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Everyone knows someone like the person I’m about to describe. I’m talking about the person who you can never get to go to social events, who always has some kind of excuse as to why they can’t go. This may even be you already, or you are at least slipping that way. The general rule seems to be that the older you get the less you can be bothered – and you are in fact turning into a ‘boring old person’, going against all the commitments you made not to do so when you were younger. It seems a lot easier to just stay in and watch a film than it is to go out somewhere, especially after a long day at work.

Theres an easy way to avoid this, which I call the ‘Why Not’ rule. Whenever someone invites you to something and you start to feel that resistance to it, you will invariably start to come up with an excuse as to why you can’t go. What you need to do is stop at this point, and start asking yourself Why Not? Is this a legitimate reason, or is it just that I can’t be bothered? Once you’ve gone through all the possible reasons you can’t go and examined them, you will either be left with a legitimate reason or you will be left with no reason. If you are left with no reason then get your backside out of the house!

This isn’t to say that you should reply yes to every request, sometimes we do just need to recharge on our own. What you should do is set a level which you think is reasonable, say agreeing to 50% of requests, and stick to it. Very few people can manage with no time to themselves, so don’t go too far the other way.

When coming up with reasons for and against, a valid reason can be anything from other arrangements to not being able to afford it. Invalid reasons are things like theres something on the TV you want to watch (can’t you record it?) or you are too tired (unless you are falling asleep on your feet, you will wake up once you get there) – if you are making these kinds of reasons then you are straying into the realm of the boring old person.

So what is so wrong about being a boring old person? The first thing that happens is that you just stop getting invited to things, why bother since you will just say no? As a result of that you don’t have as many opportunities to see your friends, you fall out of touch and eventually all those close friends you had become acquaintances, and eventually forget you. I have seen this happen to people. The other problem with it is that if you don’t go out, how are you going to meet new people and try new things? Just try saying yes a few times, it will be worthwhile.

I’ve been playing with a little Silverlight app which requests data from an XML webservice on a remote server. Ths is the first time I’ve done this and like most people I fell into the trap of not setting up my crossdomainrequest.xml file. This is a file you need to put on the remote server in the root directory, and it basically permits Silverlight to access the data on the server. If you haven’t set this up correctly you will be seeing a lot of the dreaded System.Security.SecurityException

There is a lot of info out on Google about this which has sample xml files, however none of them were working for me and I spent quite a bit of time scratching my head. I eventually came across this document which gave me a clue as to what I was doing wrong – basically my silverlight app was running on http but the site I was pulling data from was https. In order for this to work you need an extra line in the xml to permit ‘cross-scheme’ access, ie an http site accessing an https one. The xml which got me up and running was this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<access-policy>
 <cross-domain-access>
  <policy>
   <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
    <domain uri="*"/>
    <domain uri="http://*"/>
   </allow-from>
   <grant-to>
    <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>
   </grant-to>
  </policy>
 </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

Save this as crossdomainrequest.xml at the root of your web server, but bear in mind that this allows full access and so you might want to edit it to lock it down (again, lots of other turorials on this). Its annoying that I had to spend a good couple of hours sorting this. Looking around its a very common issue and the error messages could be a lot more helpful in pointing you in the right direction

I read this blog post by Steve Schwartz recently and thought I’d share it as it presents a really interesting angle on what our goals in life should be with regards to learning. Since I’m always looking at new stuff (as most people are) its important that I know what my goal should be at the end of it all. Previously I was of the opinion that this goal should be to know as much as possible, but after reading this I’ve changed my mind.

(continue reading…)