Well, Becky's parents came into town last night from El Paso.  I worked most of the day today and we all ate at P.F. Chang's, one of my very favorite restaurants.  It seemed a little silly to have a P.F. Chang's feast the day before Thanksgiving, but it was delicious anyway.

We just watched the first half of the special edition of “The Two Towers”.  All the new footage is great.  It really fills it in nicely.

Tommorow's the big day, all my practicing will come together, and we should have a great fried turkey.  I got it all marinated this afternoon, so we're all set.  Half cajun creole and garlic flavored, and the other half hot & spicy.

Since we're on the subject of eating, I'd like to reveal to everyone that I've been working hard and have lost almost 30 pounds in the last several months.  Really it's about 27, but 30 sounds better.  For the first time since college I weigh 200 pounds.  The best part is it's a lifestyle change that should be simple to keep.  I mainly realized that I was eating for about 6 people.  It all started when we had a health screening at work, and my cholesterol was high.  Since I was going to have to adjust my diet anyway to avoid cholesterol, I thought I might as well kill two birds with one stone, and not eat them both for once.

My ultimate target is somewhere between 190 and 200, but with alot more muscle than I've got going on right now, so I plan on heading toward 190, and stepping up the exercise.  Becky's lost alot as well, and we both are feeling very good.  Mom and Dad are losing weight as well, and I'm very proud of them for that.  We'll be seeing them tomorrow, along with Andrew.  Poor Sara has to work.  Jeff, I'll be sure to get his email address.

Anyway, hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!  I'll probably use the extra time to get up some pictures I've been promising.

In case you don't have an aggregator that tells you when posts change, I've made some adjustments to my wish list.  Again, I want to make it clear that I'm not asking people to buy these things, I thought it would be an interesting insight into my personality for my readers.

Another side-effect of my list is that it is causing me to think about what are the technologies that REALLY interest me, and build a roadmap for my hobbies.  Right now, I have so many hobbies that very few of them ever yield anything of interest.  I'm finding my efforts to be much more focused.  In the process I'm finding projects that combine many of my hobbies so I can kill several birds with one stone.  For instance, as a result of the list, I've decided I probably won't buy another DVD player, but rather focus on a concept called an HTPC.

There are lots of hobbies to be fulfilled here:

• Designing/Building things - It's going to require creating a case that minimizes noise, while maximizes cooling and looks wicked awesome.
• Electricity - It gots ta have wires
• Software - I can write all kinds of stuff for it to have cool features I've always wanted.
• Computers - It is one
• Movies - I can watch them
• Music - I can listen to it

I could go on and on.  But for now I won't.

We just got back from Belton where we hung out with the family for Andrew's birthday.  He got loaded up with all kinds of goodies.  I'll let him share those with you individually if he wants.  You know how he gets...Some of you, anyway.  We had a great time.

Well, since it seems to be somewhat popular on the weblogs I read, here's my Holiday Wishlist.  I'm not doing this because I'm trying to be greedy.  First of all, this is more of a dream list than a realistic wishlist, but it should let people know what kind of stuff I'm into.  I'll try to keep it up to date with my latest whims.

Home Theater Stuff:

• Samsung 50“ DLP TV - Ok, I'm crazy.  I have a very nice TV already...but come on!
• Samsung HD DVD Player - 720p...enough said. (note: I know DVD's do not contain that kind of resolution...but come on!)  It would go great with the TV! I've taken this off the list.  It only up-converts to HD on the DVI output, meaning I'd need an expensive converter, or the above TV (which upconverts to 720p anyway).  Also, there's alot of talk on new HD DVDs. I think I'll go for a pc-based solution next time around.
• Sony STR-DA3000ES - Ok, so this is the most reasonable thing so far.  I could go much crazier on a digital receiver, but Andrew's made me a believer in Sony ES again.
• Sony Universal Remote Commander - I've got no less than 7 remotes, all of which I have to use at some point.  I've got some friends with this that say it is well worth it. Whoo hoo! already got it!!  

Misc.:

• Roomba Vacuum - I know I already have a nice vacuum, but this one's right up my alley.
• Indiana Jones DVD Trilogy (Widescreen) - I just picked up The Two Towers set and figured Indie could wait a while.  (I won't fully delve into the widescreen/fullscreen debate here, except to note that fullscreen is a ploy to make more money from the uneducated consumer.) My boy Cooper came through BIG TIME!!
• a Love Sac - These things are cool!

Computer Stuff:

• ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB video card - Ok, maybe this is overkill.  I could easily go with the 9600 pro.  Since I got my LCD screen, I've been itching for a DVI card.
• MDP-120 HDTV Tuner card - The perfect driving force behind my HTPC.
• M-Audio Revolution 8-channel sound card - Perfect for driving 7.1 audio out of my HTPC.

