okay–i shouldn’t have to work another day in my life with kids that look like this. Great pix joy.

i love you!!!

3-col layout via CSS

woohoo! by tomorrow eve i should have this implemented here.

and folks thanks for the comments. we just got back from my fam’s city (indianapolis) — my great grandma died a few days ago. she was 105(!)

why hasn’t anyone come up with a PC battery that acts like a laptop battery? i.e. it goes inside the desktop PC to prevent an unexpected power loss situation (blackout, brownout, accidental tripping the cord). not quite a UPS, but basically just a laptop battery type thing you stick in the PC. feel me?

jeah, my boy had his first haircut today. he went from hippie to business man. although i kinda miss the “carefree” do of the old jaden, this one looks like he’s ready for some responsibilities. ;)

Aight then–so i’ve had my Sony Ericsson T610 for a total of 5 days, so it’s time for some first impressions. My previous phone was a Sanyo SCP-4700 with Sprint; my service is via T-mobile.

It’s by far the smallest phone i’ve had, my very first was decent, a nextel Motorola i1000, then my second was the brick–the Motorola i500. it’s nice to finally graduate to small phone mode. I’m hopefully old enough now that i won’t just lose this mug. Fits very well in my pocket. it looks classy, but definitely takes some getting used to as far as taking calls with the handset. it feels as if i shouldn’t be able to talk properly into it ‘cos it’s so tiny, and i can hear myself in the earpiece, in a tin-can sorta way. The phone came with a headset, and this is my first time to actually fully embrace them. the phone feels better just sitting in my hand, while i use the earpiece (which i wish fit more snugly in my ear). depending on price, i may look at getting another earpiece (perhaps a bluetooth one). The screen is Very Large for the size of the phone! the screen is bright and very readable, except I have problems reading it outside in normal sunlight. The colours are crisp, and the theme i created for the thing looks better on the phone than when i created it!

Next: features.

props to the homie dave shea of mezzoblue for redoing his site in CSS entirely (well as much as he could). first off it seems to load a tad faster, and just looks snazzier centered as such. but a side effect is that i was able to figure out finally how to make my header link to the home page–i had no idea, using CSS, how to make my image a URL — it was a property of the “banner”. i was able to glean from his CSS that i needed to make an h1 and a that is

display: block

and just use a <span> that contains the a href that i want to link to. big ups. was able to fix myself and joy’s sites.

#

and i will never live it down–i called, and she told me, and i shrank to like 1 meter tall at least (most?). duuuh. she never gave me a chance to catch her at the end of the day, when i was gonna tell her! Okay for the uninformed, she’s been about 1000 miles away from me for about 2 weeks already. :( anyway, i’m sorry, and it won’t be for another year where i can prove my worth again.

This newsbite links to an interesting article about research being done in an area of AI.

My main concern has less to do with being “profiled” by the government than the concept itself, and it’s ramifications on privacy in general–privacy being the right to your free time.

We’ve seen it happen already with the advent of the cellphone, and Mos Def lays it down nicely when he speaks on it in his song “Mathematics”:

“40% of Americans own a cell phone
so they can hear, everything that you say when you ain’t home”

this number’s probaby gone up since he dropped these lyrics. As a consultant i’m usually travelling to the worksite, so i’m relatively “on the hook” the entire time i’m there to be responsible for the project since i’m not at home–or so people assume. When i read something like:

“If people keep missing conferences during rush hour, PAL should learn to schedule meetings when traffic isn’t as thick.”

I see the inevitable. Computers sometimes take the fun out of “snow days” because we’ll be at a point where we’ll be able to perfectly maneuver around them in order to get work done. Essential “down time” has decreased because the expectation has become that we are to, like computers, be always available. Our only remaining “down time” seems to be those situations, as above, that are unpredictable. Now fools is trying to cut into that.

I got more to say but i’m on the hook to head out for worship this morning :) so feel free to comment:)

finally got off my “but” and got to getting into .NET web services. got to give props again to jae choi, this time for introducing me to InformIT Safari a little bit ago. I’ve had a subscription for a few months now and it’s worth it–saves me some on some books that i’d like to use as reference but didn’t want to drop loot to buy, or weren’t on my “A” list to buy, but are still Good To Have. Don’t get me wrong, they have A-list titles as well (and i’ll find myself buying them eventually anyway) but for a Tightly Aggregated Implementation Resource you really can’t beat something like it. :) but i digress…

I’ve read through the entire “meat” of C# in a Nutshell, and am “in the middle” of Professional .NET, which are both easy reads if you’re familiar with Java. And if you are familiar with Java and aren’t a “Microsoft Guy” admit it you can’t hate on the features of the C# language, that are absent in Java–i couldn’t, even if you do “realize” that many of them are an answer to Java’s weaknesses in expressing certain idioms. And even that needs to be realized by the Java camp, and addressed (which some things are, in the next Java Rev). but i digress again, and get to the point of this post. :)

I’ve had SharpDevelop installed on my machines for quite a while now, though not really doing anything with it. The Main Thing i wanted to use this software for was developing Windows Forms (not to be confused with web forms) and Web Services. I expected creating Windows Forms to be relatively easy, but i didn’t realize that creating a web service would be either. This ease isn’t a sharpdevelop thing, but a .NET and IIS thing. The book i used to refer to this was one of my Safari reads, C# for Java developers, chapter 19. All i did was write a simple service by creating a method, tagging it with

[Webmethod]

before the method i’m exporting, and compile. Stick the dll in the bin directory of the virtual directory i created in IIS (i’m skipping steps, yes :), write a quick asmx file with a certain syntax, then boom. browse to the page and my service is available, even with a simple little “testing” page!

I didn’t know what to expect, and i guess that’s why i’m pleasantly surprised. Reall and Truly, the rest of creating web services lies in your own creativity, and not spending time on implementation details, which leads me to another observation, which isn’t anything new, just something i’ve finally realized that others have said a billion times before. :) And if you haven’t yet, when you do, you’ll be on some old “aha” too.
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well thursday i got the email from amazon letting me know my phone was on its way; i get home and my neighbor said that they delivered the package about 2-3 days ago (she keeps packages for me while i’m out many times)…no matter, my phone–a Sony Ericsson T610 (flash demo) is in, and it’s tiny. definitely the smallest phone i ever had. i’m about to pass on my scp-4700, which is a great phone that i’ve gotten used to (the speaker phone alone is worth having the phone) and also has t9 text input which in early usage i haven’t found on this phone. :( after charging i will delve more into this thing and report back. This has to be about the most “rich” thing i’ve owned (with rebates it was only $99 tho), besides a polo sweatshirt i bought around 10 years ago (why why why did i pay $150 for that sweatshirt–even if it was the most comfortable sweatshirt i’ve ever experienced in my life).

more later.