Saddle(d) up

After what seemed like a lot longer than the 16 days I actually was off the bike, I took advantage of my vacation day and the gorgeous, 70-degree weather to sneak out for a short ride around the neighborhood. Here's how I break it down:

Minus	Plus
My legs don't feel nearly as strong as they did earlier in the season.	I'd still rather ride than jog.
I had to come to a full stop twice for the same school bus (in accordance with my status as a vehicle), which had its flashers on and its stop sign out.	I grinned and rolled my eyes at the driver, and he cracked up. And the kids cheered me on as they disembarked.
Some of the cheering sounded like "Get a car, old man."	At least they weren't confused by my "mannaries" and got my gender right.
One woman pulling out of her driveway looked right at me and kept creeping forward, seemingly intent on making me stop for her.	Because she was looking right at me, I was able to convey, by adept employment of pantomime, that I was fit'n ta go all Texas Chainring Massacre on her driver-side door. She stopped.
The seam of the cheap-ass chamois in my new Bellwether shorts chafed the heck out of my right thigh.	Fortunately, it was worst when I was walking, and at least it wasn't The Boys that got rubbed the wrong way. And I now know what kind of shorts not to buy in the future.
At 17.9 miles and an average speed of 16.8 mph, it wasn't the memorable sort of ride to which I'd typically devote blog space.	This posting should reassure Slow Joe Recumbo, who was starting to wonder if I would ever post anything about cycling again.

Now playing: Rob Dickinson, Fresh Wine For The Horses

We're baaack

It took us about 13 hours, but we're back from Destin, Florida.

Not a lot to write about, except to say that Turtle and I had a nice time relaxing and spending time with her mom and dad.

There are a few more pictures on Flickr.

Where on earth are Foo and Turtle?

Despite the post title, my grand plan was less to make a real contest of it than to provide a place to drop some vacation photos. Unfortunately, after the first couple, the weather turned and there haven't been many photo ops.

It's been raining here, and when it's not raining it's so humid that when we went out for a while yesterday, all the store windows were steamed up. Last night (10/22), the waves were quite large - by my landlubber standards, at least - and all the "local" TV stations were issuing tornado watches. On the up side, the locals have really been needing the rain that we (apparently) brought with us from Texas.

Here's a quick shot out the door from this morning. I'm hoping I'll get to take some more interesting pictures before we leave this weekend.

Don't start with me

Over the years, I've installed a lot of Windows applications on my computers, and I find it irritating when a new addition has the arrogance to set itself up to start every time I boot up my computer. Often, the solution is as simple as setting a configuration option, but sometimes the application doesn't provide the option to turn off auto loading.

This morning, when I installed an application that allows me to synchronize my Palm handheld with my Yahoo! calendar, I quickly discovered that it was one of the rude variety that insists on starting up, whether I need it or not. That's when I paid a visit to Annoyances.org, a handy site where you can find lots of tips about how to deal with all sorts of obscure little Windows... well, annoyances.

In this case, I learned that the solution to my auto-run problem went like this:

1. Open Start -> Run and type in "msconfig". Press enter.
2. When msconfig starts, select the "Startup" tab and find the offending program in the list.
3. Uncheck the box next to the program you want to stop auto-loading.
4. Click "Apply" and then "OK".
5. When you reboot, you'll receive a message telling you that you've changed your configuration and do you want to run msconfig and see this message every time you reboot? Check the box that says not to show the message again, and... voila!

Link

Missing

I strolled in to my cube this morning with plans to dive back into Beginning XML 1^st ed., which I'd been studying when I left. Weighing in at over five pounds (by my estimation), about 2½" thick, and with a cover printed in the WROX standard red and gold, it's hard to miss. Yet missing it was. In that spot next to the pile of ASP.NET and C# books, there was no nerdily-grinning photo of the book's author—only bare desktop.

I promptly fired off an e-mail carpet bomb, requesting that whichever of my developer colleagues had "borrowed" the book in my absence should please promptly return it (or state their ransom demands). They promptly fired back notes disavowing any knowledge of my book.

Which leads me to one of two conclusions: either one of the cleaning staff has higher aspirations than emptying my waste can, or He is trying to tell me that my seven-year-old 1st edition isn't going to cut it, and I should order Beginning XML, 4^th ed. (and expense it).

Update: The XML book never did turn up. I need it to prepare for my new job responsibilities, so I went ahead and ordered a new, 4^th edition copy of the same title from Amazon, yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon, I got an e-mail from the receptionist informing me that I had received a package that was too big for my mail slot. I thought, No frickin' way. But sure enough, it was the book I'd ordered earlier in the day. Now, I did spring for 2-day shipping, and the book did ship from just the other side of the Metromess, but... holy cow, that's fast. It usually takes at least a day just to process an order.

Weekend update

This past week, my employer sent me, along with two of my colleagues, to a five-day ASP.NET training course. Two days of C# with one instructor followed by three more days of Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET GUI training. The C# side didn't really cover much that I hadn't already picked up from books and web tutorials, and the instructor had a tendency to wander into personal anecdotes unrelated to the material. But the ASP.NET section was awesome. The instructor was very knowledgeable in the material, but perhaps more important, she did and excellent job of keeping us engaged and focused. There were cow jokes involved.

