I'm going to try to explain this as concisely as possible.  For a long time now, I've wanted to do a video where a character does really dramatic slow motion things to the music from "The Natural" specifically the part where he hits the home run and the stadium lights explode.  Then, as the video progresses he does more and more mundane things until at the end he's doing something really stupid like dramatically eating cereal in slow motion.

I've never really had a good ending or any kind of real plot to it...until today.  He needs a partner, one who at first is completely obsessed with being as dramatic as he is, but whever he tries it, he fails miserably, falling on his face or running into something, or dropping/breaking something.

Then, as the dramatic character does more and more mundane things dramatically, the roommate (or however he's related) gets more and more annoyed that he's not as dramatic as his roommate.  Then, during the one-upsmanship, the lesser roomate dies somehow, like leaps to catch a falling knife and gets stabbed.  Then, the final scene is of the dramatic guy reading the newspaper in slow motion with some stupid headline like, "Non-dramatic man dies".

So, what I need are some things that would be really funny in dramatic slow-motion with "The Natural" music, and some things that could go wrong if the not-dramatic guy tried to do them.

I've updated my PDC Wishlist.

I was recently asked by a friend of mine lucky enough to attend PDC this year, "What sessions would you go to?"  Well, this is an experimental entry which I will keep updated with my "PDC Wishlist"  What sessions I would attend and maybe even why.

• Chris Anderson's Avalon Talk -- Chris, whose weblog is the reason I blog today, is the original author of BlogX.  "What is Avalon?" you ask?
• Don Box's Indigo Talks -- I see Don Box's name everywhere.  He's had some great insights in his blog.  Click to talk link to get an overview of what Indigo is.
• Chris Sells if he's speaking -- He shows up on the speakers list, but doesn't appear to have a talk registered.  What's up with that?  Maybe I just haven't looked deep enough since I'm not actually going.  He's big on Longhorn, the next version of Windows.
• Anders Hejlsberg's C# language enhancements talk.  This will give us the goods on generics and the other goodies they're adding like anonymous delegates, iterators, etc.
• Anything else about Whidbey (next VS.NET/framework release).  I haven't found out who's doing sessions on this, but it should be a huge part of the PDC.  Generics will steal the show, but there's alot of other nifties in there as well
• I'm not that interested in Yukon (next SQL Server), but if I had leftover time, I'd make some sessions on that.
• I would definitely try to meet Miguel de Icaza.  He's head dude at Ximian which was recently aquired by Novell.  He wrote the Gnome desktop for Linux.  He's a fan of the CLR and heads the Mono project which is an open-source implementation of the CLR primarily targeted at Linux.  He's bound to be around somewhere.

I'll keep this list updated as I think/find more topics I'm interested in.  If anyone else has ideas on what's important to see, feel free to comment.

Check it out (if you interested in that sort of thing).  For those who don't know if they're interested, generics are like templates in C++, allowing you to define classes, methods, etc. in terms of a generic type rather than a specific type.  This article goes over the advantages of CLR generics as opposed to C++ templates or the proposed generics specification for Java.

Hey, I just wanted to make a plug for a really cool band.  The drummer (Weslee Copeland) was in the first Sunday School class I taught 3 years ago.  He's been in a couple of my videos too.  Earlier this year, I did a DiscipleNow weekend in Fredricksburg with the whole band.

They are really impressive.  I've really only gotten to hear them live a few times, but each time they've gotten better and better.  They've been in the studio again recently working on some new stuff.  I'm pretty excited about it.  They've got a music video up on their site if your interested in seeing/hearing them.  It's pretty good quality.

My weblog software lets me look at referrers (sites from which people have linked to my weblog).  I've noticed an interesting amount of people search for my name on Google.  Most of the hits include qualifiers like "belton" or "baylor", so I'm fairly certain it's me they're after. I really wish I had some way of finding out who these people are so I can get in touch with them.  There's no telling who they are.  They could be trying to figure out how to send me money.

I get alot of traffic from Peter's blog too.  I've got a pretty good handle on who those people probably are.

What really intrigues me is that there are evidently people sending links to my blog in their email.  I've got several referrals from yahoo where the url looks like someone was reading their email.  Again, I wish there was a good way to find out who they are.

I may have to modify dasBlog to log ip addresses and other relevant information to help me do some sleuthing.

My #1 grip with the Framework deals with ADO.net and the way they chose to implement the provider-specific mappings to native framework types.  The "generic" way to access a db is almost completely useless unless you are married to Sql Server.

There is no base type to deal with high-precision numbers that come out of a database.  Even with Sql Server you're forced to use the provider-specific types like SqlNumber and OracleDecimal, which are not related (which is impossible with ValueType I know) and provide horrible conversion implementations to the native types.

Of course the root problem is the lack of a true standard for dbs to represent data, and dbs like Oracle that have zero compatibility with accepted number standard like IEEE, but that's another story.  If System.Decimal better represented the numbers a db is capable of storing that would be a huge help.  Or even adding something like BigDecimal to handle high precision cases would be nice.

In my opinion, ADO.net has not succeeded in providing a cross-db interface to data.  Instead of providing the Bridge pattern to many different database API's, the managed providers are forced to implement features missing from the bridge, thus eliminating its advantages.  Some people may never run into these problems, but working with Oracle at work (which I've grown to hate) keeps me from using the managed providers without creating my own wrappers for the "special cases" that happen every time I query.

For fun, Becky and I went to Maxwell Nissan to test drive a Murano.  I don't know why all the pictures are that nasty orange.  It looks much better in the silver or blue.  I've been itching to drive a car with variable transmission ever since I heard of a commercial implementation about 10 years ago.  I was very impressed with the transmission, which was well under 2000rpm at 65mph.  It leverages that technology to get fantastic mileage on an SUV.  The whole thing was pretty sweet.  Our salesperson, we'll call him "Ben" (because that was his name), said, "If you can feel it shift, I'll buy the car for you".  I found that to be only slightly amusing since it's impossible for the car to shift at all.

While we cannot afford the vehicle, they did set forth some interesting numbers on a lease.  With our Explorer not worth much on a trade-in, leasing seems like an interesting option.  I've heard it put, "just like buying a used car, you're paying for half of the car, but you get the new half."  Any opinions?

Just curious what experiences people have had with leasing.  I've heard some horror stories, that I mentioned to the sales-person.  They had pretty convincing rebuttals (rebuttals?  is that right?).  Tell me what you think.