Getting "Up-to-speed"

My trip to Toronto and Stack Overflow DevDays 2009

On Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 I took the Amtrak train from Niagara Falls, NY to Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  I was going to speak at Stack Overflow DevDays in Toronto on Friday October 23rd.

I got there an extra day earlier then needed because of the time the train was going to get in on Thursday night I would of missed the speakers dinner.  But this extra time worked to my favor as I needed the extra time to work on finishing my slides and example code I was going to demo.  But I really wanted to go to the NHL Hall of Fame since it was only a block away and I had the chance to take my picture with Lord Stanley's cup.



I spent the afternoon finishing up my slides and I ran through the presentation to make sure the timing was right.  I was able to go through everything I wanted in 50 minutes. 

That evening was the speakers dinner.  I was looking forward to the dinner cause this would of been my first opportunity to meet Joel Spolsky.  But I this was not to be.  Why? Cause Joel forgot his passport and had to fly to NYC to pick it up.  I did however meet all the speakers and four developers from FogCreek Software.  One of which I learned was the intern (that is now working fulltime) who worked on StackExchange.com (the paid hosting version of Stack Overflow).  We spent a couple of hours geeking out telling stories.  The best story was of the assless chaps but I'll let Joey deVilla tell you that story.



So Friday came along and I was really nervous in the morning.  Joel gave his keynote and as I sat through a couple more talks I was starting to relax.  After lunch was my talk.



I've got to say Carsonified really made me comfortable before the talk.  They set up my laptop and made sure it worked on the projector system.  They even loaned me a Logitech slide switcher with a laser pointer.  This made it so that I could walk away from my laptop and walk around the stage.  I felt really comfortable after just a few minutes.  I got a couple of laughs where I was expecting laughs in my slides.  The 32" Viewsonic in the middle of the stage was great for letting me see my slides without being next to my laptop.  It really made it much easier to talk. 

In comparing this talk with my jQuery Conference talk I felt I did 200% better.  I didn't read from my slides like I did in Boston.  Everything flowed right out of me.  Now that's not to say that I did a perfect job cause there was plenty of room for improvement.



I've been monitoring the reviews on twitter and the blogs and I finding people either really got a lot out of the talk or they picked up one or two things.  I've only seen a couple of constructive criticism points for my talk.  The point is that I felt I learned a lot from my jQuery Conference talk and I applied it to this talk and I think the results really show.

After the conference I was able to take a picture with Joel Spolsky.



I also took a photo with fellow speakers Joey deVilla (right) from Microsoft and Reginald Braithwaite (left).



After the conference the speakers, Joel, some attendees and I went to a local bar C'est What? to have a drink and we had great conversations about technology.  I had the chance to talk with Joel one-on-one and got some advice on how to record podcasts, told him I'd love to hear more Israeli Army stories on the podcast and told about how I would love to know what question or answer a badge was referring to when I receive it in Stack Overflow.

I had an amazing time in Toronto and meet some great developers.

Caprica: DVD Review

Caprica is the latest from Ronald D. Moore and is set in a Battlestar Galactica world 58 years before the fall (or when the miniseries starts).  Caprica is a planned series that is to come to SyFy (aka SciFi) later this year. This DVD release is a preview release and I think it's very smart on the part of the producers.  Give the fans something to hold onto and look forward to while the series finale is fresh in everyone's head.  Additionally, they can gauge fan reaction and make adjustments before it airs.

Before I talk further about Caprica, let me take a step back and talk about the series finale of Battlestar Galactica.  I think many of the scenes that are found in the last three hours of the finale is to help us transition into the world of Caprica.  We saw Baltar and Six, Rosalyn, Bill,  Helen and Saul  living their life in Caprica.  We see the dark side of Caprica with Bill, Helen and Saul at a unisex strip club, this is really the first time in the series that we see that Caprica isn't unlike our own society. 

The final scenes are filled with images showing us how we maybe falling into the same pattern of advancing technology farther then it's meant to go.  Very moving scenes that was meant for us to reflect on technology and how it will affect us in the future, arguably a sign of good science fiction.

In Caprica, we are given the view of Caprica 58 years before the Cylons surprise attack on the colonies that ultimately sent a rag-tag fleet across space in a desperate attempt to survive.  We are taken back to the beginning of the end as it were.  These are the events that eventually doomed the human race.  Caprica isn't so much different then the world we live in today except for their technology which is obviously years ahead of where we are.  But their society exhibit the same problems we are familiar with, corruption, greed, control for power and teenagers looking for their independence.

When the show starts we are instantly shown a world that is full of sin.  Rampant sex orgies (w/ nudity), people shooting each other, a ceremony that involves a sacrifice of a virgin woman.  But what we are seeing isn't Caprica but a virtual world that teenagers have created to escape reality and indulge in fantasies that are so far from reality.  In essence we are seeing what a social networking site might look like in the future (a realistic Second-life) and see how it might devolve into a free-for-all of indulgence.

With in this world is were Zoe Graystone is working on making a avatar of herself that captures her thoughts, memories, personality and what she was feeling in the outside world.    But Zoe's work is cut short when she is killed when a suicide bomber blows up the monorail she was on.

In the grieving process Zoe's father, Daniel Graystone, a computer scientist who is working on the AI programming for robotic soldiers, meets another man who lost both his wife and his daughter to the bombing, Joe Adama, father of Bill and grandfather of Lee Adama. The two work with each other driven by their passion of the the possibilities of being able to create their daughters again in real life.

If you remember from the third season finale of Battlestar Galactica during Baltars trial we learned a little bit about Joe Adama.  We learned that he was a lawyer.  We now see Joe being that lawyer but we learn that he is corrupt as he is heavily influenced by the Tauron Mob.  It's this connection to the mob that makes it possible for Daniel to take what Zoe programmed in the virtual world and transplant it into the AI program that he is working with.  It's such an ironic twist from the all mighty full of honor Bill Adama and can't be corrupt Lee Adama that we learned to trust and love in Battlestar Galactica.  Ironic, that the Adama family is the cause of the fall and cause of the new beginning.

I'll be honest, my expectations about the series wasn't very high.  I had thought that this can't be as good as Battlestar.  But I was pleasantly surprised.   There is enough tie into the Battlestar world that this is really fascinating and it's answers questions of the backstory of the Cylons creation and evolution.  Seeing unfinished prototypes of the old style cylon models was great.  We are even given a "By your command" line to make the true fan jump up and down in their seat.

I found myself trying to figure out the middle as I watched and more and more was revealed.  Unfortunately, the story of the final five cylons from Battlestar Galactica can't be plotted together without some help from the show to piece that together.

After seeing this I am left wanting more. This will definitely be a series that will be on my DVR and I'll be first in line to get the DVD Season when released.  You'll definitely need to be familiar with the Battlestar series before seeing this as there are alot of events that tie together.  If you are coming into this cold I think it can stand on it's own but you won't enjoy it as much. Ron Moore is a genius when it comes to science fiction, he has a great knack for relating the sci fi world to reality.  He did it masterfully in Battlestar and he does it here is Caprica.

Some of the DVD extras explain the shooting style of the show.  It's shot completely different then Battlestar was shot.  Battlestar was shot with shoulder cameras to give that in your face chaotic feel that you were right there with them.  Caprica is shot on rolling carts and has the feel that everything is peaceful and calm because we are seeing Caprica during a peaceful time.

If you are a fan of Battlestar Galactica then I highly recommend that you see Caprica.  If you haven't seen Battlestar Galactica or haven't yet finished the series yet (what are you waiting for?) Caprica is a prequel and won't ruin the ending of Battlestar for you,  but I would at least have watched the miniseries before starting on Caprica.  

Kids can do amazing things with Social Networks

Last night my 14 year old asks me in if we can make a web site.  For what, I ask.  For his XBox 360 gaming clan.  Oh, hmm.  Well I am not going to make one from scratch for you, I tell him.

I give it a little thought.  And I suggest to him that he can make a site on Ning.  But he has to figure it out on his own.  He says ok.  I give him the address.

After he asks a few questions of me that I refuse to answer he has a site up in a matter of 10 minutes.  He continued tinkering with it last night and I checked it this morning.  I was somewhat blown away with what he came up with.

I know it's probably just themes and such but I am still pretty impressed with what he was able to come up with in a couple of hours last night.  I will be supervision him (if he knows it or not, although after his incident on MySpace I am sure he now knows that everything he does under our roof is monitored) as he runs this site on his own.  Should be a good learning experience for him.

Here's the site if you'd like to see it.

What Was Apple Thinking?

This morning Apple released the third generation iPod Shuffle.

I own a second generation shuffle and when I saw the third generation I immediately thought it was a step back for Apple. Here is what I don't like about the third-gen:

1. You now need a headset with the remote control function on the cord.  The standard set from Apple is $29.99 to replace if you lose them.  They are also ear buds.  I dumped ear buds a lot time ago due always having to shove them back in and the eventually hurt your ears.  There is no easy choice for the consumer in which headset 
2. Still no display.  They try to solve this by adding a voice to tell you what you're listening to when you want to know (Clicking and holding the center button).  I would assume this would be somewhat annoying and not 100% accurate.  
3. In my opinion, and this is probably a matter of personal taste then anything else.  I think the design is ugly and clumsy.  If you think of what the new shuffle will look like on a person listening to music it'll look clumsy.  Headphones that go to a small faceless block that has no interface.
   
4. Finally, the usability of the device is pretty bad.  My parents bought a shuffle for Christmas and they wouldn't touch it until I showed them how to use it.  I can't imagine trying to show them how to use this version.  Looking at the documentation online it looks like a nightmare. Double-click and hold to fast forward, Triple-click and hold to rewind? How is anyone going to remember that?  More importantly how are you going to know if you clicked it two times or three as it's be hard to figure out when the sound is skipping by.  Here's an interesting comment from Ernie Bello :

    
So how could have Apple made this work?  I'd like to see one set of headphones with the iPod integrated into the frame of the headphones.  Sort of like the Monster iFreePlay Headphones for the Second Generation iPod:

The Future of Programming Languages is Now

As I was commuting home from work tonight I was listening to StackOverflow #44 where Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky were discussing how the future of programming languages will gradually get smaller and more precise in their function. Jeff explains:

That statement resonated with me for a little while and I got to thinking the future of languages that Jeff perceives is already here.  Let me share what I mean from my experiences in programming during my career.

Let's first take a step back and look at programming languages back when I first started in 1996.  For me there was HTML and that was it.  For me PHP really hadn't taken off, classic ASP was just coming out and so everything was HTML even the formatting was done within the HTML *shudder*.

Move a head some to 1999 and I got into Classic ASP.  Still a language that was self contained.  You could hook it up to a database either Access or SQL Server being the popular choices but SQL statements were done inline in the spaghetti code mess.  In one ASP file you had the dynamic code the presentation and the data integration.

Let's move now to 2003, ASP.NET 1.0 is prevalant.  SQL Server 2000 is out and you could now separate your data integration into stored procedures with T-SQL on your SQL Server.  You would use ASP.NET to separate your busniess logic and your presentation.  CSS was making headway as the way to separate your presentation code from your markup code. 

In 2006 I feel is the start of segmenting ASP.NET out further.  Why? jQuery was released to the world.  And as the world grew more and more used to working with jQuery we were able to hand off some of the tasks that ASP.NET would of handled dynamically, like form validation, DOM manipulation and page interactions.  So we now have CSS to handle presentation, jQuery to handle DOM manipulation, ASP.NET to handle business logic, HTML to handle page structure and finally T-SQL to handle data manipulation and retrival. 

Seems to me that we've made it to the future.  I would hate becoming a web developer today.  You need to learn at least 5 languages to be able to create a respectable web page.  It's also my experience that colleges aren't teaching students all these languages.  They either learn them on their own or they learn on the job. 

Look at what Microsoft is doing to ASP.NET.  .NET 2.0 is the core which then 3.0 and 3.5 are loaded on top.  These versions of .NET include smaller subsets of the language that you may or may not use WFS, Silverlight, WCF, MVC, Dynamic Data, etc.  The burden on the programmer to keep up is ridiculous.

The question I have, does the future continue to segment languages even further as Jeff predicts or will there be a time where we start merging languages together and come back to one super language? When does the segmentation of languages start to hinder us instead of help us?

Promotional Video of BarCamp Buffalo

And I am in it.  Video was done by WNYMedia and was very well done.

This clip sums up my second job

Wired tries to link bait me into "confirming" my "recent order"

Last year I purchased a subscription to Wired.  I decided to let it lapse.  I paid for it on a credit card that is not active anymore so just letting them stew on it and not replying was the easiest way for me to cancel.

Well this morning I get this alarming and frustrating email from Wired regarding my "recent" order with them.  I should "confirm" and "pay" my invoice.

To me this is sleezy and immoral.  It took me by surprise when I first read this in my inbox.  It's written to deceive and get you to think the order is already processed and that I am required to pay the bill.  I have not placed any order!

I will not be renewing and I urge others not to subscribe to Wired as well.

CPU statistics on yesterday's post

I got a little help promoting yesterday's blog post from the jQuery team.  I knew that a wave of users was coming so I let my host provider know and they gave me an extra CPU for the morning (VMWare rules).  They also sent over the CPU graph for the day.  I found it interesting.

The first spike was when John Resig posted a link on twitter for me. The second biggest spike was when Rey Bango retweeted John's tweet.

Improving my Personal Brand

Today, I took the step to improve my personal brand on my blog.  I bought the domain ralphwhitbeck.com and am pointing damnralph.com to it.

Damn Ralph has always been an inside joke for my coworkers and when I went to start a new blog I thought it would be fun to set it up.

Now that I am trying to focus my blog on more professional topics I felt more and more weird posting a link to my blog or telling people the url to my blog.  Not to mention when Robert Scoble linked to a post on the 3rd day the blog existed.

With my name as my blog url I can improve search engine results on my name, it looks more professional when I give out the url and when people stumble onto my site I look more legit.

If you are subscribed to my feed you probably got the last 10 posts again and I apologies for the inconvenience. That was caused by the DNS change.

Let me know what you think of the change?

SuperBowl Sushi 2009

As what has become a SuperBowl tradition in my circle of friends I usually bring sushi to the party.  Starting last year though I started making my own sushi instead of ordering a tray and bringing it.

This year I did the same.  Although the economy being bad I limited my selection to what I could make on the cheap.  That meant Crab sticks and imitation crab meat.

