Bryan's Mind
Ponderances, Inanities, and other Nonsense
Opportunity seldom, knocks…
Mar 14th
…usually it just rings the doorbell, lights a bag of dog poop, then runs away.
Cosa Postal…Mafia Tactics at the USPS.
Mar 12th
About ten years ago or so, buying insurance on your packages gave you a nice warm and fuzzy, that the outside chance something happens to your stuff, you will be insured and can replace it. It wasn’t really necessary, but would just make you feel better about the whole thing.
Nowadays, not buying insurance means that your packages will be mishandled, crushed, opened, and the contents pilfered: Guaranteed. We have sent several packages to Italy over the past 10 years, which has become increasingly prohibitive due to escalating prices. So, we have risked not getting insurance on the last few packages. All of them were pilfered before they got to Italy. What’s more, CDs containing only pictures (non-copy-written materials) are always taken out, even if we mark them as photos. Sad state of affairs, our postal system.
The USPS now wants to have more control over their business, so they can more easily elevate stamp prices and better control their day-to-day operations without government restrictions. (For those of you that aren’t aware, the USPS has been an independent business for some time now.) It is a monopoly and needs to be opened up to competition. I think that we should allow FedEx and DHL and UPS to deliver our residential mail, same way as we subscribe to different cellphone providers and whatnot. Who knows, might even be less junk mail that way. Bottom line: competition increases customer service.
Not only that, I find things like this disturbing, as the laws don’t keep pace with the speed of business and what should be deemed appropriate regulation:
From Wikipedia:
The USPIS has the power to enforce the USPS monopoly by conducting search and seizure raids on entities they suspect of sending non-urgent mail through overnight delivery competitors. For example: according to the American Enterprise Institute, a private conservative think tank, the USPIS raided Equifax offices in 1993 to ascertain if the mail they were sending through Federal Express was truly “extremely urgent.” It was found that the mail was not, and Equifax was fined $30,000.[37]
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.
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