Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
A coworker just ran across this awesome feature in a book so I thought I’d share it.
How many times have you recompiled an app just to get some debug/trace information spit out? In VS 2005 you can have a breakpoint write information to the output window as if you compiled in Debug.WriteLine statements. Just set a Breakpoint, right click on it and select When Hit. In the dialog you can configure what gets printed out.
A week or so ago I purchased a copy of Axialis Icon Workshop 6.0 Corporate Edition so I could crank out good looking icons for Chef. I have used trial editions of past versions and found it to be a very good product, but never pulled the trigger to buy it.
6.0 changed that in a major way. They’ve come up with a fantastic way to allow the user to take stock “objects” and quickly and easily compose them into great looking icons. With their older versions it took me a long time to come up with icons, and they still never made me very happy. But that is surely not the case anymore, great work guys.
I’m halfway expecting some of those computer graphics wizards out there to start putting out “object” libraries of their own. I’m really looking forward to such a thing (anyone?! anyone!?).
Ontop of their great software sits a reasonable pricing model and the lifetime upgrades are nothing to balk at!
I have poison ivy. I got it a few weeks ago at the work picnic at Lake Springfield. I was dumb enough to chase after a baseball or two into a nice patch of weeds that happened to contain the ivy bastard.
The rash took a while to develop, and I’ve had it on my legs now for two weeks and just Saturday showed up on my hands and elbows. It’s not terrible, but damn annoying.
I took Jay’s advice and tried scrubbing my hands with bleach a few times. The first couple times didn’t hurt, but this morning’s scrub left my hands burning for well over 2 hours. After deciding I’d had enough of that, I went into the doctor’s office (an “express” office just down the road from work) and got a shot and some medicine (read, steroids) to help it move along. I wish I would have done it sooner, as the itching is almost completely gone. I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep once I get off this computer.
I took a nice bike ride today on the Lost Bridge Trail to Rochester. Ana went shopping with her mom so I figured it would be good to get some exercise. It was a 21 mile ride, which is longer than I’ve ridden before. I made a mistake and didn’t eat any lunch before riding (and only having half a bagel for breakfast), but I made it just fine. Initially my legs were hurting a little bit, but they just feel a little tired right now, 3 hours after the fact.
Today is also the 5 month mark of regular exercise for me. That’s 5 months of weekday weight lifting and bike riding (lifting on MWF, biking or leg weight training on TuTh) with more bike riding on the weekends. I’m happy to report that, while weight loss is negligible, I’m much stronger, I gained 3-4 notches on my belt, my clothes fit better, and I feel all-around better.
I may have mentioned that our yard had grubs earlier this year. They moved in last year sometime and began destroying the back yard. We have since sprayed for them, and the grass startd to recover – but there was/is still a lot of areas devoid of good, thick grass. Not suprisingly, weeds found these areas great for growing. (Not to mention my watering laziness which hasn’t helped the front yard…)
So I spent 3.5 hours pulling weeds and mowing on Saturday! I had no idea I would almost fill one of those tall yard waste bags.
I need to stay on top of the yard like I was the past couple years, but it’s so hard to be motivated when it just doesn’t look as good as it used to.
Just in case we forgot where we live and what time of the year it is, nature just reminded us. It’s August in Central Illinois. We are forecasted for a humid high of 99 degrees with a heat index of a whopping 105.
In order to try to fix my wireless problem, I decided to give Windows’ System Restore a shot. I picked a restore point from about a week ago, let it do its thing, and bingo! I’m connected again.
Today I probably spent a good 6-8 hours working on Chef. I was able to get a lot done and move it to the point where the recipe management side has a functional, basic object model. You know what that means?? Time to move on to the UI!
I already started to play around with the basic look and feel of the UI, and I’m excited about it. Its unlike anything I’ve done before; I look forward to being able to give a sneak-preview in the coming weeks.
Today also saw me beginning to hunt for a good, cheap Help Authoring tool. I ran across a promising, free product shipped with the Visual Studio SDK called HelpStudio Lite but upon installation discovered the license prohibits it being used for anything other than Visual Studio-integrated help solutions. That was mentioned nowhere, but was bright and shiny in the EULA. WTF! The next candidate is WinCHM. It appears to be basic and with a good price tag ($50), so I’ll try and dig up some reviews on it.
Two days ago I booted up my laptop like always but ran into a slight problem connecting to my wireless network. Thinking my wireless card was dead, I used Ana’s (same brand and model) with the same results. Her laptop also worked flawlessly with my card. Crap. Driver reinstalls have done nothing.
From what I can tell, it picks up the network just fine but it just cannot pull an ip address from the dhcp server. Tinkering around with it more has me wondering if there’s something wrong with the cardbus slot. I guess it really shouldn’t matter, the 4 year old machine already keeps me wired with its 5 minute battery life, what’s an extra cable for network connectivity?
Sigh.
Friday was a very busy day. My coworkers and I were given the day off to spend at a park on Lake Springfield. The event wasn’t until late morning, so I was able to do the following:
The festivities were fun – very good food, beer, and playing catch make for a fun afternoon that beats the heck out of sitting in a cube.
After the picnic I then had to run back to the bike shop and pickup the newly-serviced bikes.
The Johnson Blog 