After attending Tech Ed 2008 last week, my family and I stayed in Orlando for a couple of days and tried to jumpstart the economy by visiting Disney World.  At Hollywood Studios it was a Star Wars weekend.  What that means is parades, photo ops, plenty to buy....and yes, a dance competition.

 

After over a month of radio silence, I'm just posting to share this golden oldie:

The other day Mark sent me a link to Wired, basically talking about how indie games were looking to be a big deal this year.  The article really played up the fact that the Playstation 3 seems to be leading in this particular department.  That bummed me out a bit.  I hate being a Microsoft fanboy, but I started playing around with XNA way back when it first came out.  The indie game idea seemed really cool, especially with the ability to deploy to one of the latest generation of consoles.  But after reading that article I was feeling like the XBOX 360 and Microsoft had missed the boat.  XNA came out a while ago, and here we are able to create games, but we aren't really able to share them.  Well apparently that is changing.  Soon....

The quick version:  Microsoft is adding the ability for developers to publish their games to XBOX Live.  What they are calling "Subscriber Peers" (I'm guessing these are Creators Club members?) will be able to download the games, play them, and review them.  If the games "pass" (what all goes into "passing", I don't know), they will be added to the global catalog on the XBOX Live Marketplace....meaning available to anybody.  If you want to read more, go here:  http://forums.xna.com/ShowThread.aspx?PostID=46554

A preview starts YESTERDAY!  It's available now.  Not the full blown system listed above, but a preview.  You can download the game launcher for free, right now.  RIGHT NOW!  It's only available until Feb 24th.  So go get it.  You can then play seven preview games.  One was the winner of last year's Dream Build Play contest.  My favorite happens to be the Jelly Car game.  It's super simple, and super fun.  Try them all.

Did I mention it's only available for another couple of days?  Go get it!

One of my new year's resolutions, or more like goals really, was to get back into XNA and game development.  I have slacked off a bunch on this for the past year.  So much so that I completely missed the official release of XNA 2.0  and...AND.... the new Dream Build Play contest!

Right now it's just the Warm-Up Challenge.  http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/default.aspx

I have been out of it long enough now that I don't think I will make the January 27th deadline.  But I'm going to try.

http://scores.espn.go.com/ncf/recap?gameId=273652483

 

Researches at the Indiana University School of Medicine do a little medical mythbusting.

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/short/335/7633/1288

Wouldn't you know it?  I get all busy with the move and all sorts of stuff starts going on with XNA.

Professional XNA Game Programming was released.

The Racing Game starter kit was released.  I'm downloading that right now.

Finally, not really XNA related but just general game related, the Call of Duty 4 trailer was released.

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?

Many of the games (including some of the winners) from the Relatives of Spacewar challenge can be downloaded over at XNA Matrix.

So the warm up challenge for the Dream Build Play contest ended last week.  In the end I found that I had won nothing....

In looking through the entries, people put way more time into their games than I did into mine.  Not that I actually expected to win....  This first contest was titled "Relatives of Spacewar".  My game was actually more of a "Twin Brother of Spacewar That Plays By Different Rules".  Basically I took the starter kit, added some modifiers and a menu to offer an easy way to set those modifiers, and that was about it.  Here are the modifiers that I put into the game:

• No Collision Damage: You run into stuff, and now it doesn't hurt you.
• No Time Limit: The game clock doesn't count down.  You just play until someone gets five kills.
• Black Hole Sun: Basically turns the Sun in the game into a black hole that bounces you out of the middle of the playing area

The main goal of my game was to take the Spacewar game that I liked to play and make it a little easier so that my four year old son could play with me.  So from that point of view the game was a total success, as he loves playing that game....although not as much as Lego Star Wars II.

So now my XNA time is focused on a bigger and better game for the next challenge.  Which is just a bit bigger as far as time to make your game and prizes offered.  When I first took a look at the prizes for this next challenge all I was able to do was point at the computer screen and say "DUDE!" just a bit too loudly.  That was all that I could get out before my brain closed down all non essential functions and started going into overdrive trying to compile a list of every good video game idea that I had ever thought up.  If you didn't follow that link, here's just a highlight of the things you win if you take first prize in this next challenge:

• An invitation to enter into an Xbox Live Arcade Publishing Contract
• $10,000
• Alienware Aurora 7500 desktop system

There are a few more items on that list, but those were the ones that caught my eye. 

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some code to write.

This video starts out a bit slow, but it gets funny pretty fast.  But maybe it's only funny if you've ever had to be in the role of tech support either professionally or for family.

 

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.

Here is a pretty good article over on Web Worker Daily about managing your home office. 

I do sit on the fence as far as letting the kids play in the room or closing the door to my office when I work from home.  Usually the door is open and they can come and go as they please.  Sometimes though, you have to close the door.  You just need the privacy or the silence.

One thing that has worked well recently is having the XBOX 360 in the room, and the demo version of Lego Star Wars.  That will keep my oldest son entertained.....really for too long.  He would play that game all day if I let him.  Also, it really makes for an interesting conversation when you are talking on the phone with a client and your son or daughter starts yelling "Dad!  Dad look!  I'm shooting this guy!!!!"

click for larger image

We got a good dose of snow in Portland over this past week.  You can see more of nature gone wild out on flickr.

Tag line: See how people live around the world!

Seems kind of stupid.  But strangely, I just keep clicking on rooms to see what they look like.

http://www.normalroom.com/index.php

I'm such a sucker for these things. via chris.

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

I finally got around to seeing Clerks II tonight.  I really liked it.  If you are offended by the kind of humor that you might find in Clerks, Chasing Amy or Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, then this movie isn't for you.  What kind of humor, you ask?  Well if the phrase "donkey show" makes you uncomfortable, don't bother renting it.  If you are a fan of Smith's other work, then you'll probably like this one.  The first three quarters of the movie are classic View Askew.  The last quarter of the movie really winds up the "Clerks" story. 

All in all, good movie.  I'm going to buy it.

Microsoft Robotics Studio goes 1.0!

Looks like everyone is trying to wrap things up before the holidays.

So... that whole XNA Build stuff... seems like it only runs on the pro (or team system) versions of visual studio.  Game Studio Express still only runs on C# Express.  I'm guessing everything will come together down the road.  But that's just a guess.

In the meantime, at least until Dec 11th which sounds like that's when everything will actually launch, you can watch this video of Rory interviewing Frank Savage and see some XBOX 360 debugging live. 

I've been messing around with XNA Game Studio Express a lot lately.  It's been fun.  A lot of ideas for future projects spring to mind.  But today a harsh reality hit me square in the face.  I hadn't been too worried about the fact that the Game Studio currently only works with C# 2005 Express.  But today, the game project that I'm working on has gotten big enough that I want to use some Source Control.  Guess what?  C# 2005 Express does support Source Control.  Wonderful! 

So it looks like it's back to doing it old school.  Check out the file before you start working on it....or forget to check it out, do a bunch of work, hit save, and get prompted with the "Cannot save this file..." message.  Oh Boy!

I just downloaded the CTP of XNA Build.  Which is supposed to be for Visual Studio 2005.  More when I get that installed......

