everyone on the WebData XML Team either left or has gone back into an unknown hole to not be found. That is another problem for another day (not people leaving, but who is left and where are they?). 

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in my webstats:

Most active organization

airproducts.com

66387

12.59%

spammin’ bastahds

Posted from BLInk!

My hubby and I have a new joke. It stems from the fact that he gets up at 6, leaves the house by 6:45 anrd doesn’t get home until about 6:30 pm. I do NOT get up at 6. I usually get up about 7 and then of course I have to pet the dogs for about 20 minutes. So he’s long gone by the time I’m up dressed and downstairs. We usually chat before he comes home – maybe to have him pick up a pizza or milk or something. Really it’s mostly because I just miss him. He has decided to tease me now that I really do that to figure out what time he is getting home so that I can be sure to be downstairs in the office with the computer on so that as he drives up the road and sees the lights and glow of the computer screen, he will be tricked into thinking I have been sitting there all day.

It’s definitely a plague of a contractor who works at home. People really think you might just be hanging out or doing anything but working. (Rich doesn’t really think so though). Friends sometimes call to chat during the day and I have to figure out how to get back to work without them thinking that I don’t love them enough to want to talk to them. If a client calls and I don’t answer the phone, they might think I’m out skiing or something. Clients calling in the morning often ask if they woke me.

I have been working for myself since about 1989…that’s 15 years. But this never seems to change. Sigh.

Posted from BLInk!

Here’s a Money Mag story on a new chip being developed by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. Why can’t this be done for batteries? http://money.cnn.com/2004/11/29/technology/cell.reut/

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Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I’m just kidding. This post inspired me. 🙂

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oops. Looks like Target’s dummy data got out into the live database. It’s definitely hard for large corporations to have a sense of humor about something like that. But as a number of people have noted, the bloggers have really gone to town on this.

So if you’re dummy data snuck out onto a website by mistake, what would you be hawking or promoting. I’ve got lots of job requests with clients like “G.B.” (my cat) requesting “feed me, dammit”. I would be selling my pets off one by one. I would have speakers at Vermont.NET named Joe Blow who are presenting on fascinating topics like “Al Gore and the invention of the Internet”.

I once worked with a company whose place holder error messages somehow got deployed into a demo package. They weren’t very flattering to the user who forgot to enter a person’s last name in the record data entry.

I dunno – I definitely looked at the Target thing from the perspective of a developer and felt serious sympathy for the person who let that slip through.

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Dave Burke noted a phrase that I said on DNR – naked monkeys – which was how I sandwiched Natural History Magazine in between my stints at Penthouse and Playboy some thousand years ago –  that when he quoted it out of context, immediately made me think of one of my favorite albums!

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Raymond Chen explains why folders like My Pictures would reappear after you delete them.

There’s actually something that caught me by surprise in .NET that I learned to accept that is along the same lines. I have some code that needs to look for a file in the Application Data folder area for a particular program. But I don’t want to use the CommonAppDataPath, as this creates a new folder for each version of the application. Therefore, I use the GetParent function combined with the folder name I always want to use like this:

dirStore = System.IO.Directory.GetParent(System.Windows.Forms.Application.CommonAppDataPath).ToString & “\filestore”

But this actually creates the CommAppDataPath folder anyway! Maybe there’s an overload I’m missing and I learned to accept it. My data goes where I want it to in the long run and the users never look there anyway.

 

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JUST KIDDING!

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Well, it’s really hard to follow recent deeply technical shows with the likes of Juval Lowy, Jay Roxe, Kate Gregory, and a show with Mark Pollack, Ted Neward and Don Box, but heck “I yam who I yam” and hopefully it’ll be a fun show to listen to and you’ll even learn something new that’s actually technical.

As we are supposedly our own worst critics….I hope that’s truly the case here. 🙂

Thanks Carl for inviting me on.

okay okay here’s the link

Posted from BLInk!