So I’m ditching my home grown blogging software in favor of………… DasBlog.

I looked at a couple of other options.  I really wanted to go with Community Server, since it’s roots were in .TEXT, and I really liked that piece of software.  But I downloaded Community Server, and it just didn’t do it for me.  Don’t know what it was, it just didn’t feel right.  I also looked at DotNetNuke, but it seemed like a bit much for what I wanted.

Anyway, new site, same old address.  If you visit with a web browser, you won’t see anything different.  If you aggregate me, then you’ll want to reset your RSS feed too http://www.johnarmitage.net/word/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss

Hopefully this will be pretty painless, and you’ll keep reading.  Also, I’m hoping to post a little more often in 2006.

Eating.
These are good.

Not that I don’t usually go on long hiatuses with my blogging. But this time it’s for a good reason. I’m on vacation. I haven’t written any code in a few weeks, and it’s starting to feel a bit weird. Anyway, here is a short video of what my weeks have basically consisted of. It’s a 7 meg file, so don’t try to watch it unless you have broadband. Be sure to watch until the end. That’s where the money shot is.

Get the file

Please, oh please, if I am the person that provides you with the “family and friend” tech support plan, don’t call me saying your computer is acting funny….and it seemed to happen after you got that email from the CIA…or FBI… or whoever it was.

In this day and age DO NOT open an email attachment if you weren’t expecting it.

The FBI and CIA aren’t trying to contact you. Even if they were, it probably wouldn’t be by email. They would probably be fast roping onto your roof from black helicopters or something.

Completed one more trip around the sun today.
Don’t feel any different. Just busy.
November 17th
At work we rolled out the new system that we have been working on for about four years now. Four looooong years. There has been a lot of learning, a lot of second guessing, and a lot of reevaluating in those four years. At the end of it all, I think we delivered a pretty good product. The overall project was to get all of our legacy systems off of the big iron, and ported over to some intranet applications. This was the last big one. Whew. The roll out went pretty smoothly too. Sure there were some bugs and subsequent patches. But all in all it was relatively smooth. Speaking of bugs and patches, I better quit running on here and get back to it.

Oh, the real reason that I wanted to post was this. Basically it’s talking about some new reality show. Yeah, yeah, yeah…another damn reality show. This one sounds kind of interesting though. Basically they try to convince this group of people that they are going to send them into space. Then they immerse them in a training program. Then send them through a fake blast off. Sounds pretty crazy.

You can find Birthday Messages from the current Commandant of the Marine Corps, and General Lejeune's Birthday Message, and some motivating music over here.

Microsoft is giving away free SPOT watches.
Right now. Call right now! 866-676-8487
What’s the catch? Oh, you have to have a first generation SPOT watch and currently have a MSN Direct subscription. Me? I have a second generation Fossil Square. I still tried though, but was shut down. Here’s the deal. If you are like me and have that second generation Fossil, and you have been experiencing any data reset problem, then call. Call right now! They hooked me up with a new watch. Not the newest version, but a replacement of my current watch. I was going to write something along the lines of my first year watch review after the beginning of the year, but I guess I’ll do it now.

My watch rocks! It’s one of those tools that you might not miss if you don’t have it. But once you start using it, you feel naked without it. Case in point, with a SPOT watch and MSN Direct, you can hook up your Outlook calendar to your watch. So all of those pesky tasks like remembering that I have a meeting or dr. appt to go to, I can just forget about now. My watch tells me. In the morning when I put on my watch, I scan my appointments and I’m ready for the day. Then it reminds me when the appointment is coming up. It uses the standard Outlook timing, so you can set that yourself. Sometimes I need it to remind me a day in advance. Sometimes I only need five minutes. I also have mine set up so that people on MSN Messenger can send instant messages directly to my watch. It’s also got all your standard SPOT stuff like weather, news, sports, movie times….. all kinds of stuff that I don’t really use too much. The calendar and messaging have proven to be my favorite functions. If you have a phone that does these things, maybe that won’t be too impressive. But if you are me, and don’t have one of those phones, then this watch becomes addictive. The few times I forgot to put it on in the morning, I’ve been practically lost. It’s amazing how your brain shifts out of having to remember appointments when you don’t have to. At least mine does.