This yeah I made:

• California Roll (4 rolls)
• Classic California Roll (4 rolls)
• Avacado Roll (2 rolls)

Here are some pictures of the fun...



The setting to make the delicious sushi.



The rice all smushed out on the nori with seaseme seeds sprinkled on top.



A simple crab salad mix that makes the classic california roll.



A completed roll.  Looks almost perfect.



The completed sushi tray with football shaped wasabi in the middle.

Apple comments on "netbooks"

In their Quarterly financial conference call today:

Cook also continued to downplay Apple's interest in the "netbook" market:

We're watching that space, but from our [point of view] the products are based on hardware that's much less powerful, software technology that's not good, cramped displays. We don't think that people are going to be pleased with those type of products. It's a category we watch, we have some ideas here, but we think the products there now are inferior and won't provide the kind of experience people want.

They obviously aren't paying much attention to the demand of it's customers.  If I had the money to buy a new machine I would of bought a Samsung NC10 right after MacWorld due to the nonannouncement of a netbook at MacWorld.

Netbooks are cheap and trending.  Recession proof in my opinion.

Update: John Gruber lays into Brian Chen for noticing the same thing as I.  What I think John does not understand is that the more Apple waits and sees the more money they are losing.  In my head, I don't have the confidence that they can pull something out now.  Any netbook that comes out in the future may not have the Steve Jobs stamp of approval.  At this point, it might be a year or more until we see a release of a netbook product from Apple. 

Apple played the wait and see game back when customers were demanding an iPod with video.  Apple's statement then was, we aren't going to make a video iPod, customers don't want to watch video on a little screen.  But a year later they released their first iPod video.  And they were right we didn't want to watch video on a little screen.  It took a couple more years for them to get it right and come out with the iPod Touch. 

Frankly, I am not going to wait and see if Apple is going to come out with a netbook the market is too saturated with netbooks. 

Light at the End of the Tunnel

I've had my head down and focused on this project at work since April/May.  I've been working long hours and most weekends throughout the summer.  This project has had it's ups and downs.

For instance, I am managing three other programmers right now who are all smarter then me and can focus on one thing at a time and crank out great code.  I am also coordinating with two other designers to put together the final details that are needed in the design and to be able to deliver photoshop templates for the client to use to make content assets in the future.  Finally, I am working with a outside vendor to coordinate the set up of the hardware the virtual server environment and the installed code base and database for the four sites we are migrating.  Again, people that are way smarter then I to handle these tasks are making these taks more manageable.

That is the ups.  The downs?  Well I hit burn out back in July.  I am on auto-pilot here. It's taking me a little longer to make decisions for people and don't even get me started on how long it takes me to program a simple template or control.  Again, one of the major ups is that I have three great programmers that can focus.  Right now my mind is mush.

I feel that the project is coming together nicely.  We need to have the programming part done by October 1st and have it installed on the hardware then.  Right now it's worrying about the details, testing the data port from the old schema and 2000 database to the new schema and the 2005 database, again another smart programmer worked part-time throughout the summer to build us the most complex SQL package I every seen to be able to port the data to our new database.

As we are getting towards the end I keep thinking about the vacation time I haven't used yet.  I can't wait to be able to take them.  I am also excited to start another project.  It's been so long since I last worked on another project it'll be nice.

Any tips on how to survive long projects that are actually short on deadline deliverables?  What about burn-out?  Any tips for pushing through till a vacation can be had?

Tradition: Superbowl Sushi

SuperBowl, for me, is one of the biggest nights of the year for sushi. For the past 10 years or so I usually buy a tray of sushi for SuperBowl and bring it to whoever is hosting.  I usually educate people about sushi and get people who are normally afraid of sushi to try it when it's free for them.

This year though I made my own sushi.  I made five different types of rolls.  A Crab Salad roll (sometimes called classic California Roll), California Roll, a Italian Roll (Pesto, Spinach, Portabello mushrooms and Salmon [raw]), Philadelphia Roll and my famous SuperBowl Roll (Chicken Wing meat and Blue Cheese).

In total, I made 21 rolls in two and a half hours, that's 168 pieces.  Needless to say it turned out awesome.



Notice how I made the Wasabi to look like a football it even had the rice laces. I even bought a wooden tray that had a football field painted on the bottom.

I really had fun with this, even though it was a lot of work. The reaction I got though was well worth the trouble.

Hope you enjoy!

Observations of MacWorld Blogging

Today was the keynote address at MacWorld 2008.  I observed quite a few things this year that didn't happen in years past.

For instance this year seemed like everyone was live blogging the event. From Fake Steve to Valleywag to the normal web information outlets for MacWorld Keynotes: Engadget, MacRumors and Gizmodo.

But it seemed the first timers didn't have much luck with keeping their servers up.  Fake Steve was using a third party web app to stream the live blogging directly to his blog.  Unfortunately the app crashed almost as soon as the keynote started.

Fake Steve then went to the back up plan of using Twitter. Valleywag had also planned on live blogging via Twitter.  MacRumorsLive had planned on also posting it's updates to twitter as well as on their website and IRC channel.

Ok so with these big names live blogging on Twitter as well as countless others at the keynote and with millions of people trying to refresh to get the latest from twitter on what was happening....well let's just say Twitter buckled.  It went down hard for at least an hour. Even now they are rate limiting the API calls to less then the normal 70 an hour to try to take the pressure off.

With all the live blogging, I found a few who tried to stream video from the Keynote. We watched this stream until someone asked the guy to lower his Camera/phone.  The picture was crappy and the sound quality wasn't the greatest but at least you could sort of make out what was going on and related back to the MacRumorsLive notes.  We observed at the peak the stream had over 9000 concurrent viewers.  The most surprising thing heard in that stream?  A baby crying in the audience, seriously who brings a baby to an event like this?

I heard iJustine tried to Stream as well.  Seems like she suffered the same fate as above.

But that brings me to my next point live video streaming seemed to be big during CES but it was really noticable today.  I caught Scoble recording most of this evening with his Nokia N95.  Here he is with Leo Laporte at MacWorld.  Here Scoble interviews Qik founder when a Video streaming orgy breaks out by four different people one being iJustine.


So who had the best info this year. Engadget had the best write ups but their server were starting to buckle from people constantly reloading.  Their page took forever to come back up.  MacRumorsLive had an awesome AJAX solution that didn't require you to do anything photos and updates "magically" appeared on your screen when updates occured.  In my opinion MacRumorsLive won the bragging rights.

It's fun to see how the new technology made today a much more interesting event to watch from a far.  It was also fun to see how the old technology players struggled as they are the now go to outlets for this event.

Either way with everyone sharing information it makes it easy for everyone to experience the keynote as closely as they do.  Thanks to you all for your hard work.

A look at my most popular posts of 2007

I switched the focus on my blog to be more informational about problems I solved and to help others find that information a little easier because of my high ranking in Google.

Here are the top five posts from 2007:

1. Case sensitivity, SVN and Windows is a recipe for disaster - this was a problem I encountered while working with Subversion and a repository on a linux server and that had created two versions of the same file but with different cases.  My client tools would error because it didn't know which file to grab.
2. Uninstalling Cisco VPN client kills internet access - This was a huge problem I encountered when I uninstalled my VPN client on my laptop.  After trying all weekend and letting the System Admins at work look at it and give up I finally found a solution hidden in a forum buried way low on the page.  This was one of those problems I really wanted to bring the solution to the forefront for other users as fast as possible.  In October something must of happened and I started to get really heavy traffic for this page from search engines.  Every comment I get from someone I helped with this solution brings a smile to my face.
3. Pulling twitter updates with JSON and jQuery - I posted the code to my solution to pulling in Twitter updates via JSON and jQuery.  I use this code on the right to display my last three Twitter updates.  I like using Twitter and have limited the number of posts on my blog in favor of just posting my personal tid bits to twitter and letting them display that way and leaving more of the professional posts to the blog.
4. Sushi Nirvana - This post details my starting out with making sushi.
5. Monroe County to get Wireless Internet - This was a post to shed light on the news about a wireless internet network in the city.  I was able to connect to the network in November on a flight I took to NYC.  Unfortunately you need to be a Frontier telephone customer to connect, which I am not (Vonage) or you need to pay the daily fee to get access.  I opted for the free airport wifi instead.

So there is a look at the most popular story pages from the year.

DamnRalph gets a face lift

I've been working on a new design now for a couple of weeks and I finally got it to where I am really happy with the design.  I wanted to go for a simplified look and get rid of the big boxy feel of my previous design.

I spent alot of time writing some awesome jQuery to get the site to be a little interactive and to output the HTML exactly the way I wanted it.

I am using three plug-ins:

• FX Shadow plugin - I grabbed this right from the respository as they fixed the bug that would of hindered my use of the plugin.. click on Contact or Subscribe or any of the Blog Posts by links to see the shadow plugin in use.
• Rounded Corners - used them for the areas on the right.
• Chili - Chili is a automatic code syntax highlighter.

example:

<html> <head>  <title>test</title> </head> <body>    Hello World! </body> </html>



Anyway, let me know what you think.  I only have one more planned feature and that is to pull in my latest twitter update and display it using AJAX.  Just need to figure that out.

Update on my jQuery bug

Last month I posted about my problems with the jQuery UI shadow plugin where it wasn't working with absolute positioned divs.

I was looking at the Development jQuery UI forum this morning and came across this post by Brandon Aaron detailing how he cleaned up the shadow plugin.

I politely mentioned my bug I submitted and he politely told me that the latest version in SVN will now solve my problem.

And it does:

Yay, open source!

Interesting fact, when they release the next version there will now be a UI branch and a FX branch. Shadow was moved and will be in the FX branch.

Ze Frank

Not sure if you know who Ze Frank is but he is a pretty big internet celebrity (at least in my eyes) ... recently doing a year of video podcasts called the Show with Ze Frank.

http://www.zefrank.com

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow

Well anyways he was giving a speech at Rochester Institute of Technology tonight and I have been planning on attending since last month.

He's spoken at many TED Talks the one in 2003 is posted on Google Video and he actually gave a similar talk for part of his talk tonight.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1895918195820925057

As I was walking into the building he was walking out to which I introduced myself, shook his hand...really cool.

After the talk I went down and got into a discussion about online communities and how communities take off into the direction of their choosing ... all very interesting.

But I think what struck me the most was how approachable he was and easy to talk to.  I am sure he is quite used to it by now but I found that he was very easy to talk to and to ask questions.

Extra Night Charges

    I opened up my e-mail the same way I do every morning, after opening my web browser, FireFox being my preference, I navigated to GMail. One e-mail in particular caught my attention immediately. It was titled “Redbox receipt for Extra Night Charges.” Huh? I haven't rented a movie from Redbox in over a week and I definitely didn't return one today.

    Redbox is a fairly new DVD rental vending machine. They are usually found at the front of grocery stores or McDonalds and the rentals only cost $1 a night. Our family recently tried it and we were hooked. You can go on line and see what's available before you even go to the store and you can even reserve the movie you want so that it's guaranteed that it'll be there when you arrive.

    Just to demonstrate how awesome they are last month we were in Albany for my cousins wedding. We spent the night and we were over at my grandmothers house in the morning before we left to go home. My parents were also there. They offered to take the boys with them and drop them off at our house on their way home, since they have to drive past it anyways to get home. The benefit to the boys for going with my parents is that they could watch movies on the flip down 5 inch flat screen and DVD player that came with the Chevy Venture.

    My mom before officially offering to take them, expressed the desire for some DVD movies for the boys to watch in the van. I immediately asked, “Is there a Redbox around?” Because we can rent the DVD's in Albany drive to Rochester and take them back to any Redbox location. I had my laptop in the truck of the car, I went and grabbed it, hooked it up to the router in my cousins room and navigated to Redbox.com and did a search for the closest vending location. I found two within five miles and my wife and I were off to go rent them some movies, frankly, we weren't giving up a peaceful ride home for anything.

    I opened the e-mail and was taken aback at the cost. $24.00 plus the $1 on the initial night. I was being charged full price for a movie. But which one? And Why? I quickly scan the e-mail, “Letters From Iwo Jima,” but I haven't seen that movie in almost a month, July 2^nd to be exact. And I know it was returned. Then it hit me. That was the movie that we couldn't find the case for.

    We had rented about three movies that night, couple of the movies were for the boys. Unfortunately, Ralphie the youngest “misplaced” the case for “Letters from Iwo Jima.” Of course I was getting really irritated looking through the house for the case and coming up empty. I mean where could a case just disappear too anyways? Apparently, in the basement is the answer cause we wound up finding it a few days later.

    I hopped back on Redbox's website and went to the FAQ section and found their instructions on how to return a movie if you lost a case. Basically, you need to call Customer Service. I had my wife call, I hate talking to customer service, she does too, but at least she'll do it, I'll just procrastinate. They tell her that we need to send the DVD in a padded envelop to an address that they e-mailed and that they would refund our money based on the postdate on the envelop. No problem we went over to the post office and dropped it in the mail.

    So why the e-mail today? Again, I have my wife call customer service. They tell her that they never received the envelop and that's why we were charged full price. Ugh! So not only did we get charged full price but now we are out the postage fee and the DVD itself as now we “own” it.

    Luckily my wife insured the package with the post office for $25. I wonder what kind of hassle that's going to be to try and get that honored?

Update: I just received an e-mail from Redbox stating a refund of $25.93.  Either they just found the DVD or customer service didn't know where to look for the DVD.  Either way I am glad that this has been resolved on a positive note.

Brakes and Rotors

My brakes started grinding this week so I needed to get that fixed...I bought the parts Brake pads and rotors and went over to my cousins house and he helped my put them on....I swear to god it was so easy...I am going to do it myself next time.

I found instructions online for my type of brakes so I can do it next time.

http://www.2carpros.com/how_to/how_to_replace_brakes.htm

tools I'll need to get the job done:

14 mm socket
18 mm socket
C-Clamp
Mallet or hammer (in case the bolts are tight)
Jack
Brake pads
Rotors (if worn)

Pictures from Lilac Festival 2007

Click here for more.

Monroe County to get Wireless Internet

This is exciting although details are light, it's just exciting that we are talking about it here in our home county.  Maggy Brooks announced last night during her State of the County address that there was a partnership with Frontier to provide a wireless network for the county.

That is why I am pleased to announce that Monroe County is working with Frontier to develop a wireless internet network that will serve significant portions of Greece, Pittsford and the City of Rochester…as well as portions of the surrounding towns by the end of the year.

