Weekend log

On Friday my brother came up to help me install nice new baseboard trim around the new room downstairs and a bedroom upstairs. Having that 18v Dewalt cordless nail gun sure speeds up the job!

Saturday I installed new gutters along the front of the house.

Sunday I finished the jacks for voice/data/cable wiring for the new downstairs family room. The centralized wiring closet is working out nicely. In my first escapade with X10 home automation, I wired my cable modem and firewall router to be rebooted remotely via the computer. Later I returned the favor to Rion and helped him install crown molding in his country mansion. I guess its not a mansion yet, but you could fit my house inside his with room to spare, plus mine has two kids in it and his has none.

A new start for Westgate

I hope Costco makes it happen in Westgate:

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050809/BUSINESS10/508090348

Westgate's demise has really bothered me, coupled with the empty retail around the closed Food Town on Secor. A Costco in place of the old Dillards is convenient to the city dwellers and will be an incredible improvement to the area. It is an anchor that will revitalize the whole retail district around Central/Secor. I'm sick of having to go to the burbs for decent big box shopping (and don't jump on the "why Walmart and every other big box is evil" bandwagon with me, I disagree).

I just hope they improve the look of the shopping center to mesh better with the classic neighborhoods. I think Home Depot did a decent job of that a few years back. I doubt they would have put in the money and effort if there wasn't so much community "involvement" during that ordeal. Yes, we'll have to deal with some juggling of retail space regarding the surrounding shops. In the end there will be room for all of them I'm sure, even if it means moving across or down the street a short ways. They will all benefit in the long run (probably even short term as soon as Costco opens).

Shankland disturbs me...

In the August 3-9 issue of Toledo City Paper Terry Shankland (a candidate for City Council) claims COSI is dead, dark, and dingy. He says it cannot support itself financially so it makes no sense to keep it. That way it can be a shopping center again, albeit a heavily subsidized one ("we can't kill the stores with high rent"). Does anyone see a contradiction here? Further more, to say it should die because it doesn't break even is nonsense. Using the same logic we should shut down the libraries, parks, and public transportation.

COSI is a huge success and asset to this region. Believe it or not, it helps make downtown a destination, not just for Toledoans. Educated, creative families want venues like this, the zoo, the stadium, the metro parks, the museum, etc. Thousands of children come to our COSI each year to prop up their science curriculums and build enthusiasm. We all know Toledo schools could use all the help they can get. Many progressive cities have science museums for their children. We have a great one that should be maintained, improved, and encouraged.

About COSI being dark and dingy, it is not by any means dark unless you consider the areas that are SUPPOSED to be dark. Dingy may be true, I've commented on some of the dust accumulating in certain areas to the COSI administration. They said they were going to pose a funding issue to the voters a while back, but the Ford administration asked them to hold off to be part of an overall arts improvement budget. It seems to me they should just bring it to the voters independently. The independent venues that are supported directly by customers, voters, and benefactors seem to be the most successful. When city politics get involved, enthusiasm and progress seem to come to a grinding halt. I'm thinking of successes like the Zoo, Metro Parks, Museum of Art, Rep, etc.

As for having more retail space downtown, there seem to be plenty of other vacancies. Leave COSI alone, better yet, support it.

ROADTRIP!!!

Mom picked up the kids on Friday night so Megan and I split. We decided make Chicago our destination. Traffic was nasty getting there so we pretty much arrived at the hotel and crashed. Saturday was so beautiful...we had a leisurely morning of eating and shopping. Megan couldn't miss the Sanrio store, and keeping pace I required a trip to the Lego store. Later in the afternoon we walked around Oak Park. We saw FLW's Unity Temple, an awesome venue for a UU congregation. The town is gorgeous, we walked around the neighborhood admiring the old homes. For Toledoans, it is like the Old West End on steroids. It had a very lively main street, very pedestrian friendly and alive with activity. We ate at the Khyber Pass Indian restaurant, it was excellent.

Today I wired the downstairs for cable, telephone, and data (the gigabit backbone grows). I creatively snaked it through the stairwell by popping off the top step, down to the central wiring closet. 5 of the 9 rooms are wired now. 2 more will happen later in the fall. Also, its time to begin X10 experimentation.