Video Games:

• Metal Arms: Glitch in the System (for GameCube) - Looks like fun. Got it
• Beyond Good and Evil (for GameCube) - Got excellent reviews. Got it!!
• Mario Kart: Double Dash (for GameCube) - Classic sequel Got it!!!
• GameCube Broadband Adapter - For internet Double Dash! Got it with a thoughtful gift certificate
• Nintendo WaveBird Controller - I have one, but only one.

Ok, some of these are ridiculous.

On another note, I've been hounding Jen and Dave to get an RSS feed for their blog.  They're hosting on blogSpot, who charges for those fancy things.  They've managed to get comments and tracking from other locations, so I thought I'd step in and get them an RSS feed.  It still needs some work.  I don't have comments working yet, or the time of the posts, or several other non-essentials, but now it's even easier to keep track of what they're doing.

[Update 10:50]

Just got Referrer spoofing implemented so RSS requests will show up correctly.  Also, I updated my User-Agent string to be more humorous.  In doing so, I found some inconsistencies in the Framework for the spelling of Referrer (Referer).

My first Fried Turkey experience was a complete success.  Dave helped me out a bunch.  We only had a few minor difficulties, but I'll be ready for Thanksgiving for sure.  I'll see about getting some pictures up here tommorow.

If you've ever used NAnt, you'll love NAntPad.  From their site:

Nantpad is a powerful editor for NAnt XML build scripts. It provides an explorer-type interface saving you from having to write XML which can be tedious and sometimes difficult to maintain. User friendly icons indicate targets, tasks, parameters, comments and other NAnt entities, and attributes are modified in a property window.

I just downloaded it and loaded a few of my more complicated build scripts.  No troubles.  It helps you enforce the schemas so it's alot easier to write a script without consulting the documentation to find out the name of that one important attribute.  Me likie.

Here's some info straight from the horse's mouth (SqlTeam.com).  It seems using @@Identity is potentially bad.  They say to use scope_identity() instead. See for yourself.

I'm not a TSQL guru, but I know several people using TSQL in the mojority of their products, and I've seen @@Identity in their code.

Thanksgiving is always fun for me.  I'm really happy this year that we'll have lots of family at the house for Thanksgiving.  We've had Thanksgiving here before, but I never felt like I was hosting.  Someone else did all the cooking and preparation, and I just got bossed around.

This year, I'm in charge!  I'm going to deep fry a turkey.  I tried to get Chung to give me his secret to boneless turkey, but all I get are crazy jokes about farmers tending to amoeba-like foul.  This week, I'm doing a practice run to be sure I won't be making a fool out of myself.  That means I need a turkey by tommorow to give the appropriate thawing time.

I'm getting all my frying gear from Academy, which has a whole setup at the front of the store for teaching you everything you need to know to cook a good bird.  I've heard the results are quite delicious.  I've also done a fair amount of internet research.

Anyway, Saturday's the day!  We'll see if Jen and Dave want to come over and help.  Anyone with experience is welcome to leave some words of wisdom, but don't leave obvious stuff like, “be sure you have the right amount of oil”, or “wear protective clothing“, or “don't do it inside”.  Chances are, I know that stuff already.

If you don't know what SharpReader is, you probably read blogs by visiting numerous web pages, clicking through entries looking for new content.  There is a better way!

SharpReader is an RSS aggregator.  “What is RSS?” you ask?  Chris Sells has a nice explanation.  I've been using SharpReader since I set up my blog (having done that relatively late in the game) and it's pretty nice.  The new features in v0.9.3.1 are excellent!  My favorites are:

• Support for viewing comments (not supported by all blogs)
• Toast windows (the little MSN messenger-like windows that pop up letting you know there's new content)

Some things you should know about it before you try it:

• It takes up alot of memory UNLESS you minimize it when not using it, that way it will release it's working set, yielding a pretty small footprint.
• Closing it will minimize it to the tray, which will NOT trigger its memory release.

If you have trouble setting up SharpReader, or don't know what to do with it.  Leave a comment.

Well, when I put the spare tire on, I found a nail as expected.  A long nail.  The kind of nail that would make it statistically impossible to stand on end at the perfect angle so that it would go straight into my tire as I sped past.

I took the tire (actually the whole car) in to get the tire looked at.  They said it was repairable and repaired it.  That was Tuesday morning.  Today, I walked out to the parking garage after work, and the tire was once again flat.

With Chung's help, I quickly put the spare on and took it back to another location of the tire specialty franchise I had originally taken it to. (I don't mention the name because my blog has recently started looking like a bunch of advertisements.)  They found that the other place had done shoddy work and their plug was leaking.  They fixed it at no charge.

