One of the finer places in Portland to relax in Portland is most definitely the Portland Chinese Garden. Although we haven't made it a habit of going on a regular basis, but right around this time of year, the garden erupts with music, song, and dance. This year for Chinese New Year's, it is the New Year of the Rooster. The song and festivities most definitely reflected this! In this photo, both Jill and I are taking our time in Tao's Tea House at the Garden with afternoon Emperor's Gold Tea and Tarra Root Moon Cakes.

You know you're a nerd when:

1. In order to get its attention, you have to turn them on.

2. It has a lot of data but is still clueless.

3. It is supposed to help you solve your problems, but half the time it IS the problem.

4. As soon as you commit to it, you realize that, if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better model.

5. No one but you understands its internal logic.

6. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else accept you.

7. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval.

8. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

 

Special Thanks to Tanja Markwart and Lunch Break Commics.

If the consortium of Nerds in Portland is endorsing a flick, its simply must worth while.

Calling all nerds, Calling all nerds!

You DO NOT have to be a Microsoft Developer to get the best out of being a nerd. Lets drive this caravan to more than 50 of us going to see The Hitchhiker's Guide on April 29th. Rich Claussen has the inside scoop. Don't miss it!

Hitch Hiking can take you many places...

Last Wednesday night, our gang (Jill my wife, Friend Erindale with her daughter Joya), had the distinct pleasure of hanging out with Heather Alexander for the night listening to some great Celtic Fiddle Tunes and Johny McEldoo drum beats at the Luck Labrador in Multnomah Village!

Having to deal with Senior Project on a near full-time basis was the perfect distraction for just a few short hours. Here is our portrait:

 

A good friend, and the best technical Ally, Scott Hansellman, was graciously generous to help he out of an IIS web app debloyment blowout.

The snag: Having two virtual directories point to the same physical directory on the webserver machine, and then changing the access rights for the aspnet_wp.exe script executer thinking would fix the problem.

The solution: Eliminating the duplicate vdir by checking the process model in mahcine.config, then execute aspnet_regiis.exe -i, and then iisreset.exe.

Extra cudos to Scott for helping to run these steps that resulted in getting The Puzzler - 3D Style back underway without the senior project schedule slipping.

Side comment about blog shares: I sort of like the idea of getting “blog credits” for linking out to places like blog shares to promote the idea of getting people to post more of their public lives online. I haven't gotten a whole lot of credits, but I'm sure that will increast in the coming years.

I ran into a bit of an issue today regarding the MS SQL Sever 2000 NT Service not successfully starting (over and over) after I had change the Administrator account's password. This, of course, became abundantly clear after checking the system event log.

Some how, I don't know why yet without doing further research on msdn, this also changed the logon for the MSSQLSERVER service in the services administration snapin.

Of course this was immediately remedied by changing the service log on back to the local system account instead of the administrator's account. How it got that way, I still have no clue without more research. If any one reading this has any ideas as to what would cause this, please do leave a comment, or email --> matthew@klump-pdx.com. Thanks everyone!

This is in my response to the revolution started by Rory's post here. I know this is a little late reaction with senior project in progress, but here goes:

I'd have to say that the best damn book *ever* I've read, the one book that turned my life upside down, the one book that forced me to throw away the chains of emotional survitude to people that did not care, the one book that made me strive to climb to the highest levels of being the “nerdy engineer” I am today is: <<drum roll please>>

“You Can Become a Super Salesman!!” by Paul R Kenian

You guessed it folks, when I was handed this by the multi-level marketing freek show at Quixtar, it made more sense to have choice B) the life of a dedicated engineer, than choice A) their way, or any one else's (no reference to my current employer is being inferred in this post or any other for that matter).

No one at “the phone company” reads my blog of any kind, so I'll leave that blasted disclaimer off.

If any one reading this has a similar story to tell, please do! Blog it, email it, comment on it, but DO NOT keep it caged! Let the animal out every once and a while WITH OUT the disclaimer...

Today I solved a major snag that's bugged me for serveral weeks. Although it was cool being able to finally plug my cell phone to my pc for internet, that nothing compared to not having the correct info to set up rights for remote development.

Well after today, that has all changed. After reading some fairly important msdn articles here, I found the rather important fact that all remote developers must have accounts on the web server in question, and if it is a Windows box, everyone must be added to the VS_Developers local machine users group. If you've ever had a similar experience, would you please send me an email or post a comment? Thanks!

Last weekend we found a gorgious feline friend that we just had to rescue from the Sherwood Cat Adoption team. Her name is "Beta." Her name was inspired by the up and coming "beta" test phase for my Senior Project, The Puzzler - 3D Style.

Check it out, more pictures available at this location.

We had a great time on Halloween Night! My wife Jill went as “Arwen” of Rivendell, I went as “Aragon Son of Arathorn” complete with props, and friend Erindal with her young one Joya went as “The Good Fairly” and “The Princess To Be” respectively.

Calling all Hallow's Eve party throwers! If you're throwing a Halloween bash next year PLEASE EMAIL --> matthew@klump-pdx.com.

We had a great time at the Hillsboro Community Halloween Party, here's our gang (Art Mcgee was behind the camera at the time):

 

At this point I am discontinuing my project event logging on this sight for the sake of security. I will definitly continue to post for cool stuff going on like having dressed up like my favorite “Rings” character “Aragon Son of Arathorn,” and Jill going as “Arawin Daughter of Elrond.” Pics to be posted soon...

For today, I finished rewriting the introduction for Iteration 1 correctly. This explains what I hope to have done by next Tuesday's dead line. It seems as though my to-do list has quadrupled over night...

For those of you running WIN XP SP 2 and you are using FTP for your projects, make sure you follow these steps to keep from near tearing your hair out if you use internet explorer to access your FTP server:

Under the tools->internet options->advanced Tab:

1) Make sure that you have “Enable folder view for FTP sites” enabled/checked !