Back when I was but a young geek, I would sit in my bedroom and type source code from a computer magazine (I forget the name) into my VIC-20 computer.  I would spend multiple hours doing this, and at the end of it all I would be able to play tic-tac-toe. 

Good times, good times......

Do you remember that The Shatner used to do ads for the VIC-20?  See the video below:

 

Another Flash based time waster.

Double Wires

It has been a long time since I 've owned any of the "Madden" franchise of games.  I'm thinking that maybe the Nintdo Wii might change that.

"..if you want to catch the ball, you jump up like you would in the NFL..."

 

I'm gonna need a bigger living room.

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.

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.

Jeff has an article over on Coding Horror about source control.  You know, I always figured that something like CVS or Subversion was the most used source control system.  But it's SourceSafe?!  Wow, I really didn't see that coming.  Although I guess it makes sense...maybe.  All those MSDN subscriptions?  Is that the reason?  Beats me.  In my last post I revealed that (sometimes) I code in VB.NET.  So I guess it's not a big thing to reveal that I also use SourceSafe.  <GASP><FAINT>

I used SourceGear Vault for a while, and I don't recall now why I quite using it.  I was using it for my own source control, so at the time anyway it was free.  I don't know what the licensing for one developer is anymore.

I have been thinking about changing over to Subversion or CVS for a while now.  I think the biggest hurdle that I see coming is something that Jeff said in his post "unlearning all the bad things SourceSafe taught me about source control".  I'm thinking that is going to be a huge pain in the butt.  Luckily, that post does have some good links as to what should be happening in your source control system.

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.

We just think our wrestling in the States is hardcore.  I haven't seen WWE hanging florescent lights around the ring and allowing guys to beat each other with them.  That's what this video of a Japanese wrestling match shows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggvJtnFUnRg

It's an entertaining video if you like watching professional wrestling.  Neither of these guys is a Dusty Rhodes, but it's still entertaining.

Scott has a great hack using Ruby and Watir to turn on your phone forwarding on Vonage.

Anybody with small kids and friends that like to call late at night will understand the greatness of this code.

"Man, <insert state/city/county here> drivers suck...."

I don't know how many times I've heard that.  I used to think that drivers in Georgia were the worst.  But as I've traveled and come to see a bit more of the country, I'm fairly sure that people in general are crappy drivers.  I'm talking about everywhere.  I will say though, that in Georgia it sure seemed like a lot of the drivers just didn't know what the hell they were doing.  Here in Oregon, they don't seem to be so incapable of driving correctly.  They just seem to be assholes.  Everyone is all about me, me, me, me, me.....

But that's another rant for another time.

The point of this post is that now we know each state's ranking in a GMAC Insurance driving test.  Guess who's the best?  That's right.  Oregon.  HA!  Georgia is down around 30, so I guess they aren't as bad as I was thinking.  The north east is really bringing up the rear though. 

Sorry, Keith.

If you don't like bees, then don't look at this.

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

I've just returned home from a week away on vacation in Indiana visiting with my in-laws.  I noticed something about gas prices while I was there.  But before I go on, here's a little history.

Before hurricane Katrina hit, automotive gas was always anywhere from 10 to 20 cents cheaper in Indiana.  It would hover around $2.20 here in Oregon and it would be around $2.00 in Indiana.  Then after the big hurricane season suddenly there was parity.  The prices here and there were basically the same.  I noticed this when I was back in Indiana over the holidays.

So I fly into Indianapolis on May 10th.  When I left Portland, gas prices were roughly $3.00.  I filled up the tank before I left at $2.99 a gallon.  On May 11th I filled up our gas tank in Lafayette, IN for $2.95 a gallon.  Prices in the two locations were pretty equal.  When I left Lafayette the price for one gallon of gas was $2.69.  I just checked www.indianagasprices.com and the highest price in the state is $2.89. 

I flew back into Portland on May 20th to find a lot of the gas stations in town seem to be hovering around $3.05.  Why is it that in a week's time gas prices dropped by 20 cents in Indiana but went up roughly 5 cents in Oregon?  Is it because we are served by different refineries, or pipelines?  I don't know.  Just makes me mad every time I have to fill up the tank.

This video is crazy

http://www.harrisonline.com/2006/05/real-life-frogger.htm

when you just feel like wasting some time.....

 

This map has been making the email and message board rounds.  It lets you look at a map of the U.S. and see gas prices by area.  Then you can right click on the map (if you are running Internet Explorer that is) to see numbers for individual counties.

Hey, didn't anybody bother to test the site using Firefox?  Most of the rest of the map functionality works, but that right click thing is just nonexistent.

I've been spending entirely too much time playing some of the original Space Quest games.  No, I didn't pull out my suitcase of fifty 3.5" disks and load the game up.  I downloaded it.  Of course if you read digg or slashdot you've probably already heard.  Over on the Abandoned Gamesroom site you can download all of the old Sierra games.  You know, they make their case that all of these are abandon ware, so there is a fine line on the actual legality of the downloads.  But I thought that I've read somewhere recently that Sierra and Target were bringing back the old King's Quest titles which wouldn't quite make them "abandon ware".  Hhhmmm....

Anyway, the games seem to hold up quite well.  I'm still enjoying them anyway.  It's funny to play these games now, and think back to when I played them the first time and was amazed at how cool the graphics were.  Damn.

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

 

This is one of those stupid things.  Something where I’m trying to do something and it’s just not working.  Then when I figure out how to do it, I get that feeling like “I should have known how to do this”.  Many times that statement is modified to be “I only program freaking computers for a living, you would think that I would know how to do this”. 

Today I was trying to put a link into a OneNote page.  Simple enough, right?  You would think so.  The only problem was that my link had a few spaces in it \\SomeFancyServer\Applications Teams\Dev Team\Support.  Now if I was adding this link to something like Word, I would click on the Insert/Hyperlink menu item because I know that links and spaces in the address don’t mix.  But OneNote doesn’t have that.  My first instinct was to put it in quotes.  I didn’t think that would work, and it didn’t.  I next thought of using braces ‘[ ]’.  I really thought that was going to work, but it didn’t.  I scoured the drop down menus for some kind of hyperlink functionality.  Nothing.  I resorted to using help.  Nothing helpful.  It said to type in the link and it would automatically be created.  It’s like nobody thought about spaces in a link.  Not that it is an ideal thing to do, but it is not all that uncommon.  Luckily some online research provided some help (actually for Outlook).  Use chevrons ‘< >’, or if you are me use less than, greater than ‘< >’. 
This fixed my problem.  <Now I can link with as many spaces as I want when using OneNote>. 

Of course I’ll be using this everywhere now, just to see where it works.  You often find these Microsoft shortcuts work across many applications.  Try using ALT+Click/Drag the mouse sometime.  I learned that one using Visual Studio.  I was surprised to see that it also worked in Word. 

Notice that I filed this under 'duh'.  That's so I'll know where to look back a month from now when I forget how to add a link that contains spaces.

When did the information bubbles on Google Maps start casting a shadow?

Has it always done this?  I don't remember seeing it before.  I know that I don't remember seeing it on the arial views before.