An amazing journalist/blogger

Its too bad I learned of Steven Vincent's blog only in death. He was a terrific writer and seemed to have little restraint in his investigative work.

http://spencepublishing.typepad.com/in_the_red_zone/

I've always felt that turning Iraq into a democracy would be handing its future to a heavier political influence from Iran (via religion), and after reading parts of SV's blog I feel my predictions are partially verified. Not exactly a step in the right direction, or at least in the intended direction.

weekend log

On Friday night I mowed the grass for the first time in 6 weeks. Later we killed some time out at Media Play and Target.

Saturday we puttered around the house in the morning. Megan made these awesome baked pan cakes with fruit compote for brunch. We stuffed ourselves at Shorty's BBQ in the afternoon...great patio setup there. In the evening we went to a park in Perrysburg and poked around downtown. Because of the temperature and relative niceness of the day, it would have been sacrilege to not have ice cream somewhere. We went down to Maggie Moo's at Levis, and once again it was terrific. I thought it might have just been a fluke when they opened up but no, its some of the best ice cream I've ever had, aside from some of the home made batches we've made.

Sunday was spent painting, cleaning around the house, and paying bills. Not much excitement but made some great progress on the room downstairs. In the evening I planted a willow tree from a start my mom gave. Its only about 5 feet tall now, I really hope the transplant takes. Also I started reading The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals by Ken Henderson.

not my child!

There is a lot of buzz around recent findings of hidden content in the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas game.

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050720/205985.html?.v=1

This reminds me of an incident at Target that always makes me laugh. An adolescent was asking the Target associate to purchase a copy of GTA. Because of the rating system the associate said he would have to get his parents consent. A couple minutes later the boy comes back with his mom. The associate explains to the lady that the game includes gang violence, stealing cars, driving recklessly, etc. The mother seemed ok with it and was about to purchase the game. The associate then mentioned there was some sexually suggestive material such as prostitutes and girlfriends. The mother's jaw nearly hit the floor as she snatched the game from her son. He looked very ashamed. Basically that tells him that its alright to simulate being a criminal, but once you throw sex into the mix someone has crossed the line. If given the choice between your kids thinking about sex, or thinking about shooting someone and stealing their car, which would you prefer? Maybe you say neither, but this mother's reaction will always stick with me.

A very cool idea...

I hope the young men make a ton of money from this innovation, a peltier system to cool your car instead of the traditional freon/compressor type setup.

http://www.sltrib.com/utah/ci_2841984

throwback to third grade

kid B: [doing lots of stuff to get attention, some of it stupid] "I rule!"

kid A: "no, you're stupid, and you're gonna get us all in trouble"

kid B: "I'm rubber, you're glue..."

kid A: [takes over the game excluding kid B and his buddies]


Toledo Journal article

Wow this mayoral race will be crazy!!

weekend log

Friday evening I took the fam to the library's Harry Potter party. It truly amazed me...I've never seen that many people at the Toledo Main branch. It was surreal also with all the costumes. They had a magician, bird handler, lots of crafts, tv stations playing the prior movies, free refreshments, and more. Saturday I spent the day working around the house. Sunday we went to Ann Arbor. It was a real nice weekend...

weekend log

Saturday morning I attended a timberframe seminar, home tour, and shop tour. When I returned home, Megan was frantically trying to dry up the basement from the hot water heater that decided to stop storing water. I got a hose to empty the tank in a more controlled manner, but the piece of junk valves at the hot water heater did nothing to stop the flow. So I had to shut down water for the whole house until I could get a new one from Lowes and Sunday and get it hooked up. What a pain...I hate those household projects that are just getting you back to where you were before.

new music review

I picked up the new Ben Folds album Saving Silverman a week ago. Ben Folds (with and with out the 'five') has consistently been one of my favorites for the last 7 years (Whatever & Ever Amen). Here's my review on Amazon.

blogger legal guide

I'm still catching up on my mail from June...came across this new legal guide for bloggers posted by the EFF.


http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/

Its good to be back...

Today was my first real day back on the job. It actually felt good to be back in the office and see the people I missed all month. Having good peers and a good supervisor go a long way in keeping me happy at Pilkington. Creative work assignments, flexible scheduling, and good pay don't hurt either. Now if we could just get the locker room and grassy field for lunchtime games of ultimate frisbee like OC has...

