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.