Rockin Laptop, Rockin Demo

So this morning when I came in this morning, by Boss told me that he had signed for my laptop today and it is in the building. So I had to do my best to not jump up and down and clap like a fool. I got a new Dell with 1.7ghz Processor, 1 Gig of RAM and a 60gig Harddrive. Of course it has WiFi and Bluetooth. My phone is Bluetooth is it should be a happy little device. So this weekend is going to be taken up with playing...hmmmm I mean working with the new laptop. My first impression is that it is larger than I thought it would be, but it is beautiful.

Yesterday was other vendor demo. It differed from the previous by the answers to the questions. Everywhere we were told "No" in the demo on wednesday, we were told "Yes" in the demo yesterday! So that is just amazingly impressive. Something that works out of the box and yet is amazingly customizable and cofigurable. I am sold. If the decision was up to me we would have gave them a check yesterday.

One part of the demo that I really enjoyed was their Chief Architect , Scott Hanselman going over the architecture of the product. It really open'd some eyes! I was in heaven. I am very thankful Scott took the time to go over that with us. I have to say later that night I had visions of XML Schemas dancing in my head!

One of the other thing that I got from Scott's presentation was CodeSmith. If you aren't using CodeSmith, why? I know what you are going to say, I don't really like the idea of code generators. Well, what about one that you write the template for, hmmmm? Something that saves you 60% of your time doing the redunant coding for you. Okay wait it gets better. Eric Smith has made it a freeware. Now there is a professional version, but isn't only about 80 bucks. Come on, does it get better than that. That is so worth the two to three hours we all spend finding that typo on the easy stuff that we just goofed on.

thought for food

The images that was posted here is no longer available

More Quotes

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.
Henry S. Haskins (1878 - 1957)

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965), on the eve of his 75th birthday

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.
Philip Johnson (1906 - )

The long Parade of Salesman

So today was the first in the Long Parade of Salesman. We are going through the vendor demos for the project at work. It's a large project for us, so the vendor demos last about 8 hours. Yes friends 8 hours! Dare I say it again, 8 hours.

Today was the first one and it went fairly well. Tomorrow is the one I am looking forward too. It's a great company that starts with the letters "cor" and ends in "illian". I get to meet Scott Hanselman tomorrow!

Fuzzy's ready to go

Who's Fuzzy? Actually the question is what is Fuzzy? Before your minds go to far with this..Fuzzy is the Quad that my Dad, brothers and I build. It started life as a YZ 490 dirt bike and is now a full fledge quad. Fuzzy is a purebred mut! It's front suspension and brakes are off of a Honda 250R FourTrax. The Latter half of the rear swingarm and brake are from a Suzuki LT250R, while the first part of the swingarm is the stock YZ490 parts. It using the YZ 490 rear shock and linkage. Keeping with the Mut theme, the front plastic is from a 1986 Honda 250R FourTrax and the Rear Plastic is from a 1987 Suzuki LT250R. The Tank is (strange enough) stock YZ490. We fabricated, modified and welded the frame ourselves. We had a friend do the aluminum welding that merged two swingarms in to one.

In the end, Dad has a one off quad that doesn't look, sounds or ride like anyone else's. It is fast and stable and just a lot of fun to ride. There is a lot of bragging rights that goes with building your own quad. Anyone can buy one, but not everyone can make one!

Quotable Quotes

I currently don't have anything interesting to say, so I will differ to those that do.

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.
-Fran Lebowitz

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
-Benjamin Franklin

We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
-Mark Twain

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not be awe struck by other people and try to copy them. Nobody can be you as efficiently as you can.
-Norman Vincent Peale

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.
-Bertrand Russell

Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users?
-Clifford Stoll

Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.
-Doug Larson

Taking the fun out of fishing

I was taking a little break from coding this afternoon and decided to check out some of my regular blogs. While surfing Engadget.com to check out the latest geekwares and what do I find? The Fishing Cam, a camera that goes on your line like a floater and then inline you add the wireless transmitter. Of course right about your Penn reel you have a video screen showing you what the camera sees. No don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of technology. I mean I program for a living.

