Mick Badran tagged me. I've been procrastinating doing this, but i'm scared that i might bring an evil pox on myself if i break the sacred chain...or some such hokey pokey.

The idea is that i reveal 5 things about myself and then tag 5 other people. I wonder if the person that devised this scheme realises that with that level of exponential growth the whole blogosphere will be tagged and then people will be forced to retag people and then those people will have to find 5 more things to blog about and then tag 5 more people who have already been tagged and eventually it leads to a HIGH CPU state where the entire blogosphere maxs out the CPU thread pool on this "tagging phenomonon" eventually taking out large sections of the interwebs as blogs just become echo chambers of 5 more things that people don't care about and then the Time Magazine's person of the Year for 2006 becomes "The idiot who destroyed the internet with his blathering and ended global civilisation in 2007". 

Anyway, here are my 5 things you don't know about me.

1. I spent two years living in China, and speak a pretty good intermediate level of Mandarin (Putonghua). At the apex of my chinese character study i could probably recognise 1000 characters. Now, because i'm out of practise, i'd struggle to accurately recognise 200. Now i see alot of Chinese characters and say to myself "I used to be able to read that".
2. Just before starting at Microsoft I came this close (holding my forefinger and thumb a paper's width apart) to chucking in my IT career and studying law. I was accepted into Uni and everything. In the end i decided to proceed with my career in IT as I didn't want to live as a broke student for 2-3 years followed by another few years as a broke law clerk or some such. Now I'm glad i didn't.
3. I'm proud New Zealander. As a New Zealander living in Australia I'm often forced to watch All Black vs Wallabies matches with the TV on mute because the biased Australian commentators ruin the whole experience.
4. My Great Uncle was the Captain of an airliner that went missing in the "Bermuda Triangle" in 1949. The wreckage and 5 search planes that went out after it were never seen again. My son's middle name is after him.
5. In my early teenage years I had 20-25 houses in my lawn mowing "business". During the summer months I made upto $150 a week (thats alot of money when you're 12) which was enough money to cover my Amiga-500-games-and-accessories habit.

The five people i'm tagging are:

Ah...no one. Everyone i know has already been tagged. I looks like I'm going to be a terminating node.

I haven't seen anything on the interwebs on this issue so I'm blogging it.

I had an issue come across my desk recently where after an upgrade from BizTalk 2004 to BizTalk 2006 all the pipelines where failing. Even the pipelines that didn't have custom components failed.

The error was like this:

Error details: There was a failure executing the receive pipeline: "XYZ.Orders.Common.BizTalk.Pipelines.MyPipeline, XYZ.Orders.Common.BizTalk.Pipelines, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=dfesd197d68db7dad" Source: "Unknown " Receive Port: "Orders_Invoice_XYZ" URI: "D:\XYZ\in\*.txt" Reason: Unable to cast object of type 'XYZ.Orders.Common.BizTalk.Pipelines.MyPipeline' to type 'Microsoft.BizTalk.PipelineOM.Pipeline'. 

This was caused by one of the references in the pipeline projects being to a .Net 1.1 version of the assembly. This was unexpected because the some of the pipelines that were failing weren't even calling the assembly (even though the reference existed). The resolution was to recompile the referenced assembly to .Net 2.0 and then update the references to the new version. Voila, all the pipelines worked properly.