Time for the end of year catch up entry.

Friday night we went to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concert at the American Airlines Center in Dallas. This was our sixth time to see TSO. We had got floor seats this year since Heather hadn't done floor before. Floor is kinda old hat for me and if your not first section isn't really that great. I have seen Kiss twice from the first section (13th and 6th row) and let me tell ya, first section gives the concert a whole new experience.

It was obvious from the very beginning that they had changed up the show from previous years as usually Anthony Gaynor does the intro to the story then the music starts. This year they played two songs before the story started. The Christmas portion of the show was about an hour and a half then the real changes began. The second part of the show is the fun part where they play songs from Beethoven's Last Night and anything else that comes to mind. This year Paul O'Neal the producer and guy who came up with the idea of TSO made an appearance. When he came on stage he teased us that there was a special guest in the arena that would join them later. He did a couple of songs then introduced the special guest.

O'Neal was positively beside himself during the special guest's introduction carrying on about how this artist is a legend in the field that and that when he walked down the hall backstage it was like Moses, the crowds parted to let him through. He was the leader of the super group Free, then the super group Bad Company, then the Firm, and currently Queen. When he said Free I was going "No Way Paul Rodgers is here!!". Paul Rodgers came out to a full standing ovation and deafening cheers. The crowd stayed on their feet as he laid into "Bad Company" before transitioning into "All Right Now." The house was positively ROCKIN during those two songs. I am still a little hoarse from yelling during this part of the show. This was the first time I had seen Paul Rodgers live and I can't even begin describe the power and range of his voice. If you get the chance to see him I strongly recommend you go.

We had 13 people come over for Christmas Eve. This was a "few" more that we usually host so we had to crank it up a bit. Due to circumstances beyond anyone's control we started a little later than we had planned which resulted in the Ham and Turkey drying out a bit while keeping warm in the ovens. We still had a great time and really enjoyed seeing Aunts, Uncles and Nephews that we had seen in a while.
Oh yeah, we also got presents :). I got an 8gb Zune from work for Christmas which I gave to Heather as 8gb is no where near big enough for me.

A day late but the day has to be mentioned. We went to Tarren's Marine Corp induction ceremony (swearing in) on Wednesday at the Military Entrance Processing Station in downtown Dallas on Wednesday. Very emotional day as Tarren shipped out for bootcamp that day to San Diego. The Colonel that swore them in gave a very nice and informative speech ("You do know there is a war going on right?"). I don't remember a speech when I was sworn in 23 years ago, but then again that was 23 years ago and I have killed a brain cell or two in the intervening years. I was in the delayed entry program my senior year in high school to enter the Marine Corp.  I was 6 weeks from shipping out when I was horsing around with a buddy and fell on my arm breaking ~1 inch off the elbow end of my ulna requring 2 nails to hold it together.  The Marines couldn't take me with steel already in me.  Ces le vie.  I think things worked out ok.
Tarren Swearing in

We upgraded Heather's Yukon today to a 2007. When we first looked at the new truck it had these hideous 20" chrome rims with low profile tires (pimped). I told the saleswoman (Amy Bachman at Alan Young Buick GMC in North Richland Hills) that I would buy it if they took off the rims. They did and I did.
Heather's New Truck

Wow have we been busy the last few weeks around the house.

Heather is a member of 3 different Bunco groups and usually chooses to host the game at our house during December. The first one was in late November which meant we had to have the house completely Christmas'd up earlier than normal. This includes;
3 Christmas trees (6', 9', 12')
All exterior lights (and no I didn't crack my skull this time, I'm paying someone else to do that)
Food/Snacks/Drinks/Clean House for the night of the party.

Then we had Thanksgiving at our house for a ten or so people, then 2 more Bunco parties. 

Heather is going even further over the top this year as she is making a bunch of candy for the parties and to give away as a gift bag to each of the 11 or so ladies that attend.  She is also cross-stitching several table runners as gifts.

