Gatlinburg

I am on vacation this week and it has been the week A and Z stay with me in the summer. We went to Gatlinburg for a couple of days and had a great time. We went to the aquarium which is awesome. We went to a place called Wonderworks which was dubbed as "An amusement park for the mind." It was fun, but a little crowded. Later that night, we went on a 3D ride which was fun. The next day, we drove up to Newfound Gap and hiked up a trail. It was very cool to get away from all the crowds and be the only 3 people in sight. I got a lot of good pictures, i'll include a few here

Shark at the aquarium


Wonderworks (yes the building is upside down)


View from Newfound Gap


A & Z during our hike


A big log + 10 second timer = picture of all 3 of us


River in the Smokies

Baseball playoffs

Z's team played in their 2nd playoff game last night and won 7-1. They are playing the championship game tonight. They have played great all year, but last night they were just awesome. They were very fired up. The game was 1-1 up until the 4th inning when his team scored 6 more runs. There were several defensive plays late in the game that kept the other team from scoring. Z struck out once and hit a fly out to 1st base.

We're heading to the championship game now.

Nashville Zoo

This weekend, my company had a picnic at the Nashville Zoo. I got to take A & Z even though it wasn't my weekend. They've improved the zoo since it moved to Grassmere, but they still need to expand it (which they are). We had a pretty good time and some good food. Here are some pictures...

Elephants


The newest addition, giraffes (they were pretty far away)


"Are you lookin at me?"


Big anaconda


Iguana


Huge turtle. I took one w/ Z standing next to it to get some scale, but it was dark in the room w/ the aquarium lighted, so I used a flash and it darkened the aquarium. Trust me, it was huge.


The antelope looking animal is a Bongo.

Summer Movies

This has been the weekend for summer blockbusters. Sunday, I took A & Z to see X-Men: The Last Stand. You could tell Bryan Singer wasn't at the helm for this one, because it just didn't have the character development like 1 & 2. Also, I despise Halle Berry because she, from what I heard, bucked for more screen time for her character, Storm. Storm happens to be my least favorite character in the franchise, so thanks Halle. Yea, you look good in a leather suit, but your character is lame.

Today, I went to see Mission Impossible 3. The following paragraph will contain discussion about scenes from the movie, not spoilers, I will sanitize it so I don't give anything away. But if you don't want to know anything about the movie, don't read anymore.


I have yet to see MI:2, but I don't think anything carried over. Let's face it, these aren't exactly Lord of the Rings. Anyway, the movie itself was pretty good, very action packed. One thing I didn't like was, even though we are following the hero (Ethan Hunt), there were several action sequences when we don't know his objective. One second, he's deciding to go to city X, then it cuts to him running through a factory planting bombs. It was pretty easy to figure out what he was after, but how bout a little setup? Also, I'm fine with suspension of disbelief. I believe I have written on here before about it being okay to change the rules of the universe, but you must follow the rules the movie sets up. I can believe there really is a gov't agency called IMF that has highly trained agents. I can believe that Ethan Hunt can do these awesome stunts and not get hurt. But if you are going to use real world objects, don't change the rules just to build dramatic affect. A defibrillator that takes 30 seconds to charge? How useful would that be? These things are meant to save a person's life in an emergency, you can't tell me they take 30 seconds to turn on. My laptop boots faster than that. I may be wrong, it just seems they did it to build drama. Another thing I'm sick of seeing: someone getting shot and flying backwards. There's this annoying little thing we have called physics. In fact, in one scene Ethan is doing some calculations as a nod to physics, so why do they have to have one scene (no one else who is shot in the movie flys backwards) where someone gets shot and they go flying out the window behind them? There's that little law about equal and opposite reactions. Basically, in order for a bullet to strike someone with that much force, it would have to expend the same amount of force in the opposite direction, blowing the shooter back the same way the shootee was. Another nitpick, why cut down the time left to accomplish the mission to a point where it becomes unbelievable? At one point, they have 2 hours left til their objective and they are just now planning it. They come up w/ a lot of specialized equipment within 1.5 hours, plus apparently do more planning since things happen that we didn't see them talking about. We're talking stuff you don't go pick up at the corner Walgreens. My point is, it would have been more dramatic to say they had 6 hours left, then they pull it off at the last minute; instead of having this totally unbelievable time remaining.