However somehow this fish cam idea seems just wrong! I mean one of the great things about fishing is being outdoors on a beautiful lake, with friends and family. I mean some of my favorite fishing trips was with my two brothers, Dad and Granddad K. We rented a couple of boats and fished lake skinner for the day. We told stories and jokes all day long. As far as the fishing catching goes I think only K got a fish, and we all had "the one that got away" stories.

The other thing about fishing is the thrill of the hunt. Your pray is almost invisible to you and the only way for you to get your pray is to have knowledge of it. Trying different lures and baits. Trying different ways of moving the bait. All the guess work is removed, you see the species and know exactly what bait to use. At that point why don't you just buy the fish at the market and pay a fishing video game.

XSL in ASP.NET the Easy way

Well Boys and Girls, I am about to get geek here. I've just spend an hour trying to figure out how to write a function in C# that will let me display my xml transformed with my XSL Stylesheet. That is nothing cool then seperating the data from the presentation layer! So how come it took an hour? Well, because I was thinking in Classic ASP mode. Yup we all do it from time to time. You see in Classic ASP if you were going to transform your xml with an xsl it looked something like this:
dim xmlDoc, xslDoc
Set xml = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.4.0")
xml.async = false
xml.load(Server.MapPath("book.xml"))

Set xsl = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.4.0")
xsl.async = false
xsl.load(Server.MapPath("output.xsl"))

Response.Write (xml.transformNode(xsl))

So of course this is how I was thinking that I was going to have to do it in .NET. I won't bore you with the details of everything I tried. Let's just say that after trying the StreamWriter and still not getting what I wanted I was frustrated. I was thinking this can't be harder in ASP.NET then it was in Classic ASP, that would be a step in the wrong direction. So I did one more google search. Ah-ha, there was what I was looking for. It was easy I knew it had to be. So here is how to do the same thing in ASP.NET...Ready

< asp:Xml ID="books" DocumentSource="xml/books.xml" TransformSource="xsl/output.xsl" Runat="server" />
Yup, that's all there is too it! I have to thank aspalliance.com for doing such a great job of documenting the controls and giving great example code.

Happy coding :-)

A Nice surprise

So yesterday my Beautiful Wife surprised me with some gifts. Presents are always nice. Just little things to know you are thought of always makes one feel good. Anyhow she got me something that I have wanted for years. The movie "Animal Crackers" on DVD. This is so amazing, because amazon hasn't had it for over two years now. I don't even know how she found it.

I am just a huge fan of the Marx Brothers. There is something about their humor being witty and corny at the same time, I just love.

"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know."

Plus the characters, that Harpo and Chico always played, they were the underdogs but you knew they would make it. And of course there is always something amazing about the way that Harpo played the harp, and Chico played the piano. Two completely different styles, yet both filled with showman ship.

And we can't forget Groucho shooting off the oneliners like a machine gun.

Well in the words of Jeffery T. Spaulding - "Hello, I must be going, I'm glad I came all the same I must be going, I'll stay a week or two, I'll stay the summer through, but what I'm telling you is... I must be going"

typographic illustration

Surfing the blogs and found this link. Typographic illustration
Having a background in typesetting and pre-press work, I found this illustrations to be both beautiful and intriguing.

How to Read a RFP response

A good portion of my afternoon has been spend reading some of the RFP responses we have received for a project we are doing at work. What is an RFP? Well friends it is an acronym for Request for Proposal. So we sent out a fifty page RFP. What we get back ranges in size depending on how bored the sales and marketing teams are at each company. From this I have come away with some useful information. No so much on the products but on how to read a RFP response.