Today I celebrate my 10 year anniversary with Microsoft.  Hardly seems like it has been that long but according to HR and the glass plaque they gave me it has.  So far I have seen,

7  Major Windows Releases
13 Windows Service Packs
8  Manager Changes (had the same manager 3 times so only 6 different managers)
6  Moves (been in current location since 2001)
?? Re-Orgs and group name changes (too many to count)

In anticipation of getting a Zune for Christmas (80gb) I have loaded the Zune software and playing my media library using it.  So far it has several cool features over media player.  My favorite feature of the Zune software so far is the mosaic of your album covers that it uses as the now playing background. 
I am in the Zune Social here, Zune Social.  If you wander over you can see most recently played tunes and other stuff. Here is my Zune Card

And in case you were wondering why I am using a picture of me when I was ~8 years old as my avatar on Zune and this page.
From looking at the picture (and from memory) at that time in my life I had absolutely ZERO worries or cares. Things were on an even keel and I was zooming along.  My ToDo list consisted of "Wake up, go outside and play", lather, rinse and repeat.
Not that I am not doing fine now but sit back and imagine yourself with zero cares, no thinking about work, bills, traffic, rotten little kids stealing the bulbs out of your Christmas lights, etc...

After enough procrastinating I finally went through and converted all my ASP code to PHP so that everything that worked previously now works with my new provider.
This was primarily the display image pages and code to force the framing but there was some other cleanup as well.
Net wash is that everything should be working now, all internal links and images.

At Microsoft we have many e-mail distribution lists that you can join to discuss various technical issues. One of them is dedicated to command scripting. The primary discussion is batch file programming.

A post today was discussing how to clear %ERRORLEVEL%. ERRORLEVEL is set by applications on exit so that you can make logic decisions. for instance your batch file needs an executable to be in the path to continue processing,
In your batch file you have the folowing code,

WHERE SRVINFO.EXE 1>nul 2>&1
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO :USAGE        

WHERE.EXE walks the path looking for SRVINFO.EXE if it finds it ERRORLEVEL is set to 0, else 1
Problem is there are times you want to erase the value currently in ERRORLEVEL and there isn't a mechanism to clear it ('set ERRORLEVEL=' sets it to 1 not 0 as desired)
There were several inovative solutions presented but this one just blew me away, no other text was in the post, just the output below

echo e 100 > 1.txt
echo c3 >> 1.txt
echo r cx >> 1.txt
echo 1 >> 1.txt
echo w >> 1.txt
echo q >> 1.txt
debug 1.com < 1.txt
1.com
        

This one is just too cool on a bunch of levels,
The solution is to create an executable to set ERRORLEVEL to 0
The executable is being created from the command line, in assembly, and assembled by the ancient DOS Debug tool. In theory you could embed this into your batch file.
Note that DEBUG.EXE is not present on 64bit Windows.
Here is what it looks like in action,

C:\Documents and Settings\tony>echo e 100 > 1.txt

C:\Documents and Settings\tony>echo c3 >> 1.txt

C:\Documents and Settings\tony>echo r cx >> 1.txt

C:\Documents and Settings\tony>echo 1 >> 1.txt

C:\Documents and Settings\tony>echo w >> 1.txt

C:\Documents and Settings\tony>echo q >> 1.txt

C:\Documents and Settings\tony>debug  1.com<1.txt
File not found

-e 100
0B39:0100  90.
             c3   2E.
-r cx
CX 0000
:1
-w
Writing 00001 bytes
-q
C:\DOCUME~1\tony>WHERE SRVINFO.EXE 1>nul 2>&1

C:\DOCUME~1\tony>echo %errorlevel%
1

C:\DOCUME~1\tony>1

C:\DOCUME~1\tony>echo %errorlevel%
0
C:\DOCUME~1\tony>        
        

It's ok to break out your old DOS or Assembly programming books if you need to :)

And in other news,
The next generation Zune has been announced, and yes I am going to be down there on 11/6 to grab up an 80 gigger (early Christmas)

I have started lifting weight again. I originally started back in early 2004, and stopped in 2005 due to only having moderate strength and size gains (100% my fault as my diet was for CRAP)

Well this time I re-did my split and dramatically improved my diet (no more hotdogs and pizza)
In the last 8 weeks I think I have gotten bigger than I did from the year of working out previously. Granted some of these gains are due to muscle memory (regaining what I had lost) but my biceps, pecs and delts are definitely bigger than in 2005 when I stopped working out. I will re-do my exercise page when I get a chance.

Heather was out of town this weekend for a memorial for her late grandfather which left me to knock a few things on the house todo list.  The biggest one was to re-caulk the shower in the master bathroom.  I have been putting this off as I have done this before and caulking is a pain. 
I had seen ads on tv for a magic tool that would put a perfect bead everytime.  A quick trip to Home Depot turned up a tool similar to this one, http://www.hydetools.com/New_PDF/caulktoolssheet.pdf.  I bought a combo kit that came with a remover and a smoother thingy.  All I have to say is this thing is GREAT the remover worked good (still had to follow up with a real knife) but the smoother was fantastic.  You basically lay down a bead of silicone, then follow behind with this tool.  It wipes away the extra and leaves behind a perfect seam while removing the excess.  And since you don't have to touch the silicone with your hands there is less chance for mold to grow from the oils in your skin or other moisture introduced.

