Webdell finished the BAR and relates the experience.  In there somewhere, he mentions having some bad dreams or nightmares. Peter mentions Clinton's entrance to the world of blogging. In honor of all these things, I will tell you about a dream I had last night that included all of those people...oh, Jenkies and Andrew were in it too, but Andrew doesn't have a blog and Jenkies hardly ever posts anything.  I know what you're saying and it's true. I have really bizarre dreams.  Here we go, I'll try to remember it as best I can.

Ok, so Peter, Webdell, Clinton, Andrew, Jenkies and I were driving to Waco in an RV. So it was alot like some kind of bizzare Segues reunion, but missing some people.  For some reason we were going south on I-35 from the Temple-Belton area, but were still headed to Waco.  It was a big RV and I think Webdell was driving, although I think the driver kept changing.  Whoever was driving was driving like a maniac, running over things and knocking down signs.

We got to Waco and went to the Baylor campus.  Evidently we were going to the library. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let us in because we didn't have a library card. So we sat outside on the steps and threw rocks at birds.  Then for some reason we started throwing rocks at each other, but the rocks would become like water-balloons when they would hit, so it was alot like that Nissan Sentra commercial.

Anyway, we got back in the RV and somehow it became a submarine and was like “The hunt for Red October”. Webdell was doing a Sean Connery impersonation, but it was alot like his Saddam Hussein impression, which mostly involves him putting his fingers under his nose and smiling really big.

I don't remember anything from there, so I guess it's a bit anti-climactic.  I just thought I would share.

Today I needed an AVL tree implementation for some time-based indexing of cached data.  Unfortunately, I can't use the wonderful-looking OrderedDictionary in the PowerCollections project since .NET 2.0 is not due out for a while.  I searched around without any luck, so I rolled my own.  It's been a while since I messed with tree-based data structures.  I was pretty pleased with its performance characteristics, even with millions of records.

I'm thinking about releasing it as a short-term alternative for people having to wait on 2.0 and Peter Golde's PowerCollections project, so I thought I write a short blurb about it and link to some appropriate sites to generate some referrals and feedback.  Anyone interested in using it?

For those unfamiliar with AVL trees, it's a self-balancing binary search tree. Its characteristics that are of interest to me are:

• self-ordering - values are stored and can be retrieved in order simply by traversing the tree, something a hashtable cannot give you.
• self-balancing - This ensures that search times are O(log(n))
• fairly straightforward to implement, as opposed to Red-Black, or other self-balancing BSTs

Again, if you're interested in using it, leave me some feedback and maybe I'll make it a sourceforge or GDN project.

That title probably doesn't mean what you think it means.

After using Gmail for a few months for my personal email, searching for things in Outlook is the worst kind of ridiculous.  Lookout is an Outlook add-in that indexes for email for super-fast (like less than a second) searches.  The company was recently aquired by Microsoft, and they are continuing to provide it for free.  I'm sure they are interested in integrating this kind of searching for everything.

I just installed it here at work because I was tired of waiting for a search to complete only to have it give me nothing.  If you use Outlook, I'd highly recommend it.  It takes a little while to index for the first time (especially if all your mail is on a remote Exchange server), but works great when it finishes.

Today, Becky and I celebrate our 5th anniversary!  Pretty hard to believe it's been that long.  Happy anniversary Becky.  I love you more each year.

We just got back from seeing The Bourne Supremacy with the Barnes.  It was really good, but they went way overboard with the handheld shots.  There were lots of the movie where I had to look away to keep from getting a headache.  Other than that it was really awesome.  I was pleasantly surprised to see the actor who played Eomer in the Lord of the Rings.

My advice is to sit toward the back of the theater unless you like motion sickness.  I really think the director, Paul Greengrass, could have conveyed the same effect without so much camera shake.  It was really distracting.  But, really, it was awesome.  I love that kind of movie.

I finally got the rest of the good pictures from our vacation up on the gallery [password: marklio].  I put them all under one main album with sub-albums for each category.  I tried to keep the album sizes under control.  There are way too many Busch Gardens pictures.  Enjoy!

[UPDATE: 03/09/2005] The gallery is no more.  I have removed the link.

I just uploaded the cream of the crop pictures from our 2-day Busch Gardens adventure to the gallery (as always, password: marklio).  Enjoy.  I'll have more from the rest of the vacation up at a later date.

[UPDATE: 03/09/2005] The gallery is no more.  I'm using Flickr to host my pictures.  Here's a link to the photoset for the Busch Gardens pictures.

I just had a guy knock on my door from the Democratic National Convention.  It was too annoying/funny/angrifying for me to not share the experience.  I let him give his shpeel for a few minutes.  First, he decried Bush for raising money to run a negative campaign against John Kerry, which I thought was pretty funny.  He then listed what he deemed to be the “issues” of the election.  Things like health care, social security, and what he called an “attack” on our constitution were among them.  Wow, yes! Those are the issues!  Based on that list, he wanted me to give him a check for $100.  He then showed me a “statement of support” form, which at first glance appeared to be filled out by people in my neighborhood.  On closer inspection, the handwriting had been laser-printed as part of the form.  When I asked him what Kerry's plans were for those issues, he pointed me to john kerry dot com (where later I couldn't find real plans for them either).  I told him I wasn't interested.  He then asked if I wanted to see George Bush defeated, to which I said, “no”.  He then turned and left.

