Ponderances, Inanities, and other Nonsense
OLEDs
Mar 10th
This is pretty snazzy.
I am pretty lazy and cheap about technology, therefore a late adopter of most things. I tell you all so that you can buy them up and get the price down for me. 
Triathlons
Mar 10th
I responded to a post by an old friend about triathlons a short while ago. It seems that having done extremely well on his first cut at a marathon made caused him to think about adding triathlons to his “bucket list.” I started reminiscing about my couple of years of competing in triathlons and figured I would put together some thoughts to share with anyone else out there thinking about doing one. I encourage it: it is extremely fun to train for and the event itself is a joy.
One thing that you have to keep in mind, though is to avoid the risk of over-training. I have heard it said that one should not increase their intensity or duration more than 10% per week. This was a good rule of thumb and it worked well for me. So what should you start at? Depends on your age and level of activity. Don’t be afraid to ease into it, and it is a truly subjective issue.
I had a short list of grievances about triathlons, though. Injury made me stop, and laziness and lack of opportunity perpetuated my hiatus. I am almost ready to get back into it, though. I should be ready to compete again after May of next year (when school is done.)
Grievances:
1. The swim is proportionately shorter than the bike and run. I am sure this is by design, as the swim (and training for it) are boring and a major limitation for non-swimmers hoping to compete in a triathlon. Most people are average swimmers, at best. I am a very good swimmer and an average runner, so the fact that average swimmers and good runners have an unfair advantage over me out the gate sucks. Period.
2. Someone perpetuated that you can “draft” or “slipstream” in the water. If there is any advantage, it is marginal at best. Yet, every race some asshat would be swimming on my feet, almost grabbing my feet to gain traction. At first, I tolerated it. After I while, I retaliated. This retaliation would include a light kick, followed by much more obvious and obnoxious kicks. Again, the swim isn’t long enough for me to really distance myself from everyone until the last couple hundred meters, which is only possible in a half-Ironman or longer.
3. Swimming in open water is a bit unsettling due to the sometimes mirky water and the lack of visibility. Throw in waves and a bunch of floundering novice swimmers that can’t swim in a straight line and the aforementioned “drafters” and you are in for a real treat. Basically, most people need to do more open water swimming so they can practice swimming with the current in a straight line. Here’s hoping.
4. The swim is the start, so everyone is floundering about at once, jumping over you, onto you, etc. I see all kinds of locomotion out there. A lot of leapfrog diving and whatnot. A lot of people are very combative. I actually like the start, but it is unnerving at first.
That’s about all I can think of for now. More to come.
ForceDeleteList (stsadmin)
Mar 10th
On this edition of “SharePoint 2007 The Hard Way…”
I had a custom action that I created in the Edit Control Block set up to add a list to a list. Well, we couldn’t leave well enough alone and all of our WSP files are being combined into one big WSP. It is a long story as to why that is, but suffice it to say it has to do with interdependencies of WSPs that becomes a problem. You can set dependencies in the feature file by adding an “ActivationDepency” to your feature.xml file to force the admin to install features in a certain order, but there isn’t something to enforce the order of removal: stuff just fails. Well, when you start having 20+ *.wsp files flying around, it gets kind of sketchy.
Anyway, long story short, I goofed and forgot to delete a list instance before I deactivated the site and site collection features and retracted/removed the solution from Central Admin. So, I tried SWAT but it didn’t have rights, so I decided to try and remove the list using my old “go-to,” STSAdmin. Now, I love STSAdmin, but I don’t like doing stuff from the command line (if that makes any sense.) And I have a print-out that I keep beside me that is basically a pipe to a text file of the screen dump you get from typing “stsadm /?”. On that list is “forcedeletelist.” But, if you type in “stsadm -help forcedeletelist,” it gives you “stsadm -o forcedeleteweb -url http://web.” Now in the original printout, I didn’t even see that was an option: forcedeleteweb.
Just so you know, if you type in “stsadm -o forcedeletelist -url http://web” it works fine, and doesn’t delete your web. That is, I haven’t tried it on the root of the site, but on “http://mysite/Lists/MyListName.” It did not delete the folder in the 12 hive or any of the sites within, but it deleted that pesky list from my site.
Some neat things
Mar 8th
Midterms
Mar 5th
Well, I have to say: I don’t like tests that cover half of a textbook worth of material; Never have; never will.
I can’t say what I would think would be a fair and reasonable test, just that I have not taken too many over the course of my academic career that I have felt positive I passed. Those that I did feel good after, I either didn’t do as well as I thought or did how I would expect, but that number is probably well below the Mendoza line.
SharePoint without Designer
Feb 1st
This past week I just finished a class on MOSS 2007 development, and I don’t know if I am any closer to understanding it.
The reason is not that I am that obtuse, but that by design, SharePoint development is generally performed sitting on a server with SharePoint Designer. However, we can’t do that…all of our functionality has to be deployable in *.wsp files. There are many challenges to this limitation, most especially sequencing installation and configuration conflicts (interdependencies, etc.)
There doesn’t seem to be much out there about having to package it up yourself and developing in VS.NET, though this limitation has to be fairly common among DoD contractors.
All in all, it gets very frustrating.
Not asking Much…
Jan 19th
I don’t know why most children iron supplements are putrid…they just are. I would like to think that science would find some way to work it into a gummi bear or something, instead of me trying to administer such to my three-and-a-half-year-old via a medicine dropper and some brown or black fluid. Really, is this as far as we’ve progressed?
Anyone out there know of any supplements that are either chocolate or gummy that contain iron?
