I Like My Internet Unfiltered

Something I always find difficult to convey to others is my love of existence. I’m not talking about existence existence, like us-being-here-on-this-planet existence (though that’s mighty cool and amazing, too, don’t get me wrong!), but rather that certain things do exist. Quite often this is in regards to things that most would find… well, unsavory. Deplorable. Depraved. Obscene. You get the idea.

You see, I like my internet unfiltered — my Google SafeSearch off, exposing the deep dark seedy underbelly. There is much that I have seen that cannot be unseen; much that is truly awful, disgusting, or sick; and even more that is raunchy, ribald, or risqué to an extreme. I take a small risk in even admitting all this.

Absence Might Be Stronger

I've never been particularly religious, but until about three or four years ago I had never really dove very deep into it to explore what I really thought and felt. Much of the dust of that inner search had settled long before I started this blog, which is why aside from brief mentions here and there I haven't written much yet about religion. Having settled into a sort of secular humanist approach to atheism (most likely strongly related to my core philosophy), I expect that trend of relative silence here on religion to mostly continue.

However, it isn't just that my immediate interest and search has ended. A lot of my silence also has to do, I think, with a certain passive approach I've noticed in myself. Having just written a piece on my core philosophy, I noticed the stark absence of anything remotely religious in there. This was not a conscious attempt, though it is perhaps less surprising I suppose since I generally don't have any religion in my life. But I almost think this is more profound in the long term.

My Core Philosophy

I talk often about and freely align myself with libertarianism and naturally gravitate to organizations, news, and people that also share it. I find it to be a perfectly fine and accurate summary of my philosophy, it has the benefit of being the most well-known term (though still not necessarily a house-hold name) which aids in communicating, and it carries no (to my knowledge) adverse social stigma, such as atheist does in the theological realm.

Still, to anyone that actually professes libertarian philosophy or, such as myself, envelopes themselves in its history and thinking a lot as an interest, the term is still surprisingly vague. Many flavors and approaches exist, some from moral foundations and others from practical theories. It is surprisingly open-ended on how and why you end up promoting liberty.

Using the WPF Task Dialog Wrapper in an MVVM Application

There's been a mini-flurry lately surrounding my WPF Task Dialog wrapper/emulator combo I blogged and posted about on CodeProject last year. Mostly bug fixes, which I'm happy to try to tackle, and I appreciate that people seem to actually be using it (else how would they find these bugs?). It's given me a little boost of incentive to possibly do some actual new features and improvements.

Bonding

On Nov. 8th, we'll be voting in Arkansas to approve a bond for the Highway Dept. so that they can fund massive interstate projects (either to repair existing or lay new interstate roads).

On paper, it doesn't sound that bad. Roads, and the interstate ones in particular, are some of the more libertarian-friendly functions of the gub'mint.

It will most likely be approved overwhelmingly, as the ol' Governor got to repeat several times (and slowly, I'm sure, for us laymen are a bit dumb at times) how it involves no new or increased taxes (!). He also got to pose with folks from both the Republican and Democratic parties of our legislature.

Frankly, unanimous agreement like that between the parties and between the branches is a major red flag to me. But I'm trying hard not to come off as a complete contrarian.

The money comes from the federal level and it is done through something called GARVEE bonds. I had to look it up, too, don't feel bad. Anyway, it's FHWA money, hence the "no new or increased taxes" mantra.

But you know, I kinda like how some governors rejected federal stimulus dollars a few years back. I like the idea that just because they're opening up the national coffers you don't immediately suckle from the teat like a starving lamb. It makes us as a state more self-sustaining, as we take on only what we can pay for ourselves without robbing the rest of these United States to do it. "A fool and his money are soon parted" and all that, I know. But still, why can't we take the high road and say no thanks?

But, much as before, none of my moralizing will matter, and this thing will pass. I'll try to look surprised when the final statistics on the dismal voter turnout are released.

Halloween Retrospective and Prospective

Since All Hallows’ Eve is nigh upon us, I've been preparing this year's outfit. I don't have it quite finished just yet, so pictures will have to wait. This year, I will be going as Vincent from the game Catherine, specifically his nightmare form.

Warning: this is an image heavy post!

