Once a month whether I have something to say or not!

Oh damn.  I'm breaking one of Scott Hanselman's rules that he lists out in Blog Interesting - 32 Ways to Keep Your Blog from Sucking.  I may have passed suck a few posts ago already.  Oh well.

I'm finally settled in Indiana.  Well as settled as you can be without owning a house.  That's what is taking up all of my time lately.  Just to get a bunch of stuff off my chest, here's a dump of links that I've either consumed or am waiting to fully consume sometime shortly:

Swear Jar. (wmv)  Awesome Bud Lite commercial.

So you want to be a tracer?!  Here's your chance.  Re-inking Thor.

I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but I really want to spend some time with the latest Microsoft Robotics Studio.  It looks like they have some Sumo Robot simulator happening.  It looks like it's kind of a big brother to the SumoBots.

I really wish that I could be at TechEd this year.  But between the move and everything else, that just didn't happen.  I can still keep up with some of the goings on thanks to Virtual TechEd.  I thought it was really cool that you could watch the keynote online.  Be sure to check out the video covering Embedded programming.  NOTE: You will need Silverlight installed on your system to watch any of those videos.

If Virtual TechEd doesn't give you enough info, my buddy James is blogging from TechEd as well.

For those that keep up with such things, I am in Indiana now.  I realized something as I was driving down I-80 late on Wednesday night.  I had driven that road before, going the opposite direction, almost ten years earlier.  If I would have waited till July to move to Indy, it would have been ten years exactly.  Ten years.  I guess I like round numbers.

Here is the route that I took this last week.

Here is the route that I took ten years ago when I moved from Georgia back up to Oregon.

I wonder where I'll be driving ten years from now?

Well, two years ago anyway.  I read about Scout over on Jennie's blog.

So I guess two years ago a picture I took while visiting my relatives was found Interesting.

My friends Marq and Molli have some interesting photos too.  But then again, they have both sold pictures that they've posted to flickr, so I knew they had some good shots already.

So, if all goes well this post should show up on JohnArmitage.net AND my Live Spaces account.  All tests seemed to work, this will be the final production test. 

From here on out you will see the same blog content on both sites.  I started looking at syncing up my MySpace page as well, but that quickly proved to be way too much of a hassle.  Plus since MySpace seems to be more of a place for perverts and 13 year old girls, I don't know that I care that much.

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 75% Superman 60% Supergirl 50% Iron Man 50% Robin 45% Catwoman 35% The Flash 35% Wonder Woman 30% Green Lantern 30% Hulk 20% Batman 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Happy Birthday Marines!

SQL
Mark is working through "A Developers Guide to SQL Server 2005" and blogging about it at the same time.  It should be pretty fun to watch what he discovers along the way.  Interesting note, he's doing all of his work in Virtual PC's running on top of Vista, on his tablet pc.  Nice.

Life
A long time ago I had a subscription to Audible.  The main reason for my subscription was so that I could listen to This American Life.  After a while, I found that I wasn't getting around to downloading the monthly book that came along with my subscription level (the lowest one at the time).  Listening to This American Life was looking kind of expensive...so I quite.  You could listen to the weekly show as a stream from their web site.  That was good enough at the time, although it could have been better because I liked to listen to it on my bus ride to work.  Well it turns out that now it can be downloaded FOR FREE.  This is good to know.  The only catch is that you have to get the latest show every week.  Once the new show comes out, the old show costs money.  However, it's only 95 cents.  That is a little better than the $2 that I seem to remember it costing on Audible.

Clogs
Why do drains never clog up on.... oh I don't know, 10:30 on a Saturday morning?  The last couple time's that I've had a clogged drain or any plumbing problem for that matter, it always happens at 10:00 pm on some week night.  Every stinking time.

Hard at work, at least for one day anyway.  I haven't been hiding away in my office writing some great new application.  For the past week I have been in Redington Beach, FL, doing nothing but sitting on the beach and teaching my oldest son to swim.  I highly recommend it.

A couple of days ago Microsoft issued a press release concerning the .NET Micro Framework.  I still don't see where you can actually download it.  There are some links on that page where you can sign up for some more information though.  [via mike]

It's too bad that they aren't selling a watch yet that will allow you to write some .NET app and upload it to the watch.  It used to be, when it was called .NET Embedded I believe, that you had to buy a kit that came with some testing hardware.  There will probably be some virtualization software for testing, like what currently exists for .NET Mobile.

No matter.... it's not like I would likely have the time or money to funnel to something like that.  I've not been spending nearly enough time as I would like on my XNA projects (that's a link to the XNA site, not my projects).  That, and I'm pretty sure that this holiday season will be brought to you by the letters Wii.

This month seems like it has been full of mostly paperwork and meetings and not nearly as much coding as I would like.

Luckily some hobby projects have kept the creative juices flowing.  I've been looking at Microsoft's XNA Game Studio Express.  It's interesting.  It gives you a base framework to help in video game design.  I might drop a few of the sample projects that I've been working on out here or over at CodeProject or something.  I've been looking around to see if anybody has any similar type games out there and haven't found any.  Not that it's anything groundbreaking,  just some simple board games.  Which is why it surprises me that nobody else has posted a sample.

So XNA, and I've also been looking at upgrading the software that runs this site.....and I really need to update the boys' site, mostly because those colors are killing me.

This past weekend (and part of the previous week) we spent at Cove Palisades State Park down by Madras, Oregon.  In my opinion, this is one of the best state parks in Oregon for boating.  If you own a boat and like getting out on the water, then this is a place you should try out.  The drive is a little long from Portland and you do (at least with the most direct route) go over Mt. Hood.  But it’s not really that bad.  The reservoir more than makes up for the long drive. 