I find training classes like this exhausting but worthwhile. Sitting in class, trying to cram everything into my brain is tough enough, but the training facility was clear on the opposite side of the metroplex, and the classes ran 9am-5pm. In other words, I had three hours of rush hour beep-and-creep driving--for the first couple days, at least. After that, I decided I'd rather get up and do my morning drive at my usual time, in lighter traffic. In my mind, it's much better to spend 40 minutes driving and kill the slack 2+ hours 'til class time reading a Dan Brown book than to spend 1½ hours clawing my way through traffic and arriving in a Really Bad Mood. The return trips still stank, but I did manage to find a route that cut the drive time down to about an hour.

But I digress. It was a good class, and I learned a lot of good stuff--not the least of which, that I need to learn to "let it go" and accept the fact that using Visual Studio to create ASP.NET 2.0 web applications means that I don't have to code everything myself, from the ground up. Weird... but cool.

There's a dark side to increased productivity, as illustrated by this morning's Dilbert, which Turtle just brought to my attention.

Next...

Back to work, tomorrow. I haven't heard anything from my new supervisor, this past week, so I'm assuming that I'm not to report to the new office yet. I'll be back at the old place, where I'm scheduled to sit in on a "webinar" and learn how substantial the benefits plan cuts will be.

I'm trying to impress Turtle with my efforts to embrace change, but I'm feeling a bit like a cork being tossed around in the ocean.

Veteran Removes Illegal Mexican Flag

In Reno, Nevada, a local Veteran may be brought up on charges after cutting down a Mexican flag being flown illegally above the U.S. flag. A local television station had received numerous complaints from residents and went to investigate. When their reporter arrived, the Veteran took the opportunity to make a public statement. He quickly lowered the flags and used his army-issue knife to cut them down, taking possession of the U.S. flag and leaving the Mexican flag where it fell.

The man commented "I'm Jim Brossert and I took this flag down in honor of my country with a knife from the United States army. I'm a veteran, I am not going to see this done to my country. if they want to fight us, then they need to be men, and they need to come and fight us, but I want somebody to fight me for this flag. They're not going to get it back."

Link (Infowars.net)

According to the Infowars article, similar events have been reported in Maywood, CA., Tucson, Arizona, and Jupiter, Florida.

Earlier this year, there was a flap when it was discovered that someone had climbed the broadcast tower of a local conservative talk radio station and planted a Mexican flag there. It took a couple days to get someone to climb up and take it down, during which time the radio station faced fines for the infraction.

Call me reactionary, but I can't help feeling a bit like we're under siege and just too polite to do much about it. Except for Jim Brossert, I mean.

A tip of the hat to Cowtown Patty.

Boo Boo Kitty

Fuzzy Dependant #1 has lately decided that ear scratches and drive-by belly rubs aren't enough. He's discovered Daddy's Lap and is not shy about demanding his rightful place there, sometimes at the expense of whatever I happen to be typing on my laptop keyboard at the time.

Turtle recently captured this moment of pure bliss.

Incognito

I think we've established by now that my inner child is far too suppressed for me to get too excited about Hallowe'en any more, but some of these costumes are just hilarious. My favorites are the Parade Rock 'n' Roller and the Man-eating Shark.

If you buy one of these, I want to see pictures.

Oopsie.

So... I'm sitting here in my cube, with my XML/XSLT/XPath book in front of me, and I just finished rendering one of the exercises. What used to be a fairly innocuous bit of XML has transformed into a giant robot that's now duck walking between the rows of cubicles, trying not to step on the hotline people.

Could I have mis-coded something in my style sheet?

Paradigm shift

Ever since the company I work for was purchased earlier this year, the word has been that development on the project I've worked on for the past 10 years would be ending and that our team would be redistributed among several other groups. During my tenure, my primary responsibility had been to find ways to make the application run on the mainframe—a role that had long kept me on the periphery of things and under the radar of the people who hand out cool new things to work on.

Ironically, the fact that I wasn't well versed in some of the more esoteric inner workings of the code worked in my favor when we received our new assignments.

Because much of what I did wasn't very interesting and involved lots of time waiting for programs to compile and link, I entertained myself by learning what I could about HTML, CSS, and various other web technologies that I could get my hands on without having to request software licenses from MIS. All those years I'd spent tinkering, I thought I'd never have any professional use for the things I was learning, but it turns out that my side efforts positioned me well to be assigned to a team that's doing ASP.NET and C# development. And, because I wasn't one of the experts for the old project's core architecture, I was easily released from maintenance responsibilities.

That all sounded very promising, but I've been hearing for years how I was going on to bigger and better things. Nothing had ever changed, so I had my doubts that it would be any different this time—until this past Friday, at least. That's when it all came together. Decisions were made. Schedules were set and briefings held. Training classes were scheduled.

All the tinkering and reading I've done over the years, on my own time, is going to come into play now. My new responsibilities will involve large, steaming helpings of XML, XSLT, XPath, DOM, JavaScript, CSS, etc. and my familiarity with those technologies will make it a whole lot easier to get my head around the new stuff and more quickly make a contribution. I get to work with technology that's not 30 years old, and I'm kind of stoked about it!