Update: I found something that works, though technically it doesn’t fit the requirements stated above: Centrum Kids. Normally, my daughter is appalled by vitamins, but she likes these. Also, they have dosages for kids 2 to 3 years old. Flintstones Chewables with Iron aren’t recommended for children under 4.
Tax on Banks?
Jan 14th
I read today that Obama “unveiled a new tax on banks.” From a brief skim my take is it is retribution for the bonuses paid out by the large bank corporations after the bailout money was given to them.
This, quite simply, is ridiculous rhetoric that does nothing to help the economy, but may curry favor with voters come next election.
Quite simply put, the banks are partly to blame, but most of the blame should be sent to Ben Bernanke, Time’s Man of the Year and head of the Federal Reserve Bank and his predecessor, Alan Greenspan. This is what happens when you have a central bank that has the power to create money and artificially control interest rates. The recent housing bubble was the result of artificially fixing the interest rates at like 1% for many years, followed by the eventual rise, which popped the bubble. Until the Federal Reserve Bank is gone, we will not have a free market economy.
The way that the taxpayer (read “Middle Class”) will pay in the end s that the existence of all of the money that was created out of thin air to bail out these banks will dilute the value of the dollar, internationally. It’s not that we’ll pay more taxes, nor should we: The government already spends far more than they levy in income taxes, so taxing banks will not make a dent in the deficit, nor will it do anything to help the economy. As we are teetering on the edge of some hard times (rampant inflation), I would hope our President could come up with something more legitimate. I’m sure Joe Average will say “That’s right…stick it to them banks!” But really, it is not going to do anything, IMHO.
Family Update 1/11/10
Jan 12th
I am taking a small hiatus on my frothing about the economy to fill everybody in on the goings-on around the Hobbs’ household.
Julian: Julian started crawling in earnest this weekend past. Before he would pull-up to all fours and lunge. Now he does actual crawling. What’s more, he is pulling up to standing in his crib: not just staying there, but rather both briefly and repeatedly, as if it is calisthenics. Methinks he is doing so to strengthen his legs. He already remembers where he last saw things and figures out that if you put something over them, it is still there but hidden. He appears to be quite bright and ahead in his development. Over the past few months, he naturally developed a fear of large volumes of water, which makes sense; however, this weekend, after a brief adjustment period of about 15 minutes, he was splashing and carousing like an old pro.
Sophia: Sophia is improving by leaps and bounds. She has been much better about communicating, though she still has sleep problems. We see it as a vicious circle: she doesn’t tell us when she is sleepy, but when she doesn’t sleep, she doesn’t communicate as well. She and Julian both had a cold this weekend but are now over it. So far, she isn’t missing Shamu. We’ll see if we can make it 3 months without it…for those not “in the know” SeaWorld San Antonio closed Jan 3 and doesn’t re-open until the beginning of March. Sophia is obsessed with going there. We still want to put her into ballet, but until she starts heeding instruction a little better it would be a waste of everyone’s time.
Antonella is doing well. We started at the gym (hence the pool) at the first of the year. We haven’t worked all of the bugs out of our schedule. She is still teaching at the Montessori school, though I know she is waiting anxiously for something else to come down the pike. She still isn’t getting a full night of uninterrupted sleep, but it is getting better and better little by little.
I am enjoying my respite from school, though it is quickly coming to a close. It would appear that I screwed up my degree plan of study, but I didn’t hear anything about it until a couple of days ago. This could be a problem, as I might not get my books shipped until after class starts. I still need to finish making up an incomplete in an elective that I took. It had never been offered, and it was intended to be offered in a break. Thing is, it was too much work even then, if I was lucky enough to have been offered it a year ago in the slot that it was intended to be undertaken. The class did not exist last year, though they withheld that information from me and made it seem like I just didn’t get signed up for it before the end of drop/add. It was basically learning half of a operations research book and half of an engineering/probability book (the statistics half) in six weeks. Even without the other class, the 200+ pages of reading/week with 8+ hours of lecture was too much. Doubly so with the other class I was taking. They saw that it wasn’t feasible, so they extended it out by two weeks, but then that overlapped with my MBA capstone class, which made it that much harder, since that class was extremely time-demanding and ever so crucial.
We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s. Take care,
Bryan
The Federal Reserve Bank and why it must go.
Jan 11th
One of the things that has been interesting to me in recent months is the Federal Reserve Bank. I won’t go into too much detail about its shady creation, but I will provide a couple of interesting tidbits, in layman’s terms.
1. The Federal Reserve Bank creates money out of nothing. When they increase the money supply, they create money out of thin air (only a small fraction is minted as coins and bills). When more money exists, then each dollar is worth less. That is just basic supply and demand. The people and entities that benefit most are the ones that get the newly-created money first: the U.S. government and the banks. They spend it when it is still worth something, before inflation reduces the value of the money over time. By the time that Joe Average gets an annual pay raise, it barely keeps pace with inflation. For wage workers, minimum wage is way behind.
2. The ability to create money out of thin air dissuades diplomacy and encourages wars. If you have to fund a war without being able to create money out of thin air, people tend to care a lot more.
3. For the same reason, spending on special interest programs is not kept in check as taxes are not raised proportionately. Most of the money spent by our government really does not exist. Which again, creates inflation and devalues the dollar. The dollar is worth $0.05 of what it was in 1914 since the inception of the FRB. If dollars were still backed by gold (and therefore could not be created out of thin air,) the dollar would still be worth $1.00.
Why does this matter? Constant inflation of the dollar decreases its value compared to other currencies and versus other investments, such as gold (which costs $1200/ounce now (compared to $35 in 1968 and $868 in 2008), not because the value of gold has gone up, but that the value of the dollar has gone down) to the point that it has no inherent value to other countries. At that point, our country is in big trouble.