In addition, Frontier has also agreed to develop free wireless internet zones within this network…a critical step in our County’s efforts to bridge the digital divide.

We anticipate this wireless network will continue to expand throughout other parts of the County...and eventually become a full-scale, wireless network to serve all County residents.

Our new partnership with Frontier is a win for our taxpayers, and a win for our community. The new network will be created at no cost to taxpayers, and will soon allow our community to reap the benefits of wireless access to the information superhighway.

The loss of Jim Gray is Amazon's gain

Last weekend we learned of the disappearance of Jim Gray, a well respected database architect for Microsoft.  The news was taken pretty hard around the blogosphere.  We learned that the Coast Guard called off the search on Thursday.

I am not sure who took the satellite imagery but satellite imagery was uploaded to Amazon's Mechanical Turk for it's member to analyze.  This was/is an absolutely great idea.  Let the community that cares poor over the imagery and help in the search.

My wife and I spent and hour on Saturday going through about a hundred or so images...we flagged about a dozen or so as needs further review.  I spent another half an hour going through another few dozen last night.

But each time I went I also looked at some of the other paying Turks.  Then I got to wondering how much of Amazon's generousity of hosting and using Mechanical Turk was for the moral good and how much of it was a easy way to get some easy viral marketing of their system again.  Cause let's be honest Mechanical Turk hasn't been talked about much since it came out a couple of years ago.  But since they started this Mechanical Turk links are all I see on everyone's blog.

I know I probably sound morbid in bringing this up, but my curiosity got the better of me and I want to know how much of this is marketing and how much of it is pure heart felt generosity.

I don't think any less of Amazon, I actually have more respect for them for stepping up to the plate and helping out.  But I am sure at the end of the day their return for helping out was worth all the trouble.  But in the end maybe, just maybe the real good will be we find Jim alive and well on adrift boat out at sea.

What are your thoughts?

Anyone want Chicken Wing Sushi for Super Bowl?

Allison over at SushiDay took my suggestion for a chicken wing roll, that I made once last month, and ran with it and made her own for a post on her site.   Wow they look good.

I had originally tried this roll one day when my mom had bought pizza and wings for the boys and I was getting tired of the same old crab and salmon rolls I was making that day. 

I took a medium wing and some blue cheese and rolled them together.

I was totally surprised at how good it tasted.

I eventually suggested it to Allison on one of her other fine Sushi posts and she loved the idea and asked me if she could use it in an upcoming post. 

Makes total sense that she posted it today.  Instead of ordering pizza and wings tonight I am making sushi tonight.  Although I am not making the chicken wing roll I am planning on buying some Tuna, Salmon, Crab and Shrimp for a Smorgus borg of sushi nirvana.

St. John's Signage Case study

In my late night Google searching tonight I found a case study from ASI-Modulex the sign makers that we worked with a few years ago when we rebranded St. John's Universities interior and exterior wayfinding signs around campus.

"In partnership with BrandLogic, hundreds of directional decision points were identified across the two campuses then analyzed to create a wayfinding solution that improved the efficiency of the campus navigation."

I can only imagine the organization and planning that was needed to figure out the need, requirements and the plan to replace every single sign on campus.  If you walk onto the campus you'll see what a momentous task this was.

“ASI-Modulex worked successfully with BrandLogic to implement the new logo design and wayfinding analysis for St. John’s University.”
Wynn Medinger
CEO, Creative Director
BrandLogic

In the end I think I only helped out by creating a Word template that was used by the Staff and Faculty to create their name plate for a slide in sign next to their door. Meaning they would use the Word template to print their name and title and the template would control the placement and font treatment. I thought this was it at first but this is a more permanent sign. Next time I go up to St. John's (possibly next month) I'll see if I can spot one of those name plate signs.

You can see BrandLogic's case study of the signs here.  The mention of the signs is on the last slide and is part of the overall rebranding that we provided.

Redesigned BrandLogic.com Launches

We've spent quite sometime recently getting BrandLogic.com ported over to our BrandEnsemble product.  It's pretty exciting to actually have our website using our product.  Before we did it in JSP because it was a great selling feature for some companies that we were multi talented (which we are by the way). 

I think though that we were never really proud of our site before.  But now, I think this is the best version of our website, and we are really proud of going live with it.

It runs on ASP.NET 1.1 and SQL Server 2000.  It runs on our BrandLogic BrandEnsemble Content Management System. 

Here are some screen shots of the site (click to enlarge).

  

And some of our admin tools which our CEO states are "the best admin tools I have ever seen."

     

These shots show how our pages can be edited inline so you get a feel for what the page will look like before you're ready to publish, version control history of a page with the ability to revert a page back to a previous version and how a typical view of a group (our terminology of a directory) looks within the system.

BrandEnsemble has been used in many of our clients sites as well:

• St. John's University (Case study)
• Red Storm Sports (St. John's Athletics Web site)
• Image Manager (Case study)
  
• CareerSpace (Case study)
• Rockwell Collins (Intranet Brand Identity site)
• Bausch & Lomb (Intranet Brand Identity site)
• Texaco (Intranet Brand Identity site)
• Wyeth (Intranet Brand Identity site)

Of course BrandEnsemble is only a piece of the overall branding puzzle that BrandLogic services offer to clients.  BrandEnsemble is what I am close to as I have contributed to it's development over these past eight years.

Here are some of BrandLogics other services we offer:

• Brand Strategy/Research
• Brand Design
• Brand Implementation
• Brand Management

And who we did it for.

Feel free to contact BrandLogic for your branding needs.

I am a FAILURE!!!!

This was overheard at my house:

"Mommy? How do you spell disney for disney.com?", asks the middle child.

"It's in the favorites."

"Your favorites?"

"Yes, click off of that and click the E one, the regular internet."

A little piece inside of me died.

What does the future hold?

Where is the future heading with web programming/technologies?  I have considered myself Microsoft programmer since I graduated college.  I learned Classic ASP on the job, eventually I learned ASP.NET with VB.NET first then realized the power of C#.  I love C# I really do.  It makes programming a complex web site simple and straight forward.

We at BrandLogic would of never been able to program a complete CMS system for St. John's University in 3 weeks if it had not been for the robust framework that .NET offers.  Hell I am still to this day maintaining that code.

We've taken that code base and improved upon it and created the BrandEnsemble suite out of it.  Many clients are enjoying the benefits of the ease of programming C# provided us to be able to make a robust versioned CMS system.

So why do I feel uneasy?  Why do I feel like I am going down the wrong path?

It might be because ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio.NET 2005 doesn't excite me like VS.NET 2003 did.  It doesn't excite me like the promise of what Ruby on Rails can provide.

But I think the most important part is it doesn't wow me in the wallet.  As a freelance web developer paying $1000 for a copy of Visual Studio.NET is a huge chunk of my annual freelance salary.  So upgrading to the next release isn't on the top of my lists of things to do right away.  Plus there is the cost of SQL Server, Windows, etc. etc. Basically I need a MSDN subscription.  What are they up to now?  $3000?  I stopped caring, I guess, the last time I looked at the new MSDN offerings and I thought I needed a lawyer to explain it to me.

So that brings me back to my original question: Where is the future?  Lately, I have been seriously thinking that the future, as is the present, is in open source software and the technologies that support it, programming languages like PHP and Ruby on Rails (there is a reason why they are so popular now).  If you own a PC (and if you don't save a paycheck and go out and get a barebones computer) everything else is free, free as in beer. 

So you got an idea for a cool web site? Get a computer, download a linux distro for your operating system, install the packages you need, get programming IDE's for PHP or Ruby free off of sites like SourceForge.  Get a Enterprise level database like MySql or Postgres free again by downloading it off the internet.  Download TheGimp for image processing.  Bam! You're up and running on the simple cost of the hardware.  And best of all your legal too!  Plus there is a community of starving programmer that are on the web willing to help you out.

But PHP is Old

Yeah, PHP has been around a long long time, but it's robust and again it's free.  And as I've highlighted before, Chris Prillio nailed it on the head once when he was stating the reasons why he was using PHP on his CMS Publishing project: PHP is prevailant on most if not all hosts that are out there right now.  So make a PHP site and chances are the majority of webmasters can install your software on their site.   Try to do that with an ASP.NET site with a SQL Server 2000 backend.

If you look around Silicon Valley now most Web 2.0 companies are using LAMP  (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) partly due to the low cost in a market where the revenue stream is still up in the air for most.  But they need the appeal of the masses to get the word out.

Scoble said something tonight that got me to write this post tonight, even though I been thinking it for the past couple of weeks.  He said, "LAMP is sure getting traction — I’ve stopped asking entrepreneurs what infrastructure they are using since the answer was so consistently LAMP."

A couple of days ago I saw a sponsor on TechCrunch post job listings for web developers/designers and it got me thinking if I all of a sudden found myself out in the mix again fighting for a job, I think my resume would fall to the bottom of the pile for most places that I think I would find fun to work at (although I have a family, which means the fun places are too risky for me).  My resume is very impressive I think.  My strengths are meeting the needs of our clients in a productive and efficient manner, providing the best customer service and experience with our clients, maintaining a long lasting and trusting relationship with our clients (in the 8 years I've worked at BrandLogic I can probably count the number of clients I've worked with on my one hand, not because we don't get clients but because I help maintain the longest lasting clients.  Which I think is a testiment of the quality of service I as well as the rest of the team provide.)  And last but not least are my Microsoft skills.  Which in my opinion is a technology that is becoming more and more obsolete.

I guess I'll add a new resolution to the New Year.  Learn Web 2.0 technologies!

Don't be offended now but he plays with himself

This is just pure genius...I laughed the whole way through it.


(RSS Readers: click through to watch video)

My Laptop is now up and running and FULLY charged

The power brick I ordered off eBay came in today and when I plugged it in my laptop started charging. 

Nice!

My Laptop is out of Commision

So Saturday I am on my laptop and it's plugged in and all of a sudden it goes into Hibernate mode.  Turns out the battery died.  But I was plugged in.  I double checked the connections and yes they were all plugged in.  I tried another plug.  Nothing.

I assume (i.e. hope) that the power brick is bad.  I look up online how much it is from HP. $79.99.  I can't get a universal cause my laptop needs 120W where most universals are only 90W.

So I resign to ordering it off HP.com.

Then Larry asks me if I checked eBay.  No!  Sure enough I can get them off eBay for $32.  Larry places the order for me since I don't have money in my paypal account.  Now I just pray that this will fix my problem.

I think it will there is a little green light on the brick usually when it's plugged in and it's not on anymore.

Of course today is MLK day and no postal runs today.  So tack on another day of waiting. :(

I'll keep you updated when it comes in.

By the way I had to get my old clunky desktop up-to-date that my kids use.   Talk about a mess.  242 spyware items found.  Pop-ups flying open all the time.  After running a scan, cleaning everything off and updating my open source software I was back on track. 

That's the beauty of open source software and GMail is that I can basically get set up on another computer pretty easily.

Rush-Henrietta's Sherman Elementary Talks with ISS Crew

On January 8th Rush-Henrietta's Sherman Elementary contacted the ISS at 9:35 am with a HAM radio operated by the Amatuer Radio club at RIT and was able to talk for 9 minutes, the window when the Space Station was directly overhead.

I came into work that morning and tuned into NASATV thinking it would be broadcast live but found they were replaying chat's with other school's from previous days.

Today I found that RIT's University News posted a recorded version on their Podcast.  I found it very interesting.

You can listen to it here

MacWorld Keynote HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT for me

Sorry but I knew going into it that a iPhone no matter how awesome just wouldn't be up my ally.  I was watching for the sole intent of awaiting the news of a new iPod Video that played widescreen.

I feel that we are step closer as the iPhone plays video widescreen.  But the drawbacks are it's integrated with the phone, it only has 8GB tops for storage space and it's $500 starting price with two year contract with Cingular (an AT&T company whom which I'll never do business again).

I'll admit though the phone features are nice...but I am not interested.  In Rochester, NY we are not that dependant on mobile technologies.  I don't depend on a mobile phone 98% of the time.  I live by e-mail and IM and I am always close to it.

For me the thrill of having a Widescreen iPod video was intense.  After getting a Shuffle for Christmas I was getting even more excited to get a full iPod so I can watch my video podcasts and shows.  MacRumorsLive.com totally set me up for a depressing day by literally saying in one line "Widescreen iPod".  I flipped out.  Then I learned later that it was integrated into the phone.  Total let down.

Paul Thurrot bashed Apple for not even mentioning the Macs or Leopard. He said "Why not call it iPodWorld?"

I agree Paul especially with no new iPod announcement, heh. 

But what is with the totally irrelavent Microsoft digs.  One being a three year old quote from Paul Alchine about how he would buy a mac...but failed to stated the context it was in.  It was an e-mail to Steve Balmer and Bill Gates about how they needed to go in a new direction in Vista because they weren't being innovative enough.  They listened and started rebuilding Vista from the ground up.

Also, what was the deal with the graphic of how the sales of Zune were doing?  Just to rub it in.  Then I wonder were Apple fanboys get the pretentious attitudes from.  They have a great role model.

On a final note Apple annouced Apple TV, basically a dumb terminal to your iTunes collection so that you can STREAM it to your TV.  $299. Eh...uninspired...I'll get an Xbox 360 that similarly does all that and is coming out with IPTV.

My Opinions of CES Keynote 2007

Just finished watching the CES keynote...this was what was covered.

• Couple of cool Vista features shown.
• Animated Desktops...so instead of pictures for a desktop you can have movies.
• Version control of files just like Time Machine
• Play XBox Live games on Vista
• IPTV to be integrated into Xbox (Holiday's 2007) - the guy that showed it did a terrible job explaining anything about it.
• They showed Windows Home Server but blackout the broadcast for it for some reason.
• Partnership with Ford to integrate Microsoft Auto to sync with your phone, media device including iPods to seemlessly work in your Ford car (12 models this year)

My overall impressions of the keynote was eh...I was excited to see and hear about IPTV but like I said they did a terrible job explaining anything about it and there are more questions now then before the start of the keynote.

The Vista features were cool but nothing to get me to go out and buy Vista...I'll stick with XP for a while.

The funniest quote was from some guy claiming that Zune was the number 2 portable music player...I almost lost it. I just read an article this weekend that said they weren't in the top 10.

There was a Halo 3 Cinematic that looked awesome and I think that will be the driving force for me to purchase a 360 this summer. But that's only if the Widescreen iPod doesn't cost a second mortgage when announced on Tuesday.