1. If within three paragraphs they mention how flexible the product is more than five times, it probably isn't.
2. Gleaming technical information from marketing materials is like reading hieroglyphics, it is doable it just takes a lot of studying and it may not be a true representation
3. A RFP response is like staring at the sun, if you look long enough you will burnout your retina.
4. Brevity is our friend...All of those marketing people out there, repeat after me brevity is our friend.
5. Sending me a RFP response in PDF format is great, but don't expect me to read 200 pages off of the screen, cause, I'm just not going to.
6. Most important of all, the ones that include pictures keep you from getting bored as fast! If their in color it's even better.

Saturday night....

Well, it is Saturday night. So party party party, right...no not so much. I either have a really good cold or a really bad sinus infection. It hasn't decided what it wants to be yet. So I'm sitting in bed, watching movies on my puter DVD player and curled up with a good RFP (Request for Proposal) response. Unfortunately the cold medicine has me groggy. Happily the RFP is a really page turner, and the movie, Second Hand Lion is wonderful. Being that sudafed has left me with a peanut the size of a brain. I'll leave you with a couple of quotes from one of my favorite comedians.

I must confess, I was born at a very early age.

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

Why was I with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, she reminds me more of you than you do!

Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.

I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.

-Groucho Marx

quiet

Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world.

- Hans Margolius

McGyver's iPod

This is the kind of story I love. Guy, buys iPod, guy wants more battery life from iPod, guy builds iPod battery pack. Mr. Drew Perry is a real life McGyver, Folks! He had a need and with a couple of rechargable batteries and a deck of playing cards later he had his iPod battery pack! Better yet, this fine gentleman has even posted schematics on how to build your own battery pack. He says that he is getting an extra 10 hours out of it.

New Gadget Blog

Surfin some of my favorite blogs, I found a link to Engadget. This is a great blog for those that have to have news on the latests and greatest gadgets. It covers the whole spectrum of gear. Cellphones, Desktops, Digital Cameras, Handhelds, Home Entertainment, Laptops, Misc. Gadgets, Peripherals, Portable Audio, Portable Video, Robots, Tablet PCs and Wireless. Basically, if it's geek, they'll tell you about.

So far my favorite article is on the "Devil Duckie". I love the fact that someone had a enough of a sense of humor to make a rubber duckie in to a USB storage device.

The toys of my Childhood are now Online

When I was growing up we use to love rainy days. Why? Well first off, growing up in Southern California, there just weren't a lot of rainy days. And secondly and most importantly was our rainy day toys. These were Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys and Legos. My favorite was the Legos. I was always building castles and cars (okay, things that looked like cars if your crossed your eyes and used your imagination).

So today I was just kind of surfing around and I went to one of my favorite design site. Chopping Block.com. I mean any site that has a theme song by "They might be Giants" is pretty cool if you ask me. Anyhow one of their newest projects was for Legos. So I checked it out, and what did I find? My childhood rainy day toy is now available 24/7 on a computer near you. I was taken back for a moment. I thought about this and was a little hurt at first. My toy was now a computer program. Then I thought about it a little more, humm if it's on the screen that means there isn't any little plastic pieces to step on in the middle of the night. Whoever thought of this is a Genius! My poor parents must of stepped on about four hundred million of those little legos at night. I won't have to now. When the little boy wants to play with legos we can just fire up the computer and way he goes!

So with Legos found, its off to google to see about Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys. There is still a version of Lincoln Logs around. Infact they even have PDFs of how to build the bank, and the barn and other buildings. Tinkertoys however took a little more searching but I did find something about them. Hasbro still sells Tinkertoys. Somehow it is nice to know that they toys of ones childhood are still around in some fashion.