Maybe it's been there all along and I just didn't notice.....

Here is a cool Google Maps hack using the maps and census information.

A report came out the other day talking about our nation's air quality.

Now here in Oregon, we take our air quality (as well as water quality, timber quality, pretty much any nature quality) pretty darn seriously.  It's to the point that an average person might start to think, "Dear Lord!  If it came down to me or that damn fish surviving, I think that the state government would side with the fish!"
But this quick rant is about the air.  I spend $25 per car every two years to have my car's exhaust tested, to make sure that certain parts of the exhaust are below a certain level.  It might be $27, I don't have the numbers right in front of me.  Whatever it is, the DEQ gets that money to help it police our environment.  Off the top of my head I don't know how much money they get from the general tax funds.

So here's the kicker.  Well, it's a kicker if you've read that first link talking about the report, and you pay the DEQ to test your car and make sure that it's clean.  WE HAVE THE THIRD DIRTIES AIR IN THE COUNTRY!  Right behind New York and California.  What's up with that?

Now that I think about it, I don't even know why I'm writing this blurb.  Anyone who cares is probably somebody who lives here, and if you live here you already know about this.  It's been all over the news.  Quite a shot to Oregon's "Our state is cleaner than your state" attitude.

I still find it kind of hard to believe.  I've been to cities/states with no kind of vehicle testing, way more industrial factories, places where a lot of the people treat the state as their own personal trash can if you judge it by the sides of the highway, and I could tell the air was funkier than here.

Of course, maybe that's just the Oregon Environmental Prima Donna in me.  Whatever.  I'm going to go read my Sierra Club magazine and eat some granola now.....

Quarter inch of snow on the ground this morning.
Notice I said the ground not the street.
Still, it's chaos on the city.

Google video of SPORE, a new video by Will Wright.  It looks like a crazy game.  It looks like a game along the lines of an artificial life simulator along the lines of Sim City or Civ, with some aspects of fighting kind of like Command and Conquer, or one of that genre.  The only difference is that it looks like IT MIGHT BE fun to play and still not have to invest hours and hours to really enjoy the game.  As a husband, father of two, with a full time job and some on the side freelancing it's kind of hard to play any game that you have to put too much time into.  Sometimes a half hour of mindless game play is all that can be really squeezed into the day.  So for those days there is always Unreal Tournament or Pro Wrestling (by Nintendo).

Still, SPORE does look promising.
Here is a link to the official homepage over on EA.
Here is a review over on IGN.

Here is a link to the live action Simpsons short that may or may not have bounced into your email box yet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOVQdPHSihM&search=simpsons

Microsoft has been slowly trying to build some hype for the Origami project.  Over at Engadget, they have plenty of speculation about what it might be.  They also have some info about what they think Apple has in the works.  I think that it is a safe bet that these things will have some similar functionality.  Namely, mobile media.

Now to add more fuel to the fire (at least it gets me excited) is ABC saying that they will be offering some of their shows for free.  Grey's Anatomy and Lost among others.  The free versions will have commercials in them.  In case the thought of commercials makes you cringe, it sounds like you will still be able to buy the commercial free episodes via iTunes.

Now the two questions I still have:

   1. How much will the players cost?

   2. How long till SciFi offers Battlestar Gallactica for free?

 

Completed registration.
Got the hotel.
Looks like I'm going to TechEd 2006.

If you are thinking about going, you better sign up now.  It's already getting hard to track down a hotel room.

I noticed that the TechEd Bloggers site is already up and running.  Not that I think that I'll be signing up.  If I keep writing at my current pace, maybe I'll get one post written during TechEd.

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.....

 

I have always wondered what happens to all of the unused hats and shirts from the NFL's conference championships and Super Bowls.  You know, the ones they print up before hand to hand out to the team once they win the game?  So both teams have them printed up, and one team doesn't get to use them.  You don't really see them on ebay.  I can't find any Carolina Panthers NFC Champion stuff from this year.  I always figured that they shredded them or recycled them or something.  They must get rid of them some how because you never see them floating around and you figure someone could make some decent money selling that stuff.

According to this article on ESPN.com (read toward the bottom of the page), that the NFL boxes up all those unused clothes and ships them off to third world countries.  Well I guess that makes sense.  (Insert joke about Buffalo Bills being favorite team of third world countries here.... the author of the ESPN article did).

So I'm really hesitant to say anything about the Seahawks.  This football season, every college and pro team that I have rooted for has done terribly.  That's not to say that they were all blown out or anything, but they all lost.

Witness:
Oregon loses to Oklahoma, 14 - 17
Georgia loses to West Virginia 35 - 38
USC loses to Texas 38 - 41
Colts lose to the Steelers 18 - 21
Bears lose to the Panthers 21 - 29

...And then there are the Seahawks.  I realize that it is rather fair weather fan-ish of me, but I'm excited these days.  Seahawks in the playoffs!  Wow.  Seahawks in the championship game!  What the....  I haven't paid them much attention in, oh I don't know, forever.  Living in Oregon, they are really the closest NFL franchise around.  So from a young age you learn to root for them.  Then you realize that they suck.  At the end of each season you say "Next year will be better.", and it isn't.  I think the last Seattle jersey or shirt I owned was in second grade.  I imagine it's like growing up in the mid-west and rooting for the Cubs.  Ha, ha.  Our team is nicknamed the "lovable losers".  Only in being a fan of Seattle, it didn't feel so much loveable....just the losers part.

Anyway, I'll just lay my curse down right now.

GO SEAHAWKS!

Microsoft has some Virtual Labs up and running.
Actually, they may have been running for a while now.  I think that I saw somebody else mention them on a blog a while ago.  They are pretty nice.  Basic, but nice.
It's neat because you actually remote into a machine at Microsoft to do the work, at least on the one that I did.

One thing that wasn't so nice, was after I completed the lab it went and crashed at the step that I'm assuming would have gone to the evaluation.  Juuuuust great.  You see if you attend a lab and fill out the evaluation you get entered in a drawing to win a Pocket PC.  Well, there's one chance out the window.

If you attend four labs in a month and you are one of the first 5000, then you get some fancy action figure.

Guess I'll be doing five this month.

Oh, I suppose you want a fancy action figure too?  Here's the link to the MSDN Virtual Labs page.

So supposedly this bar down in the Mission district in San Francisco has a photo booth where you can have your pictures uploaded directly to Flickr.  Seems like a cool idea.  Here are the results:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shinesf/

[via BoingBoing]

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]

http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspxEach year you see those "Children of the 80's/70's/whatever" lists float around the internet.  But you want to see something that will really make you feel old?  Pay close attention to the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show.  Hot damn, give me one of everything! 

Most of the info I've been reading covering the show (and most of my gadget info in particular) is coming from engadget.  Two postings that really got me excited for the future were the Bill Gates Keynote post and the Sony Press Preview post.

As I sat there reading the coverage of the event, and looking at all the pretty pictures I had a flashback to my buddy Darrell and I sitting in the den at his parent's house playing on a TRS-80 and listening to some of his dad's 8-Track tapes.  Granted the 8-Track was really before my time and was old by the time that I started listening to it, but we did still use it.  Now I think about my sons, and the fact that by the time they get to the point that they are buying music or other forms of media, it will probably all be streamed directly to some device or at the very least be burnt onto some super high definition DVD/blue ray/something or other.