Lastly, they showed off an HP TouchSmart PC which looks awesome.  HP is coming out with some nice looking products.  Which in my opinion look better then Apple's designs.

Related Links

Paul Thurotts Behind the scenes review

End of Week 1: Resolutions Update

Well here we are at the end of week one of my resolutions that I set for myself.  Just wanted to update where I am at, how I am doing to keep me honest.

I have heard from you that you thought that putting my resolutions on my blog was a great idea.  Even though my personal finances might be scary to talk about openly, I agree. But I feel if I don't publish how I am doing I might get lazy and stop doing it.  So blogging about will keep me motivated to push forward.

Lets start with my Personal Finance Goals:

My wife and I sat down today and planned out our bills and budget for the next paycheck.  It's tight but my wife was able to work out a temporary reduced payment to the mortgage company so that will help out.  Again this is a first step and as I kept telling my wife this is just a plan...things might not happen the way we plan but we should be able to adjust easily to things as we move forward and refine out budget for next payday.

We have a couple of issues to work out though. One being figuring out why we don't get paid on the weekends when payday falls on a weekend or holiday.  Our account was majorly screwed up on Christmas because my pay didn't come in until the 27th.  Every other year it's in the account on the 23rd.  We already talked to the bank and they say there must be a problem with our payment processing center.  So I need to follow up on that.

As for the emergency fund goal of $1000, I found I have $140 in an account I haven't been watching very closely so that is becoming our new emergency fund account.  Bonus is that I found it pays off a good interest every month and quarter.  I have this feeling though we might need to touch that money this pay period so not all good news but at least we have a little something to fall back on if needed.

As for figuring out my debt, I feel at this time we should focus on getting our bills paid on time and get a solid and sound budget under us before we start allocating money to debt.  Also I've read that you need to set up an emergency account first before really starting to tackle debt. So that's the plan.

Now let's get updated on my personal goals:

As for my losing weight resolution I've been trying to watch my portions when I eat and I think I've been doing a decent job.  Plus I've limited my eating to just during meals and have cut out the snacks as much as possible.  The hard times for me is late at night when it's been 6-8 hours after dinner and you get the hunger pains.  That's when will power is nonexistent and we make the fourth meal (as Taco Bell calls it).  I know for a fact that that is the meal that does the damage and is the meal that I need to cut.

But this afternoon I took a walk around the blocks (see graphic to the right).  I loaded up the iPod Shuffle with podcasts and waited till the rain squall went by and then took my walk.  I walked 2.53 miles according to Google Earth and I was gone for about 45 minutes so I averaged about 2MPH. 

It's funny when you're listening to the iPod you can walk so much further and longer then if you were just walking cause you have something occupying your mind with something.

Either way I came home all sweaty and jumped in the shower and felt good about my workout I had.  I'll try and do another walk tomorrow but probably not as far.

I'll still need to figure out my starting weight though so I can track it.  I'll try and find a way to do that tonight.

As for getting my family organized we are working on it.  Alot of progress will be made after the personal finance goals are met and we can budget in some organizational tools, like a filing cabinet for me and one for Hope.  Eventually I'd like to get a safe but I think that a long term goal at this point.

And finally, my last goal was to blog more.  And I feel that I have made some great progress this week with some quality posts.  I hope you are enjoying them.

I just got caught up on my RSS feeds

Took me most of the day, quite literally.  I started about midnight last night and spent a good 2 hours just reading items in Google Reader.  Read through some posts during work today and then spent a good portion this evening going through the rest tonight.

I put the interesting to me posts in my Google Shared Feeds.

I gave up on TechMeme...unsubscribed.  They just have to many posts per day to make it worth my while to read.  I found to that most of it was stuff I already read in Scoble's blog or Tech Crunch or some other blog I have.

Some blogs where just so jammed packed by the time I got back to before Christmas in the feed I hit Mark all as read...I think I did that with Scoble, TechCrunch and Lifehacker.

I got caught up on my Podcasts last week as I was sporting the new iPod Shuffle. 

So hopefully I can keep on top of these things everyday because the worst thing to see is in Google Reader...All Items (100+)

Secure your sites while surfing on the public wifi

Lifehacker had an interesting article about how easy it is to packet sniff in open WiFi hotspots with a free Mac application.  One way to secure your surfing is to use https when you are viewing sites, if it's available.  Certain sites like web e-mail should only be viewed with https when using a wireless hotspot.

I found that GMail is accessible via https. Google Reader and Google Calendar are also accessible although none of the web applications that are linked at the top of GMail go to https so you have to actually type the address back in.

I set up my FireFox bookmarks to go to my Google Apps with https so that way I don't have to think about.

But then I tried for giggles what would happen if I typed in https://www.damnralph.com, you get a completely different site.  I think it's because I am on a shared hosting environment and that maybe the only site that has a secure site on our IP.  Anyone have an explaination as to why/how that would happen?

Related Links

What wifi sniffers can find out about you

My New Years Resolutions

I'll make some resolutions,  I am really going to try and stick to them too.  I'll even keep you all posted on how I am doing.

Here they are in no particular order:

Personal Finance Goals

1. Figure out my debt.
2. Work towards reducing my debt.
3. Pay off my car.
4. Start a savings account and put $1000 in there for emerency funds (this is a phased goal but for now $1000 is hard enough to do)
5. Pay all bills on time.
6. Plan a budget and maintain it.

Personal Goals

1. Lose weight (the last I weighed myself I was getting close to 230 lbs) Goal 200lbs.
2. Keep myself and my family organized (this sounds easier then it is, with five people living under the same roof this is extremely difficult)
3. Blog more, I lead an interesting life (sometimes ;) there has to be somethings that others might find interesting.
   

I've been working today on trying to get myself more organized so I can start tackling the above list.

Sushi Nirvana

I started getting excited about making my own sushi as soon as I started reading Sushi Day, a blog specifically written on how to make your own sushi.  I have been a Sushi eating addict for years.  I asked for a sushi making kit for Christmas and was surprised to receive three...each of which was unique and was worth keeping each one.

So over this past week I perfected making sushi...I think we spent about $50 on ingredients for the week...$50 is about a typical price for one meal at the restaurants and to be able to eat a weeks worth of meals for two at that price was great.

It took us a while to get the rice perfect...I tried twice making it in the pot and finally broke down and we hunted for all the parts to the rice cooker we got two years earlier.  The first time we made it in the rice cooker it was rice nirvana.

Also the first couple of times I tried it I tried to do it on my own from what I read and such.  It came out close to perfect, extremely delicious but yet still not right.  In one of my kits from my mom had a DVD Simply Sushi with Steven Pallett.  It was a short video but the things I learned in the video were priceless...simple tricks like dipping your knife into the bowl of water you use for your hands and letting the bead of water run down the blade of your knife before cutting into your roll was really helpful in making the sushi cut without sticking to your knife and falling apart on you.

We've made our first sushi for friends and they loved it.  

When I go to the store for ingredients we usually get a fillet of salmon without the skin, crab sticks, and shrimp that my wife fries up for some tempura styled shrimp rolls.  We also get wasabi mayo, avocado, cucumber and sesame seeds to sprinkle onto the rice.  

I like to make the inside-out maki rolls on a half sheet of nori.  I have found making hand rolls (coned-shaped maki) extremely fun to make and I like to make one of those to add to the visual presentation of my sushi, which I find to be just as fun as making it (although my wife just whips the rolls together as fast as possible as she says the fun part is eating the rolls and nothing else).

I also like Salmon Nigiri and have found that to be an excellant way of using the rest of the rice you have left when you don't have enough rice left for a roll.  Even though it looks so easy to make there is a technique that is needed to make it look perfect.

I find making sushi is like drinking it's fun but it's not as fun unless you are making it with someone else.  I can't wait to have a sushi party sometime soon.  Maybe for the SuperBowl I can make some.

Best of Damn Ralph in 2006

I was looking through what I posted this past year and I wanted to highlight my favorite posts and the posts that seemed to bring in the most traffic.

My Favorite Posts

1. I got the call this morning... - This post was about my grandmother and her tense visit to intensive care and my trip down to visit her.  Afterwards we found out that she had a reaction to the radiation she was getting for cancer.  After she recovered from the ICU visit she spent a month or so recovering at home and then the surgery to remove the cancer.  She is one tough woman as is my parents cause they dealt with it all.  My mom left her job and stayed there for five months and my dad fended for himself during that time.
2. Car Explodes in front of my House - Man every time I mowed the lawn this year I was reminded of the car fire due to the patch of burnt grass.  I am still amazed at how fast the guy got out of the car and only came out of the incident with a couple of burns to his neck and hands.
   
3. Nick Tahous Crew have a little fun with me - this one always makes me laugh every time I see it.  We used to go to Nick Tahous weekly for plates and one of my coworkers wrote Damn Ralph on the slip for my order they just transfered it over to the plate it was funny to see.
   

Most Traffic

1. How to run Ubuntu and Kbuntu in VMware Player - This post on how to make Ubuntu play in the free VMWare Player is always number one in traffic daily.  This brings a ton of traffic into the site daily.
2. Rochester Basketball Player scores 20 points in final 4 minutes...he's also Autistic - The feel good story of 2006.  J-Mac graced us with an outstanding story of dedication and miraculous things happened for the kid sending him into national attention.  He is now in talks for making his story into a movie and the President even visited him on one of his trips to Rochester this year.
3. Who really browses on their cell phone anyways? - I replied to a Robert Scoble post about the future of mobile internet browsing and how I didn't think that was the future as it's very hard to navigate.  Four days into my blog and I got a link from Scoble's blog...I am still getting links through to this day.  He must get some amazing traffic on his site.

Year in review

I still find it difficult to post to my blog.  I want my blog to be more technical and personal then just a link blog of sorts.  I want to be able to add to something then just posting because I found something interesting.  Cause my sources of information is the same common information that everyone else visits.  So unless I can add to the conversation I usually won't post about it.  For the funny posts I usually let MediaGab handle all of that.

I found while going through my posts that my best posting was done in the beginning of the year and I started to get very sparse towards the end of the year.  I think that was due to my schedule and not having any time during that time.

Hopefully I can find some interesting things to write about in 2007.

Feature Request for Google Reader

Google is a great company and has some great online applications that are really well done.

Google Reader is one of them and is my default reader for my rss feeds.

But why does it not have a simple search function for searching through read posts in your feeds?  I hate having to try to find a particular post and have to hunt for it.

Does Google not know how to do search?

Update:  Here's a hack to search your feeds using Google Co-op.

Solution: Podcasts won't play on iPod Shuffle

So my mom got me a iPod Shuffle for Christmas.  It's perfect for me to listen to my podcasts while I am doing work around the house.  So I hook it up and do the AutoFill of music and it takes 5 minutes to load the thing up.. that's cool.  Works perfect.

I hook it back up and try to load a podcast up (TWiT) and take it out and nothing.  The light on the power blinks green and orange for two seconds.  I look on the little light indicator cheat sheet it came with and that means there are no songs loaded onto the iPod Shuffle.  This made absolutely no sense to me...I tried everything re-encoding it.  Loading it onto the shuffle as a data item but it still wouldn't work.

After looking around the internet I found a few people are having a problem with regular iPods playing podcasts in playlists where they had to manually start the podcasts.  They found that each podcast is by default flagged with the do not shuffle flag.  This meant that the podcast file wouldn't come up when you were playing songs in shuffle mode.

Ah, now it makes perfect sense why this isn't working.  The iPod Shuffle works exclusively in shuffle mode so that's why it looks like there is no music on it after updating.

To get around this...select the Podcasts you want to load and right-click (yeah I am on a Windows machine) and check the check box that says shuffle and select yes. If you want to load just one file click on the options tab and click to uncheck the skip when shuffle option.  Now add the Podcasts to your iPod's playlist, right-click and select Add to Playlist and then select the Playlist of your iPod shuffle.  After the shuffle updates and you disconnect you can revert the shuffle option back to no (if not they will play when you have it set to random in iTunes) or just delete the podcast altogether.

I hope this helps someone that might have the same problem I ran into.

Liz Lawley on ScobleShow

Speaking of interesting videos...I stumbled on this one from ScobleShow interviewing my former Professor at RIT, Liz Lawley. 

It's interesting her take on MMORPG and letting your kids play along with you.  Expensive, if your playing WoW but interesting none the less.

I let my kid play ET with me...but I am very protective of him online.   He is getting a lot better but still doesn't have the strategy skills to make good decisions.  In a 1 on 1 gun fight he's excellent.  So having that role model there to help guide him is great.  And my clan helps him out whenever possible too.

EB Game Night

Our gaming clan started a new event last night.  We are calling it EB Game Night.  Basically it is a way to try to kick start some traffic to our Enemy Territory Server.

Basically the idea is to have the server set up for fun.  Last night we had it set up with a christmas theme. 

All the axis players were the Grinch and everyone had santa hats on.  The grenades were snow balls and the landmines were christmas trees. 

Plus I put together a campaign of winter maps.  Thank god I tested them on Tuesday or that would of been embarrassing cause at least 4 of the maps I had picked didn't work and one was just outright terrible.

Overall I was quite pleased with the turn out...we had 18 people on at the same time at the peak of the night, not quite full but the most the server has had in a while.

The next EB Game Night will be next Wednesday December 6th at 7pm and it'll go till the server dies ... sometime around 11pm.

Come join us anytime on the server 69.31.15.31:27960.

Today's Big News: Sun to release Java under the GPLv2

The internet is abuzz today about Sun's announcement to release Java to the open source community.  So what does this mean?  Is it an admission from Sun that Java is a dying technology and this is a ploy to get developers re-enthused about working with Java again?

"Sun is hoping that this step will attract more developers, as well as extend the lifespan of Java." -Slashdot.

It'll be interesting to see how this works out for them as this may force other companies like Microsoft to open up more of their source in an attempt to drive participation from the developer community.  Isn't that why Ruby on Rails is the hot language?  Will we see Java on Rails in the near future? 

Related Links:

Sun Open Sources Java Under GPL (Slashdot)
Sun to Opensource Java and GPL it (Scoble)
Sun to Open-Source Java Under GPL v2 (digg)

Review of Microsoft Office Accounting 2007

Last night I posted about Microsoft Office Accounting 2007 and I gave it a look over last night.

It's Free that's about the only thing I found to be nice about it.