Win a Date with Javascript

So I have a couple of pages on our site that use javascript to display the date and or time. And of course none of them have the same format. Right now each page has a different javascript to display the date. And if course that isn't very modular. So I wrote an fairly complete javascript function, that if you tell it the format you want it in it will give today's date in the format.
Here are the formats available:

shortdate: 3/2/2004
shortdatetime: 3/2/2004 10:35
shortdateUTCtime: 3/2/2004 18:35:27
longdate: March 2, 2004
longdatetime: March 2, 2004 10:38
longdateUTCtime: March 2, 2004 18:40:12
longweekday Tuesday, March 2, 2004
longweekdaytime Tuesday, March 2, 2004 10:41
longweekdayUTCtime Tuesday, March 2, 2004 18:42:18


You can download the source code here. Download the text file and change it to a iDate.js. The file is commented on how to use it. Feel free to use it in your projects.

Which Forgotten 80s Cartoon Character are you?

I got this link from PixieStitch. She was Butterbear from the Wuzzles. Too Funny!

You are He-Man from Masters of the Universe! You
take life very seriously, and you should, considering you are the keeper of all that is good and right in the universe! However, your nonstop suspicion of Skeletor and his henchman can start your friends wondering why you don't loosen up once in awhile.

Which Forgotten 80s Cartoon Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

The funny thing about this, is He-man was one of my least favorite cartoons. I always thought if it as filler. I always thought I would me more like Lt. Quicksilver, from the Silverhawks.

"This land was once, green and good"

Yesterday I bought the movie "The Dark Crystal". I knew what all of the characters where named for the most part, but I didn't remember the story. The details of the story anyway. So my Beautiful Wife and I are watching the movie. The narrator is telling the history of the story. He says, "This land was once green and good, before the crystal cracked". I thought, hold the phone, I have heard that recently; in fact I know all of this. It isn't that my memory was that good. It's the opening lyrics for "The Crystal Method" song "Trip like I do". Which I thought was very hip. It's not the same voice as the narrator in the movie, which somehow I like even more. I forgot how beautiful and enchanting this film is. It is simply amazing to me that this film was made in 1982. Jim Henson was a genius.

I have seen "The Dark Crystal" tons of times when I was a kid. Not in the movie theater though, we didn't go to the movies that often. You see when I was growing up we had the movie on CED disc. Our first CED player was a Zenith and we got it at GEMCO. Mom and Dad had put it on layaway. I remember when we picked it up. It was a Friday night and we even got the movie "Dumbo". I remember going home and watching it all the way through and feeling like I had stayed up really late (9:30pm). I must have been 8 or 9 years old. Then the next morning we got up early to watch it again.

It’s really funny the flood of memories that comes back thinking about these CED movies. The little store in Arcadia that we use rent the CEDs from, the library of CEDs that Grandma and Grandpa use to have. In fact we had just come home from the Video store when I got my finger partial cut off in the car door of our old 1973 ford pinto station wagon. I had the movie ”Alice in Wonderland” in my left hand, and I took the tip of my ring finger off with the car door on my right hand. The same car door, that my Brother and I would ask Mom to leave the window rolled down so that we could jump through it like they did in “the Dukes of Hazzard”.

I remember when Dad figured out to hook up the CED player to the stereo. (This was like in 1985-86 mind you) and Dad had these big tower speakers that he had built. They were taller than I was at the time. Anyhow us kids were watching the movie “The Neverending Story” and Mom was ironing. It got to the scene where the Rock Biter was riding his stone scooter and the floor shook. It was so cool. It felt like you where in the movie. I looked over at Mom grinning and she smiled at me and pointed at the measuring cup full of water on the ironing board and you could see the ripples in the cup from the stereo. We also use to watch the CEDs that were music videos for kids, It was called DTV (Disney TV). and it would have a montage of cartoons edited to go with songs like Hall and Oats’ “Private Eyes”.

I just did a search on ebay for CED. I was amazed with what came up. Hmmm, I may have to pick a couple up for Nostalgia.

Quick observation

If you don't get much sleep the night before, and you have a lot of busy work to do in the morning, A Quad (4 shoots of espresso) White Chocolate Moca is the only way to go. I just got three hours worth of work done in an hour. On the flipside, I am hoping that I will be able to blink again fairly soon.