Computing

Bought an iPhone 4 yesterday! Won't get it for 7-10 days tho'. Hmph.

I wonder how much time is wasted/spent everyday by every person waiting for the dreaded spinning hourglass. It's gotta be in the years!

I love this new blog skin. I still have a lot of work that I want to do on it. I don't want it to be only Harley-Davidson themed although right now that's what it looks like. I did "borrow" the Harley-Davidson.com favicon. Hope they don't mind. I also have some issues with Safari and Chrome and the sidebar. For some reason it doesn't show in those browsers even though I can see the html in the source. Weird. It's fine in Firefox and IE. I think I want to add a tag cloud too. I'll have to see how that looks. Still,...

My friend and former co-worker has started blogging. He started a technology company named Hybrid Technology and Training Partners (HTTP for short) after leaving The Solutions Group where we both worked. So far, most, if not all of his posts are about the daily activities and growth of his business. I read nearly all of the posts today and I have to say it was pretty interesting. It doesn't hurt that Jeff has an incredible vocabulary and is quite the wordsmith. Anyway, Jeff does some great work and will treat you right. You should give him a call if you have...

Hmmm. I just heard about Flickrvision. Too cool.

I've blogged about it before, but I still think TwitterVision is very cool. The bad thing is, it depresses me. It reinforces my belief that I'm on the outside looking in.

I'm spent most of my Labor Day, and much of the entire weekend, trying to install Windows 2003 Server on an old Dell Optiplex GX1 computer. I've not had much luck. First I tried to install a version of Windows XP Pro on a 4 gig harddrive. Installing Windows and the BAZILLION updates to it pretty much ate up the entire 4 gigs. I couldn't do a damn thing with it. So I decided to buy a new harddrive. I went out and bought a 320 gig Western Digital Caviar HDD. After installing it, I decided I had enough room to...

Last week I started getting blue screens on my main computer. It would barely run for fifteen minutes before shutting down. I hadn't installed any new hardware or software so I was completely baffled. After several hours of troubleshooting I figured I was over my head. I took it to a local computer store and had to leave it. After two days they hadn't even looked at it and to make things worse, there were no techs coming in for the next two days. Not good. Being the totally impatient person that I am, I went and picked it up. I...

I can't even draw a straight line with MS Paint.

I just heard of Twitter the other day over at Girl and Geek and think it is a very cool idea. I really like the idea of TwitterVision and think that it's probably the coolest thing that I've seen on the web lately. It's pretty addicting to watch although I wish there was some way to control how long the "tweets" are displayed since some are kinda long and its hard to read the whole message before they disappear. This morning I went to TwitterVision for my daily fix and was presented with this monstrosity... At first I was a little worried because...

Last night I downloaded and installed Community Server. The installation was so easy and effortless! A simple double click on the msi file and that was that. It just works. Nice. I'm using it for my forums site. I was using ASP.Net forums, which severd me just fine, but it's time to move on. There is just so much more in the Community Server product. I would like to thank telligent for making the personal version available. Feel free to check the forums out and create an account! You can find them at http://bigkspub.com/ThePub/forums/default.aspx. I'm still in the process of...

Tonight I updated my computer. Specifically, I installed Internet Explorer 7 Service Pack 1, then a couple security updates for that, then SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2. While we're waiting for them to finish, let's recap some world events that have taken place during the installs. My daughter graduated college, got married, had kids, and sent them to college. A baby that was born yesterday has grown up and become President. I have gotten old and died. We've found an alternative fuel to oil....

Shelley Powers comments on a post written by Greg Beck at CL&P. Pretty scary really. Can we ever be anonymous again?

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...

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...

Can anyone recommend a good book for getting started with Ajax?

Ever since I read about Ruby and Watir on my friend Jeff's blog, I have been fascinated by them. Ruby is an awesome language and Watir is just too cool. It does things that other companies (ie. IBM/Rational, Mercury, Segue, etal) charge thousands and thousands of dollars a seat for. Anyway, now that I'm gettin' the hang of Ruby and Watir, I'm starting to automate everything I do on the web. Even the simple things like logging in to web sites, searches, you name it. I can't be doin' all those mouse clicks and typing and stuff. Now it's one click...

I love watching the Channel9 videos. These two are my absolute favorites. To me, they are incredibly inspiring. I've watched them twice this year and I'm sure I'll watch them again. I like when she mentions that “we have a lot of really smart people here [at Microsoft]“. Suzanne Cook is definitely one of them. Suzanne Cook - Developing the CLR Part I Suzanne Cook - Developing the CLR Part II

So I just quadrupled the RAM in my computer. I went from 256 MB to a gig. Wow, what a difference! I'm running a web server, a mail server, and an instance of SQL Server so if I did anything else it would really bog down. I have a quandary though. I bought two 512 MB chips that run at 400 MHZ and the 256 meg chip that I took out is a few years old and only runs at 266 MHZ. I'm pretty sure that the memory will only run at the lowest chip's speed so I decided not to...

I really can't say that I've been busy lately although I have been doing a lot on the computer for the stock club and my sister. I created her a nice little home page with some links that she uses all the time so she can have easy access. I've also been doing some other work on the stock club application, but nothing that's really useful to the club as of yet. I've been trying to balance my computer time with getting things done around the house so I don't “waste” my whole vacation by sitting in front of the...

I've been tossing it around for awhile now but yesterday morning I finally went out and did it. I registered a domain name! I know, I know, no big deal, a gazillion trillion others have done it. Whoopee Keith. I, however, am a little excited about it. Woo hoo again! Computers are just too awesome. So, the url to this and all my other sites will soon be changing to www.bigkspub.com. Ta daaaa! Just kinda rolls off your tongue, doesn't it? So now, being the anal retentive, obsessive compulsive lunatic that I am, I have to figure out a transistion plan so...