A collection of various ramblings on technology, life in 
Friday, April 30, 2004 Melanie and I were cursed of sorts by mother nature last year when it came to attending outdoor sporting events together. Baseball games we went to were either cold, rainy, or both. And it rained on us at the U.S. Open for a second year in a row. The last time we remember attending a pro sporting event outdoors without bad weather had to be in 2002. But last night our bad luck finally changed.
We had a great time at Yankee Stadium watching New York triumph over Oakland. And the weather was perfect. No rain and the temperature was ideal. Hopefully the rest of the summer will be like this for us.
posted by Kirby | April 30 10:43 AM | comments (0)
Some people think of me as a gadget geek. Surprisingly though I'm not. Before Melanie I did not have cable TV for years. Broadcast TV was good enough for me. The last time I brought a computer was the first part of 1999, which was a laptop. And the last time I brought a desktop system was in 1998. And yes, both of these computers are still in use today.
The only gadgets I tend to keep up to date are gaming consoles, even though I don't game as much as I would like. I have a PS/2, 2 Xbox consoles, Sega Dreamcast, Super Nintendo, and a Gameboy Advance. I gave away my older consoles when I moved to New York. I would have kept them if I had the space.
So contrary to popular belief I'm not much of a gadget geek...until yesterday. I finally broken down and bought a Dell PowerEdge server for use with upcoming work. And I'm planning to buy more computers, servers, laptops, etc over the next year. But the really cool geek gadget in my live as of yesterday, and in Melanie's life, is DVR (Digital Video Recorder).
Melanie was kind enough to visit the Time Warner office yesterday and upgraded our digital cable box with the new DVR box. It's like having TiVo built into the cable box, and I for one am totally hooked. Recording shows has never been easier. And the instance replay and rewinding of live shows is awesome. It comes with a series manager that allows us to record entire show series airing on one or more channels. And we can record two shows at the same time, which is pretty dang awesome.
Time Warner DVR will definitely change the way we watch TV. Digital cable gives us tons of channels which on any given day there is nothing to watch. But combined with DVR there will also be an interesting show to watch, from Brady Bunch to South Park to the latest XPlay on TechTV.
posted by Kirby | April 30 10:34 AM | comments (2)
Thursday, April 29, 2004 I was looking at the Whistler and Killington cams today. Still snow at both resorts. It sucks to think I could be snowboarding this weekend. Guess I shouldn't have packed up the gear.
posted by Kirby | April 29 02:40 PM | comments (0)
Sunday, April 25, 2004 Melanie and I have a very busy but fun life. With work, travel, events in New York, it is sometimes hard for us to remember were we will be in 6 months. So I setup a web calendar for us to use.
I used open source project WebCalendar, which is a PHP-based calendar application. Setup was a snap thanks to the folks at CrystalTech, which is my hosting provider. Their support of PHP and MySql made getting the site up and running very easy. However, I did have to make one change to the code.
Inside of init.php is a number of "include-once" statements. Each of these statements refer to the a file in the "includes" directory such as "includes/translate.php". To make the site work correctly within the server environment I had to remove the "includes/" string literal portion of the "include-once" statements. I did not have to make any other changes to get the application running from the shared server.
posted by Kirby | April 25 09:02 AM | comments (2)
Monday, April 19, 2004 A Portrait of J. Random Hacker [The Jargon Dictionary]: "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" posted by Kirby | April 19 04:58 PM | comments (0)
Wednesday, April 14, 2004 Words of wisdom on re-throwing exceptions in .NET. posted by Kirby | April 14 06:02 PM | comments (0)
Tuesday, April 13, 2004 I have always been a big fan of O'Reilly. The books are great, the web sites are useful, and Safari is my favorite. But after O'Reilly's attempt to implement a single sign on for all their sites I am left with multiple user profiles, one for O'Reilly sites and one for my Safari account which I can now only access through a different URL. Having multiple accounts is not exactly single sign on in my opinion.
And I'm still fuming over not being able to access Safari for more than 24 hours. Unfortunately I really needed access yesterday too.
I'm very surprised that a company like O'Reilly has let something like this happen. I have always thought the company was better than that. Hopefully improvements will come soon now that lessons have been learned.
posted by Kirby | April 13 03:00 PM | comments (0)
"The trick to living well is not to live on as much money as you can but to live well on as little money as you can." -Bob Reselman posted by Kirby | April 13 10:24 AM | comments (1)
Congratulations to my friends Tom and Janet who tied the knot over the weekend! posted by Kirby | April 13 08:21 AM | comments (0)
Monday, April 12, 2004 It seems I am no longer able to sign in to O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf. I didn't realize until today how important this reference site has become to me. Come on support team. Get my access active again. posted by Kirby | April 12 08:19 AM | comments (0)
Sunday, April 04, 2004 Melanie and I had our first in over 2 months NYC Saturday together where it was just the two of us. We hit 55 Bar for some great blues music and the singing of Sweet Georgia Brown. The late show set was definite the best, with lots of energy and excitement coming from the crowd. The evening reminded me how much fun Saturday night can be in NYC.
posted by Kirby | April 4 09:44 AM | comments (0)
Saturday, April 03, 2004 Here's a good online article that features my good buddy Dave.
Creative Loafing Charlotte | THIS WEEK IN: "They're Young, They're Vibrant...
And they've all beaten cancer " posted by Kirby | April 3 08:34 AM | comments (0)
Thursday, April 01, 2004 According to the Gematriculator, this site is only 9% evil. Guess I need to work on it more and get the evil percentage up. [insert evil laugh here] posted by Kirby | April 1 01:39 PM | comments (0)
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