In the future I'll probably be asking them to help me get some music onto a tape so that I can play it on my very first ghetto-blaster (or I guess the preferred term is boom box?) circa 1981, which I still use out in my garage.  I'm sure after my iPod Mini dies off and is discarded, the ghetto-blaster will still be pumping out music.

UPDATE:
Speaking of the Bill Gates Keynot above, you can actually watch it here.

When some of this year's football games got too painful to watch, I spent time surfing the internt.  One thing that I really found interesting was the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers.  Most of what the article talks about is common sense.  But it is nice to review sometimes.

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.

this is the first test that I entered on Thursday!

this is a test message

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.

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

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.

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.

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 general.
Still no wifi.
No electrical outlets either. They have them in the floor, but all the ones I’ve found so far are locked down pretty good. Too bad I don’t have my knife with me. They also have a Hilton Hotel at this airport. I’m trying to decide if I want to go try and get a room or camp out on these benches. The cheapskate in me usually wins in these situations. The situation being, sans wife and kid.

10:55pm
I just saw a pilot (or co-pilot) walk by with a guitar strapped to his back. I don’t know why I think that is so cool.

11:15pm
I managed to pry one of the electrical outlet covers open. No plug in underneath. Crap. It’s time to go searching.

11:40pm
So I finally found “laptop alley” as they call it here. What laptop alley is, is bunch of cubicles stuck under the escalators going from Concorse B to Concorse C. What’s even better about it is the deal you get. You get your own little cubicle and for the low price of $5 for five minutes you can be surfing the internet and sending e-mail. After your initial five minutes are up, it’s only 65 cents per minute. Even better, they were closed. Not that I would cough up that kind of coin just for internet access anyway. I tried to sniff around and find if they had any wireless stuff open, but I couldn’t find anything. Another fun thing to do is find electrical outlets. They seem to be tough to come by here. Then when you do find them, there aren’t any chairs next to them. They are on some pillar in the middle of the gate area. Who the hell designed this place? I can tell you what they weren’t accounting for when they came up with their master plan. Oh well, I have another four hours left on this charge before I need to plug in.

1:30am
I found an empty gate area and decided that it would be a good place to camp out. After a while an older guy named Karl dropped in and claimed a row of chairs. A few minutes later a lady name Karen showed up. She had a ten year old daughter, and a one year old son named John in tow. Some small talk ensued before everyone bedded down for the night. Karl said that he was a rocket scientist. Karin is a grocery store clerk. She’s deathly afraid of falling asleep because she’s just sure that someone will take of with her son. She told me that and 10 minutes later she dozed off. I started to doze off shortly after, but I think I’ll just stay awake. The Eagle Scout and Marine in me don’t want anybody taking off with her son either. The geek in me doesn’t want anyone taking off with my laptop.

2:52
My kingdom for a damn vending machine! Here’s a little known fact. At least it was little known to me. They don’t have any vending machines in concourse C. They don’t have any in concourse B either. I landed in Concourse F, which I noticed did have vending machines (and an arcade). I just tried to walk back to concourse F but it is all roped off. I got to talking to a security guard in concourse B asking about the shortage of vending machines. He said all the shops in the concourse wouldn’t allow that. Yes. All the shops that are currently closed. Bastards. Then he let me in on a secret. He told me to go knock on an employees only door just down the hall. Somebody in there would probably let me get something out of their vending machines in the back. It worked. I sat on a couch in the back of the employee lounge, watched some t.v. and drank a coke.
Later I walked back to the gate encampment on concourse C.

5:00am
My flight’s gate has changed twice over the course of the night. That doesn’t leave me with a good feeling. It snowed quite a bit, but the plows were running all night. Two gadget complaints I have from the long night. I received a fossil abacus as a gift for Christmas. So far I really like it, except for one flaw that I see. The beep sucks. I was thinking about setting my watch alarm to make sure that I woke up in plenty of time for my flight. I tested it out, and it’s just pathetic. No way that thing would wake me up from even the lightest sleep. So I got to looking around the iPod Mini. It has an alarm. Again, it’s really week. You can set it for a beep which it plays from the internal speaker, not the headphones. You can select certain types of songs to play as your alarm, through the headphones. The choices they give you suck though. Purchased songs, recently listened to songs, etc. What the hell is that? Why doesn’t it just let me pick A song? I have a mp3 of reveille. That would have done the trick. Oh well. I didn’t get much sleep through the night anyway.

I just got back from a trip to Indiana.
It was fun. It was snowy. It was cold.
I got trapped in the Chicago airport overnight. I wrote a short journal while sitting around not doing much of anything. I’ll post that in a bit.
I just got done updating my main menu. For anyone that cares, I got rid of the link to my personal album (that I wasn’t using) and put up a link to my Flickr pages (that I use pretty often).

We went to the Zoo Lights last night.

Yep, it was just me.
iTunes has a crapload of audio books.

First off, thanks to the people that emailed me making sure I knew that it was spelled (with correct capitalization) “iPod” not “IPod” or “Ipod”. What in the hell was I thinking?! I am ashamed.
I really do need to get the comments set up so people can point out my inadequacies for everyone to see. But I digress.
So should I write up a big review about what I think of the iPod? What does the dude who hasn’t owned any kind of mobile music device since a walkman tape recorder think of this little gem? So far so good. Getting it set up was a breeze. Getting it synched up with all my music was simple.
I gave it the “bus ride to work” test today. It was great. It makes the bus ride much more enjoyable. Of course I’ve found that if you are listening to music and reading a book, it makes it that much easier to miss your stop.
No I didn’t. But I almost did.
One thing I’ve found that I don’t like so far is the iTunes store. Not the whole store mind you. I haven’t bought anything yet. But I’ve notice a definite lack of audio books. I figured there would be more. I don’t know why I thought that, or if maybe I’m just not looking for them correctly. More later.

So Spock got to go out in a fancy Vulcan sized sunglasses case. You however get to go out in a tube of lipstick. Unless you are on the poor side, in which case you get to take your last eternal ride in a watch battery.
Crazy.
You know, I don’t know that I would want to just get shot into orbit. Couldn’t they bust me out of Earth’s gravity and send me hurtling into deep space?

One nice thing about traveling to visit my in-laws over Christmas is that we usually have Christmas with my family a little early. We just had it tonight as a matter of fact. I got an Ipod. That’s all I can say for now….I’m busy converting a bunch of my .wma files into the Ipod file type….or ITunes file type. Whatever it is.
Actually it’s an IPod Mini.
I’ll let you all know how much I like it after the vacation.