Here’s the part that sucks though. Around mid summer my watch started resetting. I would just be sitting there (or standing there, or walking), I would hear a beep, look down and my watch would be reset. What does that mean? I would have to go online to MSN and set up my watch again. It would have forgotten all of my appointments. All summer long it happened. Doing some research online, I found that the first generation watches had a problem with static electricity and resetting. I got to thinking, it seemed like my watch would reset pretty closely to when I had done a lot of activity like walking home after work. I started taking it off when I did that. I also started being conscious of what hand I was using to open this particular door at work that always gave me a static shock (just like in Office Space). Since I’ve done that the resets have subsided a bit, but they still happen from time to time. So, when I called MSN to try and finagle a new watch from them I explained all of this. I didn’t qualify for the upgrade, but they did hook me up with a replacement. We’ll see how it goes. The new one should arrive in a couple of weeks. Anybody want to buy an old SPOT watch?

UPDATE!!
According to Marq, the Yoda dance clip has been replaced by porn. I'm at work, so I haven't verified this yet. Surf over at your own risk.

------------------------------

UPDATE II
Stop sending me email asking if it is Yoda porn.
I wonder what kind of weird google hits I'll get having posted that phrase on my site. ------------------------------

Revenge of the Sith DVD easter eggs are already rolling in. Witness the Yoda dance.

via marq

Sometime last week NewsGator stopped working on my pc. While that’s annoying because it keeps me from easily keeping up with news and some of my friends’ weblog posts, it’s also really inconvenient because I also use it to keep track of some event logs on applications that I maintain.

I did all the usual things you might think of. Reinstall the app. Nothing. Uninstall, then go through the registry wiping out any mention of NewsGator. Install it again. Nothing. So I moved on to searching the web for someone with a similar error. Nothing.

What the hell?!

I don’t know what I was searching for earlier, but it must’ve not been too slick. Because I just now googled for it some more and found this on the NewsGator site. Imagine that! Looking for help on the product’s web page.

So it turns out that under the Outlook…Help…About menu item, there is a list of programs and dll’s that have been disabled. I never even knew that existed. Looks like Word and Excel both have it too. Huh. Learn something new every day.

By the way, NewsGator was listed on that Outlook Disabled Items list. I took it off the list, and it’s working like a charm now.

So it looks like Microsoft and Yahoo’s IM clients will finally start playing nicely. That’s great. Now I can remove one of the three IM programs that I seem to have running on my machine most of the time.

You know that you are starting to get old when you see all of the movies that you watched as a kid start showing up on the American Movie Classics channel.

Cannot skip posting about Falling Georgie.

Once again, not much posting going on. But this time I have a good excuse.

This is a very interesting read. It’s basically the behind the scenes story of what it was like in the time leading up to, and throughout the Zotob outbreak.

Silicone oil and boric acid. Did you know that? Want to know more? Like what is in Cheez Whiz, or Spandex, or MSG….. find out all about it here.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve bought a comic book. I have a pretty decent stash of them all stored away. A while ago I stumbled on an article about some of the artists from Pixar making and selling their own comic books. One that looked interesting to me was Rose and Isabel. They didn’t have any around here locally, so I bought it on line right from the artist. That turned out to be a pretty good deal because I got a thank you note and my book signed. The current Rose and Isabel book that is available is book one of two. It basically sets up the story, gives you some background, and starts the main characters on their path. The story seems pretty basic, nothing amazing, but definitely entertaining. The art, like you would expect is awesome. If you like comics, I would recommend it. I’ll be buying book #2.

You know the blog seems like a great idea and all, but I seem to never find time to post anything. Maybe it’s just the summer time. I don’t know. We had family visiting for the past week, so that took up most of my time there.

While I was out, it looks like Microsoft released Virtual Earth. I see lots of cheering and lots of complaining out there on the internet. Count me under the cheering tally, I guess. I like it. I think it’s interesting. It seems to do pretty well for the stuff I want to use it for. I think the number one feature for me though, is the zooming. It just seems right. That’s how I think a map application should zoom.

I’ve seen a lot of complaining about how Virtual Earth’s maps are out of date and they suck compared to Google Maps. “For a multi-billion dollar company, you would think Microsoft could have bought some newer maps!” To hear some people talk, you would think that Microsoft had it’s own satellites floating in orbit taking all the pictures.

Actually both systems’ have map data that is newer and older than the other. I was looking for some maps for Ft. Stevens and the mouth of the Columbia River. Virtual Earth’s maps had way better resolution. When I look at my house, Virtual Earth has the more recent picture. When I look at some places that I lived in Georgia though, Google’s maps are clearly better.

Now if you were a user of NASA’s Word Wind application, you might notice that two of the different map sources in that application seem to sync up with what you see in Virtual Earth and Google Maps. It looks to me like Virtual Earth is using USGS Digital Ortho, while Google is using Landsat7.

