Berry picking….

Jun 27, 2005 1 min.

It was a very enjoyable summer weekend for our little family, including a trip today to pick raspberries (tons of fun, easy to pick…) and strawberries (very tasty… but much less enjoyable to be squatting down in the tiny little space between the rows trying to dig through the little bushes looking for ripe strawberries…) out at a local place called Remlinger Farms. We only picked for around an hour, at that is moving at the speed of a 4 year old, and ended up with a nice pile of berries.

Lacing your running shoes… via animated gifs

Jun 22, 2005 1 min.

When my brother took me to buy running shoes a few years ago, he made a point of showing me a couple of ways to lace them up based on the fit I needed… but over time I forgot, and now I have new shoes… luckily for me, the web saves the day (like usual) and I found this on the new balance site: Lacing for Better Fit

Article about the use of glucosamine and chondroitin for joint pain…

Jun 20, 2005 1 min.

I used to get knee pain all the time, just walking down stairs would cause quite an ache, but after I dropped some weight that went away… now it seems that pounding my legs onto the pavement over and over again is firing it back up again, and it is getting bad enough that I’m feeling reluctant to run as often as I have been. Seeing me limp my way down the stairs into the changing room, someone that I was running with mentioned glucosamine, saying that it really helps repair the damaged ‘stuff’ that is leading to the discomfort when I run down large hills.

Fake URLs in emails and web pages…

Jun 13, 2005 2 min.

Man, I’m getting sick of people’s attempts to trick me… mostly because they are just pretty lame, and also because I feel sorry for the number of folks that are quite possibly being hit by these scams. One of the more recent tricks is sending me a notice about my “insert online service or bank here” account and providing me a link to go and enter my userid/password… and the link text is something like “https://www.

Remembering one of my favorite books from my youth…

Jun 12, 2005 2 min.

My wife commented tonight that my son (4) was going on at length about which planet was where in the solar system and how if you lived right next to the sun it would be too hot to live, etc… and suggested we get him some books on the planets from the library. This got me to thinking about a book that I used to spend hours and hours reading, I probably read it through cover-to-cover over a hundred times over the years… and a few searches later I found the title and author, Roy A.

The Spouse Acceptance Factor

Jun 7, 2005 6 min.

I’m not sure who invented this term, SAF, but it comes up often around folks who are into new technology for the home… “sure you might want to install a media center pc, but have you taken into account the spouse acceptance factor?” or the more common, “having to restart the cable modem sure reduces the SAF”. With everything new seems to come a few annoyances, so the question is whether or not the benefits outweigh the issues… and not in your opinion, but in the opinion of the rest of the people in your house.

my first fitness ‘Boot Camp’ ends, and another begins…

May 28, 2005 3 min.

Back at the start of April, I signed up for a group fitness class at the pro club, the “Boot Camp” … a twice-weekly (for two months) running-focused outdoor workout that was supposedly modeled after real military training. Well, it wasn’t anything like what I remembered from going through basic training with the Canadian Military, but I don’t think anyone in the class would have actually wanted that. Paying to have people yell at you is something that only a small group of people enjoy.

Doing interesting things with XSL

May 6, 2005 1 min.

I’ve been messing around with using XSL to display RSS on MSDN, as a simpler alternative to a custom ASP.NET control, and while it works perfectly in the core case (display all the items in a feed in a format), there are two additional requirements that were very easy to handle in a .NET class, but trickier (for me) in XSL. Display the top n items Out of the full list, display n randomly picked items For the first, it was pretty easy… could be used to only output the top 5 items, for example… For the second though, I was stumped for a bit… then I came up with an idea.

IE 7 will have a new User Agent string, of course, so it might be worth checking your code…

May 4, 2005 1 min.

This should only be an issue if you’ve written code that checks for version=6, instead of version =>6, but that happens so you might want read the following blog entry about this new version.

Alienware adds another reason to buy their PCs… Star Wars themed PCs

May 1, 2005 2 min.

If I ever get an Alienware machine, I suspect it would be their Media Center machine, but the preview images of these new Star Wars machines are quite tempting. I wish they had a single PC though, not light/dark versions, I love the images they’ve used for both… it would be cool to have each ‘side’ represented on the opposite sides of the PC. I’m sure they’ll never split the case out on its own, as the whole point of this PC is to get you to pick up their highest-end PC just because you can’t resist the themed version.