So I don’t play too many games anymore. I have a Playstation downstairs that I fire up maybe once a month. Jenn had hinted at giving me an Xbox for Christmas but I told her not too. I know that if I have one around it will just eat up time, and I’m already busy enough.
So most of my game playing has consisted of Unreal Tournament on my laptop. For some reason the game bug bit me this year and I got Half Life 2. It was fun. But not as fun as I had expected. Then the other day I got to talking with a buddy about Wolfenstein. We had played that a few times earlier in the year and it really kicked ass. Then we got to talking about the Medal Of Honor series. I hadn’t played any of these, but looking at the web site it looked really good. Then I saw that they had a trial version of Medal of Honor – Pacific Assault. I downloaded it, played it, and now I can’t wait to buy the full game. The game is just amazing. Besides being really fun, it tugs at some deep feelings I have about the battles that it covers. You get to fight in some of the battles in the pacific during WWII. Being in the Marines, I got to learn about many of these different battles so I find it kind of fun to see the game developers take on them. Also, being a Marine, I always find it fun in a game where you can shoot a guy then run up to him and bash him a couple of times with the butt of your rifle. Anyway, if you like the “shoot-em-up” games you might want to give Pacific Assault a look.

Actually, it's not the 100 oldest domain names, but the 100 oldest currently registered domain names. via engadget

I found an interesting photography magazine last night. It's only published on-line, and it's called AK47.tv

I have been looking at Flickr today. Seems like a pretty cool site. They don’t seem to give you much space. Then again for free, it’s pretty decent. I uploaded some photos.

I was just listening to Phillip Torrone talk about his idea for a Mutant Olympics on a podcast from http://www.engadget.com
I won’t go into the details, but basically imagine a version of the Olympics that is open to anyone, and it doesn’t matter if your juiced up on roids, bionic arm, whatever. Anything goes.
Reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live sketch.

I was writing a much longer post about using the Testdriven.net add-in for Visual Studio, but I realized that a lot of they text I was typing was trying to make use of hyperlinks and because of that lots of quotes and other nice characters that you cannot just dump into an insert statement and save to the server.
I really need to write a web log poster.
Maybe this weekend.
If I do, you can be sure that I’ll be including some unit tests. Those unit tests will be easy to use because of Testdriven.net. Go over to http://www.testdriven.net and check it out. I just started using it today (I’ve been using nUnit for quite a while) and it just rocks. It doesn’t do much for me for outright running all of my tests. But when I want to run one test or just start debugging a test, this add-in really shines. No more attaching to the debugger. Just right-click and go. It rocks.
Go check it out. via http://www.computerzen.com

yep, today I am one year older. 30 years young! I did notice that when I woke up this morning my back was quite sore. I guess it is all downhill from here....

November 10th 1775
...That two Battalions of Marines be raised consisting of one Colonel, 2 Lt. Colonels, 2 Majors, and Officers as usual in other regiments, that they consist of an equal number of privates with other Battalions, that particular care be taken that no person be appointed to Officer or enlisted in said Battalions, but such as are good seamen, or so aquainted with maritime affairs as to be able to serve to advantage by sea.

So I have been playing around with the Tablet PC SDK a lot lately.  It’s pretty damn nice.  Makes me wish that I had bought a convertible laptop.  I’ve got the speech SDK as well, but I haven’t had a chance to play with it much.

Tonight I finished watching the boxed set of Band of Brothers.  That is a kick ass mini-series!  I got this set from the library.  I’ll have to buy it though.  I can see myself wanting to watch it every now and then.

So while I was all immersed in watching the movie, I was thinking that I still need to put together a shadow box of my awards and medals.  Not wanting to run out and find a hobby shop at 10:00 at night, I decided to throw together a virtual shadow box.  Here’s what I came up with.

I better add a spell checker to that story poster

Havn’t had a whole lot of time to work on this site lately. I have the album stuff pretty much finished up, so I’ll probably get some images up this weekend. One thing I need to do is get a better way set up to post stories. Right now I’m writing them directly to the database. That sucks.

So I have everything set up and working.
...and by everything, I just mean the web log. Not anything else like the photo album, code section, or the others.
I think the syndication is working too. Just RSS 2.0 right now. Give it a try if you want. Will probably be updating the sites features from time to time. Keep your eyes on this space.

Like that cell phone you're using? Do you like it better than having good hearing? http://www.engadget.com/entry/7674671712512224/

Dear God....... according to this survey (What band from the 80's are you), I'm Peter Cetera.
I probably shouldn't have admitted that.
Didn't he specifically write songs to be added to the soundtrack of Karate Kid movies?

You're a sap. Either that or it's all just a way
for you to get some ass. You might have an
illegitimate child somewhere.

What band from the 80s are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I've been doing a lot of thinking about mug shots lately. Not that I've had mine taken recently, mind you. But I'm thinking about how they are captured, stored and used. Doing some research, I stumbled upon these sites:

Mugshots.com

Arresting Images (from The Smoking Gun)

I also noticed this Sheriff's Office web site. I like the look of it. Seems to be pretty clean and provide useful information.

if you grew up in the late 70's or 80's you can probably relate to a lot of this stuff. I had forgotten about a lot of it. Now excuse me while I go do some searching on Ebay.

I usually head out to the pumpkin patch this time of year. It's a pretty fun place. Pumpkins, petting zoo, CORN MAZE! I'm really looking forward to it this year because Riley is two and he should get a kick out of it.

I found this site concerning the corn maze...er maize... uh MAiZE. I thought some guy had just tromped around and busted down some paths through a field of corn. Actually though from the overhead shot, you can see that they really put some thought into it. Of course you won't catch me going in there. I can see it already. Some punk 12 year old kid hides in the maze...MAiZE... jumps out to scare me and I leave a John shaped path directly to the nearest (newly created) exit in the maze. MAiZE.

postings will be kind of slim for a while....yeah, like they weren't before. Except for today. I have a couple already on tap for today.

Also the blog will be moving. But there will be more to come on that. Hopefully before this site expires.

You know, I hate using the word blog. Especially now that I hear news anchors use it every day. “The new fad, blogging”........ “How blogging will effect this election”

at least according to this survey. via chris

our distinct personality, The Shepherd is to tend to your human flock. You understand the needs of those for whom you are responsible. Shepherds are vigilant and reliable. You realize your obligation and commitment to the well being of those entrusted to your care. Shepherds are very dependable. You engender a feeling of comfort and stability to those within your charge. On the positive side, Shepherds can be empathic, caring, understanding, practical and realistic. On the negative side, you may be manipulative, close-minded and sentimentally rigid. Interestingly, your preference is just as applicable in today's corporate kingdoms.

I've been messing around a lot with Visual Studio Add-Ins. There seems to be a real lack of stuff out there concerning these. Sure there are a few people giving away or selling them, but where are the articles explaining them? I mean REALLY explaining them. Sure there is some source out there, and I found an article or two on codeproject, but where is the MSDN documentation? Where is the good stuff?
I finally stumbled upon “Visual Studio .NET 2003 Automation Samples”. So this link is just to share, as much as it is to remind me where to look when I forget and go trying to find this info again.

I used to use a Kryptonite Evolution 2000 lock on my bike. Not anymore. Check this out:
http://www.engadget.com/entry/7796925370303347/

More specifically, how long can the Name for that control be? A coworker swore that she had gone over the allowable limit today and was getting some strange errors. I told her that I didn't think that there was a limit, or that if there was one it was probably too large to really worry about.

