I was adding some complex usage logging in a data abstraction layer today, and I wanted to minimize its impact on performance.  I was dreading having to manage worker threads, then I remembered the ThreadPool. It was so easy to shuffle off my logging to a managed worker thread.  That saved me alot of trouble.  One of those “pit of success” moments for sure.

(I would have rather linked directly to Rico's site, but Brad had a higher google rank.

Peter's been keeping us up to date on California diesel prices (supposedly), and they're high.  I've found a solution for his Jetta.  It's a conversion kit for a diesel-powered car that allows it to run on vegetable oil.  I had seen this concept before, but it was experimental.  These folks sell the conversion kit.

Oddly enough, vegetable oil prices are much lower than diesel prices, especially if you parter with a local fast-food restaurant that would have to pay to get rid of it anyway.

Looks like GreaseCar.com sells the kits for around $800, which would more than pay for itself in a short period, especially if you're getting the oil for free.  Evidently it burns more cleanly as well, a boon for any environmentalists out there.

I may have to find me an old diesel-powered car and do this as a project!

I played my first soccer game in over a year yesterday and I am incredibly sore.  For those unaware, I developed pretty horrible shin splints about two years ago when I got back into soccer, and was forced to again retire.  I lost about 45 pounds, then slowly got back into running.  Then, last week someone from my old team sent me an email asking if I could sub, so I thought I'd give it a try.

We played at Zilker park from 10-12.  It was hot.  I did pretty well.  I played sweeper or stopper, occasionaly making a foray into the offensive side of the field.  By the end of the game, I was having trouble lifting my legs, and today it is quite painful to do so.  You use so many more different muscles playing soccer than you do doing anything else I've ever done.  I remarked to Becky on the way home from church that the muscles that move my eyebrows were the only ones that weren't sore, so I was doing alot of eyebrow raising.

I'll probably continue to sub this summer, and start playing full time in the fall.  I'm pretty excited to have played a game and not have my shin bones be killing me too much to walk.

I'm experimenting with a project which will need some complicated file parsing abilities and I don't want to go the XML route for various reasons.  Therefore, I am looking for a parsing framework built to take advantage of the CLR.  Everything seems to be a port of some archaic C library, or some Java framework that's been modified to produce C# code.  I'm used to being able to do a simple Google search to find the kinds of libraries I need, but I'm getting very few good hits for this.  I've only built a few pieces of code that really qualify as parsers over the years, so maybe its my inexperience that's my problem, but it just seems like it ought to be easier to find a good tool.

We've had enough time for the CLR tools to take on their own identity and take advantage of the CLR rather than remain lagging clones of their Java or C++ counterparts.  I see this in almost every space.  There just seems to be a huge hole for file parsing.  Maybe most CLR developers have embraced XML as the one and only file format.  But, when it comes to human-edited files or content, XML is pretty cumbersome and bloated.

For now, I've settled on Grammatica, which is the most straightforward (and working) parser generator thus far.  It's written in Java, but that's not a big deal.  The problem is that its output is Java-centric, and only modified slightly to be C# code.  It's got callbacks instead of events to handle tokens or products.  I found myself modifying the output (a no-no in code generation) to make it simpler before I realized I'd just be doing it again if I changed my grammar.  So, I'm really frustrated and just ranting, but I should be able to mold it to my purposes.

After we went fishing, we met Dave and Andrew, Dave and I went to Sammon's in Temple to play some golf.  I've shared some golf stories before, and it is well-known that I suck.  I've done some crazy things like accidentally throwing a club into the water, and now I have another one to add...

I hit Dave with a golf ball.  It was a total accident. I was lining up a 9-iron shot while Dave was searching in the stream for his ball.  A 9-iron is supposed to give you a really high arch, but mine went like a drive...straight at Dave.  I hollered, Andrew hollered, but to no avail.  Lots of thoughts went through my head like:

• He'll be killed, and I'll get life in prison
• It'll hit him in the eye and he'll be blinded
• Maybe he'll pull a Matrix maneuver and avoid it completely.  The ball will continue and go right in the hole.

Nope.  It hit him right in the front side of his elbow.  He's doing fine now, and it looks much better.  I felt really bad.  He had to play trombone at church the next day.  I thought his career might be over, but it's fine.  I even found out he was bragging that he had been hit.

Anyway, I had some nice shots, like a 45-foot putt, and a drive on a par 4 that put me inches from the green (which then took me another 5 strokes to get it in the hole).  It was a blast.

I've been really busy, but I want to get most of my activities up here, cause we had alot of fun.  I'll get them up one-by-one.

Saturday morning, I got up early to take my car in to the shop to get the windshield replaced.  It had a huge crack in it, right at eye level.  While it was in, we decided to go fishing, so my dad, brother (Andrew), and I hooked up the boat and went to the lake.

