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Well, my monitor appears to be failing.  Even as we speak, I'm being wowed with a beautiful assortment of flashing colors.  Unfortunately, this time the cable is not the culprit.  I fear the worst...

Looks like I'm gonna need a new monitor sooner than I had hoped.  This is probably as good a time as any to jump headlong into the LCD flat panel world.  I went to Fry's to check some out this evening to check some out.  To keep me in my current feature set, I would need 1600x1200 resolution.  This doesn't appear to be possible for under $1000.  My LCD-related requirements are:

• At least 500:1 Contrast Ratio
• At least 400 cd/m² Brightness
• DVI AND Analog (VGA) inputs -  This way I don't have to upgrade my video card immediately
• At least 1280x1024 resolution

Fry's got a nice 19" Sony and a 19" Samsung that meet my requirements.  I'll have to figure out which one soon.

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.

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.