Best. Soup. Ever. Especially for breakfast.
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Smoking Ban
A smoking ban went into effect this past Sunday for public facilities in Springfield. A lot of people are up in arms about not being able to exercise their freedom and fill the air with toxic chemicals that harm people, but a lot more are happy that they can go to a restaurant without having to breathe toxic chemicals that harm people 🙂
A co-worker (and friend… I guesss) of mine, Justin Long, said that his home away from home, Spammy’s Tavern is having a rough go of it without all of the smoke. So rough, in fact, that they just purchased a large flat panel television to show how much money they’ll be losing because of the ban. What a shame. I feel for them. Really, I do.
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Mozilla Thunderbird Gripe
Every time I install Thunderbird on a new machine I have a hard time finding the option to have my replies begin before the quoted text in an email. I can never remember that it’s under Account Settings…Composition and Addressing and not under, oh.. Tools..Options with other composition-related options. Really pisses me off, but hopefully by writing this out I’ll somehow magically remember in the future.
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Programming Languages for Beginners
This article appeared on Slashdot this morning, definitely worth a read. It’s something I have thought about on more than one occasion.
In grade school, every once in a while my math class would have a computer lab day where we would sit and type in those commands found in the math books (and other exercises). That was on an Apple II, and I remember going home and asking my dad if there was a way to do the same on our PC. After a little poking around on the hard drive, I found qbasic. I also recall saving up $40 to buy… this book. I read every page and did almost every question/exercise at the end of each chapter. I have tossed many of my old programming books, but this one still sits on my shelf.
I agree with the author that it’s a shame there aren’t accessible languages/tools for curious kids to explore with. I think Microsoft may be starting to realize how important this is, with their attempt with Visual Studio Express. But I think the kids still could benefit from something as simple as the old qbasic to ease them into the programming mindset.
I cringe when I hear younger relatives and those their age not even considering a use for their computers other than MySpace (more on that in another post), IM, and games. I know that it’s not for everyone, and that that generation has grown up around computers like my generation has grown up around toasters. But it still bothers me that none seem to take any deeper interest in this stuff.I guess I’ll shut up now. Hopefully that made some sense.
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Uniform Look
Using my new Photoshop Elements, I changed the style of the Chef website(no content there yet) to match the application:
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New laptop
It has been long, long overdue. I bought a new laptop at Sam’s Club of all places last night. It’s the HP DV2047CL which has an AMD Turion 64 X2 (64-bit, dual core) HP DV2047CL.
Jay created an OS CD for me last night so I could wipe all the preinstall crap off of it, and I spent the next couple hours getting all the drivers reinstalled.It’s a fast machine, I hope it lasts the 4.5 years my Sony has.
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C and .NET
A coworker and I have been trudging through a lot of code recently. .NET code written by a C programmer. Folks, these things should never mix, because when they do, you end up with:
byteArray = new Byte[hexString.Length >> 1];
That’s right. Don’t divide by 2. Bit shift. And nevermind that there is a builtin .Net function that does what this line of code came from. And nevermind yet again that there’s a good helping of HEX shit like this in an ASP.NET web app. -
TechSmith SnagIt
A while back I installed the trial version of TechSmith’s SnagIt software. I remember asking myself why on earth I would need a utility to capture screenshots – seriously, what’s so hard about alt+PrintScreen, pasting into an image editor, cropping, and saving to a file?
This afternoon I purchased a copy. I grew to love the 2 seconds it took to get a screenshot taken and saved. It also has a bunch of other screen capture capabilities (regions, scrolling windows, to PDF, time delays, including cursor, etc.) that are very useful. Most of the other screen capture utilities I’ve tried in the past were shitty little apps that were just clunky to use and didn’t speed up the process. Way to go SnagIt, you have replaced MS Paint.
A side effect of this purchase is most likely going to be an increaesd number of screen shots/clips. I don’t know yet if that’s a good or bad thing. -
Circuit City
This morning I tried to go to CircuitCity.com, but found they must open their website late on Sundays 🙂
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Furniture Delivered
Today our wait for bedroom furniture ended. It looks like we did a good job in selecting our paint color.
The Johnson Blog 