I was a little surprised (although I shouldn't have been) to see that it needed the .NET 2.0 framework.  It also needed SQL Server Express 2005.  The installer installed these automatically and I was a little miffed that it even installed.  This made the installer take forever.  I actually forgot I was installing it till it was done and came back into focus.

OK so I start it up.  This took forever as well.  I imagine that it was setting up the SQL Server database and initializing the application.  After this was done I had an interface that resembled the Office Suit particularly Outlook 2003.  Then the product activation screen came up :(

Of course you can spend a majority of your time setting this up for your business.  I just went with some basics things so I could see what it had to offer.

It's pretty robust to be honest, probably too much as it is in my case.  I was more interested in the Time Sheets, Quotes and Invoices.

I wasn't happy with the Time Entry Form...it was really complicated and it would require way to much work to get to that screen everyday...you would literally need to have that application open all day to be using it.

Thinking that I might be able to work around it if Invoicing was a breeze...then I realized why it's given away...it is TIGHTLY integrated with Microsoft Office and Invoices require Microsoft Word.

And as I looked around the application I found the many of the features required Word or Excel or Outlook.

And since I went Open Source on my Office Suite, Open Office and GMail this became just about useless for me.

Related Links:

Microsoft Office Accounting 2007
My Post about Microsoft Office Accounting 2007
OpenOffice.org
GMail

My costume from Saturday Night's Halloween Party

I dressed up as my wife and my wife dressed up as me.  I thought it was funny as hell although we didn't get one damn vote for  best costume.



Click here to see more of me in a dress.

Firefox 2 Launches Officially

Mozilla, this evening, officially releases Firefox 2.  After some controversy yesterday when the exe was found and a link of the exe that was on a mirror FTP server spread around and many people started downloading before the release not knowing what exactly they were getting. 

Mozilla officials were extremely upset with the early spreading of the bits and spouted off why this was a bad thing to do.

But after a day of waiting it has been finally released and I am downloading now. 

Enjoy!!

Related Links:

The Anti-Release
Mozilla Releases Major Update to Firefox and Raises the Bar for Online Experience
Firefox

NHL: Big shake up this morning in Philly

The Flyers General Manager Bob Clarke resigned this morning stating he was “burned out” and coach Ken Hitchcock was fired.

It's about time.  This is what should of happened after the end of last season.  But now we're eight games into the season and you can argue that the season is shot for the Flyers.  With new coaches and young talent coming in it'll be awhile before they hit their stride.  By that time they may be to far behind to make the playoffs.

Personally, I don't like Hitchcock, of course I am bias he and his Dallas Star defeated the Sabres in '99 for the Stanley Cup.  But like I stated earlier this week he's geared towards the old NHL and hasn't or doesn't want to change for the new NHL that is geared for speed.  His Flyers are too slow and not quick enough.  Opponents are just going right around them and getting scoring chances and the defense isn't quick enough to get down the ice to score a goal.

This is just the start with the three players waived last week and the coach fired see some trades happening to get some speed in Philly.

Not to brag or anything, ok I am bragging, the Sabres are 8-0 after beating the Hurricanes on Friday and the Bruins on Saturday.

Related News:
Flyers GM Clarke resigns; Hitchcock Fired
NHL: The Philadelphia Flyers need to shake things up
Sabres stay unbeaten, match their best start

NHL: Sabres Jerseys Number One Seller

The NHL on Tuesday announced that Buffalo Sabres new jerseys are the number one seller on NHL.com since the Sabres unveiled their new logo in September 16, 2006.  Sales accounted for 10% of NHL.com’s total sales during that period.

Sabres jersey sales are up 900% from the same period last year.

OK I just don’t get it.  Do people really like the slug?  Or are they just supporting the team?  I am sure the look will “grow” on people.  I particularly love the “new” alternate jerseys, which are the old 1970’s blue and gold jerseys.  Of course they aren’t selling those jerseys on NHL.com.

My theory is that it’s just the diehard fans all bombarding the store at the same time to get the new digs and sales will flat line after the initial rush.

I wouldn’t mind though, a Sabres hat ;)

Related Links:
Sabres New Jersey a Hot Item
Buffalo Sabres Jerseys on NHL.com

My IE7 Experience

Microsoft released IE7 on Wednesday.  I went ahead and installed it on my laptop.  Let me tell you that I did not enjoy that installation.  After I download and run the file I a prompted that I need to install security updated for IE before I even install the browser. Well not wanting to get hacked with this security hole I go ahead and install it.  Five minutes later it says it needs to reboot.  Ugh!

Ok so I say yes reboot.  But the installer hangs and needs to be forced to end. That’s intuitive for novice users to do.

Once the system came back up the installer didn’t run and start where I left off. I had to restart the installer and it again asked me if I wanted to install security updates.  I again said yes thinking there might be more, as dumb as that sounds.  It checked for installs and ran the Malicious Software Removal tool again.  Then it went right into installing the browser finally.

It took about another five minutes.  After it completed it required ANOTHER REBOOT!!!  Holy crap two reboots to install a web browser.  Once the system came back I launched IE.  It has some nice UI features to the browser but I found some weird UI choices as well. For instance to set any options in the browser now has to be done in a control panel or something cause there is no more menu items across the top.

No File, Edit, BOOKMARKS.  How can you leave bookmarks off a browser?  

Anyway I went and checked out some of my sites.  Some are just not right at all.  Travis said that IE7 is interpreting display: block; in some cases as display: crazy; he had to do some conditional statements to get a work around working, another crappy work around for IE.

So far as a web developer not to happy that I know have to deal with another crappy browser from Microsoft.  The best part is now I need a virtual machine because I can not have both IE6 and IE7 on the same machine for testing.

Excuse me while I go rip my hair out.

If you’re not using Firefox yet, thugs are going to come to your house and beat up your first born.

Related Links:
Microsoft IE 7
IE7 vs Firefox 2: The memory usage showdown
Robert Scoble: Firefox vs. IE 7 (IE7 having trouble with Google sites?)
Firefox

NHL: The Philadelphia Flyers need to shake things up

The Buffalo Sabres are 6-0 after beating the Flyers on Tuesday 9-1.  You would think after getting embarrassed by Buffalo last year in the playoffs the Flyers would have made massive changes over the summer just to compete.

I was surprised to see over the summer that they didn’t do anything.  They kept their coach, even extending his contract by three years, Ken Hitchcock, who arguably is stuck in the old NHL of the pound and grind your way to victory.  They are still relying heavily on Peter Forsberg who had to have ankle surgery over the summer.  Thank god for the Flyers that he only needed surgery on one ankle cause if he needed it on both they were saying he’d be out till January.

Then there is their pitiful goal-tending.  Here’s a team that could use a new starting goal tender. As much as I love Marty Biron of the Buffalo Sabres, he could possibly save this team some face this year if the teams could work out a deal.  But the clincher is the feud that Hitchcock is having Robert Esche.  Esche apparently said his coach has an empty head.  Well guess who didn’t pull their goalie during the 9-1 route?  Guess it was a lesson in humility Hitchcock was teaching Esche.

Well as if the GM’s in Philly finally woke up and they started making some changes yesterday.  They put Petr Nedved, Niko Dimitrakos and Nolan Baumgartner on waivers and called up a couple of rookies with some passion from their farm team.  It’s a good first start clearing some of their dead weight from the first six games.  I still think they need to fire Hitchcock and get someone in there that the players respect cause right now they have no respect of their coach and once the respect is gone there is no fire in the team.

I guess you could say that the Flyers are the last team to figure out that this is the new NHL and they need to adapt to be able to compete.

Related News:
Sabres stay perfect with rout of Flyers (CNNSI)
Philly puts three players on waivers (CNNSI)
Flyers agree to three-year contract with Hitchcock (CNNSI)

*Disclaimer: I am a hardcore Buffalo Sabres fan but I watched intently over the summer expecting massive changes in Philly and now I think they need to really wake up and understand they are going to fail unless something is done.

Major Bike accident on the way home today

So back in January...yeah it must of been nice around here then...I wrote about two morons popping wheelies down the highway.

Well guess what happened today...had to have been a few minutes in front of me traffic stops and as we start merging to the right I see that two cars have the outside lanes blocked off with flashers and in front of them is two bikes down on the road.  As I get closer I see all the skid marks from what I could tell it looked like there were three bikes, one looked to come down from a wheelie sort of at an angle and whiped out and must of took out a second bike...either way two bikes looked to be totalled and leaking gas all over.

One guy was on the highway and a lady was holding the guys neck in place, no police or medical personal had arrived yet.  The guy seemed to be "ok" as he did have his legs bent so I am sure the lady was just being cautious as she should.

Here's a better look at the Sabres new logo

STILL hate it...no no no I LOATHE IT!!

Buffalo Sabres unveil new jersey's

Um wtf???

"I think fans like the jersey, but they really love the team," Sabres managing partner Larry Quinn said.

Ah...no, no we don't...they are hideous and don't have any of the former Sabres feel.  They remind me of the Atlanta Thrashers jersey's.

The new jersey's should of been last years red alternate jersey's.

Although the only cool thing you did was bring back the 1970's jersey as the new alternate jersey but ffs bring back the old jerseys and don't start the season with this debachery.

Since when has Reebok and Nike become experts on designing jersey's and logos.  This is the second team I have seen a sneaker company ruin a jersey/logo.

Wednesday Post (9/13/06)

Come check out some funny ass pics and videos to get you over the hump of the week.



Click here to see more funny pics





MediaGab is a Entertainment news site and forum check us out and give us some love.

No Widescreen iPod Announced today

Man am I bummed...I thought for sure we would see a widescreen iPod today...especially with the announcement of movies (Disney) now being available in iTunes (widescreen format btw).

They even upgraded the resolution of TV shows to 640x480 up from 320x240...almost to DVD quality (720x480).

But they did improve on the iPod to make it easier to watch video by increasing the brightness that one can allow... a bigger choice 80 GB instead of 60GB ... a 24 hour battery...Games available for 5G iPods.

But still they foregone with the widescreen feature...I've been holding out and will continue to hold out.

I thought the Zune, Microsofts new portable entertainment system would be my new system...but it won't do video so it's not even a choice now.  But they have a widescreen! wtf?

Oh well...when the next major annoucement?  January? MacWorld?

New Dialog box in VS.NET 2003

When I load up a web project in VS.NET now that I have Subversion installed I get this dialog box that says:

Refreshing the project failed. Unable to retrieve folder information from the server.

Thankfully this isn't a real problem just a nuisance as after you click ok (the only choice given) the project loads just fine.

So what's going on?

Well a bug is happening.  VS.NET refuses to read/load directory names that start with a "." and guess what new directory in my web project now starts with a "."?  .svn

I do not have VS.NET SP1 installed yet...I'll install that tomorrow and let you know if it contains a fix for this particular issue.  But digging around the net Microsoft has known about this issue back in 2003 when people first started to complain about it.

Update (1/30/2007): I see alot of people finding this post via google having the same error above.  I found a better way around this.  So instead of starting a new post I'll just add it here.

You can set up Subversion to use _svn instrad of .svn here's how, if you set an environment path variable SVN_ASP_DOT_NET_HACK to true and then restart your computer (you must restart to have tools like Tortoise and Ankh recognize the _svn folder).  You will need to recheck out your repository and then VS.NET 2003 will work as expected with no error messages.   The problem lies in VS.NET 2003 only 2005 will read .svn folders fine.  But the good thing is 2005 will also run _svn folders with no problems. 

So rule of thumb if your on windows and using Subversion with any version of VS.NET just add the path variable.  Also very important...make sure you commit everything before you do the variable cause you won't be able to after it's added, you'll have to undo the variable and commit and then add the variable back.

SVN Source Control in Windows

At work we started exploring using SVN for source control with Visual Studio as Visual Source Safe is still living in 1999 and Visual Studio 2005 doesn't seem to be anymore promising (Jeff Atwood recommends "Anything but SourceSafe").  AnkhSVN was made to integrate with Visual Studio but wasn't the easiest to set-up...Scott Hanselman says there is a new version out but it's still in Release Candidate and requires you to upgrade to a release candidate version of subversion too.

Anyway with SVN being open source I was looking at setting up a version control solution for my personal projects.

Lifehacker recently ran a two part series (part 1, part 2) in it's weekly Hack Attack column about setting up Subversion and TortoiseSVN for Windows.  It also includes an optional Apache install to access files from other computers.

I followed the Lifehacker articles and installed Subversion and TortoiseSVN and created a couple of repositories for projects I am working on. I elected to skip the Apache install on my machine as I only develop from my laptop.

I'll tell you that it already saved my butt once this weekend...in a rare act of stupidity (OK it really wasn't that rare) I copied files into the wrong directory...it only overwrote one file.  But with version control I just right clicked on the file and hit revert and pulled up the original file I overwrote...without source control I would of had to recreate that file.

I still need to figure out a backup solution that is easy and unobtrusive.  I am thinking about one of those one-click backup external hard-drives.  Maybe for my birthday ;)

Feeling sick again

I keep getting these fevers that last a couple of days and totally knock me out for a few days.  I became bed ridden about Wednesday evening.  I try to keep the fever contained with some Motrin but it still sucks...

Things are falling behind on the house...the grass in the backyard is up to my knees.   I just have no motivation to do anything at the moment.

Hopefully I'll feel better tomorrow.

Suckerfish Menu with jQuery

Me on jQuery's blog

I think we all have heard of or used Suckerfish CSS Menu's before, written by Pattrick Griffiths and Dan Webb for A List Apart. If not, it's a cool way to make drop down menu's using standards based semantic HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, with IE still dominating the browser marketplace we still need a way to handle the hover state in IE. To do that we need a little bit of JavaScript to attach mouseover and mouseout events to HTML elements.

Myles Angell decided to rewrite Suckerfish's JavaScript with jQuery. Myles uses jQuery's Basic Effects to show and hide the submenus and jQuery's BaseStyle Base module methods to highlight the current moused over menu item. Pretty slick.

Check out some of Myles other experiments with jQuery. For the jQuery beginner these are good examples to start out with. The treeview is another experiment that caught my eye.

How to run Ubuntu and Kbuntu in VMware Player

I had an itch today to run Ubuntu.  I actually wanted to see how Konqueror compared to Safari in rendering as I needed a way to test since I don't own a Mac. Since Safari is a descendent of Konqueror it makes sense that they render the same for the most part.

I started by downloading and installing the free VMware Player.