2) Make sure that you have “Use Passive FTP (for firewall and DSL modem compatibility)” unchecked/disabled !

If this saved you several hours of time and you're running win xp sp2, please comment here! I'd love to hear your comments of what has and has not worked for you with the SP 2.

For the design session, I flushed out some more details by creating a stratospheric view document that describes the over all actions and interactions going on in my project. This use case visio diagram further describes all the actors and systems external to my project that have a remote possibility (and within the scope/domian) of interacting with this project as well as use case situations going inside the system/project.

Today in the laboratory for senior project at OIT Portland, I had a fantastic experience with Jay Bockelman (See Picture of us Below) exploring and visually diagramming some high level modularized ideas for building "The Puzzler - 3D Style."

The digital record of our notes is available here for download (photo images). Use cases are just about complete and will be ready for inspection by the Due Date on Tuesday, October 19, 2004. Come back and visit for more details about this evolving project inspired by Scott Hanselman.

I can personally attest that Rory and Scott's presentation did not suck. Far from it! The best I got out of it was the new concept of the Provider Pattern for ASP.NET 2.0 Beta. During the swag competition, I was fortunate enough to get a copy of the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta guide book.

Of course after having gotten the book the first thing I did was to lookup “Provider Pattern” for the detailed info (I realize I could have done it online but this was so much more fun!).

Some other gold nuggets I found was the concept of a “Master Page“, and a complete chapter dedicated to just “Data Binding.“ Check out the new ASP.NET! I think you'll really like what you see.

 

Here in Portland, the market for Software Developers may still be sluggish, but most certainly not impossible. Back in August we had a very important seminar at PADNUG discussing the ins and outs of the business side of software dev.

At the time, someone brought up a very interesting question. So what is the going rate people should charge out for consulting here in Portland? Alot of us answered back by saying it has alot to do with what language skill is required for which ever project and the number of years experience with that language. To help with that point, an audience wide survey was done so folks could get an idea of what would generally be charged with a given language in Portland.

For anyone needing an idea of how this turned out, the spreadsheet results are available here. For folks needing a zipped version, that is available here. Much Thanks do to Rich and Howe for compiling this.

We just got back from London England Not long ago, and what a tremendous adventure it was! Our photograph collection is available for your inspection here. Have fun and don't forget to leave comments!

Yup, I was there when he won it at the PADNUG Business Side of Software Development Seminar...

Such luck, fantastic and congradulations!

I could see it now just as the plane pulls up into the London Airport:

An observer just happens to look upon our group disembarking a 747 just in from Seattle International Airport, “Sweet heart, who's that guy over there with the two quart tankard hanging from his belt, the fourteen megapixel camera around his neck, and the custom build Pocket PC on his other belt? I'll bet he's one of those traveling tourist nerds we've heard so much about!”

We any way, I hope we don't sick out (like a handful of soure thumbs) that much while we're in London, but I do hope to make a lasting on the people I meet of how much I love technology. Especially while being a tourist!

We'll be off this Saturday the 4th returning the 11th. Please take note every one, I hope to see all of you back to our site to comment on said photos that could very well be six megapixel or better! So visit now and often, and we'll see every one back here in the not so distant future.

For any one that has the time or the inclenation (without violating licensing) to try porting your group's own custom software package to your own hardware.

In the case of Owl Eval, that is exactly what I did! Over the last week I spent several says going through the process of porting the Owl Eval php/mysql web app running at the time on an Apache web server on top on Linux to my Windows box at home which is a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz 1Gig Ram running Windows XP Pro with IIS 5.1 web server with a PHP/MYSQL plugin.

I must say this was not a trivial matter! Fixing the broken link references form the old site was the most grueling espcially the documentation to say the least. But please check it out here, and tell me how well I ported things compared to the old site.

For our generation 9/11/2001 was truely an event no American will forget. This blog entry is dedicated to all the thoughts and events going on in our lives on that fateful day.

I implore any one reading this entry to reach back into your mind to that day. Where were you at the time, and what were you thinking when you first got the news?

For myself, I got a call from my wife about 7:45am exclaiming, “Quick, turn your radio to 820am!” The next thirty minutes completely stunned me. The rest of the that day was sent home from work, glued to the television...

Was Bush's reaction adequite? Did the 9/11 Comission correctly rule that this event had no one to blame other than Osama and Al-Qiada?

Scott Hanselman just got back from a vacation at Disneyland, CA and offers his perspective on visiting The Magic Kingdom. I must say I really got a kick out of it! Check it out here.

For the day or so, one of our computers at home was unable to use https or ftps secure server for a short while. As a result of googling on the subject, I've discovered that if you use internet explorer, there are exactly three critical settings that must be properly set to use SSL secure sockets through the internet explorer client browser:

Under the Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced Tab:

1. Use SSL 2.0
2. Use SSL 3.0
3. Use TSL 1.0

All must be checked. Time wasted trying to figure out why I couldn't fill out online orders, 34 minutes. I suppose I could've gone to Microsoft's Knowledge Base, although I didn't feel that becoming lost among the “man pages” unix style (but managable) support pages, settings tinkering seemed to be more on my side.

Hey there guys, as I'm sure you can well tell that Mateo's blog is finally up, running, and ready for your comments!

With senior project getting under way I have lots of questions so please visit often to my blog to help Mateo answer all kinds of questions regarding life, programming, .NET, and web services.

Extra kudos to Scott Hanselman, Rich Claussen, Jim Blizzard, Jay Bockelman, as well as all the OIT Staff for helping me to get this far with my programming career. With you all, none of this would be possible!

Thank you so much to you all, and please come visit often!