Now this boat is pretty small, and really old, and it's had its share of problems.  It used to belong to my grandfather “Papa” who loved to hunt and fish and everything outdoors.  I got alot of my love of the outdoors from him.  He headed out to a nice cove near the northeast corner of the lake.  I'm working on being able to generate maps from my GPS data, but I'm not there yet.

We fished for a while until we spotted a pretty cool cave.  Andrew didn't want to go in because of the spiders, and, to his credit, there were some pretty large scary-looking spiders in there.  I got in there and killed them with an oar.  It was pretty cool.  It's hard to see what it was like from the pictures, but it went way back. If I had had a flashlight, I might have gone in further, but no way without one.

We trolled around some more, and witnessed a kid getting hooked in the ear across the cove from us.  It was really quite, and all of a sudden, everyone in their boat was screaming and yelling. The kid was pulling away, which was setting the hook deeper, the mom was yelling, “Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-Oh-my-gosh-“ and the dad was yelling “Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-Don't-pull-“. It was crazy.

When we tried to start the motor to go elsewhere, we realized it wouldn't go into gear. Perhaps it was the stump we hit on the way into the cove.  We tried to open it up and fix it, but the linkages were fine, it must have been something in the vertical-to-horizontal transfer case, which we couldn't fix.

We made an effort to get back using the tolling motor, but the winds were pretty high, and the GPS was indicating it would take almost 2 hours to get back at that rate.

We flagged down another boat, which happened to be the boat that we witness the hook-in-the-ear earlier.  The boat “The Emperor of China” towed us back to Temple Lake Park and we got the boat out of the water without too much trouble.  We were happy to have gotten back.

It's the first day of my Memorial Weekend 2004 vacation, and I did so much.  Here's the short version of what I did today:

1. Took car in to get windshield replaced (had a crack)
2. Went to the lake to fish with my dad and my brother.
   1. Fished
   2. Climbed in a cave with big spiders
   3. Broke the boat
   4. Got towed back to shore by the Emperor of China (or at least a boat of that same name)
3. Picked up my car
4. Went golfing with Andrew (my brother) and Dave
   1. Sunk a 45 foot put
   2. Almost chipped one in
   3. Hit an awesome drive when some people were watching
   4. Otherwise stunk up the joint. (we almost ran out of balls)
5. Ate at El Chico's

I hope to break these stories down a bit and include some pictures, but I'm exhausted.  So I'll give that a try tomorrow sometime.

I guess they've got the air conditioner on summer duty here at work.  It is freaking cold.  I just mentioned to some co-workers that I was suffering from Frozen Mouse Hand Syndrome and it got a laugh, so I thought I'd write about it real quick.

For those who don't understand what I'm talking about, the hand you use your computer mouse with stays exposed on the keyboard or mouse much more than the other one (at least from my personal experience).  Mine gets really cold before I realize it, and I have to sit on it for a few minutes to warm it back up.

I just got a call from Becky who was doing some shopping at the I-35/Parmer Target.  They are opening a new Freebirds in that shopping center!  Location is no longer an issue in the great Freebirds vs. Chipotle debate.  This one is about the same drive time from our house as the nearest Chipotle.

The website says it's opening on June 7th! whoo hoo!  Of course, it will be mobbed for the first month.

I got my installation kit for voice over IP for my home phone last night.  It's pretty awesome.  My home phone number doesn't get switched over until Friday, so I can only make out-going calls.  All incoming calls still go through the old system.

The hardware they sent is just a D-Link 1120M that's specialized for the service.  It's basically a single-port NAT firewall that you put between your cable/DSL-modem and the rest of your LAN infrastructure.  If you're serving external service like a web site (like this one) then you have to delve into the configuration (which sucks compared to my Linksys router) to allow incoming traffic to successfully traverse the “double-NAT”.  If the D-link had a DMZ option, it would be perfect, but it doesn't, so you have to forward ports on both routers. I plugged in an old phone and made a couple of calls last night, and there was absolutely no perceivable difference in operation between it and a regular phone line.  Not thinking, I rebooted the router while I was talking to my dad, which of course ended our conversation.  That was pretty funny.  It just completely slipped my mind that I was not on a regular phone line.

The service lets you do awesome stuff like:

• Unlimited long-distance
• Have your voice mail sent to you in an email, or check it via the web, or send alert emails to let you know you have voice mail
• Forward your calls to multiple locations and have them ring all at once, or in sequence
• Schedule “do not disturb time“ when your phone will not ring (with an exception process for emergencies)
• plus lots more I can't think of

And it costs much less than we've been paying for our home phone service.  This is starting to sound like a commercial, but I'm just excited about it.  If you're paying more than $40 for your home phone service, let me know and I'll send you a referral so we can both reap the rewards.