I know it has been a while since I posted anything here, my excuse is being busy with a new contract and a new house.  Just realized I don’t really have any pictures of the house but I will post some soon.

 

Also moved the blog over to www.discountasp.net and it was dead simple to get up and running and get dasBlog working on it.  Things might not be working properly for a while but I’m working on it.

Just posted my quick thanksgiving round up and noticed that I really hadn’t posted any pictures of Dexter since he was only a few weeks old.  He just celebrated his 5 month birthday on Saturday, there are a lot of pictures of him over on my picasa page.

Pretty sure everyone now knows that Ian is down for two weeks, which meant he was down for Thanksgiving this year.  We had some amazing weather this year which always makes for an amazing weekend and a really tired unproductive Tuesday morning.  Posted some pics over on my picasa page , we had 55 people at dinner last night I heard. 

 

Only a few days until I’m off to the Carolina’s for golf…

 

Day 2 passed pretty quickly, he slept alright during the night but woke up rather early Sunday morning.  On the plus side though, his personality is very close to mine so Sunday afternoon we both curled up on the couch and had a nap. 

Sunday night we took him over to the big Forsyth Family Birthday Blowout Spectacular, where I don’t mind admitting, he stole all my thunder.  Other than trying to eat a couple of earrings (still attached to ears) he was good as gold, and he was so tired he slept the whole night without a peep. Here are a few pics from Day 2.

We finally picked up the new puppy today, a very long day spent picking him up and then driving back home, just to jump into another car and go the Ti-Cats game (great game, tough loss).

 

So with out further delay, here are some pictures of Dexter during the trip home and few more we snapped this evening.

The breeder sent us some new pictures of our still unnamed puppy today.  These will probably be the last pics we get before we pick him up on July 12th. 

Looks a lot less like a 'retarded gerbil' now :)

Finally a new post, to be fair this is the first post worthy thing that has happened in the last few months.

We finally got the first pictures of our new puppy today.  He was born a couple weeks ago and is a Cockapoo.  We will pick him up around July 12th, at that point we hope to have a name picked out that we can both agree with...

 

More pics on my picasa page

Just got back last night from a weekend of hockey and shopping.  Steph, myself and JLo all went to Pittsburgh for the weekend.  Shopping at the Grove City outlets on Saturday and a Pittsburgh Penguins game on Sunday afternoon.  Great trip, bought some good stuff, had some cheap Yuengling on tap and saw a great hockey game.  What more can a guy ask for you wonder?  Well I got some other stuff as well, like my trip to the sketchiest 'beer store' ever. To be fair, the sketchy 'woman' at Walmart made it sound really sketchy and yet I went anyway, and it didn't disappoint (JLo refused to leave the car).  I apologize for not taking pictures of this 'beer store' and next time I'm near Mercer PA, I will stop and take pictures of it.  Also with the win Pittsburgh moved up into 1st place in the Eastern Conference with only a few games left in the season, so it was a big win.

My pics are here and you can also check out John's pics over here.  He brought his nice camera and has some nice game pics.

My old Thinkpad Z60m was starting to do some strange things like randomly shutting down.  So I decided it was time for an upgrade.

 

 

 

I finally settled on the Dell M1530
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T7500 (2.2GHz/800Mhz FSB, 4MB Cache)
3gig of ram
NVidia 256mb GeForce 8600M GT
200GB 7200RPM Sata
Wireless N card Some other bells and whistles like a built in webcam.

I love the look of the laptop and was fairly happy with the build quality.  The Z60m had the best build quality in a laptop that I have ever seen so it's not surprising that the new Dell couldn't live up to that.  The first problem I had was that there was a dent around trackpad, but Dell gladly replaced the whole laptop.  However another problem I had with both of the laptops was that they wouldn't sleep 95% of the time. They would just crash and reboot.  After hours of research I found some info on the Internet that diagnosed the problem as PC-Cillin anti-virus that comes pre-installed.  How exactly Dell ships software in this condition baffles me.  I uninstalled (or at least tried) PC-Cillin and presto, no problems at all anymore.