I did some research and couldn't come up with anything on the web that explained how long a web control's Name could be, so I started working on the solution myself. What I found was if the name of the class behind your web control is over 155 characters long, you start to get errors on the .resx file for that class. 155 characters is ok, but at 156 you start to have problems. Now, the .ascx file can actually be named something that is over 155 characters, but the the class that it inherits from cannot be. So, it's either something in the class, or in the CodeBehind specification in the aspx page.

This is a saw!

The site is in German I think, but that's not too important. I was just impressed by the pictures. It looks like something out of Mad Max.

TrackBack From:http://www.cnblogs.com/ccboy/archive/2004/09/10/41848.aspx

These apps have been floating around for a while now, but I thought I would mention them anyway just in case there was somebody that hasn't heard about them.

Cropper
Brian Scott has written a really killer app called Cropper. It's a nice little app for grabbing images. Get it here (you can get the source too):
http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/archive/2004/09/09/3085.aspx

Paint.net
Another nice app (again with the source code available) for doing some simple image manipulation. So help me, if you are still using paint......well there is just something wrong with you. Get Paint.net here:
http://www.winisp.net/rbrewster/pdn.html

Jeff Key
Yes, Jeff is a useful app, in that he is consistently pumping out great tools. The list is too long to list here. So just go to Jeff's site and look at the menu over on the right. Plenty of useful stuff there.

You know, I never really even thought to question what happened at the Pentagon on September 11th.
Watch this video and see what you get out of it:

http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon121.swf

The college football season starts this weekend!

Either there isn't a whole lot going on for me to write about.....or there is so much going on that I don't have time to write about it. I haven't figured it out yet. Right now, I'd have to blame it on the fact that every evening I sit on the couch, watch the Olympics and fall asleep. Only a couple of more days and I can break that addiction.

I stumbled upon the Oregon Blogs site. I don't read them as much as I check out the pictures down the right hand column. I've managed to grab a couple of desktop images from that list.

The title of the last post mentioned peaches, and then I never mentioned them in the actual post. Maryhill has some great peach orchards all around it. It's a good place to go if you are looking from some fresh peaches (or plums, or corn, or berries...)

So I posted that blurb about trying to debug with sql, and I haven't touched the subject since. I guess things are running just about normal around here.

Went camping at Maryhill Sate Park this past weekend. Two things that really stick in my mind after we got back. 1. Sometimes the Columbia River can be really nice to ski on. That far up the river, the water can be completely flat. Not nearly as choppy as it gets down near Portland. 2. Camping in 100+ degree weather blows.

and a bonus number 3. A melted chocolate bar, refrozen in the cooler, still tastes pretty damn good.

You know, every article I can find on-line that talks about debugging a stored proc from Visual Studio makes it sound easy as hell. Too bad it doesn't seem to work so easily for me. Visual Studio is on my pc. SQL Server is on my pc. Debugging is turned on in my project. So what the hell?

Hmmm....

I'm thinking that I need to flip a flag on SQL Server somewhere. I'll be damned if I can find it though.

I haven't been posting much lately. I've been trying to do some more work on Flashtastic, as well as rewriting the software that this blog runs on to something that I am making myself. Not that .Text doesn't do what I want it to do. I just want to use something that I've written myself....and something a little more basic. Plus I want to make a type of photo-blog feature in it as well. All that, and the fact that the weather has been really warm recently have kept me pretty quite on this site.

I just got done reading the Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now article on MSDN. I wanted to note that here so that I will know where to look to easily find it a month from now.

It's pretty toasty in Portland these days. 103 degrees yesterday. It's supposed to be close to that today. What in the hell? Isn't it supposed to be overcast and cold in Oregon? With heat like that comes smog warnings, clean air advisories and the like. What can you do? Look here for ideas.

Does anybody do their part to help out? Not me. I pulled my boat up to the lake, and spent the day trying to break my wife's arm by dragging her around the lake on a ski.

With Sand in the City safely behind us, we can now turn all our attention to the summer's most anticipated event....The Oregon Brewers Festival

We went to Sand in the City today. It wasn't really that much fun. It was neat to see all the sand sculptures, but over all it was just a ton of people packed into Pioneer Courthouse Square. Maybe going on Friday or Saturday when they were actually working with the sand would have been more fun. I don't know.

I never even thought to go to the contest at Cannon Beach. I haven't been to that one since sometime in the 80's.

One final thought. What the hell is with the weather people these days. It seems like they have been really off this year. If it hadn't been for their claims of thunderstorms the afternoon/evening, we would have been out on the boat today.

Now, I like the Far Side as much as the next guy....but holy crap.

One day I'll write another post that has something technical in it. But this isn't going to be that post.

A few years ago the Air Show was removed as one of the Rose Festival events. These days it's called the Oregon International AirShow. It looks like the Blue Angels are back this year. We'll surely be going as Riley is completely infatuated with planes right now.

I thought it was getting on toward that time of year. The time of year when you really love living in Portland, or the time of year where you'd like to go on vacation for a week or two.

The past couple of years I've avoided downtown like the plague during Rose Festival. May venture down to see the ships with Riley this year though. Just watching the news now. Huh. A week of rain...during Rose Festival. Looks like another Trailblazer just got busted for drugs. Everything sounds like business as usual.

Holy crap! May went by with only two posts. I've been a little too busy to write anything lately. Been writing lots of code, but that's about it. I have a bunch of links to go through (maybe tonight) so I might toss out one or two of those later on.

For now, get yourself some Gilligan or A-Team.

my God, I hate computers sometimes.

or maybe they are?

So it looks like they aren't working in Internet Explorer, but do work in FireFox.

nice

test

I hadn't heard of this movie named “The Terminal”. From the preview, I would say that it looks pretty good. I usually like most of the movies Tom Hanks has been in anyway. Yes, I even liked Joe Versus the Volcano.

The cheap gas station by my house finally hit a price over $2.00

Time to take the bus.

So this guy takes a BMW Mini, and builds a robot out of it? It looks pretty amazing. Unbelievable even. If you watch nothing else, be sure to view the Car Stopping video.

Holy Crap.

Squirrel Fishing. That's all I'm going to say about that.

I threw together a little flash card program to help me study for my certification. I couldn't find anything suitable out there already so I started hacking away. I have an early version available if anybody is interested. I'll warn you, right now it's not pretty...code-wise anyway. It runs. You can add data, save card decks, view the cards one at a time, edit and delete cards. I need to put in some shuffling and randomization still. As well as some kind of printing capability.

Work in progress, but feel free to use it if you want. Requires the 1.1 .NET Framework.

source and all is here

feedback is appreciated.

I installed Sourcegear Vault tonight. Really nice tool. So far I haven't done anything spectacular where I would see a noticable difference from what I was using for source control before (VSS). Nothing but basic Visual Studio intigrated checking in and checking out. Hopefully I'll find some time to put it through the ringer the next couple of days and see how it handles.

The client tool seems to have about the same functionality as VSS. It looks a lot nicer though.

The admin tool is no comparison. Vault gives you more, and gives it to you in a much more intuitive layout.

