June 2006 - Posts

• VW, Unpimp my Ride

  Mike Hodnick took the time to organize a nice collection of VW commercials from YouTube. I don't have a television, so I don't know if these maybe show up all the time on TV. If not, I would definitely check them out. I was on his site to thank him for the GlueBlur skin, which is where alot of the beginnings for this skin came from. Posted Jun 25 2006, 11:58 PM by Bob with 1 comment(s)

• Radio Button

  You'll notice above I have a new button marked Radio. If you ever wandered what this geek listens to, well that link has my current play list. As long as my hosting service doesn't get excited about it being there it will stay. Posted Jun 25 2006, 11:48 PM by Bob with 2 comment(s)

• Click

  I went and saw click this weekend, which features Adam Sandler. Most Adam Sandler movies are pretty hit or miss, it is either really good or makes you want to gouge your eyes out with a sharpened spoon. Movies.com gave the movie a D- and had the critics giving it a C. There were alot of reader reviews though and they gave it a B. I have found that critics are a bunch of blow hard elitists, so I read some of the reader reviews and decided to go see it. Click was damn good, not Happy Gilmore good, but damn good. I have some comments about the ending, but since that would spoil things I think I will keep them to myself. Check it out, I don't think you'll be disappointed. Posted Jun 25 2006, 09:34 PM by Bob with 3 comment(s)

• I Create Magic

  For the people who don't know me, I am a geek. I have always been a geek. I was into computers pretty strongly up until I was about 20, and then real life came along and I got off on a tangent, getting jobs that had nothing to do with computers. About 5 years ago, I went into reflection and decided there was no reason I should not be coding for a living. I promptly quit my job and slowly worked my way into a coding job (doing support, doing DBAish jobs and eventually becoming someone who is paid to write code) Now that I have rewritten the path my life was taking, I am doing what I would do for free and getting paid for it, I decided to do some reflection again to make sure it was what I truly wanted. The main things I asked are    1. Is it everything I was looking for    2. Why do I code? The answer to number one is a resounding yes! I truly enjoy coding and I get up everyday excited to go to work. The second one is alittle more complex. A very large part of the reason for my career change was, in my old life, I could feel my mental capacity deteriorating. I literally noticed my rate of comprehension and computational abilities getting worse. This has definitely been reversed. I think at this moment in time, even though I am now 34, my mental facilities are stronger than ever. This only partially answers number two though. Why do I code. Why coding? Why not 'insert other option here'. The more I thought about it, the more I understood the lure. My sig line at work says 'Code Poet' and I believe that is important. The thought of why we code is important, it is more than a paycheck. Many people who create take raw materials and they create something with them. We as programmers, we take nothing and create magic. Physics tells us that matter and energy are transversable, and can interchange states, but the sum of the two remains the same. Nothing is lost, nothing is gained. I think Physics is wrong. Programmers add to the sum. The total gains based off the magic we create. We are not alone in this. Do not misconstrue my comments to mean I think programmers are better than anyone else. Many other create from nothing. Musicians for one. The reason I am a programmer is it allows me to add to the total sum of everything that exists. It allows my ideas to become a reality. Magic happens. Everyday. Posted Jun 23 2006, 09:14 AM by Bob with 3 comment(s)

• Mounting FTP as a Drive Letter

  As mentioned earlier, one of the things I did recently was move to a hosted solution. My poor cable modem was threatening a strike. One of the side affects of this move was the tedium of having to move things over FTP everytime I wanted to add or change something on the site. Everyone kept telling me that I should get an FTP client, but I am averse to adding an application that does something Windows has built in (Explorer) unless there is truly a benefit. Along comes Net Drive. Before we go any further, there is some gray area about whether or not you should be able to download Net Drive. I found the article about it on Engadget, though the circumstance where they are allowing you to download it may be suspect, so please make sure to real the EULA when installing. Back to the fun part. Basically what Net Drive does is allow you to 'mount' your FTP site as a drive in My Computer. Honestly, this is something Windows should support out of the box. This isnt 1990 any more. Having said that, no more Explorer for FTP, no more classic FTP clients. Open My Computer, open the X: drive and bam. I am moving things to my site. *That* is how the internet was made to be used. Posted Jun 22 2006, 11:25 AM by Bob with no comments