Tonight I went to the local .NET user group meeting downtown. Joseph Poirier gave a presentation on a dispatch application he wrote for a local company. Its really great to come together with other techies in the greater Toledo area.

Final day at Teched 2005

I didn't want to miss the 8:30 session, and somehow I woke up in time to catch the bus over there without the use of my alarm. I didn't even walk fast, actually I couldn't walk fast because my feet were so sore from walking through the freaking everglades the night before. Oh yeah, did I mention that? Andrew found an excellent short cut. And when I say short cut, I mean tall wet grass and it took us twice as long to walk back to the hotel. I was sure a croc would crawl out at us any moment.

PRT355 Enterprise Project Server integration with Sharepoint by Jean Francois LeSaux. Jean gave a terrific session showing the architecture and integration points between sharepoint and MS Project (PWA ans Professional). Allows for task integration with Outlook/Exchange. Allows for personalized web portal including task list and gant charts, and health of projects.

DAT310 Programming SQL Server Management Objects with Michiel Wories
MicrosoftSQLTools.com - Shared source initiative he started
You can perform any SQL management task programmatically through SMO.NET. Communications settings (partial object instantiation or full) can be configured to meet your own scalability needs.

Lunch

DBA417 Maximizing Query Performance in SQL Server with Burt ??? (MS SQL Support escalation engineer). This guy was FREAKIN AWESOME. This was hands down the best session I attended at tech ed, and if you have access to the webcast sessions online, go watch this one.

Tech Ed '05 was great, and I really look forward to going to Boston next year if possible.

Teched Day 4

Hands on labs all morning, the cool thing about HOL at teched are the dozens of lab assistants who are actually knowledgeable about the products and demos and are literally sprinting around to help people.

Two lectures after lunch...

PRT376 Sharepoint Portal Server Search Technologies
A good overview of searchable scopes of webs and subwebs, metadata, and list content. Gave overview of Sharepoint table structures within SQL. I forget his name, but the guy liked his whiskey. He gave out shots at the end.

DBA421 Inside SQL Server User Mode Scheduler with Ken Henderson.
In depth look at how SQL uses cooperative multithreading under the covers using worker fibers hosted within the main SQL thread. SQLPERF(umsstats) is good way to measure the health of your UMS. Ken gave me a copy of his newest book for asking a question...how cool is that!?!

Andrew and I went to Universal Studios together...the spread was amazing. You really couldn't ask for more, and the theme park wasn't bad either. We hung out at the Bob Marley club after the park closed. Unfortunately the busses were all gone by the time we were finished. It was nice evening and we were both wired (and mildly inebriated) so we decided to walk back to the hotel...how far could it possibly be? OH MAN was that a mistake, I'm pleasantly surprised we survived. About a mile away from our motel a taxy slowed down for us, but at that point we couldn't give up. We literally walked for 2.5 hours, arriving back at the hotel at 2:30am. Fortunately we never seem to run out of things to talk about so all ended well.

Teched Day 3

Went to two lectures today and filled the rest of the time with hands on labs.

PRD393 SAP and Sharepoint with Justin Chandoo offered a nice survey of integration techniques. Go to www.microsoft-sap.com for more info on the api and new developments, especially regarding Mendocino. Also there are some SAP Web part samples on gotdotnet.


DBA311 SQL Recovery Best Practices with Kim Tripp was an awesome demo highlighting partitioning, split file groups, schemas, piecemeal restoration, and snapshots.

I have no recollection of what happened after this... :-)

Teched Day 2

I went to a hands on lab for the new SQL management console, the improvements have really made me dread going into Enterprise Manager and Query Analyser.

After lunch I attended Jespen Johansson's "Anatomy of a Network Hack". He is a great presenter, hilarious, but also very very useful. I did a great job of scaring the pants off every admin in the room (I estimate a thousand of them packed in).

My last session of the day was on Sharepoint with Mike Fitzmaurice(Microsoft) and Ted Pattison(Pluralsight). They covered generation of your own Sharepoint Templates.

