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.

So I mentioned in an earlier post that I had installed Whidbey, and then I couldn't seem to debug any web apps in Visual Studio 2003.  I tried a couple of quick fixes and nothing seemed to work.  So it's Sunday night and I'm trying the standard stab in the dark approach (ie. search Google and find anything pertaining to our sounding even remotely similar to my problem and attempting to do whatever that person did to fix the “kinda” same problem).  Well, nothing was working.  The clock struck......sometime late.  I don't know.  Long after I had wanted to go to bed.  So I decided it was time to stop guessing and figure out what the hell was going on.

• Step 1:  Realize that I had thus far neglected to check the System event logs
• Step 2: Check the System event logs
• Step 3: Find out that every time I try and run a web app in Visual Studio 2003 there is a message being entered into the application log saying “Event message:WebErrorEvent:Configuration Error"
• Step 4: Look at the source of the message.  ASP.NET 1.2.30703.0.
• Step 5: Yell “DEAR GOD!  THERE'S THE PROBLEM!“
• Step 6: Sneak upstairs and make sure that the kid and wife are still happily asleep.

What was the problem?  Installing Whidbey forced IIS to associate all ASP.NET applications with framework version 1.2.30703 which is the early version of framework version 2.0.  When you are running a project in Visual Studio 2003 you want to be hitting framework 1.1.4322.  Damn.  Easily enough fixed.  All you have to do is run Aspnet_regiis.exe (each .NET framework has it's own) to update the script map for you ASP.NET application.  If you need more help (and by you I mean Me a month from now when I have forgotten this), you Me can check out the following on-line article:

Monday, March 22, 2004 8:21:00 AM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00) | Comments [0] | OldSite

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.