelines, thus ruining the handling of the car. To meet EPA rules, a catalytic converter had to added to the exhaust system which caused a decrease of 40-50 horsepower in the engine. And finally, the FBI entrapped founder John Deloreanin a drug smuggling case as he was trying to raise money for the company, which was the final nail in the coffin.
Before starting the De Lorean Motor Company, John Delorean worked for Packard Motors and then various divisions in General Motors. In addition to developing many engineering patents, he might be most noted for the Pontiac GTO.
I am somewhat heartened to learn that a Texas company has purchased all of the remaining parts and assets of the old De Lorean Motor Company, formed a company using the old name, and that a new updated DeLorean can be purchased.
In its basic form, bread is very simple: water, flour, yeast and a little salt. Perhaps that’s why I like baking my own bread, it’s so simple but so nuanced. Beer, which contains similar ingredients comes to mind, too.
I’ve been making my own bread since the invention of the bread machine, ten or fifteen years ago. I had made bread prior to that, but I wasn’t a fan of the kneading process and the whole process seemed too complicated. The bread machine taught me a lot of things. I think the main thing it taught me was there is nothing critical about making bread. Cookbooks always made bread sound more like a chemistry experiment with tightly controlled parameters. Granted the bread machine does keep track of time and temperature, but that’s just because it can. Bread has been made for many centuries without timers and thermometers. The other thing the bread machine taught me is that fresh bread dough, since it was easy to make, makes a huge difference in things like pizza or cinnamon rolls, and lately I use bread dough in place of pastry dough in fruit cobblers.
But with time, the bread machine’s program kept getting in the way. It was either kneading too much or too little. Sometimes I wanted a longer rise time. There was no way to control these things. While I still have a bread machine, lately I prefer my food processor and its dough blade for kneading and the old fashioned approach of using bowls and bread pans (depending on the dough sometimes I’ll bake it directly on my pizza stone). With the food processor, I can easily control how much kneading the dough needs and kneading only takes a few minutes at most.
I used to think yeast was finicky. Nah. It’s simple and not very demanding. Once reanimated from its powder form, it will live as long as doesn’t get too hot and has something to eat. Once, I had a sourdough starter I kept alive for nearly 8 months. And the only reason it didn’t last longer was some other yeast or bacteria started living with it, which didn’t make very good tasting bread.
When the bread is rising, the yeast are busy making baby yeast, eating, belching and making alcohol. This process gives bread its flavor. I’ve learned not to rush this process. But it does require some babysitting. The yeast don’t have legs and once they eat the food in their immediate area, they starve and die unless you “punch down” the bread and redistribute the yeast. I think what makes bread smell so good while baking is the evaporation of the alcohol made by the yeast. With the long winters here, I look forward to turning on the oven to warm the house and making a fresh loaf of bread.
My town used to have a bakery that made fresh bread daily. That was until eating carbs became bad. I’m here to say that carbs are not bad. The problem is American’s eat too many carbs, too much junk, too many processed foods. If you remove the junk and the processed foods, there is plenty of room for bread. Maybe one day when I’m done being an engineer, I’ll open a bakery/pinball arcade/record store/teahouse. Hmm… with the exeption of pinball, it sounds like my home.