Teched Day 1

Had a great Sunday evening with Andrew, we ate at Charlies Steak house which is rated #2 in the nation. After that we went up and down the strip just to see what was going on. There is SO much to do here! I'll post pics soon.

I attended some great sessions on Monday, most noteworthy was a SQL index tuning session with Kim Tripp. She is AMAZING! There are a couple of .NET Rocks episodes and free online webcasts from her that you could check out if you don't believe me.

The sharepoint sessions were cool so far, and I've been making my best attempt to talk to people in the audience to get their opinions on the product. Bill Sharp from Mindshare gave a great talk on the strengths or best practices for Sharepoint Portal Server 2003. I spoke with a 'retired' programmer who is building a patient records application for a medical practice for fun. He considers the Sharepoint services (WSS) framework to be the best application platform to build web applications on these days. Alex Paytuvi from Quilogy introduced a bunch of free business line templates for wss that looked terrific. They are basically application starter blocks that are about 80% finished. The example sites he walked through were project management, IT admin, and HR recruiting. Each template was thoughtfully configured using the taxonomy (terminology) and predicted uses for each task.

Jullien Sellgren from Metalogix lead a great hands on lab for scripting the content loading and even altering the structure of WSS sites. WSS out of the box is very similar to DotNetNuke as configurable site all via the browser interface. But in major conversions of content into WSS, it is awesome to be able to programmatically build the web parts prepopulated with content. Metalogix provides a free wrapper class that makes use of FrontPage RPC and web services to make all the magic happen within a simple consolidated API. Think about how cool this would be for change management in major web portals! I really would have liked an approach like this when we migrated our old IBuySpy portal to DNN. Maybe there is a decent way to do it but I never found it. Probably when the next version of DNN supports web parts a solution like this would support either type of portal.

Monday evening was the grand opening of the exhibit hall which means great grub, free drinks, and lots of creative marketing. Andrew and I made our way through the menagerie and talked with some of the vendors. My favorites included: Mimosa (transparent Exchange archival), Red-Gate(terrific SQL tools), MS Live Meeting(virtual team facilitation), Patch Link(server patch mgmt), and Macrovision(ton of including Installshield).

After the exhibitors closed up for the evening we headed down to the jam session. Those geeks can really play! The night club they rented out was top notch.

Pre-TechEd

I've been lax in posting recently, its been a whirlwind with my daughter's birthday party, sister's graduation, and getting ready for my three trips in June. In the event you care about our experiment with South Beach, it really seems to work. Whatever flab I did have around my gut was gone at the end of the two weeks. Unfortunately some splurges at the birthday party, graduation party, and homecoming party of my brother Cain have negated any benefits. In all the diet seems to really have helped stabilize Megan's sugar levels, which was one of the main goals.

My first trip of June is TechEd '05 in Orlando. I flew into Orlando Sanford this morning, a small airport slightly north of the bigger Orlando International. Getting shuttle service to my hotel was a bit hectic. Why did I fly in there? When booking the direct flight from Toledo, I guess thats where TMA goes!

When checking into the Wyndham I was asked if I had transportation...answering no she pointed me towards the bell hop and said to talk to them. As it turns out, the Wyndham here has its own convention center, 3 pools, various nature areas and restaurants. So I joined one of the hotel golf carts and headed off to the back 40 for my room. The room was small and had a very small table, so I politely complained and they moved me to a suite, with desk, king sized bed, fridge, etc (for the same price). Someone needs to give that lady a raise!!!

I checked in to TechEd and picked up the yearly swag. The laptop bag this year is not quite as impressive as last year's backpack, but decent quality. The thing weighed about 20lbs from the massive amount of marketing literature and software included. Before I left Megan said she expected me to pick up some sun screen, and the bottle had better be half empty by the time I return. Problem solved--I have Microsoft sunscreen from my pack. There will be far fewer geeks walking around sun burned this year...if their testosterone permits them to use the thoughtful gift!

There is an Alien Ware area set up with Far Cry gaming tournaments. I walked in and played a round thinking I would get trashed since I don't play that game. Turns out I only missed qualifying for the next higher round by 1 'point'. There are about 30 people playing together, and the top 2 from each round are deemed worthy.

Tonight I plan on hanging out with my old friend Andrew.