Today is our 7th anniversary.  This year, our anniversary is during a particularly hectic time as we prepare to move to Washington.  Becky's been a real trooper, putting up with all the work I'm having to do to get things ready for the move.  Things are coming together though.  The haze is clearing and we can start to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  It's so much fun to have such an adventure with such a good friend.

Anyway, my parents came up on Saturday and helped us with some projects to get the house ready to sell.  That evening, they watched Jenna while Becky and I went to see the latest installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I was a little confused about a few plot points, like why was Jack looking for the key before he found out that Davey Jones was after him?  Maybe it was part of the whole compass counter-story, and him not realizing why or what he wanted. Personally, I think they rearranged the scenes so they could use the openning scene as the openning rather than where it originally was in the story.  I also hadn't realized that it would be such a segue to the next movie.  Unlike me, Becky saw the ending coming a mile away, which is opposite of the way it usually is.

I'm also glad we had watched the original on TV the other day rather than our DVD.  The TV version had the extra "monkey scene" at the end.  Much of the second movie wouldn't have made sense if I hadn't seen that extra scene.  I wonder when they added it.

Things have been uber-crazy around here the last month or so. The quality and quantity of my posts had been seriously lacking, and there have been tons of things to post about.  Jenna's crawling everywhere, standing up and walking while holding stuff, and starring in a broadway musical (OK 2 out of 3 isn't bad).

Anyway, I've neglected my readers, and I apologize for that. Hopefully that will change soon. I thought I would come up for air for a moment to announce that I have accepted a position at Microsoft.  Becky, Jenna and I will be relocating to Redmond, WA (near Seattle) sometime in August (wow, that's soon isn't it).

I will really miss my current team, our local friends, and church; but Becky and I are super-excited about this new opportunity.  I'll post some more details when I get a chance (and after I learn for sure what I'm allowed to talk about), but for now I can tell you I'll be working on the Common Language Runtime team.

Becky and I are vacationing with her family up in Cape Cod.  We've been up here since Friday evening, but I haven't blogged about it because the trip got off to a horrible start.  I may tell the whole story some other time, but right now, I just wanted to get everyone up to speed.  It's been raining since we got here, but that's fine with me.  We're just hangin out.

Here's a local.live.com collection of places of interest from the vacation.  I'll keep updating it as things happen.  Be sure to check out the bird's eye view images of the house and such.

I'm fairly frustrated.  I got a replacement console back from the XBox repair center last week after mine died.  It seemed to be a fairly quick, relatively painless, and reasonable procedure.  However, when Becky popped in a DVD and got a region code error, I was pretty upset. They had sent a console with the wrong region code setting.  Now, setting arguments against region coding aside, this is riduculous.  Now, I have to go through the procedure of sending the box back AGAIN, and there's no guarantee I won't have some other thing wrong with it. 

I might be less upset about this if I had been given some compensation for this stupid mistake like some complimentary Microsoft points for the marketplace (especially since I have to buy my arcade games again so my wife can play them on her account) or even a sincere apology would have been nice.  Instead, the "technician" simply read a pre-written apology to me without the slightest bit of feeling.

Becky sent me an IM earlier today to let me know that my XBox360 just arrived.  I had to send it in for repairs after it died a week or so ago.  The repair process was pretty simple.  They sent me an empty box.  I took off all the accessories and put the console in the box and dropped it off at the UPS store.  And now it's back! I'm hoping that there aren't any more problems.  I can't wait to download the new system update and try out 1080i DVD playback with my new VGA cable!

If it does everything it says it does, the update fixes every single complaint I had about the dashboard and system software. yippee.

[UPDATE] The VGA settings do not have a 1080i/p compatible setting, so no 1080i DVD playback for me.  Looks like the VGA cable is useless for me.  Back to Best Buy it goes! Here's hoping for DVI support.

I had a conference call with some people in one of our facilities in China.  My manager is currently over there and I was going to run a presentation and demo from over here.  I VPN'ed in from home and waited for the call to begin.  Evidently, the conference room they were in had a broken telephone, so they were unable to call in.  After a while of trying to fix it, my manager said he didn't think they were going to get it working and did I have any ideas.  We were already communicating via Google Talk, so I just hit the "call" button.  A couple of rings later, we had a perfectly clear and relatively delay-free voice communication channel.

I was running the demo via netmeeting, but the netmeeting voice chat is horrible quality and there is a sizeable delay.  I was able to give the whole presentation and demo via Google Talk.  Well, until someone kicked the network cable on the other end and disconnected the whole thing.

My XBox360... is dead.  It started locking up in the last few days, and now is completely dead.  I spent some time on the phone with support to no avail.  They are sending me a coffin to put it in so they can try to resurrect it.  I suppose it's fairly good timing.  I had planned to get alot of work done around the house this holiday weekend, and I'm sure the 360 would have been a distraction.

I thought some others might find this useful.

I have been baffled for a few days why certain actions in an experimental Rails app would work fine in dev mode, and then give me mysterious HTTP 500 errors when deployed.  The Rails logs would tell me everything was just fine and there was no problem. But, there they were in Fiddler... status 500.  I haven't figured out how to get ahold of the Apache logs from my host yet, so they couldn't help me.

I finally set up Apache with FastCGI myself so I could attempt to duplicate the problem.  It was immediately apparent.  The Apache log was complaining about invalid headers in the FastCGI communication.  I was using "puts" to write out to the console when running in dev mode in order to quickly debug what was going on.  This works fine when using the Webrick standalone server, but FastCGI on Apache evidently uses stdout to do the communication between it and the fastcgi processes, and writing to stdout screws up that communication and Apache reports HTTP 500, even though Rails thinks everything's A-OK.

The lovely thing about Ruby is that I was able to fix it by redefining puts to do nothing.  Ideally, you ought to use the logging mechanisms, and I will.  But that made a great short-term fix.

Scott Hanselman pointed out a service that I am sure to get tons of use out of in the next few months.  ThanksNo.com is a polite-as-possible way to remind your friends and family that you really don't want to get all those forwarded emails, jokes, or other "non-personal" emails from them.  It does a good job of pointing out why you don't want them, which is often hard to explain.  Visit for yourself to see what I mean.  You pretty much reply to the email with a short message and the link, and hopefully the flood of "non-personal" email from people you know will cease.

This has been a huge problem for me.  I get all kinds of emails from friends and family with dozens of people copied, and with very little, if any, value.  In the past, I've dealt with them by just silently archiving them for fear that any email explaining that I didn't want that kind of email would be misinterpreted.  (Actually, maybe this blog post will do the trick.)

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Now all we need is a similar service for what I refer to as "corporate spam".  Why bother having any kind of intranet at all if you're going to send out 3 emails a day to every employee full of useless or redundant information?  I can understand getting the information by default, but at least let me opt-out of all but the most important emails.

And another thing.  What's will marking every email as "high importance"?  It has lost all meaning when you get an email at work marked urgent, you open it up quickly to find out what action you need to set aside all of your important work for only to find out that there is a bake sale next week.

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