Proud dad

I am very proud of A, my oldest son. Tonight was his school's awards ceremony. For the second year in a row, he won Best Percussionist for his grade.

Upcoming Concerts

Awesome, I just heard The Black Crowes are playing this summer and Robert Randolph and the Family Band is opening.

June 27 at Starwood, tickets go on sale Saturday (May 13). Anyone want to go?

And as mentioned by the photogenic Jane, Steely Dan is playing Starwood on July 10, tickets are on sale now.

I need to start saving my pennies for tickets.

New Music

I've been sitting on this post for a week and a half, I just haven't had time to throw it out here.

A couple of new bands and an old band w/ new music...

Damone - Out Here All Night. I got the title track as a free iTunes download and liked it. It reminds me of 80's hard rock. I listened to the samples of the rest of the album and bought it. It's pretty good. I don't imagine it will stay in heavy rotation once it falls out of my "New Songs" playlist, but it's nice to hear a guitar solo that's more than 3 notes in modern music.

Wolfmother - Dimensions EP. I got Dimension as a free iTunes download and just went and bought the 4 song EP. Awesome. Take 3 Aussies, lock them in a room with a guitar, bass, drums and keyboard. Only let them listen to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Who and Pink Floyd for 6 months and this is what you get. They just released a full LP, but I haven't picked it up yet. Target has it for $7.99 vs. iTunes at $9.99.

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium. It's not out yet, but I grabbed the single "Dani California" and it's really good. I haven't been really into RHCP since Mother's Milk/Blood Sugar Sex Magic, but their new one is on my wishlist.

Minimum Wage Update

I received a comment from State Representative Susan Lynn, who was quoted in my recent rant on Minimum Wage. It turns out she has a blog. Since I called her comments "idiotic", I thought I would be nice and include her comment to me and a link to the article she references.

Dear Jeff,

I was pretty frustrated by the article too. Please remember, articles omit a lot of other comments.

Actually, I wrote a guest column in the Nashville City Paper. You can see that article on my blog: http://susan-lynn.blogspot.com

The article is called: Public Policy & Raising the Minimum Wage

Thank you for allowing me to respond.

Rep. Susan Lynn

Public Policy & Raising the Minimum Wage

I'm betting she found my rant by doing a "vanity search", but I still think it is great that lawmakers are taking the time to see what the public is saying about them and sharing information via blogs. What's even more impressive is that I'm not one of her constituents, I don't even know where the 57th district is. So it wasn't a case of "vote grubbing."

Online Movie Rental

I think online movie rentals is a great idea. I had been considering trying one of the services for a while and finally decided to give it a whirl last month. I kept seeing billboards for www.gamezandflicks.com and I checked them out. They were cheaper than NetFlix AND offered video game rentals, so it seemed like a no brainer. I wasn't real jazzed about NetFlix anyway after reading about them "throttling" their high volume users.

So I paid my $16.99 and added some movies and a couple of games to my queue. They quickly shipped 2 movies and a game and I had them within two days. As I started trying to add movies to my queue, I realized why they were so cheap. Their selection was very limited. And when you selected the New Releases category, they listed all the movies that were recently released to DVD. Now, I know that makes it a new release, but I shouldn't have to browse through 6 pages of 70's movies to find a new movie. When you go to the video store, they don't put Smokey and the Bandit 2 in the New Release section just because it was just released on DVD.

Their navigation also left a lot to be desired. When you added a movie to your queue, they didn't provide a way for you to return to where you were when you added the movie. So you end up hitting the Back button and as a web developer, that's never a good thing when you are submitting information to a site. I just looked today to get the link and it looks like they have done a redesign, so maybe that is not an issue now.