But I’m just guessing.

The site was down for a while. I don't know when it started, but I saw it on Friday and it was working just fine. It ended up being a nasty db issue (and by nasty, I mean my database ip address changed out from under me).
As luck would have it, the site never goes down unless I have something that I want to post. So here it is:

Somebody should stick this guy's mug shot on a shirt with the caption "Got Gold Paint?"

This site is moving to a new server in the next day or two. You might see some outages.

I’ll be going to the Portland Code Camp this year. Sounds like a great time. Are you a developer? Want to learn from and with other developers? Check it out.

By now I’m sure everyone has heard about bombings in London. It has been on all the major news sources. What I thought was different, was the amount of blog traffic that this generated. I’m not just talking about people writing about what they saw on t.v., but people directly from the affected area posting news about what is happening. We saw some of this during the attacks on the World Trade Centers and again in the invasion of Iraq. It seems to be a little more out there now though. Within minutes of the first bombing, the blogs lit up. Then, and here’s what I think is kind of crazy, the photo blogs started pumping. It seems like everyone has a phone with some kind of camera in it these days. Right away we started seeing photos from inside the tube, and on the streets near the bus that was bombed. Flickr users went into action right away. Two image pools seemed to be gathering the most momentum. They were “London Terror Attacks” and “London Bomb Blasts”. Two blogs that I kept tabs on were “Metroblogging London” and “londonist”. It seems like the world is getting smaller and smaller every day.

A whole month with no posting. I may have lost my two readers. Been busy at work. We’re getting closer and closer to moving our big app into production. It has been three years in the making. It seems kind of weird to be reaching this point. Anyway, I’ll try to post a little more often.
Hello.
Is anybody reading?
Is this thing on?

Lord Vader knows what you are thinking!

I am a Light Cycle. I drive fast, I turn fast, I do everything fast. I even breakfast. I tend to confuse people with my sudden changes of heart. Sometimes I even confuse myself, which tends to cause problems. What Video Game Character Are You?

via chris

Has anybody not seen the movie yet?
I went to the midnight show on opening night (morning). It was a good movie. I’d say it’s the best of the first three, and maybe second best of all of the star wars flicks. I think it had some of the same problems as Attack of the Clones though. One thing is that you see the Jedi fighting and kicking ass, and then suddenly the movie has to start winding down and they just all die really quick. Overall the last third of the movie just flew by. Short scene after short scene of trying to wrap the movie up. Still it was good. I’ll probably see it again this weekend sometime.

How do I know that I’m still a nerd at heart? My wife and son are out of town visiting my in-laws. It’s one o’clock on Saturday morning, and what am I doing (besides posting to my web log)? The Matrix is playing on the dvd player, I have a glass of jack daniels and I’m reading a book about DirectX 9 and typing away on my laptop. I wonder if I will ever grow out of this.

So it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted on here. Busy with family, work, and all the normal things that life throws at you. Here are the highlights that may be expanded on sometime in future posts:

The New Guy – A few months and another ultrasound later and I can officially confirm that the new guy is in fact a guy. Also, the estimated due date is September 21st. This could make things interesting considering that Riley’s birthday is September 23rd.

Crystal Enterprise - This has been consuming most of my work time lately. You know I complain about it a lot, but it is a decent tool. The place where it is really lacking, as far as I’m concerned, is in its documentation. Sometimes it seems like they are purposely leaving some info out of it making it so you have to call them for help or hire a consultant. I don’t know. Call me crazy.

Woodstock NET – Neighborhood Emergency Team. More on this later.

Managed DirectX – Bought a book. Started reading. One small project and haven’t had anymore time to work on it.

And just to end this post right, here’s a funny link for you: http://www.putfile.com/media.php?n=voltron20

If you are a Windows developer, and you write a program that isn’t a true Windows administration tool that will ONLY RUN under an admin account, then you suck. Granted I’m saying that I suck, because I have written programs like this. Of course the only difference is that what I wrote were little utilities that I use day-to-day….not commercial software that people have to buy, or buy a service and then have to use your program. Who does this you ask? Quicken sucks. But you can hack it, and I still use it. I just signed up with audible. It looks like their download manager is the same way. Just great! Just freaking wonderful. I hate running as an administrator.

So it’s looking like at the end of September or early October we’ll be getting a new roommate.