I then downloaded the Ubuntu iso (disk image) from Ubuntu's site.  I had the best luck with the torrent files.  I was able to download the 696mb iso in 20 minutes.  Since I'll be touching on it later you can also get the Kbuntu iso from the Kbuntu site.

Now that I have VMware and the iso's I need to make a Virtual Hard Disk.  I found directions online here. 

First I needed to download and install QEMU because you need the qemu-image.exe to emulate/create the virtual hard disk.

After you installed QEMU open a command window and change directories to c:\program files\QEMU or whatever the directory name you put the files.  Once you are in the directory run the following command which will allowcate 3GB for a Ubuntu virtual hard drive.

qemu-img.exe create -f vmdk Ubuntu.vmdk 3G Formating 'Ubuntu.vmdk', fmt=vmdk, size=3097152 kB



For Kbuntu:

qemu-img.exe create -f vmdk Kbuntu.vmdk 3G Formating 'Kbuntu.vmdk', fmt=vmdk, size=3097152 kB



This will create a file Ubuntu.vmdk or Kbuntu.vmdk in the QEMU folder.

Create a folder called Ubuntu or Kbuntu in My Documents > My Virtual Machines and move the vmdk file you just created in there. Also copy the iso file to this folder. Finally, create a blank text file and name it either Ubuntu.vmx or Kbuntu.vmx which are VMware Configuration files.

In the Ubunti.vmx files paste this:

config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "3"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.filename = "Ubuntu.vmdk"
memsize = "256"
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"

#ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
#ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

ide1:0.fileName = "ubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
floppy0.present = "FALSE"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
displayName = "Ubuntu"
guestOS = "Ubuntu"
nvram = "Ubuntu.nvram"
MemTrimRate = "-1"

ide0:0.redo = ""
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
uuid.location = "56 4d 5c cc 3d 4a 43 29-55 89 5c 28 1e 7e 06 58"
uuid.bios = "56 4d 5c cc 3d 4a 43 29-55 89 5c 28 1e 7e 06 58"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:7e:06:58"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"

uuid.action = "create"

checkpoint.vmState = ""

For Kbuntu.vmx paste this:

config.version = "8"
virtualHW.version = "3"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.filename = "Kbuntu.vmdk"
memsize = "256"
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"

#ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
#ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

ide1:0.fileName = "kubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

ide1:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
floppy0.present = "FALSE"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
usb.present = "TRUE"
sound.present = "TRUE"
sound.virtualDev = "es1371"
displayName = "Kbuntu"
guestOS = "ubuntu"
nvram = "Kbuntu.nvram"
MemTrimRate = "-1"

ide0:0.redo = ""
ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
uuid.location = "56 4d cf a0 97 ef 95 ad-c2 6a 6e 62 5b f2 78 ff"
uuid.bios = "56 4d cf a0 97 ef 95 ad-c2 6a 6e 62 5b f2 78 ff"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:f2:78:ff"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"
ide1:0.startConnected = "TRUE"

uuid.action = "create"

checkpoint.vmState = ""

Save the file and close it.  All you have to do now is double-click the vmx file and it will launch VMware Player and boot with the iso image as the Boot CD (you don't need to even burn a CD).

If you decide to install Ubuntu, at the end of the installation you will be prompted to reboot, before the system starts up go in and modify the vmx configuration file so that it boots off the virtual drive instead of the iso by modifying these four lines

Find:

#ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
#ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

ide1:0.fileName = "ubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386.iso"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

Replace with:

ide1:0.fileName = "auto detect"
ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-raw"

#ide1:0.fileName = "ubuntu-6.06-desktop-i386.iso"
#ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

The great thing about Ubuntu is that it runs live right off the CD you don't even need to install it if you don't want to.  The differences between Ubuntu and Kbuntu is Ubuntu uses Gnome as it's Desktop and Kbuntu uses KDE.  Like I said at the beginning I wanted to test sites against Konqueror and with Konqueror being a KDE application it was installed by default in Kbuntu and ran perfectly right off the live CD without installation.  It can run off Ubuntu but you'll need to install Ubuntu then install Konqueror from the Synaptics Package Manager.

How NOT to market yourself on the Internet

Ok, so you made a pretty good name for  your business or yourself on the Internet.  You've pulled in some pretty big clients.  You own and maintain a website that has tens of thousands of registered users.  You're able to make ends meet with the clients you get that aren't all that big.

Sounds like everything is right in the world for you.

Here's where I start to get into the part of the post where I tell you what not to do.

• DON'T go on an Internet radio show to talk about your business and talk about how you don't have the passion for the stuff you do.
• DON'T tell everyone that you only want the "cool" clients and the rest can f*** off.
• DON'T go into detail about specific clients and talk about how bad of a client they were, especially after you just named who they are.
• Finally, DON'T publicize all of this even more by posting the show as a podcast so everyone and anyone can hear it anytime they want later on.

I'll tell you I witnessed a company do this just this week.  A company I idolized.  A company whose business model is every persons dream. 

Well it will be interesting to see if they can get through it...they usually do but man it's just a weird way to market yourself.

Real Life Enemy Territory

Anyone that knows me knows I am big into playing Wolfensteins - Enemy Territory, I even play it competitively in Leagues and Ladders.

But I stumbled across this video tonight on YouTube and was laughing my ass off the whole time...Well done.

(video)

My review of Google Spreadsheets

I needed to do a quick data grid in a spreadsheet and I decided to use Google's Spreadsheet Web Application to do the job for me.

First I copied some data from another web application and pasted it into here.  No issues.

I needed to then resize the columns to make the text fit.  That seemed to expand all the columns but that was easily fixed.

Deleted a couple of unneeded columns and added another.  In the new column I needed to multiple the column to the left by 60 and put the results in my new column.  Using the formulas I learned in Excel. =B2 * 60 did the trick.

Copied and pasted that all the way down the column and it calculated the the rows the way I wanted.  So far so good.

Now for cosmetic adjustment.  This is were I think Google Spreadsheets has the most room for improvement.  One of the nice features in Excel and in OpenOffice.org Calc is the Auto Format feature where you highlight your spreadsheet and give it a theme.  I couldn't find anything like that in Google Spreadsheets.  Oh well, it wasn't that many rows and column. I went ahead and made alternating row colors and a header color with the formatting tool.  Not to hard at all just some busy work.

Now usually in this step of making the document I would copy all the cells and paste it right into Word or OpenOffice.org Write...but when I pasted it all I got was the data, no formatting!  I was able to export the spreadsheet out to xls and I opened it in OpenOffice.org Calc.  I had to only adjust the column widths and heights and then I was able to copy and paste into Write.

So Google Spreadsheets is a great online web application but still lacking, for me anyways, the importing of data from a spreadsheet to a word processing application...maybe they will read this and find a way.

I got the call this morning...

7:15 AM the phone rings...I ignore it.

It rings again...this time I get up cause I know something must be wrong. My mom has been in Albany for the last week taking care of my grandmother who was recently diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.  Wednesday of last week she was admitted to the hospital because she was becoming dehydrated.

Walk over to the phone, sure enough it's my mom's cell phone. Immediately think to myself "oh man this isn't going to be good"

"Hello?"

"Hi Ralph, I just wanted to let you know your grandmother was admitted into the ICU today and she might not make it to the end of the day."

I was stunned cause my mom said that they were only going to the hospital for IV and now this. I really didn't know what to say to her at that moment...so I listened and then hung up.

I sat there for a while then it hit me like a ton of bricks...I haven't seen my grandmother in months maybe even a year. I was supposed to go up to see her in the beginning of June but the trip got canceled when I had some car trouble.

Then the thought of regret fell upon me...if I don't go right now I might not ever have the chance to see or talk to my grandmother again. That was just not something I wanted to live with the rest of my life.
I called my mom back. "If I come up can I get in to see her?"

"Yes" my mom said.

"I am on my way"

"Ralph, there is nothing you can do for her."

"I am aware of that but all I want is five minutes to at least be able to talk to her."

"OK, just drive safe." my mom demanded.

After taking some directions down and looking up the Hospital name in Google Maps I hung up and called into work...took all I could to finish the voice mail without breaking down. I told Larry (my boss) that I couldn't bare to make the call again to Shondra (Office Manager) and asked if he could let her know.

At that point I hung up the phone and lost it as I was waking Hope up. I think I freaked her out. She had no clue what was going on and thought the worst had happened to one of the boys. I quickly told her what was going on and she gave me a big hug.

She helped me get things ready to go and I packed my laptop up for the trip...I needed to stop into work and print out the maps and directions.

While I was at work Larry spots me and offered up everything he could to help me out. I later told my mom how he offered to help me out and she said "that guy is such a good friend"...she's right..he's always there when I need help in someway, constantly goes out of his way for me.

The ride down was uneventful. I made good time arriving at the hospital with one stop in a little over 3 hours. I had to ask someone how to get to the ICU and when I got off the elevator I ran right into my mom who immediately broke down and gave me a hug.

We went down to the cafeteria as I couldn't get in to see her right away as they only allow 2 visitors for 5 minutes an hour. My aunt and uncle were there getting food and we sat and chatted for a bit and I got up to speed on what happened over the weekend.

We went back up and called into the ICU to see if we could get in. We had to wait a half-an-hour cause she was getting a bath.

Finally a nurse came in and said we could go back. We walked in and I could see her across the ICU. She was a fraction of the woman I had last seen. She had lost so much weight. She had a tube in her nose, many IV's in her hand and a mask providing 100% oxygen.

She looked weak and didn't move much but I was totally reassured when she looked at me and said “Hi Ralph” in her own way that I come to know and love. We talked for about 10 minutes reassuring our love for each other and talked about the kids and how she misses them. Then she wanted to sleep so we left to let her sleep.

I told her I loved her and I would stop in once more before I left.

About two hours later my dad and I went in to see her but she was sound a sleep.. stayed about five minutes and walked out to let my mom in. She was struggling to breathe and it was tough to watch.

I had to leave shortly after that and didn't get to talk to her again. Hopefully I will again. I am planning on going down again Friday if all goes well this week otherwise I'll be making another trip down which won't be fun at all.

But after driving 6 hours and putting up with the 95 degree heat and all the waiting in the waiting room the fifteen minutes I spent with her was worth the trip. It eased my mind and I won't have any regrets if she slipped away and that was the sole purpose of the trip.

Please pray for her. Pray that she doesn't suffer and that my mother has the strength to get through this cause this is especially tough on her.

Whose blogging about BarCampRochester?

Well of course besides me.

Well obviously the organizers are blogging about it.

• Justin Thorp - gave a presentation on Web Accessibility Standards for Content Authoring tools as well as help moderate the event. Justin showed his presentation on slides he created with S5, which I thought was a cool online app.
  
• Erica O'Grady - who also moderated the event gave a great presentation on Web 2.0 Web Applications that are underused.  I wrote about the ones I haven't heard about before here or you can see all of them from her delicious group. Erica also provided us with a Flickr feed of the event.  Hey where are the pictures of the BrandLogic crew?  My wife doesn't believe I attended please upload them for the sake of my marriage!
  
• SeenCreative - The final moderator/organizer.  They gave an awesome presentation about their company and their experiences and showed off their Ruby on Rails project that has been getting noticed in the online community called myBillq.com
• Larry Roth - Part of the infamous BrandLogic group that stormed into the event late and took over.  Not really, but I think you could call our entrance a classic entrance of "shock and awe".  Anyways, Larry presented some of our client work and discussed our experiences...I helped were I could but we came not really prepared. 
  

Some other presentations that are now online:

• Sam Cole presented on Bliki's and uploaded his presentation

You can keep an eye on future blog posts by watching Technorati for BarCampRochester.

What's hot now?

Obviously Web 2.0 apps are hot and all the rage.  I posted some examples of popular and up and coming apps.

But what I think is surprising to me is that Ruby and Ruby on Rails is the hottest programming language out there right now.

myBillq.com was done in Ruby on Rails.  It was done for two reasons. One, it gave the developers and the company something to program to show off their talents plus gave them experience with writing an application in Ruby on Rails.

OK it seems like it might make web 2.0 easier to program? Is that a fair statement?  What's a good resource to start understanding Ruby?

Web Applications

Listening to a presentation now about web applications.  Here's some of the interesting ones that I haven't heard before:

Crazy Egg - Coming soon app that will analyze your click throughs on your site with a heatmap metaphor.

Writely - online word processor

Shopify - online e-commerce solution

gliffy - online visio app

Jambo - proximity chat

Dabble DB - Online Spreedsheet (subscription based)

Domain Specific Class Selector

This is pretty cool...we stumbled across this syntax in a Digg Article about putting the menu back on the right.

docrule ::= "@-moz-document" S+ url-list "{" S* ruleset* "}"

url-list ::= url-item ( "," S* url-item )*

url-item ::= ( "url(" | "url-prefix(" | "domain(" ) URL ")" S*

where S is from the CSS2 tokenization, ruleset is from the CSS2 grammar,
and URL is like the production URI in the CSS2 tokenization except
without the 'url(' and ')'.

To define the three functions by example:

@-moz-document url(http://www.w3.org/),
               url-prefix(http://www.w3.org/Style/),
               domain(mozilla.org)
{
  /* CSS rules here apply to:
     + The page "http://www.w3.org/".
     + Any page whose URL begins with "http://www.w3.org/Style/"
     + Any page whose URL's host is "mozilla.org" or ends with
       ".mozilla.org"
   */
}

It basically allows you to have a class that only works on a specific domain. Of course it only works in Mozilla. Good use for the userContent.css file in FireFox.

Some Cool Links for tonight

• Someone found KC-135 refueling tanker refueling a C-5 Galaxy in mid-air. Download the Google Earth Keyhole here to view it. The ghosting effect is a artifact from the planes being in motion. (if you look in one of the field to the northwest you'll see a farmer marked his field with "USA BUSH")
• Warren Buffet has decided to give 85% of his fortune away.  But to whom you may ask?  Bill Gates who else!  Actually it's actually to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
• Beautiful NASA Photos
• 40 Things you didn't know about Superman, btw going Thursday night to see Superman Returns in wonderfull 3D Imax glory.
  

Interesting the people you meet at the most unusual times

Yesterday was my nephews high school graduation party.  Yep my nephew graduated and my oldest son is going into middle school...I am getting old.

At the party my dad said I had to meet my nephews uncle that runs his own business doing what I do...I ask "oh what's that?" "COMPUTERS" I always get a kick out of that.  They never realize that that could mean anything.

A couple hours later after my wife had handed me my 8th Crown Royal and coke my nephews grandfather bring him over to meet me.