If you find someone a similar person at your door.  I'd encourage you to press them on their candidate's plans for those important “issues“.  And if they have one of those phoney forms, I'd grill them about attempting to manipulate people.

Peter posted a pretty funny mis-quoted song lyric.  I thought I'd share a few more that came to mind.  Feel free to guess the real origin.

• The miggity-miggity-mac came to get Ahvorn.
• Your rap is Eagle-filled, the milk has been spilled.
• Here I am, watching like a hurricane - (like the eye of a hurricane watches?) Sorry B-Dub, I couldn't resist.

I know of some others, but I'll save them for later in case soem other people want to get in on the action.

We got back from Florida yesterday evening.  Becky's reaction has subsided and everything's pretty much back to normal.  I've got over 3 gigs of pictures to share.  I'm going to have them posted soon.  (Probably just the good ones).  Thanks to the Barnes for watching our house and cats while we were away.

Well, Ben's wedding was today and wouldn't you know it, Becky had an allergic reaction to something in the sea water.  She started to break out, so we went inside, and she swole up like a balloon.  When it was time for the wedding it was better, but her eyes were still really puffy.  But she went on anyway.  She just looked kinda oriental.

The wedding went great, and hopefully she'll be back to normal tomorrow.  It's late, so I'll just end it there.  We're having a great time.

We went to Busch Gardens today.  It was AWESOME!  We had a fantastic time.  I've got lots of cool pictures of things like gorilla charging, tigers playing, etc.  We walked like 15 miles or something...seriously, we walked alot.  They've got some great roller coasters as well.  A couple were closed though.  They're doing alot of new construction.

Well, I got fed up with the hotel we were staying in.  We got back and wanted to take a shower to cool off, but something was wrong with it.  I got them to give us another room, but the AC in that room didn't work well and made alot of noise.  So, we moved hotels.  Things are great now, and we're waiting for a tasty Dominos Pizza to arrive.

We're going to Busch Gardens again tomorrow to have more fun.  We probably won't stay as long though.

Well, we made it to Florida.  We're here in Tampa for Becky's brother's wedding.  We decided to get here a few days early and go to Busch Gardens and so forth.  So far, it's the smoothest vacation I've ever planned.  Flights, rental car, and hotel have all gone off without a hitch.

I don't know how fast/consistent my internet access will be, so I may not get pictures up till we get back.  But I'll try to keep everyone informed.

There's an Olive Garden about a block down the street, so we'll probably eat there this evening.  I like the Olive Garden pretty good.

Jen recently blogged about her blog's birthday.  Out of curiosity, I wanted to see when I started.  Turns out I missed it.  My first post was on June 5, 2003.

Looks like my old permalinks don't work.  I'll have to check that out.

I've mentioned the thumnail generator, “Thumbo”, several times.  I wrote it about a year ago while I was on vacation wanting to upload pictures to my blog over dial-up.  All you had to do was drag images onto it and it would spit out thumnails sized to your specification.  I had a “duh” moment the other day when I right-clicked on an image in explorer and was surprised to see “Resize Image” in the context menu.

Turns out, I had installed the Image Resizer powertoy for XP, which provides basically the exact same functionality integrated into the shell.

Anyway, I know a few of my readers are using Thumbo to generate thumbnails.  In the interest of not having to support it anymore, I would recommend using the powertoy instead.

After my photography spree over the weekend, I needed a more dedicated outlet than the blog.  I'm running nGallery here.  It automatically manages picture sizes and such, and supports ratings and comments. If you're running an aggregator, it supports RSS!  I just hope I have the bandwidth.  I've put a password on it to keep Googlebot and others from crawling it.  The password is “marklio” (without the quotes).  Enjoy!

I still need to mess with captions and titles, but in the interest of letting people see the pictures, I decided to go ahead and let you look at it.

It has an interesting album structure that I'm still getting used to.  Some albums that may be of interest are:

• The fireworks album from our stay with the Knights.  It's “hidden“ in a sub-album.
• My “Nature on the 4th“ album.

[UPDATE: I'm working on the problem with the above links.  For now, go to the gallery and log in first (password: marklio), then the links will work)

[UPDATE: I'm also working on the password issue.  If you're having trouble, resist the urge to hit enter after putting in the password. Click the submit button instead. That seems to work most of the time. If not, keep trying. Obviously, the password feature was added late in the game.]

Wow, finally another post to put in my “4th of July” category! Man, what a weekend!  We spent some time in Belton with family to hang out, watch the annual 4th of July parade, and shoot some fireworks.  We got VIP-type seats at the parade because we were “in-the-know“.  We shot a great bounty of fireworks.  It was a blast.

It was the first weekend and major event for my new Canon Digital Rebel, so I have TONS of pictures.  I'm working on a gallery.  I'm having to sort through hundreds of pictures.  I may just give up and put them all up there.

We also went to Dave and Jen's parent's place.  Well, more precisely Jen's parents.  There we shot fireworks, camped and played with cameras.  Jen's brother Jerry also has a rebel and was kind enough to let me play with some of his accessories. He has some pictures of the weekend already up.  We couldn't have asked for better weather.

I'll post when I get the pictures up somewhere.  I have some fantastic fireworks photos.

[UPDATE: My new gallery is available]