I remember being involved in some mischeif when I was younger, like “TP-ing“ the wrong house, shoe-polishing the cars of girls we were “likin those days“, saran wrapping cars of those we didn't, scaring our friends' big sisters with outlandish contraptions that allowed us to knock on their windows from the safety of another room, building bombs out of contact cases...but nothing that actually damaged anyone's property.  Sheesh...kids these days.

For the last few weeks, I've been trying out Firebird (a lightweight, Mozilla-based browser) as my browser.  Several of my co-workers swear by it.  It has some features that IE doesn't have that are really compelling.

• Tabbed browsing - Browse multiple pages in one window.  This is the main reason I like Firebird.
• Pop-up blocking - Blocks annoying pop-ups. This is currently very annoying to do in IE.
• Rich plug-in/add-in support
• Low memory profile - Less than 20MB under normal circumstances.  It even dumps its current working set when minimized which usually takes it down below 4MB.

It's drawbacks, in my opinion, are many.  Lots of pages JUST DON'T WORK because they are targeted for IE, or are otherwise not standards-compliant.  Who is at fault for this is completely irrelevant.  IT JUST DOESN'T work.

I got to thinking about it and realized there is nothing keeping someone from using the IE core and creating a browser with all of the above features.  For instance, my RSS aggregator, SharpReader, uses the IE core to render contents.  I thought about writing one myself, but decided if it was so easy, someone's bound to have done it.

With one Google search, I found several.  My favorite is MyIE2, the second generation of a tabbed browser using the IE core.  It has ALL (ALL) of the Firebird/Mozilla features I like plus the advantage of having the IE core engine, complete in all it's “evilness”.  So for now, Firebird is uninstalled.

CodeSmith is (according to it's website):

CodeSmith is a FREEWARE template-based code generator that can generate code for any ASCII-based language. CodeSmith templates use a syntax nearly identical to ASP.NET syntax so that creating templates should feel immediately familiar to ASP.NET developers. Check out the overview for more information, visit the download page to get the latest version, or visit the support forum to get your questions answered.

So, if you like that sort of thing...Check it out.

I just upgraded to dasBlog 1.4.  Everything went very smoothly.  It only took about 2 minutes.  Lots of neat features added, mostly for me the owner.  RSS feed tracking, cross-posting, click-through tracking.  They've also used a new editor for new entries which seems to be even better than the old new one.

Also, I'm kind of frustrated because my categories are totally out of control.  It's so bad that most of my recent posts don't even have a category associated.  If anyone has any ideas on how to efficiently go through and re-categorize all my old posts, I'd love to hear them.

Well, it seems I was the victim of some Halloween mischeif.  The air was let out of my left, front tire.  I have not yet determined the cause, but noticed when I attempted to back down the driveway.  My guess is that someone propped a nail up behind the tire, since this happened to Becky's car a few years ago while we were in the apartment.  It was pouring rain this morning, so I got a ride to work rather than get all nasty in the rain and have to get ready all over again.

This evening, I'll put on my spare donut and take it in to see what is the trouble.  Hopefully, it will be covered by hazard insurance, although it probably won't be that expensive.

Ok, so you've figured out that my post about collecting background information was really a cover for being able to fake information.  In Alias, they're always needing to alter pictures or surveillance video to cover their trails, so I figure that's important in the spy world.  It's also alot of fun.  Since my last posts haven't gotten much of a response, here's another for your enjoyment.

I mentioned earlier that my monitor was going out.  Also, Becky's mouse was a piece of crap.  She didn't even have a scroll wheel.  I ended up getting the Sony SDM-HX73/S for a new monitor.  As per usual, I managed to find an "open-box-buy" at a reduced price, so with that and the rebate...I was very happy.  Those who know me well know that as an educated consumer, I really like the open-box buy.  They also know the consequences of your friend buying a 300 pound television without a box and having to haul it up 3 flights of stairs with only the help of your friend and a pregnant woman when it's 105 degrees outside...but that's another story, which I will tell only if there's enough interest.

Anyway, the monitor is beautiful, I turned on "ClearType" and really like the extra "fake" resolution.  For those who don't know, LCD screens are composed of lots red, green, and blue "mini-pixel triplets".  Microsoft has a technology that exploits this fact and increases horizontal resolution 300%.  It really is a neat trick, and sometimes you can see color "edging" around certain fonts, but overall I like it.  Microsoft has a site that allows you to tune ClearType and make it look the best to you.

I also got a new wireless optical mouse.  It has a scroll wheel that turns vertically, as well as "tilting" from side-to-side.  I've seen lots of attempts at 2-axis scrolling, but this is the best.  I tend to write lines of code wider than my editor, especially at my now-reduced screen resolution (1280x1024 as opposed to 1600x1200 with my old monitor).  Becky inherited my old mouse, which is still pretty good and about 1000x better than her old one.