January 2006 Entries

I'm sure I'm way late on this but I still get a lot of hits from my previous post about Jerry C. Looks like he has his own site now and someone else has posted a site with all of his videos.

Enjoy.

Video site - http://www.jerryc.co.uk/

Jerry's site - http://jerryc.tw

I learned some new words today. Folksonomy. Tags. Social Software. Between these and AJAX and ASP.Net 2.0 and C# 2.0 and VS.Net 2005 and SQL Server 2005 and these and who knows what else... When do I live? When do I sleep? Where do I put all this information? My brain is about full now.

My company gave me an incredible Christmas gift this year. We had our choice of several unbelievable gifts but I chose a new Dell 20 inch monitor. Pretty nice huh? Unfortunately I didn't have a DVD player to show DVD's on the new monitor. I say didn't because I went out on Saturday and picked up the LG GSA-4166B DVD burner. It's pretty nice but I'm having some severe problems with DVD playback. The video is extremely choppy and the timing is way off from the audio. I'm not real familiar with this type of stuff so I don't really know where to look for answers. It came with PowerDVD software to play the videos but I'm not happy with that at all. I put in a help ticket to their support team and they basically told me I had to run my monitor with 800 x 600 resolution! Thanks for nuthin'. And to top that off, it doesn't fix the problem!

Some guys at work pointed me to the free codecs downloads for Windows Media Player but that didn't help either. I get a digital copyright problem when I try to use that, whatever that is. Microsoft says to reboot and that should take care of that problem. Wrong. Again, thanks for nuthin'.

I'm starting to think that the problem lies in my video card. It's not horrible but it is a few years old and maybe it just isn't up to playing DVD's. I currently have an NVidia Riva TNT2 64 Pro card. I haven't shopped around for new graphics cards in a while and I am really surprised at how expensive they are. I'm thinking that it might be time to demote ole' Betsy here to a file server in the basement and get me a new desktop computer.

If anyone out there has any ideas about my DVD playback problems I'd appreciate a shout.

Why do we still have AM radio? It sucks. It's not in stereo. It fades out when you go under a bridge. It's nothing but static when you're driving next to high power lines. The station's signals are so damn week if you turn your car in the opposite direction they fade out. Do you here me WDFN? Are the FM radio frequencies that limited that we can't add more stations? And while I'm at it, why aren't there any sports talk radio shows on FM? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Specs Howard?

What great .Net developers ought to know

Looks like Vegas is out. The kids need books for school, the kids got screwed on their rent, the kids don't have enough money for their car insurance, the kids need a room built in the basement, we need new carpet on the stairs, we need new carpet in the living room, you can't have new carpet without new furniture, you wouldn't dare put new carpet down without painting first. It never ends. Sigh. Maybe we can get away for a weekend to Soaring Eagle.

Just a note to myself that I moved my blog over to SQL Server 2005 today. Keep your fingers crossed.

Friday I moved my stock club web site from MSDE to SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. It was realitively painless except that I had to uninstall the SQL 2000 tools that I had on my computer. The new Server Management tool is pretty cool and it only took a short time to get up and running with it. I was really surprised that I had to do virtually nothing to the code when it ran against the new database except change the server name in the connection string. That was pretty awesome.

Now for the bad news. Since the install for SQL Server 2005 Express went ok, I decided I would download and install the other express edition tools for VisualStudio 2005. Uh oh! Hold it right there mister. SQL Server 2005 Express is a Cummunity Technical Preview. The other tools want me to uninstall that before I install them. Damn. Not gonna do that. Hell, I just spent all day installing it! I guess I'll have to stick with VS.Net 2003 for a little while longer.

If anybody comes by here and I'm wrong about this, please set me straight and give me work around. I'd certainly appreciate it.

I've been off all week because my new company closes down between Christmas and New Year's day. It's really a great benefit to have the week off especially when we're such a small company. So I was sitting here earlier tonight getting myself mentally prepared to return to the grind tomorrow when the phone rang about 9:30. It was the owner of my company calling to tell me that we would be closed again tomorrow for the holiday. I was and still am totally floored! I am so lucky to have found a company like this to work for. It is an absolute joy and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate and love it. I've seen the other side and this is so much better!

We had a pretty good holiday season this year although I did have a pretty big letdown after Christmas. Truthfully, I am glad they are over. I took my tree and inside decorations down on Thursday and the outside lights down today. The holidays are officially gone for 2005.

For 2006 I want to get healthy. (I know, I know. Every year, the same thing. But at least I haven't given up!) I've really neglected myself and I'm at the age where I need to really start taking care of myself. Also, I want 2006 to be as stress free as possible. I'm really going to try to not sweat the small stuff and enjoy life. I want to be more active and get out of the house more. Especially in the summer and during the summer evenings. I really miss being "out" on a hot summer night.

Vegas Baby! If all goes as planned, Gayla and I are going to Las Vegas in March. It's been a long time coming and I can't wait! I actually found some pretty reasonable airfares. Now I need to find some reasonable hotel rates.

That's enough for one post.