Tap My Mind

A Blog by Scott Isaacs

Month: March 2005 Page 1 of 2

Settlement at Utica Lake

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On March 30, 2005

In Uncategorized

I’ve been quiet for a while.  Things have been busy lately, to say the least.

Kelly and I bought a lot last week, and are planning to build a house.  Right now, it’s just a field, but there is a big tree (oak I think) on the corner of the lot and a few smaller trees near the back lot line.  Since this was farmland, we have some of the only trees in the whole subdivision (named “Settlement at Utica Lake”).  There is a small lake (Utica Lake) very near by, and lots of trees around that, but none of the lots actually have lakefront property.

Here is a map of the area — our lot is the third one from the lake going west.  The pin is close, but may not be exact.  The lots aren’t marked on the map, so to put it into perspective, there are 13 lots between Gramling Lane and Utica Lake.  Our lot is roughly 0.4 acres.  It’s mostly flat — at least compared to our current yard.

I took a few pictures of the land the other day and will post them soon.  It just looks like a field, but it’s our field.  🙂  I’ll try to keep the updates coming as things progress, especially when there are more pictures.

HTML Syntax Highlighter

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On March 24, 2005

In Uncategorized

This isn’t new.  I found it linked from Scott Hanselman’s blog.  Even though I didn’t discover it, it’s still pretty cool if you ever plan to post code to your blog, or include it in any other HTML document.  Check out CopySourceAsHTML.  It is a VS.NET add-in that copied selected text and formats it in HTML to look as it does in VS.  Here is a sample.

   12 Class HelloClass

   13     ‘ Private Variables

   14     Private _Who As String

   15 

   16     ‘ Public Variables

   17     Public Property Who() As String

   18         Get

   19             Return _Who

   20         End Get

   21         Set(ByVal Value As String)

   22             _Who = Value

   23         End Set

   24     End Property

   25 

   26     ‘ Public Methods

   27     Public Function SayHello() As String

   28         Return SayHello(Me.Who)

   29     End Function

   30 

   31     Public Function SayHello(ByVal Name As String) As String

   32         Return String.Format(“Hello, {0}”, Name)

   33     End Function

   34 End Class

A History of the Future of Media

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On March 21, 2005

In Uncategorized

EPIC 2014

The Big 2-0

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On March 15, 2005

In Uncategorized

No, I’m not talking about my age (sadly, I’m the big 3-0).  I’m talking about blogging.  I just realized that I was at 19 posts since I started blogging again on February 7.  So I decided to post this one to round it off to twenty.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to do this “milestone post” on a regular basis.  I guess that depends on if I have anything to say after my 29th post, or 49th post, etc.  I suppose for that matter I could just start posting “milestones” at any point, such as “This Is My 32nd Post”, but I don’t see any rhyme or reason to that — unless, of course, you consider that 32 is a power of 2.  Hmmm.  I could have a decimal milestone post AND a binary milestone post! 

Don’t even get me started on base 3!  Or prime numbers!!  That would be really fun!

I’m getting kind of excited over here!  I might actually have some serious amount of blog content pretty soon at this rate.

Whoops!

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On March 14, 2005

In Uncategorized

So I was upgrading this site from Community Server RC3 to 1.0 tonight.  No database changes were needed — just a file copy.  No problem, right? 

Wrong! 

I forgot that I had modified the skin that I’m using to be more like what I wanted.  Even worse, I forgot that there was an unmodified version of this skin included in the CS install.  So, I overwrote all of my skin changes. 

Sigh.

I think I’ve mostly got it back to how it was earlier today, and I’m making my changes in a new skin directory so that I don’t do this again.  If something doesn’t look right to you, let me know.

IE Stuff: Open Highlighted URL In New Window

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On March 14, 2005

In Uncategorized

This is something very small that I hacked out for myself a couple years ago.  It allows you to select an un-linked URL on a web page, such as “scottisaacs.com”, and easily navigate to it.  What you do is highlight the URL that you want to visit, right-click, and select “Open Highlighted Link in New Window”.

This will modify your registry and if you don’t know what that implies, then you probably won’t want to install this. 

Use this at your own risk! Here is the ZIP download.

Huh?

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On March 12, 2005

In Uncategorized

I found an interesting site linked from here.