Yes, through technology we have now figured out how to keep people from losing a finger while cutting wood. I stumbled upon the site for SawStop tonight. SawStop is technology for woodworking tools. Basically, when being used with a table saw, it can detect if it is cutting wood or not wood (for instance a finger). But my question is this: Without a cranky old three fingered wood shop teacher, how are kids going to learn to fear and respect that damn table saw?! This technology won't save the numbnut who tosses a piece of wood on top of the table saw (and on top of the blade), turns the saw on sending the blade spinning, and wood flying resulting in a mighty blow to the breadbasket. If you have never seen that, then you're really missing out.....

Just watch the video for yourself. I thought it was pretty neat.

http://www.sawstop.com/video.htm

Now you can drive one of the Mars rovers! Well, kind of.

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/m2k4/driverover/frameset.html

The above link will let you drive around on a virtual Mars and discover interesting objects. Good way to glean a little bit about what has been found up there. They didn't have cool stuff like this when I was a kid. Hard to drive a Mars rover with an Encyclopedia though.

Clackamas County, Oregon, has a website were you can check out some of the people with Warrants out for their arrest AND sex offenders that may be in your zip code.

http://co.clackamas.or.us/corrections/wlist.asp

So....Washington County will tell you who is in jail, Multnomah County will tell you who has been released, and Clackams County will tell you who they want to get as well as a few “notables” that might be in your neighborhood.

Shouldn't there be some kind of standard?

I just noticed something funky in .Text (the blog tool that is running all of this). I wrote an entry titled “Getting out of jail”.

I started writing that last Friday. I just typed in a couple of notes and saved it. I finished it up tonight and finally checked the little checkbox that tells .Text to publish what you have been typing. .Text posted it with the date and time from last Friday. Huh. I wonder if there is an easy way to change that? I don't see one in .Text.

I notice weird stuff late at night.

I installed Whidbey on my dev box at home the other day. It installed fine and is running great. The only problem is that VS 2003 is now jacked. More specifically, I cannot debug when I run a web app. Crapolla! They tell you in the ReadMe.txt file “Do Not Install This Side-by-Side with VS 2002 or 2003.” I've read a couple of fixes out on other blogs but none of that seems to be working for me. The server is set up right. The web sites are set up right. I even ran a utility to fix VS 2003 and the framework 1.1, but none of that worked.
Then this morning driving into work, I realized that I didn't delete my pdm.dll file before running the fix. Maybe screwed up the fix? Hopefully, I'll be able to put some more time toward getting it fixed this weekend.

I've been sick as hell lately. Luckily I have “Battlestar Galactica - The Complete Epic Series“ checked out from the library. HOURS of quality entertainment! Surprisingly, I'm not joking. It's still very watchable....if you can ignore the wires and same repeated footage of vipers flying through space.

If you had a one million dollar bill, couldn't you just buy the entire WalMart store?

Check this out! A water powered toy car. I'm talking “water powered” as in fuel cell, not “water powered” as in water rocket.

John D. points to a great best practices document covering the DateTime object in the .NET framework.

what's kind of funny, is that those pictures have changed since I posted thes message. Originally, there were some crazy ones where a guy was actually standing on the drawing and you couldn' really tell if he was real or not until you looked REALLY hard.

Much better than the stick figures I draw.

I can't get over how real they look. I like the one that looks like the people are standing on rocks.

I've seen this mentioned a few places already so most of you who care have probably already heard. But, on the slim chance that you don't already know...... head over to O'Reilly's Windows Dev Center. I've always liked O'Reilly books, although I don't think I have any .NET specific ones.

Now that I'm thinking about it, wasn't Tim O'Reilly supposed to be speaking at a PADNUG meeting or something? Did I miss it?

Get your free hot sauce here.

Wow, these are some serious drawings. All nice and flat on the sidewalk. But you wouldn't think so by how realistic they look.

I am cornholio!

Once again, my name was not called. So I pretty much inhaled the ADO.NET book that I was talking about in a previous post.

Highlights Of The Day

• Had a very old gentleman sitting next to me, reading a copy of People and laughing like Butthead for about an hour.
• Found out that even though I can use my County ID badge to go in the side door to the Court House when I go there to work, I'm not supposed to do it when I go there for jury duty. One more employee perk down the drain.
• Watched part of Pulp Fiction on some guy's laptop
• Had lunch at the mall food court again, and saw a mouse run across the floor in the middle of the lunch hour crowd and almost get smashed.

yep. I saw a couple of people surfing the internet during the day.

Your jury cell (I mean, room) has WiFi??? When I saw ours last year, I sort of felt lucky there were chairs.

Well, there is eight hours of my life that I'm never going to get back. I spent the whole day sitting in the “Jury Pool” room waiting to have my name drawn to go to a court room.
But it never happened. So I spent the morning playing cards and reading a year old Sports Illustrated issue. Had lunch at Pioneer Place and bought a PC Magazine so I could spend the rest of the afternoon reading it and gazing longingly at all the laptops in that issue that had WiFi. The “Jury Pool” room has WiFi.

One day I'll find the exact computer I want and buy it. But until then I will continue to gripe about it.

Jury Duty, day two is tomorrow. I guess that I've finally found some time to read that Pragmatic ADO.NET book.

Did you grow up in Portland, Oregon like I did?

Did you grow up watching some of the old breed of wrestlers, like Rip “The Crippler” Oliver, Mean Mike Miller, Playboy Buddy Rose, Curt Henning, Billy Jack, Stan “The Man” Stasiak, and Rowdy Roddy Piper?

If so, you might be interested in knowing that Portland Wrestling is back! Granted it's not quite as cool as it used to be (either the wrestling isn't as good now, or my taste has refined a bit in the last 20 years), but it can still be a really fun time. And hey, it looks like The Grappler and Moondog Morretti are still around. So it can't be that bad.

If you are interested, here is the info you need:
Where: Kliever National Guard Base, 10000 NE 33rd Portland, OR
When: Saturday, January 31st @ 4:30pm
How Much: $5 (only $5 for good wholesome family entertainment?!)

I'll see you there!

I've been playing around a lot with FreeTextBox. It's a really nice control that was created by John Dyer. If you use .Text as your weblog of choice, then you've seen FreeTextBox already. When you are adding a new post or article, that's what you are using. I'm writing a simple weblogging tool for my friend, and FreeTextBox came in very handy. If you are in need of a web control that will give your user a Word, or FrontPage WYSIWYG experience, then this may be the tool for you.
NOTE: When working with FreeTextBox, pay close attention to where you put your image files. I've found that the ImageGalleryPath property doesn't quite work as I would have expected.

Governing.com has created a report talking about how all of the 50 states in the U.S. are taxed. They also gave each state an overall grade. Very interesting read. Especially if taxes are right up in your face all the time like they seem to be here in Oregon.

I'm voting Al Hamburg come election time!

cool. I'll check those out. Thanks!

Some other popular tabbed browser's are:
CrazyBrowser and SlimBrowser.