I just got back from a week in Seattle at a technical conference, TechReady 5. 

I had a great time and learned some things also.  I got to see and meets lots of people, including some I've been working with for years only via e-mail and phone..

I also finally got to see Bill Gates do a live presentation after 10 years of working for Microsoft. I even got to see someone make the most emberassing mistake. During the Q&A session with Bill someone walked up to the microphone and said she was glad that 'Steve' could make it. Oopsie, that's BillG not SteveB, Bill wasn't real keen about the gaff but it did give everyone in the room a HUGE laugh.

The flight back had an interesting moment also (flight 1676 from SeaTac to DFW on 7/28/2007). I saw that we were approaching DFW from the south, then as we were dropping in for the landing the pilot raised the nose and aborted the takeoff. I was thinking, that's odd. Then he come over the PA and announced that we had "a problem". Then he told us that the front landing gear indicator was not showing that the landing gear was down, and that the DFW tower had visually confirmed that the gear was NOT down. He then explained that they had procedures to handle this sort of thing. After a few minutes he explained that part of the procedures was to prepare for an emergency landing. Then he said the word that every air traveler dreads, "Flight attendants prepare for emergency landing" At that point the attendants started instructing the people sitting near the exits how to open the exit doors and deploy the chutes.

After several very tense minutes the attendant came over the PA and announced that they had managed to get the gear lowered and locked (We passed by Alliance Airport on the way back to DFW and I'm betting that their tower visually confirmed that the gear was down). We all responded to this news with applause. Then the attendant informed us that one of the tires on the front gear was replaced yesterday (we were the first flight of the day at 7:45am) and that may have been the cause of the problem. This also meant that we might not be out of the woods yet, she shakily informed us that we would need to be cautious during landing and taxito the gate. Needless to say everyone was aprehensive as we touched down and breathed a huge sigh of relief as we touched down without incident. As we zoomed down the runway as expected DFW had rolled out plenty of fire/rescue equipment in case something went wrong. Several of them followed us the entire way to the gate just in case something went wrong.

This whole ordeal was pretty scary and further complicated by the fact that I really, needed to go to the bathroom before the incident started and was not looking forward to a crash landing with this "condition".

We just got back from a 2 week vacation visiting Atlanta GA, Clayton NC, Chimney Rock NC, and Memphis TN.  Chadd and Carsten went with us and everyone had a great time 

We started off by driving to Atlanta Georgia and spent the next three days going to Six Flags over Georgia and the Georgia Aquarium.

We then drove to Clayton NC to visit Heather's brother Matt, Andrea and Bailey.  We spent most of our time in his new pool, helping him build a fence around the pool and a "few" minutes playing games on C&C's new Wii

Then we drove to Chimney Rock State Park, NC and spent several days climbing around on the river, climbing up and down the mountain
We also ran up to the Pisgah Forest and saw the birthplace of the US Forestry service, a really cool rock slide, and a waterfall. 

On the way back home we overnighted in Memphis and spent a few hours wandering around Graceland the next morning. 

Note All of images below are JPEG FINE at 2000x3008 which comes out to almost 3mb per picture.
Maximize the IE window to get the best view.

Highlights 

Water jets	You could pay to hose the people down. That's me hosing Chadd down :) on the Roaring Rapids ride at Six Flags. We dumped a ton of tokens in these things
Paintball Shooting Gallery	Fun paintball shooting range and here, even if there was a Vette as a Target

Lowlights

Freeway closures	We hit two of them (I40 in Tenn for 1.5 hours and I30 in Royse City .5 hours (fortunately neither of these were injury accidents)
Traffic in downtown Atlanta	Granted we were trying to get into downtown with 150k other people to watch fireworks on the 4th of July but the traffic/lanes and such was hideous
Rain	On the way out it rained off and on from Dallas, across Louisiana, and Mississippi. (yes, all 3 states) We also got a ton of rain from Clayton to Chimney rock we slowed down to 25mph at one point.
Pain	I was able to complete the hike around Chimney Rock with no issues but damn was I hurtin the next day.
Pain Part 2	Heather bruised her tailbone on the first ride at Six Flags the Georgia Scorcher  Unfortunately this injury kept her from riding any more rides and caused her discomfort for the rest of the trip
Full Size	The beds in Chimney Rock were "full size"  I'm not sure who thought up the name "full size" but they couldn't have meant for two people to sleep in one.

