Tuesday, September 26, 2006

I just had to laugh at this one

No, not everybody goes to heaven. Some have the hope of an earthly resurrection. But still, this was funny.

A Tom Sawyer Moment...

Three friends die in a car accident, and upon their arrival to heaven, they are all asked one question

"When you are in your casket and family and friends are mourning upon you, what would you like to hear them say about you?"

The first man says, "I would like to hear them say that I was a great doctor of my time, and a great family man."

The second man says, "I would like to hear that I was a wonderful husband and school teacher who made a huge difference in our children of tomorrow."

The last man replies:

"I would like to hear them say: 'LOOK! HE'S MOVING!'"

Monday, September 25, 2006

I am inspired

What you'll get in today's post:

Fam and Friends, a bit of an update

Coders and Geeks, a bit of love from MSDN, or in other words, highlights.

First off, why am I inspired? Last week, I realized, I have time to read RSS/Blog feeds with my PDA. So I installed pRSSreader on my Pocket PC. Sweet, I'm up to date on all I care about.

Coding
Then I went to the MSDN event in Harrisburg. Definitely not a snoozer. We talked about highlights of the new .Net 2.0 System.Net namespace, including a simple IsAvailable and Ping, so you can do some network checking in your apps, without major coding.

Then they talked about Windows Communication Framework. They showed us how to do a Windows/Web Service on steroids. Write one app with a built-in service contract, and expose it via Web Services, Named Pipes (for same PC communication), TCP (for same network communication), and MSMQ, MS Messaging Queue (for disconnected messaging). They showed a basic example, but all the way from start to finish.

Named Pipes and TCP used to be under the .Net Remoting, an mystical (to me) realm I dared enter and had no idea of the benefits. But picking the right communications protocol can improve speed. The demo showed a client app on the same system as the server part of the app. Named Pipes was the fastest, and Web Services was 4 times as slow!!! ON THE SAME PC!!! That must be a lot of overhead. (All that was transmitted was 'Hello World'.)

Finally, they showed us Ajax, using Atlas. The few controls they showed rocked!!! I'm sure I'll have a few growing pains when trying to implement it, but WOW!!! You don't need a full post back for simple .Net Server changes. Sweet, finally. I do too much to have figured it out on my own.

Family/Friends
Ok, it's not as exciting as my cousin moving to Indonesia to teach English, Health, and the bible. Or my friends the Ive's who are going to Malaysia as missionaries. But we had a fun weekend of camping in Pine Grove Furnace.

We cooked many meals over the fire. I was the heat master, with not just the fire pit, but count 'em, two (2) camp grills, one propane and the other an old Coleman stove. I do believe fun was had by all, though maybe not all at the same parts of the trip. We hiked, biked, chased the noisy neighbors all over the forest, and ate. That's the best part of camping, the food. The Coleman was $5, and the propane grill was $0. (Of course, I should have known that if it came with a tank of propane, it wouldn't be full.)

It rained the first night, but not terribly. Chris, my bro-in-law provided an awesome tent and cots, that kept us up off the cold ground, and outta wet's way.

Now that we're back, I have to finish my next public talk. And of course there is Lost. I like the idea of being lost on a tropical island. I don't know if I'd want to come home. Depends on who's trapped with me. Maybe I'd just 'help' them home.

Now I'm back eating my 'Oats and More', a 'Honey Bunches of Oats' knock off, that doesn't taste half bad. Time for my coffee and much more work.

Questions about any portion of this posting can be directed to the Comments link immediately below this posting.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

A new neat weblog.

Check out the weblog of Ken and Sue Ive's. They will be going to Malaysia.

Thursday, September 14, 2006