• Calendars

  Jayson and I discuss often the benefits of having a Calendar control on a blog. Does anyone actually use the calendar instead of the archives? I ask this as even though I do not see any benefit of having a Calendar (because it being free and pretty) , it seems all themes have them...would anyone care if they went away? Posted Jun 22 2006, 10:36 AM by Bob with 1 comment(s)

• Yet Another Skin Change

  So, I decided to find a decided making a skin from scratch is alot of work (though I haven't ruled out doing it again), so I decided to find a sking I somewhat liked and tweak it alittle. I found GlueBlur on a site ran by Michael Hodnick (thank you Mike) and went edited from there. Yes, it is quite orange. You can blame Jayson for that. he started talking about orange links, and I have this fixation problem. So now I have an orange site. All joking aside, I am very happy with it so far. I will probably add a left side bar and move some of the widgets to the left side as the right side is pretty cluttered and there are still widgetish things I would like to add. This seems to render well in IE 6, IE7 and Firefox, though there are alot of tables and whatnot I will probably want to remove and the skin doesn't fare well in XHTML validation, so there will be some time spent there. Posted Jun 22 2006, 09:24 AM by Bob with no comments

• About Bob

  This will one day be a great section about me. Posted Jun 22 2006, 07:46 AM by Bob with no comments

• SubText 1.5 Is Out

  I know I am kind of late on this, but I wanted to wait until i had personally installed it before recommending you update to it. SubText 1.5 is out! The update went very smooth, though I don't think there is much added. I would back up your data first, as the wizard makes some schema changes. There is a much lauded 'Submarine' skin, but it is too skinny to use unless you are running at 800x600. I hear the next upgrade will be low feature except a conversion to 2.0. I had 1.0 running on 2.0 earlier, but ran into some issues with the archives and didn't have the time to sort it out, so now it looks like I won't have to! Posted Jun 21 2006, 09:28 AM by Bob with 5 comment(s)

• My Bike

  Finally got a picture of my bike posted, unfortunantly I am sitting on it so shield your eyes. Its in the gallery. Posted Jun 19 2006, 09:12 AM by Bob with 2 comment(s)

• New (Old) and Improved XP Remote Desktop

  Here is an interesting article on activating and old feature from the Windows XP SP 2 beta, allowing a person to Remote Desktop into an XP box without logging out the person logged in locally. I found this looking for something else, and since I use 2k3 on my desktops (not counting the laptop which is Vista) I haven't tested it so your milage may vary. So back up your old dll before getting too far into it. Posted Jun 19 2006, 05:53 AM by Bob with no comments

• Bill Gates retiring, kind of

  As everyone and their brother has probably already heard, Bill is retiring in July of 2008. For all the people who take pleasure in bashing Gates, they need to remember the amazing things that the Bill Gates Foundation does for the underpriviledged in the world. As Jayson reminded me, almost *all* of his billions go to the Foundation when he dies... Posted Jun 16 2006, 10:12 AM by Bob with 1 comment(s)

• RDOS

  Jayson is my hero for the day. I haven't blogged lately as all I have done is log in to blog, spent xx minutes deleting spam, get frustrated and leave. No more. Jayson pointed me to RDOS, which should work with just about any blog software. Best thing ever. Posted Jun 07 2006, 07:55 AM by Bob with 4 comment(s)

• I Hate VS 2005

  Actually, I really like it, but I keep running into one specific issue, and I am hoping it is user error and one of you will explain my deficiency. On a web application I work on regularly, most of the pages do not have a code behind, all the work happens in a magical intrinsically inherited base page. On occassion though, I want to add a code behind to an existing page. There seems to be no logical way to do this in VS 2005. It seems you can A: delete the page and recreate it with a code behind. B: add new item, create a cs file, add the page directive in the old aspx page to use it, fix the partial class namespacing and it still wont show up 'attached' to the other page in the IDE until it is closed and reopened. Please tell me I am just missing something... Posted Jun 01 2006, 07:05 PM by Bob with 2 comment(s)

• Enough Abuse

  Ok, enough abuse, I turned off my skin. I am going to redo it in some nice Tans ;) Posted Jun 01 2006, 12:38 AM by Bob with no comments