Turns out he runs pokerdream.com a for pay online poker site.  He told me the site was written in VB.NET and the poker rooms were written in C++.

I visited the site this morning and was really impressed with the design and layout of the site...very professional looking.

He's looking for someone to build an affiliate program for the site.  I told him about my experience with building banner ads tracker on MediaGab and how I thought that should work...now that I think about it I should of told him about RedStorm Sports and the Ad system we build for that as well...I guess I can thank my wife and the 8 cups of Crown Royal and coke for that.

We exchanged cards and talked about our nephew and his choice of college and his decision to go into Computer Science.  I was telling him I think he'll switch to IT eventually because I don't see him have the geekiness to like Computer Science once you get into the Science of it...I know I couldn't handle it and switched to IT in my third year....it's just more satisfying to make things work from existing software and applications then it is to build it from scratch.

MySpace hiring ASP.NET Developers

Speaking of MySpace.  I got a bulletin today from Tom (the founder) looking to hire more MySpace Developers.

i want to hire some more .net developers to work on myspace. do you have experience? here's what i need:

Required Skills/Experience:
- 3+ years of solid C Sharp experience
- 3+ years of ASP.NET (and the .NET 1.1 Framework) experience
- 4+ years of experience developing with SQL Server 2000 (including stored procedures)
- Strong knowledge of several protocols (including HTTP, TCP/IP, and UDP)
- a solid foundation in n-tier, Business Objects, Design Patterns, and general OOP
- Strong knowledge (and wisdom) of IIS6 and its internals
- Experience on sites under heavy loads that require meticulous attention to coding practices as they relate to performance and scalability

go here to upload a resume:
myspace developers

please dont upload anything about any other job at myspace. i'm only posting this to find .NET developers!

oh yah, you've got to live in, or move to LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA! yeehaw!

If I was single and didn't have a family and a house I would totally have jumped all over this.  Not because I like MySpace and want to make it better.  I would do it for the experience and jump into another company in the "Valley" that would be impressed to see a big name like MySpace on my resume.

But I have a great job here in Rochester, NY.  Even if I am stuck in Maintenance Programming....thank God Coding Horror says it's pretty complex and challenging stuff. Thank god since I am challenged everyday with it.

The Best MySpace Experience I have had

You know those friends you have when your a kid 7-11 years old that you do everything with?  Play baseball, ride bikes, go hiking, have sleep overs, camping, etc. etc.

I had a friend like that when I was growing up.  But I moved away when I was 11 and we kept in touch here and there until finally I went away to college and we lost track of each other.

Well today I check my e-mail and I have one that says I have a MySpace message from Thomas.  Usually messages on myspace for me are just spam crap.  But I was delightfully surprised to see it was from my childhood friend.

I remember him as a scrawny short kid (skin and bones almost) but his pictures show him to have beefed up...could be because he is in the Air Force now stationed in Alaska.

I sent him a reply getting him up to speed on me and my life and hopefully we can arrange to meet sometime if he ever comes home.

Let's not forget what today really is...

And no I don't mean it's an evil day...today marks the 61st Anniversary of the D-Day invasion at Normandy.  Let's not forget our fallen soldiers that invaded France and won back the freedom we enjoy today. 

LinkButton doesn't print out a name attribute

When you use a LinkButton Control in ASP.NET 1.1 there is one difference compared to a Button Control.  A LinkButton does not print out a name attribute in the Generated HTML.

I was trying to write some javascript from a textbox to press the LinkButton if the enter key is pressed as this is not done automatically in .NET.

I was having the worst time debugging this stipping it all down to bare javascript calls. But I kept coming up with this.form.elements.somenameattibute has no properties.  Obviously I was getting at the LinkButton control but for some reason could not figure out why.  I switched over to document.getElementById("someIDattribute").click() and this worked great in IE but did not work in Firefox.  So back to debugging I went.

After looking at the code and the example code that I lifted this with I noticed that the code had a name attibute and my code did not.  I switch my Link button over to a button control and everything worked fine.

So in case you need to know this information at a later time a LinkButton control does not print out a name attribute, at least by default.

How to create Firefox extensions

Here's a great article on creating Firefox extensions.

I have a couple in mind for administrating MediaGab a little easier.

Sabres lose game 7 to Carolina

At least it was a fantastic series.  But now the season is done.  Carolina and Edmonton for the Cup now.

And I will shock people by saying GO CAROLINA!!!!  I don't want that suck ass bastard Micheal Peca to get his greedy hands on the cup.

Memorial Day BBQ

The two on the left straight BBQ Sauce (for the kids)

The two in the middle Spicey BBQ (started with a dry rub of chilli powder, cumin powder, this cajun power I had, garlic powder and italian spice.)

The two on the right Garlic Chicken (Garlic powder and powdered butter rub...then I melted butter, Garlic powder and Italian Spice on the grill and basted it on the chicken).

Cooked them for an hour over indirect medium-low heat turning them every ten/fifteen minutes.

Turned out awesome.

I am itching to grill a Salmon Steak now.

Userbars

I stumbled onto this cool little concept today.  Userbars.  Kind of like a signature image of you and your interests.

Here is an example.



There is even a site where you can take a handfull of these images and make a animated one out of all of them.

Here is an example.

So I thought this is pretty cool.  So I made one for Damn Ralph.



Of course I couldn't go without making one for MediaGab.

Opening day of little league

Man why every year....no matter that it was 70-80 all week long...today was rainy, cold, wet, windy and downright miserable for the kids first game.

Every year same thing.

I think they had fun though.  It's fun to watch the little kids and Brandon moved up a league this year and I am just blown away at the level they play at now.  Brandon won his game 8-6.

Here are some pictures from my Jordan's game today.

Sabres Take one from the Ottawa Senators in OT

I called it before the game...this series is going to be awesome.  You have two evenly matched teams.  Speed, goaltending, offense, defense.   I have to lean on the side of Lindy Ruff for Coaching though....I mean what other coach can coach as long as he has with the same team and build a team based on a hard working team.

Last nights game was one the fans could really enjoy...especially if you are a Sabres fan.

Back and forth, back and forth...three goals in the final three minutes of regulation play to send it into overtime where the Sabres got the game winner 18 seconds in.  Such a great game.

Here are the highlights from the game.

ASP.NET 1.1 Web.configs Inheritance Feature but to me it's a Bug

I was working on a project on Saturday when I ran into a problem. I spent a good four hours trying to find a solution for it. When I finally did I still am not sure why it works but works it does.

I was working on this web site that was written in .NET. I needed to dupe that site and make a new site in a sub directory. I made the subdirectory a virtual directory as I didn't want to make the new application conflict with the root site.

Well that didn't happen. Conflict it did. I was getting an error (similar to this) that one of my declarations in my web.config was already declared. The declaration was in the Configuration part of the config file.

I went and did a little research and found many other programmers just as frustrated that they were having the same issues. On their development machine it worked fine but when they put it onto the site it would throw this same sort of error. Turns out they develop the way they are advised too by creating a subdirectory for each project so they don't inherit from each other. But when they tried to put the files on the server one project was the root and one was the Virtual Directory. Bam!

I was able to recreate this error on my machine by setting the project that was the root on the site as the root on my development machine. I could at least try and debug it.

In my research I found that even though the app is in a virtual directory it STILL inherits from the root on up.

Basically the hierarchy starts with the machine.config -> machine web.config -> app web.config -> subdirectory web.config and so on.

Technically a virtual directory is a subdirectory but the point of making it a virtual directory is to separate the app from other apps in your site. This works for everything except web.config files. Why? Microsoft says this is a feature and not a bug...I on the other hand beg to differ.  Here are some configuration scenarios Microsoft details they get into the virtual directory configuration at the bottom.

I finally got around the problem but it took some work. One of my class libraries in the project I created as a IConfigurationHandler and has set it up in the web.config but because both projects used different name spaced the declaration line was slightly different. I tried everything to try to override it. I read you could override the web.config by using <clear> or <remove> tags but then I found that the web.config schema doesn't allow those tags in the configuration element.

In the end I took the class file and made into it's own DLL and referenced it in both projects and the configuration element became identical in both projects allowing me to see the virtual directory without an error.

So does this “feature” still work like this in ASP.NET 2.0? I am told that Microsoft fixed this. But frankly I am not sure if it truly does or not. I do know there are more tags in the web.config to allow you to lock or override elements in the web.config. So until I see it for my own eyes it's a hope that it is fixed.

I haven't even touched how ASP.NET 2.0 and a ASP.NET 1.1 web.config files don't like each other...but I haven't gotten to that point yet.

Superman Returns Trailer

Me on Mediagab:

I was skeptical when I first heard about this but watching the trailer I think they might have nailed it...Christopher Reeves is the Superman I know so it will be hard to see this new guy playing the role.

Kevin Spacey as Luther and the guy playing the Chief I forgot his name seem perfect for the roles.

Here is the trailer. http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/supermanreturns/trailer2/large.html

I actually can't wait for this...Ernie, Travis are we going to this one?

CNNSI Blogger says Philly has a chance lynch mob ensues

This is great.  Mike McAllister of CNNSI writes a blog giving his analysis of all the 0-2 teams that are in the first round right now...one of them being the Flyers that the Buffalo Sabres are totally man-handling right now.

Out of the four teams that are 0-2 and that are half way to golfing right now....the only team he didn't pick to be done and over with...that's right Philly.

Reading through the comments you can see the Buffalo Fans are furious with this prediction.  They are frustrated that the national media won't give Buffalo the credit they deserve.  They are a top calibar team but you wouldn't know that if you were anyone but a Sabres fan because the media just doesn't want to talk about the Sabres.

Car Explodes in front of my House

My wife called me at work today and told me that there was a car accident in front of our house and one car was engulfed in flames.

From my speculation the car that burst into flames was turning onto a side street when a mini-van plowed into the back of him at full speed.  This pushed him into our lawn and at the same time the gas tank exploded.

My wife said the guy flew out of the car and stop dropped and rolled on the ground.  He got up and walked away.  He was very lucky he got out when he did a few more seconds he would of died.

When I got home tonight the local telephone company had a truck on our lawn fixing the lines as I guess they had melted or had some heat damage...but I looked at the grass and it's all burned up.  Even the street sign on the corner was burned  it's black and you can't read it.

As I was looking at the grass and the damage a woman gets out of her car and walks over to me.  Turns out she is the wife of the guys that jumped out of the car...she was looking for the guys that helped her husband.  She told me and my wife that he was ok but badly burned on his neck, chest, legs and feet.  As I looked at her she looked familiar and it dawned on me later after I left to take Brandon to baseball practice that she was from our church.  My wife confirmed that when I got home.

Any way here are some pictures from the accident my wife took with her camera phone.

This was taken as the fire was being battled...it was much worse before this.




Fire is out but there is nothing left of the car.




You can see the street sign in this picture and it is pitch black.

Some interesting links from the week

I have been so busy at work this past week I havn't had a chance to even think about my blog.  But it hasn't stopped me from finding some cool and/or interesting links on the web.

I have been looking into resources for AJAX.  I went to Borders yesterday and was looking through "Professional AJAX" from WROX.  It looked good but I found better resource from Rushi Vishavadia, AJAX Resources for Beginners.

Getting Started with AJAX - Author Aaron Gustafson takes you through writing a basic AJAX application (An address book). Lots of code there.

Mastering AJAX - This is a pretty good tutorial which gives you the nitty gritty basics, talks about cross browser compatibility which is really important with XmlHTTPRequest object in IE (stupid MSFT :-p) What I like about this tutorial is that it explains info in a very easy to understand manner and it also says why you need it. (Part 1 (introduction) of the tutorial is here)

Using AJAX with PHP and mySQL - Being a PHP Developer myself, this tutorial is really well written and very complete. Step by step instructions on how to go about working with the XMLHttpRequest object too.

XAJAX - Xajax is an open source PHP Library for building ajax based applications. xajax is very easy to use and damn powerful, allowing you to use php where you wouldnt unneccesarily use JavaScript. They have a very good tutorial here called Learn Xajax in 10 Minutes.

Another good tutorial by John Wiseman on Creating a mySQL connection with PHP and Ajax.(If the code seems too small copy and paste it intoyour favorite editor, or hit Ctrl + '+' on Firefox to increase font size)

Ajax Loading Indicators & Icons - You can make up your own indicator icons, but the ones provided are really nice and fancy.

Lastly, Max Keisler has a very comprehensive list Ajax tutorials, resources - from beginner to advanced.

Scott Hanselman had a couple of interesting articles about debugging/troubleshooting.

• Debugging the ASP.NET worker process running at 100%
• Tracking down a Trojan

To go along with the interesting links category Travis sent me this link the other day to a LASIK @ Home Kit.  I posted it on my forum with some "observations."

Remember that How to be a Rockstar Programmer post?  Well apparently there is some difference of opinion that is going around.

Lastly, and certainly not least Apple announced that they will ship a program called Boot Camp in their next release, Leopard, but a beta was pushed out earlier this week.  This really has alot of people excited.  Apple listened to "Bloggers" and provided them a way to dual-boot Windows and OSX on a Intel Mac.

Paul Thurrot has many many posts detailing his thoughts and experiences with Boot Camp.  I do agree with him that they should of made a boot loader menu show up on default rather then having to push and hold a option key to bring up the menu.

Still though didn't someone already do this with a IBM Laptop?

Beer Theories

   *Sometimes when I reflect on all the beer I drink, I feel ashamed.
    Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the
   brewery and all of their hopes and dreams.  If I didn't drink this
   beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered.
    I think, "It is better to drink this beer and let their dreams come
   true than be selfish and worry about my liver." *

   *
   Babe Ruth* *

---

   *
   "I feel sorry for people who don't drink.  When they wake up in the
   morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day." *

   *
   Lyndon B. Johnson** *

---

   *
   "When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."

   Paul Hornung *

---

   *
   **"24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case.  Coincidence?  I think not."

   H. L. Mencken*

---

   *
   *"When we drink, we get drunk.  When we get drunk, we fall asleep.
    When we fall asleep, we commit no sin.  When we commit no sin, we
   go to heaven.  So, let's all get drunk and go to heaven!"

   George Bernard Shaw*

---

   *
   "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

   Benjamin Franklin *

---

   *
   "Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind
   is beer.  Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention,
   but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza."

   Dave Barry*

---

   *
   BEER: HELPING UGLY PEOPLE HAVE SEX SINCE 3000 B.C.!

