To Whom It May Concern...

http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=49750&cl=2874516&ch=49799&src=news Wouldn't it be nice...

Ok, things have settled down. I hope my dad get's over his pneumonia soon, he's running out of things to do. I updated the colors of links in the blog. I don't know if people could see them. My GBPVR and MVP setup rocks. Here are some of the modules I've got running: Recording Of Course, so that I can record shows Weather We have basic cable, so we don't get the weather channel. This gives us local weather. Music Plays all the stored music to our stereo. Pics We have Gigs worth of pics. Now we can slideshow them to our TV. They aren't even on the GBPVR server, they're on the Linux Server! Web Music Streaming radio stations, so I can listen to my CT stations from PA! Caller ID I can see who's calling when I'm in the middle of a movie so I don't have to get up and check. Cinema I can see listings of what's playing at the local theaters. All of this on our TV, with one remote!!! Sweet!

We were down at Ocean City, MD this weekend. We walked the beach, despite the cold wind. Walked the boardwalk. Steph tried Go-Karts for the first time ever. Absolutely no computer work. YEAH!!! (We did bring the laptop for navigational purposes, but it didn't come out of the bag once we were there.) Sunday I get a call from my brother: 'Your mom rushed dad into the emergency room this AM with chest pains. They said something about a pulminary embelism.' 'What hospital?', I asked. 'I don't know, Marsha got the call, I think Hartford.' (It ended up being Manchester.) Thankfully, it's just Pneumonia and he's on antibiotics. (Thankfully just pneumonia? Sheesh, what a system.) He's taking it easy, letting things settle down. They checked everything else and he's fine otherwise. What a way to wind up our weekend! Hehe... I can laugh about it now tho.

So, I'm setting up my Flickr site. Very cool. I posted a picture there, because I'm at work and couldn't put it on my server. I wanted to blog about the picture. (See next post.) Flickr had a very convenient 'Blog This' link when you were viewing the image. After a few more clicks to link my Flickr account with my blogger account, it worked! Very nice. Speaking of things that just work. I finally got my Hauppagge MVP yesterday. I had already set up GBPVR on my PC, using a TV card with onboard MPEG2 encoding. I was inspired by this article . This allows me not only to record and watch TV shows, but play Streaming audio, view picture slideshows from images on my image server, and play my audio library (stored on my server) through my stereo system. Internal Video Capture card: $45 Hauppauge MediaMVP: $89 Having your wife say marrying a geek is cool: Priceless In other news, we just had to close our bank account because somebody is buying gas with our money in other p...

Bad Braingle Originally uploaded by mkenyon2 . It's just funny how automated advertisements seem to pop up at the worst times. Look at the riddle on the left, then read the ad on the right. This is how I found it.

For reference: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187745.aspx I'm working on an app where the datafield (in SQL) was set as a tinyint (-255 to 255). The typed dataset in the app used a byte (-128 to 128). Problems occured as the datafield received or needed to use values bigger than 128 or 255. An unsigned byte would have gone from 0 to 255. I'm updating both fields to do -32,768 to 32,767. This will be a smallint on the SQL side, and a Short on the dataset side. I'd love to find a reference that translates SQL datatypes to dataset/xml datatypes. If you know of one, comment here.

Battle for a chimp to get 'person' status In some ways, Hiasl is like any other Viennese: He indulges a weakness for pastry, likes to paint and enjoys chilling out by watching TV. It's a crazy, mix-ed up, world. Animals should be taken care of regardless of status.

It's been a crazy month. Starting a new job, Aux. Pioneering, lot's of activities. It's had it's ups and downs, but it was good. Today was a nice touch. On the way to work I saw a pretty nice rainbow. It wasn't the entire rainbow, but both ends. (The top was missing.) I also did some work on my system to fix a problem I was having with my RAM. I couldn't use both chips of my Dual Channel OCZ RAM. I also couldn't tweak the BIOS settings for RAM because the motherboard was very limited. I got a new ASUS board which booted right up with both sticks of RAM. Later though, I got the same Windows Stop errors. But I was able to go into the BIOS and tweak the settings for latency and such, getting it to work with no errors. However, I'm also trying to use my system less. I'm wrapping up my projects for my old boss. I'll eventually end up with this box as a media box, feeding a Hauppage set-top unit. So, getting closer to our Wyoming trip. What's new i...

