I finally got around to giving toonlet a whirl.  I wish that I could figure out how to resize or move that word bubble.  It appears that sometimes I talk out of my eye.  Also, I can't figure out how to (or if you even can) add text in other places.  Like say on the shirt.  Anyway, here's my freshman attempt:

Indy. One year later by ballpeenhammer

On Twitter, Lyza put up a comment about Dire Straits: Brothers in Arms.  I don't know how many times I listened to that tape.  The only thing that stopped me was the fact that it finally broke.  Thinking about led to (as it so often does) YouTube.

Clifford Stoll gave this TED Talk a little over two years ago.  I just found it today.  I don't agree with everything that he says, but he makes very valid points.  If you haven't seen it yet, you should find 18 minutes and watch it.  It will be worth it.

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.

Quite a while ago now, Marq and I were having a conversation about some pictures on flickr and how someone (or many people, I forget) had "favorited" a picture that he had of feet.  After far too many jokes about feet, footr was born.  The pictures are usually safe for work.  But every now and then you get one popping up that you really shouldn't be looking at. 

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

I just noticed this morning that my spell checker wasn’t working (outlook and word) in 2007. I googled around and it only seems to happen when you upgrade, not for a fresh install.

I don’t know how many misspellings I’ve been sending out for the past two weeks since I upgraded. I’m too horrified to even think about it. If you find yourself in the same boat, this was the fix that I found:

In your registry settings delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Proofing Tools\1.0

That seemed to fix everything.

For the record, I did run the MS Office Diagnostics tool first. But that didn’t fix the problem.

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!

I usually run Query Analyzer Sql Server Management Studio with my query results being displayed as text.  But every now and then I really need them to show up in a grid...usually for copying and pasting.  Whenever this happens it's always a process of me sitting there clicking through menus until I remember that you can change that setting under  Tools -> Options -> Query Results -> Default destination for result

What a pain in the ass. 

Today I discovered the keyboard shortcut for making this change and committed it to memory (AKA the yellow sticky note on my monitor).  Here they are for you, and for me when I forget sometime in the near future.

CTRL+D: Results in a grid
CTRL+T: Results as text

Another one that Mark was asking me about the other day... how to insert a NULL into a column when you have the table open in Management Studio.

CTRL+0  (zero)

If you are dead set on never touching the mouse, here is the definitive list from SQL Server 2005 Books Online:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174205.aspx

They don't seem to have that insert NULL shortcut listed there though.  I wonder if any others are missing?

This is a temporary post that was not deleted. Please delete this manually. (a5c3679a-c9d7-4b8d-a697-19c6c54c135e - 3bfe001a-32de-4114-a6b4-4005b770f6d7)

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

I had a great idea today.  Turns out somebody else already had the same idea…

http://www.flickr.com/groups/recipes/pool/

Over at Comentario Loco Marq is sharing some of the songs that he can listen to over and over.  I know that this song has to show up on his list.  But I couldn't wait for him to find it, so I went searching.

The Simpsons movie is coming out soon.  If you have some time to burn, head over to the movie's web site for games, info about the movie in general, or to make your own Simpsons character.

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

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

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

Swear Jar. (wmv)  Awesome Bud Lite commercial.

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

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

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

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

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?

I had a post half written out...basically a cool goodbye to Oregon.  The place where I was born and have spent the majority of my life.  But like I said, it's only half done.  I was supposed to leave this morning.  It's now 11:03 pm.  I managed to get a parking ticket today while I ran into a city office to get a permit for my POD.  Gee... thanks Portland.

So now it looks like I'm pulling out of here tomorrow.  I'm off to the flat lands of the midwest.  I'll miss a lot about this place.  My family, my friends, most things about here in general.  I was just looking through some photos and realized that I'm really going to miss the view out of my former office window.

It's not the best shot of the mountain that I've ever taken.  But it reminds me of those days that I used to spend at work... late on a Friday afternoon... waiting for the weekend to come.

Where's the best place to downhill ski in Indiana?  Anyone?  Anyone?

UPDATE: I noticed that the image wasn't showing up (in my web browser at least).  Updated the image info.  Looks like it's working now.

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

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

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

Over on Gamasutra they have and article entitled "We See Farther - A History of Electronic Arts".  Great, great article about one of the biggest publishers in the video game business.  When most people think EA, they think Madden {insert year here} or NCAA Football {insert year here}.  Actually, they have a game for just about every sport going these days....NASCAR....Golf....Arena Football.  Where is the lacrosse game?  Curling cannot be far off.  But what EA does best is franchises.  That's why people, or maybe it's just me, always think Madden. 

