Avalon Bellevue Towers: 4 years of time well spent

In this blog post I will be sharing my experience of living in the Avalon Bellevue Towers Community right in downtown Bellevue, Washington for 4 years.

Avalon Bellevue Towers’ slogan is: Time well spent. Let me explain what they mean with that!

The staff and the service

abt-602-During my 4 years living there, the community and its staff lived up to their word.

The concierge staff was always professional and friendly (hello Ken and Stephen). Apart from greeting them when I enter the building, they took care of the package reception and delivery and other mundane issues.

When it comes to maintenance requests, I can say it was top notch. Mr. Attila Madaras, the maintenance supervisor, was always there in person to fix all kinds of problems in the apartments: from replacing busted light bulbs to repairing a broken appliance. I would place a maintenance request online and within the same day (or max the next day) I would get the issue taken care of.

The leasing office staff was also very friendly (hello Cathy, Michael, Rebecca and Terri). I interacted with them often, not just once a year when I was renewing my lease.

As a positive “side-effect” of the staff’s friendliness, they became like a small family to me.

Note: I don’t want to sound all sensual in my experience, I have to say that I did encounter some misunderstandings with the staff during my stay, but when I communicated my concerns politely, I was met with nothing but good and prompt service. Continue reading “Avalon Bellevue Towers: 4 years of time well spent”

Mouse Without Borders: Control up to 4 computers with one mouse and keyboard

mouse-without-borders-iconMouse without Borders is a prototype that makes you the captain of your computer fleet by allowing you to control up to four computers from a single mouse and keyboard. This means that with Mouse without Borders you can copy text or drag and drop files across computers. Mouse Without Borders is a Microsoft Garage project by Truong Do. Garage projects are side projects that Microsoft employees like Truong build for fun on their nights and weekends. Mouse Without Borders was designed for people who use many computers in the same room. For example, a laptop or tablet that you take to meetings might sit right alongside the desktop PC in your office.

I love this software. I use it whenever I have my laptop and desktop sitting next to each other. I can just use my desktop’s keyboard / mouse to control the laptop’s mouse and keyboard. The moment the mouse is moved away from one monitor, it crosses the borders to the other computer’s monitor. Not only that, any clipboard content will also transfer across borders. If I copy text or files on one machine, I can then paste them seamlessly on the second machine!

You can set up how your computer screens are laid out. For example, in the screenshot below, my desktop screen raised above the laptop who sits beneath it. Therefore, the moment I move my mouse from the computer’s screen all the way down, it then goes (across borders) to the laptop’s screen and activates the keyboard as well:

mouse-without-borders

It is very easy to set up and configure the “Mouse Without Borders” software. You can download it from Microsoft’s website here: http://aka.ms/mm.

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Control Color Explorer: Explore your colors

As part of Windows apps development cycle, especially WinForms applications in Visual Studio, you may want to pick the right colors for your ListViews, Buttons, Labels, etc…

The best way to pick the colors is to visualize them.

With Control Color Explorer, you can visualize all the colors in the System.Drawing.Color type. You have the option to render the colors using the BackColor attribute or the ForeColor attribute:

color-explorer-bkg

Once you chose the colors you like, you may simply click the “Copy Color names”  to copy them and use them in your application.

You may grab the source code of this tool from my GitHub repository to compile it by yourself, or just download the binaries from here.

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