Totals

3008.1	Miles Driven
184	Gallons of gas
16.3	Average MPG (affected by load, running AC and climbing up mountains)
50	Average speed MPH
~2.5	Hours spent sitting in traffic
863	photos taken (the new Nikon D40 worked like a champ especially when using no flash in the museums and the aquarium (Piranha 1 Piranha 2)
1 box	Number of nails shot working on Matt's Fence
????	Number of minutes spent playing Wii during downtime.
1 Jillion	Number of Steps walked up/down. That's how many it felt like we trekked up and down when hiking in Chimney Rock. Stairs 1 Stairs 2
2	Number of Do Not Cross Signs Crossed to take pictures Warning Sign 1 and Warning 2  Picture from other side Warning Sign 3  Picture from other side
1	Number of waterfalls we walked to the top of (kinda anticlimactic huh?)
1	Number of waterfalls Carsten played in We think the water temp was in the 50-60 degree range
1 Billion	Estimated Number of Records Elvis has sold
1	Number of Pink 1960 Wills Surrey Jeeps in the Elvis Presley Automobile Museum

Seems everyone is getting on the net these days. My Nephew Roger's Blog is at, Twiggelf
Updated 6/29: Corrected link :(

I had heard about this from my buddy Brian and his http://www.orangenoiseradio.com/ site. But I just found out today about the day of silence being observed by net broadcasters in protest of the increase.

From http://www.savenetradio.org, The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!). How much of an increase you ask? 300-1200% increase. Retroactive fees are running into thousands of dollars for small net only broadcasters, can you imagine retroactive fees for 18 months for your electric or phone bill?

My favorite online station KNAC.COM Pure Rock(The Loudest Dot Com on the PLANET) is playing Metallica's Fade To Black, back, to back, to back.....

Also, I found out that my brother has a website up, www.texasgaston.com
Among other things pictures of my nephew Rogers Navy graduation available on the site.

It turned out that the substance on the mailbox from the TP night was just flour which caused no permanent damage.

Instead of just leaving the lights on all the time (I know I would forget to turn them off, there was a HUGE bug problem when leaving the lights on all night)   I replaced the two front porch lights and both sets of flood lights by the garages with motion sensing lights. This way the miscreants will be able to better see next time :)

On other home-type note after sitting in the garage since a week after we bought the house (almost 4 years for those keeping count), I finally installed the Mini-Clik Rain Sensor on the sprinkler system. I have been avoiding doing this as I was thinking I need to mount the sensor on the roof (which would require routing the wire through the roof and eaves to do it neatly)  It finally dawned on me this weekend that the fence is out in the rain and would be a great place to mount it. I pulled the wires through the existing hole in the wall used for the valve control wires. I tacked the sensor wire to the fence and mounted the sensor where it was out of the way, verified my wiring and was all done.

To enable some mail features my current web provider didn't offer I have changed web hosts.
My new provider is http://www.orange-hat.com/
What? You didn't notice? Good, that is exactly the way it is supposed to work :)

You might notice that the site is faster though; my new provider's servers are hosted in Bedford, Texas

<sigh> The house got TP'd again last night, this time they also spray painted the ground and put some paint looking stuff on the mailbox.  Now I get to spend money buying photocell and motion sensor lights so that they are always on at night, and spend the money on electricity to light them.  This is double aggravating as I am currently on a "if you don't need it turn it off" kick with regards to things that consume energy.  Like monitors, lights, TV's etc... I also get to figure out how to remove the paint or whatever colored crap they put on the mailbox. Since they damaged the mailbox we called the police and filed a report.
And yes I am really, really trying not to become a grumpy old fart.

And while I'm here let's catch up on things,
Lesse, I got a new fire breathing computer at home, Dell Precision 390 (E6600 core2 duo (2.4ghz 64bit) 4gb ram, 250gb, Quadro FX3500. And man this thing is quick :) This will allow me to give the old computer (1.9ghz P4, 750mb) to Heather.  I'm planning to put it (and the scanner/printer) in her scrapbooking room so she can surf, scan and print easier. 