Couple of things I like / are different:

The 9 cell battery doesn't extend horizontally out the back like other laptops, it actually extends vertically out the back.  This creates its own little laptop stand, and so far I like it.

The big barrel hinge at the back of the laptop means that there is no 'latch' to close the lid, it just closes and stays closed by magic.  Not sure how I feel about that, I like the idea of a latch keeping my laptop closed.

The touch sensitive media control buttons on the laptop look really cool, but there is a learning curve to using them.  Once you learn the proper way to 'touch' them they are fine.

Update - March 18th, 2008
Still loving the new lappy, survived a trip to Vegas and the battery life was spectacular.

I've always loved my WHS.  I've been using it since the first beta, but I don't mind admitting I'm not the most committed beta tester.  There was no way I was going to try restoring a backup to a machine that had nothing wrong with it using a beta product.  If one of my machines failed during the beta, sure no problem, but I don't go looking for trouble.  So in all the months I've been using the WHS I've never had to do a restore, until this weekend.

Steph's laptop randomly rebooted and then came up with a little message explaining the registry was corrupt.  No problem, I'll restore it!  Well the first restore didn't go as planned, in fact it bombed out with no message at all.  However I figured it was a hard drive consistency problem, so I tried to do a chkdsk which told me there were errors that couldn't be fixed.  So I bought a new hard drive, popped it in and tried the restore again (Note, I had to create a primary partition first which I could have done using Disk Management right in the restore process).  This time the restore took an hour and at the end of that hour the laptop was up and running like nothing had ever happened!   

I love it, I would have spent a couple days trying to fix the problem without blowing away the OS and then I would have given up on that, and then I would have spent some time trying to get all the files off the machine, then I would have to reinstall windows, then I would have to put all the files back on. The whole time Steph would be 'asking' when her computer was going to be fixed.

 

So why don't you have your own home server yet?!?  Don't know what a home server is?  Have more than 2 machines at home?  Ask me about it sometime and I'll talk your ear off.

Note: The above picture is not an accurate representation of the events that led to the Steph lappy failure of '08 because we don't have a dog yet.

We've been busy getting ready for our first Christmas, left is our first Christmas tree.  I won't lie, Steph did all the decorating, but I think I did an excellent job of supervising.

Been really busy at my new contract but with the time off over Christmas I'm hoping to work on a new WHS add-in that has long sat on the shelf.  I'll have even more time to work on it since my Xbox 360 decided to do a terrible impression of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer (ie. The Red Ring of Death), which is more than a little upsetting.

As a ginger I've had to endure the typical stereotypes, abuse, ignorance, and out right bigotry.   However, I had no idea this type of stuff was still being taught in schools around the world!  Time to step into the new century Korea, gingers are people too!

 

What am I ranting about??  Well take a look at the two pictures below.  This comes from a Korean textbook used to teach English, the lesson is opposites.  On the left is 'pretty' next to a picture of a blond girl, and on the right... 'ugly' next to a picture of a ginger girl!

 

 

 

 

 Here are the pictures I have from our Blessing (Wedding #2), super big thanks to everyone that came, and super big thanks to everyone that came to both of our weddings :)

 

Brin's Pictures

John's Pictures

The dasBlog team has released a new .Net 2.0 medium trust version of dasBlog.  You can find an announcement of dasBlog 2.0 at Scott Hanselman's blog or at the dasBlog home page.  The upgrade is pretty smooth and painless, and there are a lot of great things coming down the pipe as well.

A big thanks to everyone that was able to join us for our Blessing on August 4th, we had an amazing time.  We managed two hours of sleep before we left for our cruise, which made for a very long first day.  We managed to rebound and had an amazing time though.

 

Wedding #2 (Blessing) Pictures (More Coming)

John's Pictures

 

Our Honeymoon Pictures

Ok, I've been back for almost a week now, and I just barely found time to pump out a new version with only one small change.

 

Change Log 1.2

- Removed settings tab

 

Version 1.2 is now released, unless I hear about some bugs or some interesting feature requests this will probably be the last version.  I think it does what it was meant to do, and I'd like to get started on my other add-in.