Their customer service also pissed me off. They don't provide any phone contact, so it's all done through the website and email. They even have a help request for finding out if they carry a particular movie. I submitted a request because they didn't have The Sopranos Season 5. I found Season 4, but not 5. They just closed the ticket, no response, just closed it.

So I started searching for an alternative. I found a guy on the web (I can't find the link now) who compared all the services and rated Intelliflix highly. I check them out and they had either a $16.95 plan for 3 movies at a time or $24.95 if you wanted to be able to checkout games also. $24.95 is a little steep, so I decided the game rental could be done locally because I really don't rent many of them anyway. Plus, I generally only want them on the weekends A & Z are over and one thing I've learned from this online movie adventure is you can't control what you get or when you get it. So I sign up for the $16.95 plan and add about 50 movies to my queue. I was very pleased with their selection and when you click New Releases, you get new releases.

Alas, things were too good to be true. I notice my bank says the charge from Intelliflix was $18.45. No big deal, probably some sign up fee that I overlooked when registering. So I head to the site, go to Help and submit a ticket. They don't let you type more than 500 characters when submitting a ticket. Now, they do have a couple of dropdowns that let you narrow you ticket type down, but 500 characters is still pretty limiting. Still, no big thing. I send them a quick note asking what the extra $1.50 was. Get an immediate "Your ticket was received and is number ######, we'll get back to you shortly." A day passes and I get an email from support saying that it was forwarded to the billing department. Then nothing. No more response from anyone. I head back to the site and look for somewhere I can enter the number they assigned my ticket to see the status. Hmm, there's nowhere to do that. All you can do is submit new tickets. I just let the $1.50 slide and kind of forgot about it.

While this is going on, I've been watching movies. I got my first 3 and sent them back and then received 3 more. I noticed shipping was a little slower than G&F, because G&F seemed to be shipping everything from Kentucky, but Intelliflix was all over the map. What's an extra day though? After a couple of cycles, I noticed they had received all my returns, but hadn't shipped anything. They had been shipping 1-2 days after receiving a return. I waited 2 days and submitted another ticket saying "Hey, you're not sending movies, I've got 50 in the queue, surely something is in." I got back a response saying "We're sorry, we are looking into the problem and we made sure somethign got shipped to you." Sure enough, I get an email saying something was shipping out that night.

Now it comes time for the monthly charge. I have MSFT Money set to automatically enter the $16.95 and it does. I check my bank and surprise! They charge me $18.45. Another ticket, another forwarding to billing, but this time I get a response. It simply says that it is a processing fee. Hey, don't flood me in information here. What kind of processing fee? I'm not going to let them off that easy. I reply and ask what kind and is it an avoidable fee and if it is not, why is it charged separatly and not advertised? No response. Now I'm pissed.

I had gotten another batch of 3 and returned them. They marked one received on the 19th and the other two on the 20th. As of the 21st, they had not shipped anything, so once again I submit a ticket. And included my questions about the processing fee. I hit the 500 character limit (you knew that would come back up, didn't you?) and probably sounded like an idiot. Hey, it's hard to rant in 500 characters or less. And I get the exact same response (about shipping new movies) as before, just from a different person. So one movie ships on 22nd. I replied to the canned response and repeated my complaints about slow service and the processing fee question not being answered. I requested that my ticket be escalated to someone who would give me more than a canned response because they were in danger of losing me as a customer. That was on Monday, today is Wednesday and I have heard nothing from them. I haven't received the movie that shipped on Saturday and they haven't shipped anything else, even though my other 2 movies have been back for almost a week now.

I don't expect to get 100 movies a month for $17, but I do expect them to provide a basic level of service. If it takes 3 days transit both ways, I should be able to expect to have at least one new movie every weekend. My boys and I watched 2 movies 2 weekends ago and I sent one back on that Saturday and one on that Monday and I still haven't gotten a new movie.