Spiderman on Broadway!!! By U2!!!

Try this with just a numeric keypad. http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/ptech/04/22/top.texter.ap/index.html

Go to: http://maps.google.com Click on the directions tab. Enter 'New York' to 'London' and search Look at step 23.

We don't know everything, but everybody knows something. How can you glean the answers to your questions from the internet. Google.com is a great tool, but sometimes, instead of a back-hoe you only need a spade. So, to search for .Net stuff, try this: http://www.searchdotnet.com/ . This is a focused search for your .Net answers. I've also heard some things about Singletons at my new job. What is a Singleton? One of the links that popped up on searchDotNet.com was this link: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms954629.aspx . Interesting...

We had 136 with 1 partaker on April 2nd. Our bible studies came, so that was nice. Okay, the new job. I like it. I have to get acclimated to the new type of work environment, but as for technical skill, I'm not as far behind as I was afraid I would be. I still have a lot to learn, and it's a big project, but it's VB .Net 1.1. So I don't have to get used to a new language right now. I'll try to find topics I can talk about but for now, just getting used to the routine and such. All else is well.

I'm on a roll with this PHP and mySQL stuff. Here's an updated book site: http://mark.phillk.net/sellBooksByAuth.php?ID=1 Notice that I'm passing an ID in. I have an authors table and a books table. Thus, in the future, I can have pages for other authors. I also created a PHP page to enter the data. I can drop in the Amazon ASIN number with the other info and automatically have a link to purchase the book. It's Amazoning what you can do...

Why would a Microsoft guy say that? Well, because they do!!! I created a demo database so that I could flex my muscles with PHP while searching for a job. (More on that to come.) You can check out my samples page here: http://www.greatwhitedata.com/samples.php I got to thinking, when I wanted to add a joke to my site, why create a page for every joke? So, I created a database for my site with tables for jokes. Take a look at the results here: http://mark.phillk.net/funnyKeys.php I even create a PHP form for adding jokes in. It uses Key words to sort. It's not as intuitive as .Net, but it works, and it's free. New Job Ok, now to my new job. Computer Aid . I decided that I needed to broaden my horizons, get out of my basement, and get something that paid enough so that I wouldn't have to work 2 jobs. (7 DAYS A WEEK! YEESH!) I can't give out details of my job assignment, but this is a consulting firm, so they have multiple projects for multiple clients. I will probably be ...

First you must watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leEsz9ci5XE Then the slightly less funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3KponfM52A&mode=related&search=

In a world where messages can travel at the speed of light in many different forms (e-mail, voice, even video) it's nice to see somebody wasting time using technology to advance the age-old methods... Pigeons! In other news, can anybody help with this Channel9 post ?

I have a page put together now that shows some of the work I've done: http://www.greatwhitedata.com/samples.php

Ok... what have I been up to lately? I've been working on DataMatch, adding an e-mail server to my linux box, and my very own PVR. Let's start with that. Joel Gott offered a while ago on his blog an article for a 'Poor Man's Tivo'. Well... I got to thinking, and looking... and found this: http://www.byopvr.com/Sections+index-req-viewarticle-artid-10-page-1.html This entails using your own computer at the desk, and networking/streaming the signal to a Hauppauge MediaMVP. I spent $45 on an Avermedia 150 Plus, which has coaxial input for cable and one for FM. Most important, it has an on-board MPEG2 encoder. This saves your PC horsepower. I can work while it records. (Not that there is much to record during the day when I work.) The only problem I've run into is the hard drive. I have 120Gb SATA, but failed to set it up as RAID. So, as it get's filled, it gets slow... very slow. (Plus, I run SQL server and Visual Studio on this box, and they hog RAM.) The mothe...

Why didn't I know about this sooner? Homemade Knight Rider K.I.T.T car... In other news... I'm ramping up development... doing both DataMatch, our Windows Forms app, and the site, which will be tied into DataMatch. Web Services, Data Access, it's getting messy. I'm up to my waste in code. My computer is still running at half power for RAM. I've had a few suggestions for tuning it up, but haven't had the time to work on it. I've started working Saturday nights, from 11PM to 7AM, cleaning. Boy do I come home tired. With service and sleeping all day Saturday, and Sleeping and Meeting on Sunday, the weekends are pretty much blown. Oh well.