Well I should be packing right now, I'm leaving for my wedding tomorrow... but instead I wanted to add a quick feature that hornetfig mentioned in the WHS Developers Forum.  So instead of getting ready and packed I sat down and did some coding.  

So here is version 1.1

Update - Version 1.2

If there are issues with that build you can stil get 1.0 here.

Thanks to We Got Served for their post on my 'succinctly named' add-in. :)

I've been playing around with some Windows Home Server development and I got sick of having the console open and having a RDC connection open to check the Event Log or mess with IIS settings.  Thus the program launcher was born. 

 

You can download it here

I only have one Home Server so testing is a little difficult so let me know if you run into any issues.

 

UPDATE:  Posted a new version, to fix some icon problems.

Dan

Just installed the beta 2 release of Home Server and I moved all my web junk up to it and off my desktop.  Seems to be working perfectly so far...

I went down to the Ice House Microsoft built for their Vista launch event in Toronto today to check things out.  First of all the ice house was pretty impressive with lots of details, but damn cold.  They had some simple yet impressive demos going on all over the 'house' with even more MVPs and other 'experts' wandering around answering questions for the masses.  The one thing that almost all the machines had was DreamScene, this is a new (in beta) Ultra Extra that lets you set a movie as your desktop wallpaper.  Now you could set anything if you wanted, but it ships with a couple of small subtle looping videos.  The one I was looking at was a shot of a rainforest (I think) and a waterfall.  Looked amazing.  Going to look into getting a copy of the beta.  I've been running Vista Ultimate since mid-December and finally got a legit license for it now.  The initial 'wow factor' has worn off, and I still love it.  It's fast, it's sleek, and they fixed a lot of little things that really pissed me off in XP.  I think it is a big step forward for my tech support customer (ie, my family). It will be a learning curve in certain spots, but it should keep their machines nice and clean (hopefully).

 

The event seemed like a success to me just wandering around, I heard lots of people talking about all the cool things, like DreamScene and Media Centre slideshows.  Not sure how many of those 'oh I want that' will translate into a bought copy of Vista but hopefully a few of them at least. <Rant> I did of course hear 'dude, just download it off bittorrent you do know the url for bittorrent right?', so many things wrong with this statement, BitTorrent is a protocol, a site that hosts BitTorrent files is just that, a site that hosts BitTorrent files, not BitTorrent itself.  </Rant>

 

Anyways, I snapped a couple of pics with my new phone.  Turns out I should have looked into the Camera capabilities before I left.  I had the thing set on the low quality setting, so I apologize for the lower quality pics, next ones will be better I promise.

 

Vista Ice House (PicasaWeb)

Finally got around to buying a new phone which I have been talking about for months.  My old was just old, sometimes wouldn't answer calls, other times after I hung up it would just ring and ring and ring even though no one was calling, the only solution was to yank the battery.  The camera was useless because I scratched off all the silver coating protecting the lens. 

 

So I finally broke down and got myself a nice Motorola Krzr, so far I love it.  Gets better reception than my old phone down in my nuclear fallout shelter that doubles as my basement.  Comes with built in MP3 support with a microSD slot so I can stash a whack of MP3s on it (yes, 'stash a whack' is a technical term meaning 1 gig capacity)  So far I've been nothing but impressed with it, the only draw back has been the battery life, which doesn't last as long as the nearly 2 weeks my old phone lasted.

Well it has been almost a month of fighting with IBM I finally got my laptop back.  I had a problem with the machine locking up and then when I rebooted it, the LCD refused to turn on.  Before I get started, I love my Lenovo laptop.   But I hate Lenovo.   Such unbelievably terrible service.  The story is long, and boring, and not appropriate for children.  If anyone wants to hear it let me know I don't mind telling it.

 

Now that it is back, I'll start blogging again more.

 

Update: I think IBM broke my SD card reader.