We went to play Bingo with Giles at the Knights of Columbus hall. This was fun; it has been over 20 years since I have played bingo and man have things changed. All paper cards now, we used to have cards that were 2 pieces of cardboard stuck together with a little plastic window you slid over to cover the number. Then you SMACKED it on the table when you didn't win the round to reset,
Ah, more happy memories associated with sound. Kinda like the sound of dominoes smacking the table brings a smile to my face.

Lots of baseball, basketball, concerts and other fun stuff with the nephews
I am going to TechReady5 in Seattle next month.
I discovered the band Tool. And for those keeping score the bands that are getting heavy rotation in my CD player are,
Disturbed
Godsmack
Ministry
Static-X
Pantera
Rob Zombie
Seether
Slipknot
The Union Underground
System of a Down

Texas Transportation Code 550.022 Section b states the following: If an accident occurs on a main lane, ramp, shoulder, median, or adjacent area of a freeway in a metropolitan area and each vehicle involved can be normally and safely driven, each operator shall move the operator's vehicle as soon as possible to a designated accident investigation site, if available a location on the frontage road, the nearest suitable cross street, or other suitable location to complete the requirement of Section 550.023 and minimize interference with freeway traffic.

This means that if you are involved in an accident on the roadway and all vehicles can be moved, please move all vehicles to a safe location and wait for an officer to arrive to complete a crash report.

Showing my age here, but some of the other grey hairs will remember this game,

Zork is alive and well and ported (well, ok hacked to) PHP,
Take a wander around, but watch out for the Grues http://thcnet.net/zork

And for the sprouts that don't remember Zork, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork

Oops seems it's been a bit since I updated my blog  

Saturday we took Heather's mom and the twins go to the Ennis BlueBonnet Festival and drive the bluebonnet trails It was 50°, cloudy and very windy Saturday so we didn't get out and wander around the festival (mainly arts and crafts). We drove around for a couple of hours and saw some really pretty scenery.

Since we were in the area we took a little side trip to city I group up in, Frost, Texas. We lived at the southwest corner of Wyrick and Hughes street. The house has been gone for at least 10 years now (last time I visited), replaced by a parking lot for the school, :(  If you look at the Google link below the green arrow is basically pointing where the house was.  There used to be an empty field across from the house where I spent many hours playing, now there is an annex for the school there (the blue building in the Google satellite image below). As you can see from the size of the town if you zoom out there wasn't much to do so I spent a lot of time riding my bicycle (and falling off of it).  I basically did a square going, East on Hughes then south (Was it Minor st? it wasn't paved at the time but it is now and still doesn't look right.  Or is it the unmarked road between Minor and Carrol st only visible in the satellite view below?  That seems more right as I remember going further) to Pace, then back to Wyrick, this was repeated till I had put a couple hundred miles on my bike.
Also very evident in the satellite picture is the now mostly gone cotton mill that was at Pace & Sullivan.  As we were driving around I was looking for it and I drove right past it. I had to back up just to prove to myself that this is where the mill was.  Back when I was 10-12 my dream job was to be one of the kids they hired to climb into the cotton trailers to run the vacuum system to suck the cotton into the mill for processing.  I have always been fascinated with machinery even as a child I would sit across from the mill and watch the machinery.
As I was typing this up I made an interesting observation, back when I lived in Frost the city limit signs credited the city with a population of 548 (1970 census), my graduating class at South Grand Prairie High School was over 550.  That is a little example of the culture shock I hit when I moved to Grand Prairie.

Google Maps Satellite image
Sorry Live maps but your shot is old and crusty looking, although it does show the area before the annex to the school was built,

On Sunday we had my family over to throw a going away party for my nephew Roger who is going to Navy boot camp at the end of the month.  We started off bowling (wounded dad doing this) then finished off playing Guitar Hero and watching Monty Python's Holy Grail 

We are finally starting to get the garage organized after 3 years of clutter.  I put 64 linear feet (4 8' sections, 2 shelves each) on the front walls of the garage filling the empty space from 6' to the ceiling at 10'. 

We also had a first for this house (I think first ever but Heather thinks this happened at Stratford); our house was TP'd Saturday night.  I looked out the window Sunday morning as was like, "what is all that crap in the front yard?".  Seems someone decided it was our turn and wrapped 3 rolls of TP around the 2 maple trees in the front yard.  We aren't sure if the miscreants shredded the TP or the wind but there was torn up TP all over the front yard.  They also stuck a bunch of plastic forks in one corner of the yard.  Then there was the only part that made me mad, the eggs and gum on the mailbox.  They were nice enough to use the really good thick toilet paper which made cleanup much easier.  But oh twell, all cleaned up and life goes on.