I don't know much about SlimBrowser, but Avant is pretty comparable with CrazyBrowser (an MDI layer that utilizes IE). I prefer crazy browser over Avant Browser because you use f2 or f3 to flip backwards or forwards through the tabs, which is remarkably user friendly. (you have to use Ctrl-F for search next, since f3 is hi-jacked for next window - it's no isssue at all in practice.)

cheers - keep up the good blogging
leon

Dear God, “It” has spread even further than anybody could have imagined. (via scoble).

Frost bite within 5 minutes? screw that. I wouldn't leave the house.

Just be glad you were not up here in New England this past week. Last Thursday when I got up ut was a whopping -8 degrees outside. However, it did warm up. The high was around +5. They said with the wind chill we were reaching -45. Frost bite could occur within 5 minutes.

Here's the evidence.

Do you use and RSS aggregator too keep tabs on your favorite web loggers? Want to share your list with the world? Want to see what other people are reading?

Sign up here: http://feeds.scripting.com

Wow, glad I got out of Indiana and all that cold weather.

yeah.

right.

it got down to 7 in Lafayette today. More of the same the rest of the week I guess. I'm heading back to Oregon just in time to miss the snow there.

YOu're killin me... It was 65 the last few days down here in CINCY.

In case you didn't know, Indiana in December is freaking cold!

This Christmas I'm all about the classics.

and by classics, I mean Elf Bowling.

It's looking more and more like I may be working on a pretty big VB.Net project here in the near future.

Besides brushing up on some basic VB knowledge from a previous life and getting used to this menu, it's also clear that I will need a pretty hefty supply of eggnog to get me through these times. A quick search produced this recipe. But then there is always the low carb thing that I have been doing lately. Another search led me to some low carb eggnog. What will they think of next? Excuse me, while I "get my nog on".

crap. it was posted.

Ok. Let's try this again. I'm gonna push the save button, and we'll see if this post is saved, or posted.

a test post from my newsgator client.
I didn't even know this existed until I read about it on Bliz's blog

I was just doing some routine bug fixes at work. As I was entering notes into the bug ticket, I noticed that the ticket's id number (four digits) looked strangely familiar. Where do I know that number from? Suddenly it hit me. I'm talking 'hit me', like something slamming up from deep brain RAM and knocking me out of my chair, 'hit me'. Those four digits were the same four numbers that ended a phone number that some bum gave me in a dream last night. I was walking around with this little mini laptop trying to find an internet connection and....I could go on, but I won't. Suffice to say, that was a mildly freaky moment just there. I think I'm gonna call it a day and go home and sleep.

Doc Searls gives some pointers about presentations. via scoble.

So, I have been tinkering away with datagrids for a little while now. For the last few years most all of my projects have had at least one datagrid, usually quite a few. Throughout all those projects we made use of the base datagrid functionality. Show data. Put an add button on there to add a blank record in a new row. Put an edit button on there to set the EditItemIndex and allow the user to modify data. Put an update button to actually trigger the update (or add) to happen. And toss on a delete button for deleting.

Recently though, we moved on from this simple “update one row at a time” approach, and started using the grid to help us update multiple records at a time. It works great! At one time, though, I was asking myself, “How in the hell do I set more than one row into edit mode at the same time?” That's the kind of thinking that can have your head spinning and make you spend countless hours searching down the wrong path, for an answer that is never to be found.

How do you do it, you ask? Well I was going to write a lengthy post about the subject but after doing some more in depth research I've found quite a few people have already written about this very thing (how didn't I find these earlier). While most all people have the same basic idea, and some even have a small working example, I'm just going to point you to the guys who can tell it to you like it is. The Visual Studio Team. Find the answers to the Top Ten Questions about the DataGrid Web Server Control.

I do, however, need to give Scott Hanselman a plug for Bringing Data Along For The Ride. He has some good insights into the grid and I made use of decorating some of my objects with attributes where I stored s

Lots going on the past few weeks. Soon I'll drop a post on here about some grid work that has been done. For now though, it's a race to get everything done before I take a little time off for Christmas and New Years.

If you're feeling really bored though, you can always go read George Bush's blog.

check out this 360 degree view from the top of Mt. Everest.

*Note, requires QuickTime

don't mind me. I'm just a test article.

Dennis E. Powell seems to think so.

I don't know what got me looking through some old links I had tonight, but I'm pretty glad I did. I came across a link to some Star Wars fan movies. One in particular that is really good. If you are in to such things, you might want to check out Art Of The Saber. It is easily one of the best fan films that I have ever seen.

And remember, nothing says Thanksgiving like a good lightsaber duel!

Finally, a standard we can all get behind.
yeah......behind.

party on, Wayne!

With a quack, quack here and a quack, quack there. Here a quack, there a quack....uhh. Hi, we're in Deleware.

Oregon wins the Civil War ! Hell yeah!

heck yes, man! I might have to take you up on that offer.
By the way, send me an e-mail (john@jivastich.org) with your current e-mail address. I have to ask you a question.

Hey John, I can get discounts from Dell for being a UPS empployee, if you are interested.
-yer cousin

I read the explanation, and i still don't get it. I'm gonna have to do the experiment myself.

You're killing me... No work gets done till I figure it out myself...

I've been struggling recently with what I want my newest toy to be. I've been wanting a laptop for a while. A long while. Joe is a big proponent of Dell. From my shopping around, Dell seems to have some of the best prices combined with what you actually get in regards to the pc AND warranty/service. But recently, I've been looking at some of the tablet p.c.'s. I have yet to actually play around with one myself, so I'll have to do some hands on shopping soon. Scott just dropped a quick note about Toshiba's Portege. The other day I was looking at what Gateway has, which they bill as a laptop that transforms into a tablet. Same thing, I think. But, for the price of a laptop or tablet, I could upgrade my home pc to be a monster and get a pretty nice PDA. Seems like most places I find on-line rate HP as about the nicest PDA you can get. Dell's doesn't look too bad either, although I have yet to find somebody that owns one. What to do, what to do..........

Here is an interesting picture and post from Randy Kimmerly. Count all the people in the picture. Wait for the picture to shift, and then count them again.

If you can't be bothered to actually READ the news, at least now you can see what's going on. news-images is a listing of images from news sites all over the world. If you find an image interesting, you can click on it and then you'll be taken to the article where you can actually do some old fashioned reading.

Old news really. But good news if you are like me and didn't have a very good understanding of C# Generics. Juval Lowy wrote a really good article over on MSDN to get you up to speed.

If you want even more examples and if you can understand VB, Carl Franklin has been doing some work with generics as well.

I hate it when that happens. It's like after working on the site in short bits of time over two weeks, I finally got it up and running. Then I couldn't think of anything to say. Blog Writer's Block.

Since my birthday is coming up, I thought I would make it easy on everyone. Just get me a Bombardier. Also note that after holding discussions with colleagues, it was determined that the proper way to ride this vehicle would be while wearing a cape and WWII flying ace type helmet and goggles. I'll need those as well. My current cape just wouldn't work. Also, we came to the conclusion that striking the heisman pose while riding would be optional.

I finally (finally!) get on the site yesterday.

And then I couldn't think of anything funny enough to write.

found this church sign generator on Scoble's site.
nice.

Happy Belated Birthday Marines!!!

This year's ALMAR.

looks like it works!

I'm testing the comments