One thing that kept EA around during the lean times of the console wars was the fact that they publish games to everything.  Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox....Console, handheld, PC.  They have their fingers in about every pot.  Since I haven't been following EA that closely recently though, I have one question about one of my favorite franchises.  What is up with the splitting on the Medal of Honor series?  You can get Medal of Honor: Vanguard on the Playstation 2 and the Wii, but not the Xbox 360?  But then on the 360 you can get Medal of Honor: Airborne.  Actually, it looks like a generational difference.  Airborne is for the 360, Playstation 3 and PC.  The only other Medal of Honor games that I have played have all been on the PC, and they were killer.

Anyway, this whole rambling post started after I read Jeff Atwood's post over on Coding Horror about that very same Gamasutra article.  His question "What happened to the grandiose sentiments expressed in the We See Farther" ad.  I think the visionary element in video games started to go out the window as the games got more and more complex, visually amazing, and all in all just started costing more to make.  Instead of a bunch of different guys each coming up with their own game that they think is cool, you now have a couple of guys driving the whole game with a staff of artists, programmers, and whoever else behind them. 

Try to find something really unique.  It's kind of hard.  Def Jam Icon sounds like kind of a new idea with new game play.  But for the most part EA is about their franchises.  Then again, maybe that's not a bad thing.  Right now I need to run out and see if I can find that Medal of Honor: Airborne game.

Released this morning on Xbox live is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.  I had actually never played this particular game, but was a big fan of the original Castlevania game.

This installment stays classic to the original, being a 2D scroller.  That said, you don't scroll through a predetermined path.  It's very open ended allowing you to go almost anywhere you want to go.  It also has some RPG elements such as collecting equipment and gaining experience levels.

I'd post more, but the wikipedia link above covers it as well as I could.  All I can add is that it is proving to be a FUN game!

If you have an Xbox live account, check it out.

I was reading Marq's blog earlier this morning and went to leave a comment.  When I did, I realized that the pc I was on had me already logged into blogger.  The thing is, I don't remember signing up for blogger.  Actually, I doesn't surprise me that I would have done it sometime in the past.  I'm sure I have blog posts floating out in the ether that I have completely forgot about.  A few minutes of research pointed me to this old blog:  http://johnwashere.blogspot.com/    Apparently, I set this up back in October 2004.  Who knew?! 

So in my quest to reach a full saturation point, I have sync'd up john was here with my other blogs johnarmitage.net and my live.spaces site.

Fancy.

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.

A week late, but Microsoft has finally come out with the first contest in Dream Build Play.  The Challenge is to create a game based on the Spacewar Starter Kit.  Use the codebase, content or both.  They also mention that you can use the Torque X tools.  Very nice....  I already have my ideas, do you?

Games must be submitted between February 21st - 28th.

Go read at Dream Build Play to find out more.

Microsoft released the .NET Micro Framework 2.0 the other day.  This is pretty cool technology with a lot of possibilities.  I find it hard to play around with it too much though because I don't really have any hardware that will let me deploy applications to it.  It would be neat if there was a way to write stuff that could run on my watch and load it up on there.

One really cool application that I've seen (in this video) is somebody setting the temp in their house via their cell phone while on their way home.  It would be sweet to set up that kind of automation and remote control, as far as lights and thermostat and other things in your house.  Leviton has a lot of home automation technology.  It looks like some of it is .NET Micro related too.  Haven't followed up any more as of yet to see how pricey or hackable the products are though.

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 just learned about the ReBuilding Center.  I'll have to stop by and check it out as I see a few home projects in my near future.

via Make

Your results:
You are Lex Luthor

Lex Luthor 49% Kingpin 49% Dr. Doom 44% Juggernaut 44% Mr. Freeze 39% Apocalypse 37% Venom 33% Magneto 31% Riddler 22% Catwoman 20% The Joker 18% Green Goblin 16% Dark Phoenix 14% Poison Ivy 13% Two-Face 4% Mystique 0%

A brilliant businessman on a quest for world domination and the self-proclaimed greatest criminal mind of our time!

Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz

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.

The release version of Game Studio Express is out on MSDN.

So I sat down this morning to work on an XNA game, but somebody sent me a link to iSketch.... and well my early morning work session was pretty much shot.

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......

The XNA Team recently released a video that shows a bunch of clips from games that were created using XNA.  Some of them look pretty cool.  Here's the link to Major Nelson's post, which has a link to the video.

Happy Birthday Marines!

“On November 10, 1775, a Corps of Marines was created by a resolution of the Continental Congress. Since that date, many thousand men have borne the name Marine. In memory of them, it is fitting that we who are Marines should commemorate the Birthday of our Corps by calling to mind the glories of its long and illustrious history.”
-JOHN A. LEJEUNE
-Major General - Commandant
-1921.11.1

Message from the Commandant [pdf]

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..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saw this on Digg a while ago.  Finally got around to watching it.  It's pretty funny.  If you liked The Matrix....and muppets.