Intelliflix has lost me as a customer. I'm going to finish this month since I paid for it, but I'm looking at the two remaining services. Blockbuster and NetFlix. I know people that use both, so I'm torn. I've never really liked Blockbuster and I don't like the idea of NetFlix manipulating customer's queues but I'm sure all of them do it. They are both the same price ($17.99), but Blockbuster adds the feature that you can print a coupon once a week to get a free in-store rental. Maybe that is my option, so if they aren't shipping movies or I don't have anything kid friendly on my kid weekends, I can just run down to the local Blockbuster and pick something up.

Anyone had experience with either of these and have any input?

Mein Gott! This is a long post. I apologize, I just got started and couldn't stop.

Does our government meet this criteria?

"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."

--Thomas Jefferson

IRS, FCC, USDA, ATF, SEC (not that SEC), Departments of Energy, Commerce, Labor, Transportation, Education, DEA, EPA, etc. Hmm, I don't think so.

Speaking of the ATF, "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms" should be the name of a store, not a government agency. I know I would shop there.

Fewer calories, less filling

I'm not much of a grammar policeman, I do love spotting misspellings, but I normally let the grammar mistakes go. Probably because I make so many myself. But if I were writing an advertisement, I would probably pay more attention to it. I noticed a sign on the way home today that has been there for years and I never really paid attention to it. It was at The Mac Authority in Nashville. The sign mentioned that Macs have 97,000 less viruses than PCs. Since you can count the individual viruses, it should be 97,000 fewer viruses.

Now back to your regularly scheduled life.

Eagle Eye Webcam

I had to share this link. It's a webcam viewing an eagle's nest. There are two eagles incubating two eggs.

Eagle Webcam

Apparently, I have the best profession in America

According to this Money article, Software Engineer is the best job in America. Just a few years ago, the media was predicting nothing but gloom and doom for developers.

Catching up

I think I blogged myself out last week, I haven't had much to say. Things have settled back down since returning to town. I took this weekend and did as little as possible to unwind.

I hope everyone out there weathered the storms okay on Friday. I was worried for my grandparents because they were right in one of the areas hit and I couldn't reach them. I tried to go to their house, but traffic was too backed up and I couldn't get through. They finally called around 8:00 that night and everything was fine except they didn't have power. They didn't get it back until 9:00 Saturday night. And the church that was destroyed (Metro Baptist) was where they went to church.

I met up with a friend Saturday night that I hadn't hung out with in a while. We met up w/ some friends of his from work and listened to karaoke. Suprisingly, about half of it was pretty good. There were actually some people that could sing. I didn't stay too long though, I was really tired. In fact, I slept late both days this weekend. My allergies are acting up, so I've needed my rest.

Z's baseball team made up their Friday night game on Sunday. They won a nail-biter 4-3. I've got a lot of kid activities this week, last night was the only night this week where something wasn't going on.

Dev Connections Day 4

I don't have my notes in front of me, so some of the titles may be wrong.

8:00 - 9:15
TDD and SharePoint Web Parts

This was interesting and the presenter did a good job, but it wasn't much new information. In fact, most of it was exactly like a presentation I gave a month ago to other developers at my company.

9:30 - 10:45
Synchronous and Asynchronous Web Services in .Net 2.0

This was a great session. Cody was in this session and he had see the presenter before. He said he was good and knew his stuff. He was right about that. Microsoft just keeps making it easier to write code. Asynchronous Web Service calls are almost as easy as synchronous in 2.0.

10:45 - 11:15
This was a coffee break. About 10 minutes before the next session started, I got a phone call from work. One of our SQL Log files was eating up all the disk space on our test server. I had to go to the car and get my 10 lb laptop and VPN in and fix it. The database got in a weird state because of the lack of disk space, so I just deleted the database. I'm subtle as a sledgehammer.