One really cool thing is that you can rent those inflatable trampolines at the main marina near the campground.  If you plan on doing a lot of boating, bring a couple of dollars for gas because the price on the water is $4 a gallon.

The only thing that really kills me about this trip is that I didn’t take many pictures…and I didn’t take a single one out on the water.  I was busy pulling kids on skis and inner tubes all weekend!  You can find some pictures out on Flickr.  Just ignore all the people that I don’t know from Adam, and check out the lake.

No, I didn't melt away into nothing.....I'm still here.  As usual, too busy to post much of anything.  I've been working a lot with MSBuild.  Which is quite an accomplishment considering that at work we are still stuck using Visual Studio 2003 and the .NET 1.1 framework.

On a more personal note, I finally crossed the line and bought a minivan!  I hear it's all downhill from here.  Although I will say that it's just about the nicest car I've ever owned.

Finally, when I wasn't busy trying to get an automated build working, or fighting with car salesman, I was playing dice.

So it's 5:30.  Work is wrapped up for the day.  I can either go outside and try to not burst into flames, or sit here for a while longer and find something interesting on the internet.

My motto used to be "Friends don't let friends join MySpace".  Apparently I have no friends.  Well at least no friends that follow that rule, because I'm signed up now!  IMPORTANT NOTE: I didn't particularly want to sign up on MySpace, but certain circumstances finally required it.

By the way, what a pain in the ass!  Especially when you are signing up and it comes time to pick a url for yourself.  It really has that AOL...Geocities....most any other social type networky thing going on where you have to spend a half an hour coming up with your name.  Here are some of my normal interweb names that I go by that were already taken....

ballpeenhammer

tidge

jwa

armitage    

jarmitage

jjdidtiebuckle

I was about ready to give up at that point.  But I found one.  Finally.

Hey, in the time that it took me to write up this post, it looks like I've already had one person sign up as my friend.  Damn I must be popular.

Of course now that I realize what I have done, I feel dirty.  If you need me, I'll be downstairs kicking my own ass.

[UPDATE]

Ah, the one friend that showed up on my list immediately was Tom.  He seems to be the MySpace helper dude.  MySpace's very own Clippy the Paperclip.  I better stop writing about this now, as I'm sure everything that I stumble over or find out over the next few minutes EVERYONE ELSE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD has already gone through.

john out.

So it has been a busy summer already, and it's just starting.

Over the past month I went to my in-laws in Indiana.  Came back home but left my wife in kids in the midwest to continue their visit.  They finally came home just in time for me to leave for Tech Ed.  Then I got back from Tech Ed in time to go on a family camping trip to the Metolius River.  I think that I'm actually rested now, though.

I've already posted a couple things about Tech Ed.  Looking back, the conference just flat out rocked!  I would definitely recommend going if you have the means.  The local County that I work for should somehow work it in their budget to send a few more people.  At least one developer, dba, and tech services type person.  There is so much information there that it is just exhausting trying to take it all in.  I only took a few pictures there.

Tech Ed was held in Boston this year.  Great town.  Great People.  Not a straight road in the whole city.  Lots of Dunkin Donuts (as I've mentioned before).  The conference kept me pretty busy, but I did manage to take some pictures walking around the city one day.

We spent one evening at Fenway Park.  That night was crazy.  I don't know how much it cost but BillG sure knows how to throw a party.  Pictures.

Finally, the family camp out.  So it has been raining in Oregon since last September.  But the weekend that we decide to go camping the weather decides to wake up and shoot up to 100 degrees!  Actually, it was nice where we were.  I think the hottest that I saw it was 95, and the river helped to cool things down.  Camping pictures here.

The whole story of the NSA data mining all of our phone records is old news.  This article itself is ten days old, but the author articulates a lot of the same feelings that I have very well.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9000515

When I left yesterday morning, the whiteboard only had words on it.  Apparently my son thought that it was somehow lacking.

Lots, and lots of stuff going on these days.  Unfortunately most of it is stuff that I can't directly talk about because it is in development.  One thing that I can say is that GIS on the web is proving to be a really fun area of technology, and AJAX only makes it that much better.

Personal notes:
I finally got a site thrown up for the boys.
It's looking like I will be going to Tech-Ed this year.

Cool stuff that I've stumbled upon recently:
The No One's Listening podcast.  So far I have liked what I've heard.  Time will tell though.
Spaced Penguin.  Really addicting online game.
Netflix.  Yep.  I may be the last person in the free world to have signed up for this service.  But I finally got around to it, and I really like it.  One thing I don't like about it is that you can't change your subscription level in the middle of the month.  Of course as soon as I signed up with Netflix, Blockbuster came out with their rent-by-mail system, which is priced about the same BUT you get a free in store rental every week.  Luckily I despise Blockbuster, so I don't feel too bad about it.

Super Let Down:
Seattle lost the Super Bowl.  I wasn't even going to post anything about this, but one thing has been bugging me.  A lot of people have just been complaining non-stop about the refereeing.  I'll give you that it wasn't the best reffed game in the world and a few times the referees blew a call that just killed any momentum that Seattle had going for them....but the Seahawks certainly didn't help themselves out.  A few stupid penalties, and what I think was poor clock management at the end of the half and end of the game gave them no chance to pull out a win.  There.  Now I have that out of my system.....

Parent Hacks is a weblog that collects tips and wisdom from parents all over about raising their kids.  I thought it was kind of interesting.  [via boingboing]