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.

Ok, so this isn't so much "Smooth" in the sense that it's a really slick piece of code.  Rather it's "Smooth" because it took me way to long too figure it out and I thought that I better write it down somewhere that google has a chance of indexing it.  That way a month from now when I may have forgotten this, I'll be able to look it up. 

I'm working on this project where I show users an image and they can perform some zoom in type action where they click on the image and drag a rectangle, or they click on a bunch of points to draw lines allowing them to draw their own shape.  This is basically all accomplished with javascript.  Good.  Not hard to figure out.  When they are done drawing their shape, I am clicking on a button in the background (by using javascript) to force a postback so that I can call some web service in the code behind and reload the image.  Note that this isn't a full Page postback, since I'm using an anthem:button.

Ok, so all is well, I get the new image url, I load it up.  Done!  Not quite.  Because in my case, I'm doing some fancy fade in from a placeholder image that lets the user know that something is going on.  Ok, so I need to get back to running some javascript.  Stick it in the window.onload event.  Yeah.....no.  Not so much.  This is where anthem causes a problem because the page isn't actually reloading.  Just my image....which did I mention is an anthem:image?  So the obvious solution now is to put my javascript method call in the image's onload event.  Sounds like a good idea, right?  Well it is, but the only tricky part is, how do you do it?

This doesn't work:

< anthem:image onload= "FancyFadeIn()"> </ anthem:image >

That's because an anthem:image doesn't play the onload game that way.  BUT if you really know what's going on, you'll know that when everything is said and done that <anthem:image> ends up as an <img> which does have an onload event.  To add that attribute using the Language of the Gods VB.NET, you do something like this:

Me.mapImage.Attributes.Add("onload", "FancyFadeIn()")

Now when the image reloads, the fade in javascript is called and everything is right with the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ballpeenhammer

tidge

jwa

armitage    

jarmitage

jjdidtiebuckle

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

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

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

[UPDATE]

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

john out.

Scott Hanselman has a great podcast up covering the basics of Scrum.  Better than just the podcast itself is a whole list of links covering Scrum and Agile Software Development.

This is something that we try to do at the County and has seemed to work really well.  I don't know that we are always successful in being really "scrummy" but we do our best.  We are doing a lot of talking about moving to Team System so it was nice to see a link and some information about Scrum for Team System in there too.

ALSO, if you happen to be a C# / ASP.NET developer and think you might want to work for the local County government in Portland, then watch this blog.  We might have a job opening up soon.  I'll post the link to the job description if it ever gets posted.

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.

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.

Senator Ted Stevens shows his understanding of the internet.  Not that I think everyone needs to understand exactly how the internet works.  But this is one of the guys that is going to be creating laws that attempt to lay out what people and businesses are able to do over the internet.

So Oregon finally got their act together and threw up a Sex Offender web site.  Is this good....bad?  I don't know, but a lot of other states have them.  I guess it's good to know the information if you have kids.  For instance, if my kids were of school age and going to the school in my neighborhood I would be sure to tell them to be leery of and steer clear of one house in particular.

Here's a blurb from the Conditions of Use Statement

"Information is only provided for sex offenders who have been designated as Predatory, as provided in ORS 181.585, who have also been determined to present the highest risk of reoffending and to require the widest range of notification; or found to be a sexually violent dangerous offender under ORS 144.635."

So that makes it all the more comforting to know that this guy, who's prior targets included "Juvenile females 12 years and younger" lives a block away from the local elementary school.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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.

I just read on jason mauer's site that another Portland Code Camp is coming up.  The post is a little stale, and I haven't seen anything lately, but here's hoping that it happens.

I missed the last one so I'm really looking forward to this one.  The question is, will my wife let me sneak off to this after spending a week at Tech Ed in June?

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.

Another time sink.

http://www.yarukinoki.net/flash/pendulumeca/

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.

Mark has been playing around with the Google Desktop SDK and created a plug-in.
It looks like the folks over at Google liked it.

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.

Another thing that I have been working on lately was getting my web site cleaned up. 
Although it's not nearly done, one of the first things I did was make a final decision on my blog engine.  I already talked about that earlier.

One thing that I definitely wanted to do, was take all of my old posts along with me.  I initially took a look at the basic XML files that dasblog creates.  It looked simple enough, so I started writing a quick program to convert all of my old posts (which resided in a SQL Server) and write them out to XML files that dasblog could use.  Luckily, within the first few minutes I stopped and thought "You know, I can't be the only person that has done this before."  Sure enough, Scott had a great post talking about the basics of migrating blog data from a random blog engine to dasblog.  It made the conversion super easy.  If you are considering converting from your current blog software to dasblog, you might want to bookmark that link so that it's handy when you finally get around to making the move  ;)

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