11:45 - 12:30
Security for the SharePoint Developer

I will give the guy the benefit of the doubt on this one since I came in 30 minutes late. But he was flat and uninteresting and instead of doing demo code, he showed us part of a real application. You would think that would be better, but when there is so much code around the concepts you are trying to teach, it makes it very difficult because you start having to explain way too much. I left and relaxed in the lobby.

12:30 - 1:45
Lunch

We had a good box lunch. Cody and I practically redesigned the app we just finished with some of the stuff we learned.

1:45 - 3:00
Improving Performance & Scalability for .Net Applications

This was the best session of the week. Steven Smith did a great job of providing tips for improving your app's performance. I had to leave right at the end so we could make it to the airport.

We are sitting at the airport now. We should be boarding in 30 minutes. I'm ready to go home, I'm very tired.

Dev Connections Day 3 Part II

Just got back from the party. Great food! They had casino games set up and Lee, Cody and I played poker for an hour and a half. I wish we had been playing for real money, because I started w/ $30,000 and finished with $108,000 (excluding the last hand where everyone went all in).

I also forgot to say thanks to the guy who returned my wallet today. Apparently, it fell out of my pocket during the second session today. After the 3rd session, someone called me and told me he had found my wallet. I didn't catch his name, but to the tall bald guy, thanks a million. I'm glad you thought to look at my business card and call my cell phone. If you had just turned it in someone, I might never have got it back. Thank you.

It is time for bed. Final day is tomorrow, it's going to be a long day.

Dev Connections Day 3

Well, it's 5:30 on day 3. The day isn't over yet. We are going back at 7:30 for the party. Free steak and chicken. One thing I can say is the food has been excellent here.

I originally planned on blogging the actual information in the sessions, but I just don't have time to get to that, so I'm going with more of a quick summary and review. I have about 5 of the sessions I'm going to go back and write more in depth summaries and will either post them here or at www.workagile.com (when I get it up and running).

The sessions were 1 hour long yesterday and we had a keynote in the morning and 4 sessions. Today, the sessions went to 1 hour 15 minutes and we had 5 sessions.

8:00 - 9:15
SOA and SharePoint - Using Web Services to aggregate disparate data sources

It was a mouthful of a title, unfortunately the content didn't live up to the title. Bob Mixon is a low talker. He kept getting off track telling us about how his system is setup or how does this nifty post build event. It reminded me of when you are replacing someone at a job and they are leaving. The last day when they are supposed to be training you, they keep bouncing around saying "oh, yeah, this is neat, wait I have to show you this over here and that over there."

9:30 - 10:45
How the Core ASP.NET Engine Works

This was really a filler session for me. There was nothing else I wanted to go to. But Rick Strahl blew me away. I think he knows more about the internals of ASP.NET than most of the MSFT guys. Excellent speaker and very knowledgeable. As he said at the beginning, there wasn't a lot of practical take-away information, but it's good to know how the "magic" happens.

10:45 - 11:15
Coffee break. Cody, Lee (another co-worker from a different dept) and I compared notes on our sessions. I drank a Mt Dew and a Starbucks Mocha iced coffee and I can feel the caffeine coarsing through my veins.

11:15 - 12:30
Building a Corporate Telephone Directory w/ SharePoint

He could have given us all the useful information in 10 minutes. This plain sucked and I don't want to waste anymore time typing about it.

12:30 - 2:00
Lunch (very good lasagna and meatballs. And some kind of vegetable dish that was heavy on the zucchini. Normally I don't like zucchini but this was awesome)

Cody and I walked around the hotel and tried to teach a parrot to say "asshole." It kept saying "Hello" and "cracker." Stupid bird.



They gave away the Harley. A Russian girl won it. They asked if she likes motorcycles and she said her boyfriend would. I bet he will. If she plays it right, she can trade that motorcycle for a ring.

2:00 - 3:15
Building Web Parts the Smart Way

Great job by Patrick Tisseghem. Great info on the SmartPart which I guess I will be using soon.

