Lamont Harrington's Blog

I received an this e-mail this morning and I thought I'd share with the loyal readers of my blog.  Enjoy

40 Tips for a Better Life – 2008

1. Take a 10-30 minute walk every day. And while you walk…smile. It is the ultimate anti-depressant.
2. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes each day. Buy a lock if you have to.
3. Buy a DVR and tape your late night shows and get more sleep.
4. When you wake up in the morning, complete the following statement, “My purpose is to ___________________ today.”
5. Live with the 3 E’s → Energy, Enthusiasm, and Empathy.
6. Play more games and read more books than you did in 2007.
7. Make time to practice meditation and prayer. They provide us with daily fuel for our busy lives.
8. Spend time with people over the age of 70 and under the age of 6.
9. Dream more while you are awake.
10. Eat more foods that grow on trees and plants and eat less food that is manufactured in plants.
11. Drink green tea and plenty of water. Eat blueberries, wild Alaskan salmon, broccoli, almonds and walnuts.
12. Try to make at least three people smile each day.
13. Clear clutter from your house, your car, your desk and let new and flowering energy into your life.
14. Don’t waste your precious energy on gossip, energy vampires, issues of the past, negative thoughts or things you cannot control. Instead, invest your energy in the positive present moment.
15. Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.
16. Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a college kid with a maxed out charge card.
17. Smile and laugh more. It will keep the energy vampires away.
18. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.
19. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
20. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
21. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
22. Make peace with your past so it won’t spoil the present.
23. Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
24. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
25. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: “In five years, will this matter?”
26. Forgive everyone for everything.
27. What other people think of you is none of your business.
28. GOD heals everything.
29. However good or bad a situation, it will change.
30. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
31. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful, or joyful.
32. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
33. The best is yet to come.
34. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.
35. Do the right thing!
36. Call your family often (or e-mail them to death!!) Hey, I’m thinkin’ about ya!
37. Each night before you go to bed, complete the following statements: “I’m thankful for _______________. Today I accomplished _______________.
38. Remember that you are too blessed to be stressed.
39. If you can't change your situation, change your location.
40. Enjoy the ride. Remember, this is not Disney World and you certainly don’t want a fast pass. You only have one ride through life so make the most of it and enjoy the ride.

May your troubles be less, May your blessings be more, May nothing but happiness come through your door.

I mentioned in a previous post the work I've been doing with the Library of Congress.  It has been a great effort and an excellent showcase of the power and flexibility of our platform.  On April 12th, we closed another chapter in this unprecendented effort by officially launching their myLOC.gov website.  The website has been architected and built on top of a platform consisting of SharePoint Server 2007, Silverlight, Windows Communication Foundation, and Windows Live ID.  The launch of the myLOC.gov site on this past Saturday marked the culmination of 9 months of work to deliver a compelling solution that's geared at reshaping how Americans view American History by literally bringing many of the historical treasures contained within the walls of the Library of Congress to life and allowing not only the American people, but the entire world to experience this great treasure.

The launch of the myLOC.gov website capped off a great week for the Library of Congress and Microsoft.  As a part of the revitalized digital experience, coined the "Library of Congress Experience", is also the launch of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)-based interactive touch screen kiosks that's running within the Library of Congress's Thomas Jefferson Building in DC.  There, US citizens, and people travelling to DC from around the world, will be able to enage within an immersive technology experience that allows people to interact with the Library's historical collections in new and exciting ways.  The myLOC.gov site takes this onsite experience and brings it to the web!

In the coming weeks, myself, in combination with our great partners, Portal Solutions and Schematic will be creating a "How We Did It" article (likely to be posted on the SharePoint Team Blog), in the same vein as the two-part article I published on another great effort with Conservation International, that'll dive deeper into the overall solution architecture and cover specifics around logical and physical architecture as well as discuss implementation details of key features and functionality.

So stay tuned!

Unity Application Block

April 2008 Release (1.0)

The Patterns & Practices team have recently released v1.0 of the Unity Application Block.  The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection (DI) container. It facilitates building loosely coupled applications and provides developers with the following advantages:

• Simplified object creation, especially for hierarchical object structures and dependencies;
• Abstraction of requirements; this allows developers to specify dependencies at run time or in configuration and simplify management of crosscutting concerns;
• Increased flexibility by deferring component configuration to the container;
• Service location capability; this allows clients to store or cache the container.

You can download the bits from MSDN here and participate in the community forums on CodePlex.