Bloggers in The Neighborhood

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On March 10, 2005

In Uncategorized

I found BlogMap by accident, but thought it was pretty fun. So I added it to my left navigation.

If you register your blog here, the link they give you shows a map of bloggers that are in your area.  It’s using MapPoint technology (the map image says “Evaluation”), and it’s a pretty interesting use of the technology.  I’ve yet to decide if there is a real benefit to this, but I thought it was cool anyway.  🙂

Sign up for your own BlogMap here.

RECAP: Deeper in .NET 2005

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On March 9, 2005

In Uncategorized

Well, Deeper in .NET 2005 has come and gone now.  Friday night blurred into Saturday, which blurred into Sunday.  It was finally Tuesday when I started feeling rested.  It was an awesome day, though.  The speakers were great.  The crowd had good questions.  The box lunch was…  ummm, the speakers were great! 

In my last post, I mentioned all of the speakers that were coming and a few of their topics.  I really enjoyed them all, and I learned a lot too.  At lunch, there was an open forum to ask pretty much any question to the panel of experts, which included four of the speakers (all except for Rocky who had to leave) and Tom Lindley (sp?).  Scott Guthrie was in a rush to catch a plane, so the moderator asked for all of the questions about ASP.NET 2.0 to be asked first so he would have a chance to answer them before taking off mid-session. 

Well, I had recently found out that he was now in charge of the IIS team and that a new version was in the works.  After a series of questions on ASP.NET with fairly short answers from ScottGu, I asked (paraphrased), “I know you’re about to leave, but in about 1 minute, what is the coolest feature of IIS 7?”  Well, I may have made him miss his plane!  He seemed very excited to talk about it and listed several (5 or 6?) pretty cool features, and talked about it for probably 5 minutes! 

Sorry, ScottGu, if you missed your flight!  Needless to say, it excited me about the product to see his excitement.

After the event, the Executive Committee of the WI .NET Users Group, any remaining Platinum sponsors, and any remaining speakers (who didn’t have flights to catch) all went to a nice steak dinner at the hotel restaurant.  I actually got to know some of the EC members a little better, and they’re not so bad after all.  😉  I even got to finally meet Doug, Dan and Mark from the Chippewa Valley .NET Users Group.

All in all the whole day was pretty awesome and I can’t wait for next year’s event!  We just need to come up with a name for it.  The first was Day of .NET, then Deep in .NET, and now Deeper in .NET.  Let me know if you have any suggestions for next year.

Now, aside from all of the event stuff happening, I had a little more going on.  I am a partner in Oochie Web Hosting, which was a Gold sponsor of the event (as well as being the hosting provider of the WI .NET Users Group).  Dennis, one of the other Oochie partners, was there manning the booth, but he wasn’t alone all day. 

I need to give a very special thanks to my wife, Kelly, for showing up and helping Dennis get through the day.  She kept Dennis company and even answered questions when it was busy, which is pretty impressive given that she’s not really a technical person.  Plus, she went and got lunch for me and Dennis at some chicken place nearby (which explains why the box lunch seemed less than wonderful).

All in all, we (Oochie) collected around 100 business cards of people interested enough to leave a card with us.  Since we didn’t have any little gimmicky things at our booth to give away like many vendor booths do, we were more than impressed with the turnout.  We were, though, giving away a free year of hosting, as well as some other discounted services. 

Anyway, yesterday, Kelly took all those cards and entered them into an Excel spreadsheet for us.  Plus she did all this for free — that is, free plus a new pair of shoes…  🙂

I’m not really sure what we’re going to do with all those names yet.  Maybe we’ll sell them… j/k  I imagine we’ll just do a one-or-two-time mailing to find out who is interested, so if you’re name is in there, don’t worry, you won’t get SPAM blasted.

Anyway, I thought the day was great, and so did a few others.  Here are a few blog entries I’ve seen about the day after the fact:

I’m really looking forward to next year!  (I think I alrady said that though…)

 

Sand Art

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On March 9, 2005

In Uncategorized

This video is pretty awesome!  It’s several minutes long (maybe 10 minutes?), but well worth it.  If you’re on a slow connection you should probably download the file instead of streaming it.  Do this by right-clicking on the link and choosing “Save Target As…”.

Thanks to Karie (my sister) and Dennis for sending this to me.

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