3:15 - 3:45
Break

I am taking all of my white shirts and throwing them away. On the flight down here, I was wearing a white polo. I was eating a muffin. I dropped a bit of muffin onto my shirt, where it left a stain! Who but me can get a muffin stain on them? During the break, I was eating a very tasty dessert. It had a plump, juicy raspberry, I poked it with my fork to eat it and it squirted its juice all over my 2nd white polo. Only black shirts for me from now on.

3:45 - 5:00
Advanced Web Part Development

The presenter, Scot Hillier, was very knowledgeable and a great presenter. The content just wasn't very useful because it dealt with building web parts in .Net 1.1 and I work exclusively in 2.0.

I may post more after the party, or I may not. Depends on if anything cool happens.

DevConnections Day 2

Sorry for the delay in posting yesterday.

8:00 - 9:00
We started off at 8:00 with another keynote speech. Prashant Sridharan spoke about MSFT Team System. You know the piece of $10,000 software that you can recreate with Open Source software for free. The session was pretty boring. It's nice spending this much money and having a marketing pitch thrown at you. One thing he mentioned was a new VS ad campaign at www.400plusdifferences.com . There were a few humorous clips.

9:30 - 10:30
Deep Dive Into ObjectDataSource

I was looking forward to this one. We design our apps to have objects in a middle tier and this seems to be targeted exactly to that. Kashif Alam was the speaker for this session. Basically, he demoed the same databind/paging/sorting crap that they do in all the demos. He just used an ObjectDataSource instead of SqlDataSource. That's fine if he had used a real object, you know like a custom class, but he just used a typed dataset. Also, his presentation leaves a lot to be desired. He is well-spoken, but very lowkey and he jumps around in the code a lot and never completes a thread.

He referenced www.asp.net/QuickStart which look pretty cool.

10:45 - 11:45
Creating Dynamic Web Sites w/ ASP.NET Web Parts

As is becoming the standard, the slides were not in the book. Remember, this is the extra book I paid $100 for. Thanks.

My first boneheaded move of the conference. The way the doors were labeled, we were in D&E and should have been in F (which was in the back of the room). So we sat in the wrong session for 20 minutes. We were wondering when he was going to get to web parts. We found the right room and discovered that the session we wanted had been rescheduled. So we went to the mobile pc lab and checked out tablets and got a hat.

11:45 - 1:30
Lunch and cruising the vendor area for more swag.

1:30 - 2:30
Visual C# Under the Covers

This is covering new stuff in C# 2.0 and upcoming features in 3.0. The presenter was Mads Torgersen and he did a very good job. This has been the best session so far. There is going to be some cool stuff in C# 3.0; Lambda trees, Extension methods and the LINQ stuff are very interesting.

2:45 - 3:45
Overview of Patterns & Practices Library

This was pretty lame. The only Enterprise Library pattern I was even remotely interested in was the Logging. And it doesn't support rolling log files, so log4net is still my choice.

4:15 - 5:15
ASP.NET 2005 Tips and Tricks

I didn't have high hopes for this, except for the fact that it was Scott Guthrie presenting. But it was awesome. Lots of useful stuff. He showed an RSS from MSFT that lets you write a few lines of code and generate an RSS feed for your site. That will be added to www.workagile.com very soon.

We came back at 7:00 to the MSFT "Unplugged" event. Free pizza and beer and a Q&A session with all the MSFT guys. Some people had some good questions. I didn't get to ask mine. I wanted to know what they thought the advantages were with Team System over Open Source alternatives. After that, we went and watched the Florida-UCLA game.

Day 3 should be up tonight. It's actually lunchtime on day 3 right now.

Dev Connections Day 2 Postponed

Postponed until tomorrow.

Dev Connections Day 2 Quick Note

Full post on day 2 will be up later tonight. I'm just taking a break before the MSFT Unplugged event tonight, not enough time to type up all my notes.

Just wanted to post a link to another blogger that is at the conference. He helped me name the rocket I mentioned last night...projectile swag. Check his blog for a video of the swag in action.

http://iwkid.blogspot.com/