I was over at Casa Runham last night to hang out and make fun of the kids trick-or-treating.  I must say I was shocked!  Shocked I say!  What I saw was the saddest group of kids ever in the most uninspiring costumes ever.  When I dressed up as the guy from Scream (not sure I actually did, but play along) it was topical.  The movie had just come out, however it has been 6 years since the last Scream movie came out.  Darth Maul??  Seriously?  The guy was in about 10 scenes in a movie 7 years ago.  Clearly he is no Darth Vader, a cultural icon.  One kid came dressed as an Ipod, a lame Ipod mind you, but at least it was a creative idea. 

 

I was pretty disappointed in the state of costumes, these kids need a little passion.  Check out this guy below, in possibly the greatest costume I've ever seen. Well next to the Home Wrecker costumes from Drew's Halloween party...

 

Well I just had an amazingly action packed weekend that has left me dead tired and VERY sore.  It all started on Friday night when Steph, Julia, Gord and myself went to see Wicked,which was probably one of the better musicals I've seen in a long time.  I highly recommend it.  Saturday I was up nice and early and off once again with Gord and Julia in tow to Kev's place in Waterloo for Oktoberfest.  Which was an amazing evening, big thanks to Kev and Mel for hosting once again.  Saturday night was a bit of a late night, and Sunday morning we were out the door by 10:30 and on our way to paintball. 

This was the first time I've ever been paintballing, and man was it a great time.  I really wish I didn't have hockey as soon as I got home though.  I had a really hard time walking for the next week though. 

Went to see The Departed this evening, great freaking movie!  The movie was a classic action movie, with some really funny parts and stock full of big name actors.  Sometimes that isn't always a good thing, but they all did a great job in this movie.  Don't want to add any spoilers, but it was a great ending to a great movie.  Also it revealed to me that there is a third Wahlberg!  Yes that's right Donnie, Mark and apparently Robert who also 'starred' in this movie.

Went to the Penguins vs Sabers pre-season game in Hamilton last night.  At some point you would think that Hamilton was hosting an important game, at other points it was clearly amateur hour at Copps.  They had guys taking money to park in my normally free hidden parking spot, but then there were only 2 girls working the beer window, with no change.  The line-up for beer was way too long, then when you got to the front you learned the big 'Molson Canadian on tap here' sign was just a lie.  They only had Steelback.  I thought that was ok, I'd never had Steelback before and I was willing to give it a try.  Steelback is the gross.

 

On to the game... it was a pretty decent game.  Crosby lost his temper and took a penalty for it, had 2 nice assists though.  There was a good fight, some kid named Stone got his right arm free and gave the Sabers kid 3 good shots to the face and knocked him clean off his feet.  And finally the game ended in a shootout, and a long shootout at that.  11 rounds before Clarke MacArthur ended it.  Crosby also had a goal in the shootout.  It was a pretty good game, but to the people in Hamilton I have one suggestion.... clearly people will not pay 60-80 dollars for lower bowl tickets to a preseason game.  Copps was at about 50% capacity last night.

 

Check out John's pictures from the game.

I'm not 100% how this works, cause I don't watch a tonne of Oprah, but I guess she can explain stuff...

If you don't know what RSS or a Feed is, I strongly recommend that you take a look at this article.  RSS is a great tool.

RSS Explain

 

Scott Hannselman finally announced that the new DasBlog 1.9 has finally be released.  This blog runs on DasBlog and I've just finished the upgrade to 1.9 from 1.7.  The upgrade process was more or less painless and everything seems to be running well so far.  If anyone runs into a problem let me know. 

Also moved my feeds over to FeedBurner, that should be seamless.  Check out my next post if you don't know what a feed or RSS is.

Well I finally got my new Dodge Caliber.  I ordered it on April 16th and it finally arrived around July 26th.  I was really getting sick of my old car so it was really easy to love this car in the first couple weeks I had it.  But I'm coming up on a month of owning it now and I still absolutely love it.  I've only had one problem so far, and that is a broken button on the universal garage door opener that I can't even get to work anyway's.    You can see a couple more pics over at my PicasaWeb page.  I'll try and post a couple more pics once I get cleaned off again.

Pictures of my new house.

New Blog Tool means more blogging?