Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
It has been a while since our last photo session, so this morning I got all of the gear out and setup for a quick shoot.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t so quick. And wow it takes alot of effort to get a 2.5 year old to cooperate!
After about an hour and a half I felt like I had a sufficient set to choose from and we called it quits. The rest can be found in the gallery.
Yesterday after work we went out to the fairgrounds to partake in the 2010 Illinois State Fair. Unlike the past 2 weeks, the weather was great and made for a very pleasant evening of walking around.
David got to see and touch many animals, as well as enjoy a Corn Dog and some Lemon Shake-Up. With the small crowds and great weather we were able to make our rounds to everything we usually do, with the exception of Conservation World which closes early. If this great weather continues we may just head back out there sometime this week.
On short notice, we decided to take a day trip to St. Louis today. When we first woke up this morning the weather didn’t look favorable, at 7am St. Louis was showing 94%+ humidity, so we figured we would just find something indoors. But on the way there the sky was overcast, the temperature wasn’t too bad, and the humidity had dropped – so to the zoo we went!
David had a really good time, he really wanted to see the Lions more than anything. He also really enjoyed all of the fish in the tanks he got to gaze into.
The cats are always a hit too.
It was alot of fun watching David get so excited – his last visit was exactly 1 year ago when he couldn’t express himself so well. Today he was sure to hop up for every exhibit, until he just got too tired near the end of the afternoon. We knew he was tired when he told his “No, I don’t want to see more elephants…”
And for the first time we can remember, we actually got to see the penguins outside. These went over very well 🙂
I’ve been a MotionBox Premium user for almost 2 years now, and this evening I received an email saying they sold themselves to Snapfish. Lucky for us, we get to use Snapfish free for a year! If only you could hear my voice, there’s plenty of sarcasm in it.
Offering Snapfish for a year is a joke. Why? Because it in no way compares to what I’ve come to expect from MotionBox. I quickly created a Snapfish account to try it out, but found:
Anyone have any suggestions for a replacement? My wishlist (all things I had with MotionBox) is:
R.I.P. MotionBox, I think you’ve left plenty of disappointed customers behind.
Ever since upgrading to iOS 4 on my iPhone 3G and then on the new iPhone 4 I have been seeing problems connecting to my local Exchange server when I was on wifi. Even with previous versions of the OS, the iPhone never seemed to do Push reliably on when on the same wifi network as the Exchange server. The problems with iOS 4, however, seem more severe. Even force-checking the email on wifi would result in the phone just sitting there “connecting..” but never actually working.
Tonight I decided to take some time to look into it – and I think I have it fixed. Maybe this will help some others with the same problems (and judging by various forums, there are plenty of you out there).
The issue boiled down to a combination of iOS 4 being unable to resolve DNS names ending in .local and my local DNS configuration. The mail server hostname I the phone was accessing wasn’t .local since it’s publicly accessible, but it did have a CNAME DNS record on my internal DNS server that aliased to the .local name of the server. On a hunch I removed the CNAME and just made an A record point to the local ip address of the server, rebooted the phone, and voila! My local Exchange mail works as it should!
To to summarize – don’t have any .local names involved in the lookup of your mail server. Change your DNS config if you can, and reboot the phone.
David has been singing this a bit lately and it’s pretty funny…
(edit: video hosted by Vimeo now)
Today’s weather was fantastic so we decided to make the most of it by heading to the ballpark!
We took david to a game last year, but he was just a little too young to begin enjoying it. Today, however, he had a BLAST. He was cheering the players on and happily watched 6+ innings before it was time for us to leave. To top it off he got to meet Speedy 🙂
Here’s the garden Ana has put in with David’s help. Unfortunately there are no photos of all of the digging and planting David was doing, as I was busy working on getting the deck washed.
The fence around the garden is new this year and is much more substantial than the one last year. Here’s to hoping it thwarts those rabbits. I’ve already told Ana that if it doesn’t work we’re upgrading to lasers.
If you use Visual Studio 2008 and install Microsoft Office 2010, it looks like there’s a very good chance your Visual Studio Web Designer will be clobbered. The symptom is when you go to visually edit a web page (html, aspx, etc) in Visual Studio, it will appear to completely lock up. Actually, I think what is happening is a message box is popping up, UNDER Visual Studio so you cannot click it or do anything but End Task to close Visual Studio.
Some searching around quickly came up with a few things to try.
You need to run “C:Program Files (x86)Common Filesmicrosoft sharedOFFICE12Office Setup ControllerSetup.exe” and select Repair (drop the “(x86)” portion if you’re running 32-bit).
On one of my machines, this was sufficient to repair the problem and Visual Studio went back to normal. However, on another computer I had to completely uninstall that software by selecting Uninstall instead of Repair. When that is done I then ran the Web Designer Core setup from the Visual Studio CD located at WCUWebDesignerCoreWebDesignerCore.exe. Be aware that if you were running VS Service Pack 1, you’ll want to reapply it after that setup completes.
One the topic of the Office 2010 install, I must say that my experience has been dismal. In addition to this problem of breaking Visual Studio 2008, on one of my machines I had to manually uninstall Office 2007 because the new 64-bit setup detected that the old version wasn’t copletely gone after uninstall. As you can guess, this was a pretty lengthy process, following a document from Microsoft led to about 10 minutes of hunting down and deleting various directories, files, and registry keys. Ouch.
Office 2010 is a nice upgrade, but Microsoft sure seemed to have botched the install.
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