Slogging through the middle

Tuesday, June 22 2010 - - 0 comments

At 55k words on Oasis: The New Dawn. I’ve been consistently taking time off from writing because of other pressing things and each time it happens I tend to lose the story and restart. I know that what I’m writing now is nothing like what I envisioned. In fact, one of the characters that the story wasn’t supposed to be about has really taken over. What I would like to do is start over, writing the entire story from that characters perspective. Once I’m done I may end up going back and actually writing her story instead.

Social Web and Education

Sunday, June 06 2010 - - 0 comments

The relationship between the social web (aka Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc.) and education has almost always been rather tumultuous. Recently a student at a school in my city committed suicide. I happen to know this particular school has a strict policy against teachers being on Facebook or any other social site. The question that has been bothering me lately is why? In the case of suicide is it almost always telegraphed, sometimes very explicitly. If a teacher happened to be linked to this particular student on a social site wouldn’t they have picked up on those signals? Oh, I’m sure the argument...

Windows Live Writer Updated

Sunday, June 06 2010 - - 0 comments

I just downloaded and installed the latest Windows Live Writer. One question: why does this thing take so long to install? Seriously, given what it does it should not take almost five minutes to actually install. It makes me wonder how many hooks this “little” program has into my operating system and what it is really doing.

IE8 Developer Tools No longer Visible on Windows 7

Tuesday, May 25 2010 - - 0 comments

I’ve just begun to experience this problem. When I hit F12 or Developer Tools from the menu the screen flashes and nothing appears to happen. Looking at task bar I can see the Developer Tools window however all that is there is a mouse icon and the close. After screwing around with it for a while I discovered that the window is actually open, however it has been minimized to a very small size and pushed off screen. To Fix: Click on the developer tools window from the task bar to select it as active (not that you can’t see it). Use Alt + space to bring up the window menu, and using the keyboard...

Steve Jobs Promised me Freedom from Porn but He Lied

Friday, May 21 2010 - - 0 comments

I am shocked, no appalled, that the promises of “Freedom from porn” have not been upheld. My iPad not only plays porn, but I am convinced that YouPorn is one of the best playing web sites on the iPad [not that I spend time on porn sites]…

Prius Owners are Environmentalist Posers

Thursday, May 13 2010 - 0 comments

The big push to own a more fuel efficient vehicle and help the environment seems to be what drove the popularity of the Prius: Photo from: www.treehugger.com There are a lot of skeptics out there when it comes to how environmentally friendly the Prius actually is. There is little doubt that the environmental cost of manufacturing a Prius, especially the hybrid technologies in it, are far greater than comparable non-green technologies, but let’s just say that doesn’t matter… I believe Prius owners are posers because here in New England not a day goes by that I don’t get passed on one of our highways...

Save the Trees go Paperless or Not

Monday, May 10 2010 - - 0 comments

My to be unnamed retirement account management company sends me endless trade confirmations. I hate them; they almost always go into the trash. Last time I got this small flyer in with the confirmation: Cool, I thought. I can finally end the barrage of trade confirmations. Take a close look at the paper flyer. Notice anything odd? Hint: There is no URL, no place to sign up, no company identifying information at all. In fact, it looks as if some bright individual took a web based ad and made it paper. All I have to do is click the >go paperless button and I’ll be all set....

Visual Studio 2010 with MVC2 and jQuery Post Callback Issue

Friday, May 07 2010 - - 0 comments

I’ve been doing some prototyping with VS2010 and MVC2 and ran into a problem where the call to $.post(…) wasn’t triggering the callback function. I attached the debugger and verified that my controller was being called and in fact the code appeared to be returning the correct view. Next I fired up Fiddler and verified that in fact the correct view was returning and it rendered the correct HTML. For my test I was using a PartialView. The out of the box call redirects to a new URL, but I needed to remain on the page and I needed to return only the LoginSuccessResults as a partialview. I took the...

Scribd Business Model is In Trouble

Wednesday, May 05 2010 - 0 comments

So last week I posted this on facebook: “By the way Scribd's business model is F'd considering Steve Jobs latest treatise on Flash and Apple products.” Today what did I find on TechCrunch: Scribd is ditching Flash for HTML5. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/scribd-html5/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+Techcrunch+(TechCrunch)&utm_content=Google+Reader...

NH Walking Disability Certification Absurdity

Friday, April 23 2010 - - 0 comments

In New Hampshire if you having a walking disability you are entitled to getting a “Disability” license plate or placard. These things come in two varieties: Permanent and Temporary. The temporary can last up to 6 months and then you need to re-certify. If you require a permanent one however, after the first year, you are required to recertify every five years. The certification process is a document that is signed by your doctor/certified nurse, etc. that testifies to your continued disability. It’s reasonable to say that recertification will help reduce the unnecessary use of these things, but...