Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
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.
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.
This morning I tried to go to CircuitCity.com, but found they must open their website late on Sundays 🙂
Today our wait for bedroom furniture ended. It looks like we did a good job in selecting our paint color.
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.
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