   W. C. Fields*

---

   *
   **Remember "I" before "E", except in Budweiser.

   Professor Irwin Corey*

---

   *
   **To some it's a six-pack, to me it's a Support Group.  Salvation in
   a can!

   Leo Durocher*

---

   *
   One night at Cheers, Cliff Calvin explained the" **Buffalo** Theory"
   to his buddy Norm: **
   **
   "Well ya see, Norm, it's like this.  A herd of buffalo can only move
   as fast as the slowest buffalo.  And when the herd is hunted, it is
   the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This
   natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the
   general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the
   regular kill ing of the weakest members!  In much the same way, the
   human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells.
    Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells.  But
   naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first.  In
   this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain
   cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine!  That's
   why you always feel smarter after a few beers."*

French pushing free choice of music downloads

Reuters:

The French parliament is set to vote early this week on a new law that would allow consumers to legally circumvent existing software that protects copyrighted material.

This could be bad news for Apple Computer Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which have for the most part locked consumers into their own downloading systems with proprietary anti-piracy software.

Analysts say that the French are on to something that the rest of the world has yet to figure out: It needs to set rules for this new market now or risk one or two U.S. companies taking control of online access to music, video and TV.

Paul Thurrott originally blogged about this.  I have to agree this is the way to go.  Being locked in isn't very consumer friendly.

More on the Presidents Visit to Rochester Yesterday

Actual quote in an MSNBC article:

For their father, the President had a message. “He says your sons, he said your son that passed away your son now, he says that are doing he says this is not going to go in vain and that to me was just…I was like... I didn't know what to say” John Pernaselli explained.

J-Mac meets the President

So the President meet J-Mac today at the airport today.  With the restrictions on the residence of Rochester because of the presidents visit...I think this meeting was probably the only thing that was worth while for him to come to Rochester for.

You remember J-Mac right?

A co-worker of mine told me today that there is movie in the works to tell this story.

St Patty's Day Parade

Yesterday Rochester held their St. Patty's day parade and we went down there.

Sherry and Travis served up an irish breakfast.
We went to the parade
Then went for a drink at The Old Toad (English/Irish bar)

After taking a nap we went to go bowling then our for another drink at this place called Boogey's. 

Needless to say I am pretty beat and don't really feel all that great today. 

Anyways I started a Flickr Group of our pictures of yesterday.

Quick links for the hump day

Just a couple quick links to start off the day.

• 30Boxes sets up e-mail and SMS reminders...this was the feature that allowed me to uninstall Sunfire.
• Our CEO at BrandLogic, Hampton Bridwell has his second article, The Keys to Revitalizing a Mature Brand,  published on Chief Marketer.
• CNNSI has an excerpt from a book exposing Barry Bonds for the cheat that he is.
• Pictures of Google's Facilities, it's amazing people get anything done over there.
• Of course what kind of blog would I be if I didn't link to the latest Origami minitablet pics from CeBit.
  

OK time to start blogging again

I took the week off blogging well because I saw my stats exploded for the autistic basketball kid post.  I wanted to respect the kids story and leave it as the top post for a while.

Well I think that was long enough and I am going to start blogging again.

Homestore Busts a Move

The last couple of weeks I have been working on a project for Homestore, Inc. which officially announced yesterday it's plan to change it's name to Move.

There are future projects in the works with them and I am not sure what I am allowed to talk about in terms of what I am doing now or is planned to do in the future but all I can say is keep an eye out on Move in the future and perhaps it might of been something I worked on. 

Probably when things are more official I might be able to highlight some of the work I have been doing but currently it's all internal to Move.

Here is an MSNBC story that explains the name change.  You could also check Google News for other stories.

Here's a 2006 word of the year contender

I was debating politics on a discussion board today and a very identifiable Republican was dissing us Democrats (not that I am declaring I am, but with Bush in office it's hard not too) so I called him a Partist

This is how I am defining a Partist:

par-tist
n. & adj.

adj. based on party intolerance "a right/left wing comment" 2. discriminatory especially on the basis of political party views n. a person that believes that their majority controlling political party is superior to other minority political parties.

Feedburner feed updated

With a little help from Travis I updated my Feedburner Feed to include my Del.ic.ious feed and my Flickr Feed.  If you are already subscribed to my Feedburner feed you will now enjoy these new updates if your not subscribed to feedburner then use this link to update your subscription.

If your not subscribed...well let's just say you don't want to come to your house and force you to subscribe.  Things could get messy.

On the way back from lunch...

I saw two guys on motorcycles you know the crotch rockets and they were going down the highway at 65 mph at least doing wheelies down the road.


I never so wanted to see a whip out in my life.  But they landed them just fine.

Looked cool but what dumb asses.

Man talk about a nasty week

I spent most of the week just trying to get by.   I have had this head cold that is just enough of a nuisance to make me feel not a 100% I feel fine enough to do everything I need to but the motivation just isn't there. 

Sore Throat
Pressure headache
and a very mild fever. (just enough to knock you down a bit)
stuffy nose (an after effect of the pressure headache I am sure)

But all this isn't going to stop me from going out and having a couple of drinks tonight with the wifey wife.  I invited the office but got a slew of terrible explainations of why they can't go out tonight.  My favorite?  "My cat is sick."  Choosing pussy over drinking?  Well I can't say that's the first time I have heard that.

Nick Tahous Crew have a little fun with me

Went to Nicks today for lunch and when we got back and took out our orders I found this.

HAHAH love it.  Oh and the plate was del.icio.us.

Thunderbird 1.5 RSS Engine has taken a step back

I am really disappointed in Mozilla Thunderbirds latest release 1.5 and it's built in RSS Reader.  It has basically taken steps back in terms of progress.

Let's take Robert Scoble's blog for example.  In 1.0.7 I could read the whole story within Thunderbird now I only get a description and have to read the whole story on Scobles site.  This defeats the purpose of RSS.  I originally thought Scoble changed his feed but looking at the raw RSS XML I see there is a description element and a content element description is before content and description holds the summary lines that I am getting.  There is no way to change the feed (that I know of) in Thunderbird to say display content in the body and not description.  Again this is something that has changed in 1.5 and it made the RSS engine worse.

Let's look at BrandLogic's Internal Blogs I use at the office.  I post daily on my blog what it is I do during the day simple list multiple lines.  I don't add any html or anything just drop in line item after line item.  In 1.0.7 they would show up as I typed them. In 1.5 they show up as one line.  Talk about a step back in progress.

Other bugs I have found:

• Editing a feed is not possible the text box does not allow you to type in it.
• When you create a new feed and you right click you only get "Copy this Link" as an option not the desired "Paste."
• When I lose my connection on my laptop (put it in hybernate or go out of the hotspot area) RSS feeds won't update without restarting Thunderbird.

These issues have made me think about switching back to 1.0.7 until 1.5 is fixed in 1.5.1.  I am not the only one who thinks this Travis Hardiman (coworker/friend [I did make this months payment right?]) tried installing yesterday and the application wouldn't open for him.  He is currently back on 1.0.7.  At the time I thought he was full of shit when he was blaming Mozilla and talking trash about how bad this version of Thunderbird is.  Well I now agree with him.  I am downgrading.

But Thunderbird 1.0.7/1.5 is still better and less bloated then Outlook, IMO.

My Experiment with Mobile Web

So after I wrote last week asking who really browses on their phone anyways I decided to pony up the dough and see what all the fuss is about.  Many people said they read News Items and/or RSS feeds.  OK!  I'll try setting that up on my phone.  I have a Samsung A850 through Verizon (Yes I can hear you now!).  I went in and purchased the internet plan.  $5.95/month.  OK I try it. It's loading......

Loading....


Loading....

After like two minutes it finally comes up to a menu screen of other menu's...this is obviously a failure in UI on Verizons part as thier AOL styled portal is just terrible. If I want to navigate to a separate URL I have to go to search then there is a sub menu for go to url.

I decided after like 5 minutes of waiting for a crappy page to load that this wasn't for me.  I was planning on going into verizon and cancelling the service.  Then I stumbled apon Googles Personalize Page for mobile phones.  I tried this out.  And I'll say this is what I would want as my home page. RSS Feeds, News Feeds whatever you can put in the online version of Google Personalization. 

Now all I need to do is find a quick way to access it from my phone.  This might make it so that I like checking my phone for RSS feeds.  But it's still slow as hell and totally unusable.  I'll keep you posted on my progress.

Monthly Elders Meeting ... Wine Tasting?

I had my monthly elders meeting tonight.  The usual go in get an update from the pastor on the state of the church, vote on any upcoming events or special needs.  Open discussion on how to get more communicates involved and attending, yada yada.

Tonight was totally different.  Walk in and I am handed a small plate with five little cups and five saltine crackers.  There are bags of cheese on the table as well.  Turns out we were taste testing a few different wines as the currect communion is too sweet for diabetics and the alternative was too dry.

So the folks at Marketview Liquor provided us with five bottles of wine.  Three of which were way to dry, two were really nice smelling and had a sweet but not to sweet taste.  But tasting between the two it was determined that one was better as it was a screw off top which was beneficial to the ladies that would have to open the bottles as well as had more contents per bottle making it more cost effective then the other bottle.

But forgetting all that after we were done with the tasting we had to run the normal meeting and I found that I was completly buzzed.

Hahaha I love church.

Got my test results back

I went in last Wednesday to get tested for Diabetes, I have history in the family and I was showing some symptoms (excessive thirst, tired easily, heal times getting slower).  So I had some blood work done.  Results all came back normal except for my Triglycerides which were high (350 when they should be under 200).   It all just means I am a big galute and I need to exercise and lose some tonage.

Triglycerides if not kept under control can cause stroke and/or heart disease. Guess I'll have to get this under control.

Who really browses on their cell phone anyways?

OK so I been chewing on something Scoble blogged about a couple of days ago.  He's going to start calling web sites out that don't look good on a cell phone.  Why?  Well he says and quotes other people that back him up that Cell Phone Browsing is a trend that is hugely important coming into 2006.

I don't get it.  Are people actually spending their time waiting for sites to load on their phone to make it worth the trouble to download my site?  I don't think so.  How would I be turning away customers if my site isn't mobile compatible?  Do people actually shop online with their phone? 

Maybe it's different on the West coast (as Scoble is in Washington) then it is here in the East Coast (Rochester, NY) but I've only known a couple of people that have their mobile web activated on their phone.  And the two times I seen them use it it was to look up a movie time or look up an answer to a trivia question we absolutely needed to know...of course it wasn't at that minute as it took forever for the pages to load then the T9 typing then the post back I think it took 10 minutes on the phone what would take 20 seconds on a computer.   But it certainly wasn't to look at and answer e-mail.

I bought a Samsung a couple of months ago and I elected not to get the mobile Internet package. Why? because I felt I would never use it.  And I am right.  I would never want to read RSS feed on there as it would be to slow and for the content that required some sort of plug-in what use would it be reading it on the phone?  Buying things online through your phone?  No way I would never do that.  I would sit down at my computer and do that. Don't get me wrong I have bought stuff with my phone but it was games for my phone and it was terribly slow and I won't do it again.

So I ask what is it that makes my web site so important to be viewed on a cell phone?  What would I be missing out on if I didn't have a mobile ready page of my site?  Wouldn't my RSS feeds handle any mobile users that are interested in my site? 

Look to the left for a list of my other sites...MediaGab actually has products that are for sale.

Time for a new Avatar

It's 2006 time to change from the Santa Avatar I use on Forums to this one:

Happy New Year

Happy New Year 2006!!!!

We went out to the Chineese Buffet tonight, it was great we had the place to ourselves and they had crab legs.  Hope and I spent so much time cracking those legs open.  I went for the sushi which was surprisingly good tonight.  At the end of dinner they bring us a couple of boxes of take out to take with us as it was getting close to closing time and they were trying to get rid of the food still left out on the bar.  I still haven't looked to see what they gave us.

On the way home the Dome Arena was setting off fireworks as the had a family New Years night where they celebrate New Years at 9PM for the kids.  We pulled over and caught the last 10 minutes of the fireworks.

We came home and watched Dick Clark on ABC. I had totally forgot that he had a stroke the year before and it was kind of a shock to watch him slur through the broadcast.  It's good for him that he feels good enough to go throught the whole show but I think we will find out that many people will switch over to Regis on FOX. It was hard to stomach watching Dick Clark tonight.

Well anyway here is to the new year may it be healthy and prosperous to you all.

An example of something inappropiate

So you really want to know why this blog is named Damn Ralph?  Well let's examine my friend Ernie's Flickr Photo Gallery (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ern/).  Specifically the gallery of the LoTR marathon (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ern/sets/208393/) that we had earlier this year.

Ernie graciously provided most of the appetizers for the 12 hour long drunken marathon.  But even before I was officially drunk I had to start something inappropriate.  And inappropriate I went when I created my masterpiece right there on the living room floor using the only material available to me...PoppyCock!

I entitled my creation (as shown in the picture) as the PoppyCock Ring. 

If you look at the title of the image on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ern/8384791/in/set-208393/) you can see how appropriate it is to call this site Damn Ralph.

The Entertainment Industry is in Remake Glory

There were a couple of movie remakes in the beginning that were cool but now it's gotten ridiculous....they can't make a good one anymore they are just regurgitating the same crap that was already done .  And everything is a remake...I went to the movies on Tuesday I don't remember any movie that I want to go see in the future, Miami Vice and Posideon were the only movies I remember and both are remakes.  

2006 is blank for me ... I am not looking forward to any movie being released.  This year I at least had Star Wars and the years before that was LoTR's.

Movies are starting to suck just like Music does.  TV is getting bad too it's the cable channels that take the risks that have the good content.  Daily Show and Battlestar Galactica would never be shown on the networks.

Our entertainment industry is driven by the advertising companies now and not by Hollywood.

You want an example of this?  Let's look at the Apprentice.  First season they were selling lemonade on the streets.  In the current season every episode is a hour long commercial for what ever product or service has bought the rights to that weeks show.  The Apprentice is now dictated by advertising and not creative influences.  And because of that money that is pouring in we'll see many more seasons of the apprentice even after the novelty wears off...just like Survivor.  Do you think the top prize of a one year contracts means anything to the winner?  No, Trump probably puts them in the basement with Milton to get rid of the cockroach problem.

The entertainment industry is either dead or dying.  But no one notices it but the consumers.  Time to wake up Hollywood it's time to change or die.