Check out NASA’s World Wind application. Get a nice map of the world that allows you to zoom into your favorite places. It looks like it’s written at least partly in .NET. I know the system requirements are the .NET framework, and the latest version of DirectX (which allows for managed code to access the goodness that is DirectX)

Suddenly my pansy ass paper shredder that has trouble dealing with a staple looks even punier. Check out this industrial strength shredder.

I started playing the Crimson Room tonight. Made it quite a ways through before I had to go look up some help. What the hell? I followed the exact same steps as the walk thru that I found. When I go to the web site on the piece of paper though, I get a set of numbers and they don’t unlock the safe…… Damn’t. These games shouldn’t be played at one in the morning.

Open source projects in C#. via mike.

We took a long weekend to Seaside recently. Posted some new pictures up on Flickr. No more photosets though. Guess I’ll have to cough up the $40 for a full membership.

It’s just a movie night tonight. I wish I had a quarter of this dude’s moves.

Somebody sent me this link of a girl flipping through the air and coming down through a basketball hoop. Wow.

I’ve been playing around with google maps a lot lately. In talking with people about google maps, I found out about a bunch of other mapping services that I hadn’t tried before. The best of which seems to be map24. I really like it. Both it and google just kick yahoo and mapquest’s butt.

Dear God.... the good folks at Google just keep pumping out useful apps. For instance, have you seen the new Google Maps?

Have a SPOT watch?
Want to get one?
Wondering what you can do with one?
Check out MSN direct to see all the out of the box functions.
Check out SpotStop.com to see what you can make work with a little elbow grease and technical know how.

Back in the day, when some of us were still cruising around on 1200 baud modems (or less) and AOL was called Quantum Computer Service… well, not many people cared about Quantum Computer Service because the only real dial up service provider worth having was CompuServe (which was eventually bought out by AOL). The cool thing about CompuServe was that they were one of the first to start offering email. One of the even cooler things they did was host a game called British Legends. I remember playing that game for hours on end. Remember back then you could be paying as much as $5 an hour. I usually played late at night though when the rate was something like $1.50 an hour. Anyway, I played that game a lot. Recently my friend Darrell sent me a link to the current version of British Legends. It hasn’t changed much (if at all) since those days. It’s still all text based. It doesn’t seem to have as many players as it did back then, but it’s still pretty fun.
If you have fond memories of playing the text based MUDs, you might want to check out British Legends.
If you do, when you are in the game use the USERS command and see if Ballpeen is online.

So this guy built himself and x-ray vision machine that he claims can see through walls AND apparently his own skin. That’s right. He used it on himself.

Next year I’ll just pay somebody $250 bucks to kick me in the nuts. It would probably be just as painful but be over a lot quicker. I bitched and complained last year about how United Airlines was a joke of an airline and how I wouldn’t fly them again. To my horror, I found that by flying United over the Christmas holidays I would save about $750 for my son, my wife and me to fly to Indiana and back. I swear next year I won’t even look. It’ll probably still be cheaper, but even if it is I don’t want to know about it. So here it is, 10:09pm on Tuesday night. I missed my flight from Chicago to Portland because we spent 20 minutes sitting on the runway in Indianapolis and then another 25 minutes sitting on the runway in Chicago. I’ll be camping out here until 8:00am tomorrow. And it’s snowing. I’m currently crossing every appendage on my body that can be crossed in hopes that I can get out of here tomorrow. I just asked some service desk clerk if she knew of any place in the airport that had wifi access. She looked confused and I should have abandoned my search there. But I tried to explain that I wanted to connect to the internet with my computer. She said that she thought there was some place underground, but she didn’t know how late it was open. I wonder if she found the words I was saying as confusing as I found the words she was saying. Oh well, I’ll go poking around later and see what I can find here. Having not had internet access for the past two weeks, I’m sure I could pass a few hours just looking around.

It’s 10:45pm. I have moved to a little less crowded gate. They must have just boarded a plane. People are running up in twos and threes yelling “Is the plane still here?!” From what I’ve gathered, it’s going to San Francisco. I also heard the desk clerk tell somebody “The flight is really empty so just sit wherever you want.” I asked her if I could change my current Chicago-to-Portland ticket and get on this flight to San Francisco and get a flight from S.F. to Portland in the morning. All I got back was a blank stare. I explained that the further west I could get, the happier I would be. Also I explained that I was worried about the snow and it messing up my flight in the morning. The blank stare turned into a puzzled look. She explained that it wasn’t necessary. I told her thanks, and that I really didn’t even know what I wanted. After all, I’m only the consumer in this scenario… or is that hostage? My God I hate United Airlines. Possibly the whole airline industry in gener