Occupier Outreach

Reason.tv has up today a video of Peter Schiff at the Occupy Wall Street rally with a camera and a microphone engaging people there in debate. It's almost 20 minutes long, but I watched the whole thing. There's a lot I could say, with a bullet point list of time codes and comments, but the number one feeling that ran throughout the whole thing for me was this: debate is difficult.

What do I mean by that? Let's analyze my statement closer, in the context of this video and the OWS movement as a whole.

Voter Identification, National ID, E-Verify, etc.

Recently a co-worker and I were discussing voter identification in the context of some state, which I have since forgotten specifically, passing or possibly attempting to pass some law requiring it. He was in favor of it and I, unsurprisingly, was against it. The details aren't important, really, because I want to elaborate on some broader points.

As I see it, my co-worker was making two big fundamental mistakes.

Converting an image byte array into a usable WPF BitmapSource

In a couple of our systems at work we store file attachments. The data gets put in a database table as a varbinary column. When we pull this down into our .NET apps, it’s represented as a byte[]. This is convenient to do image processing on it, as well as writing it to a file to be viewed, etc., but what about previewing straight in the application?

NETLOGON Event 3210 and Corrupted Domain Authentication Woes

Was having an issue for several weeks at work where when I tried to run ASP.NET sites locally (debugger attached or not), I was getting an imposing YSOD:

The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.

Man arrested for asking creepy questions

On the ever growing list of reasons I'll need blood pressure medication when I'm older, some weirdo was arrested on "two counts of misdemeanor harassment" for accosting various women, commenting on their fine looking toes, and ultimately asking to suck on them.

Criminal charges!

The police came and picked him up at his home!

To serve him two counts!

Picture in the paper!

Everything!

Agh!

Requisite disclaimer: Yes, this man is surely guilty of being a creep, but at worst he deserves the middle finger and a stern "fuck off" from these women. But criminal charges? Seriously?

I just... I just don't know what to say. It stuns me. And worst of all, everyone else at work just kind of looks at me like I'm overreacting. Which maybe I am, but the point is that it never even registered to them that this might be going a bit far. To them, the slightest bit of deviancy is perfectly reasonable grounds for an arrest. Why not? He's clearly disturbed! Lock 'im up! (Think of the children!)

I understand the desire to want to live in an area free of repugnant individuals, and so the need for swift cleansing tends to build up over time, but at some point we've got to clearly state that it's not a crime to be annoying. Granted, if you are annoying, you better be ready for the consequences, but it shouldn't be a crime.

Instead the man is hauled out of his own home, potentially spends a night or two or three in jail, paraded before a court, and plastered all over every local news site, paper, and evening headlines segment. Convicted or not, the guy’s social life is now ruined over what may possibly have just been at best a lapse in judgment. What could have been a great opportunity to show tolerance, respect, and compassion by getting the guy some help is instead made into a let’s-all-point-and-laugh-at-the-sicko. Way to go, community.

Sigh.

Some WPF Memory Leak Gotchas

Just a couple of insights I recently gleaned tracking down memory issues. I used the CLR Profiler and it worked well with snooping on heap allocation to find out what references were still being held onto and by what objects.

Regaining Automatic Relationship Fix-Up with DbContext POCO Entities

Recently at work I upgraded the WPF application project I've been working on for a few months now to Entity Framework 4.1 so that we could take advantage of the new DbContext class. It was a snap using NuGet, too. When we started, we used database-first and then generated POCO classes via the Entity Framework POCO Generator extension plugin.

I quickly noticed some problems in our application, though. Many of the method names are different between ObjectContext and DbContext, so it required a small bit of refactoring. I didn't have any problems with this, so I didn't suspect anything, but suddenly navigation properties were coming back null when they used to not be. We've got lazy-loading disabled (because we explicitly make data loading calls on asynchronous Tasks), but I was used to navigation properties being filled whenever its associated foreign key integer value changed, provided the associated object was already cached in the context.

Making Sacrifices, or Turnip Blood Transfusions

Little Rock, where I live, is hoping to increase the sales tax rate. Here's some relevant local news coverage:

• Fox16
• KATV
• THV

You can find lots more just by Googling "little rock sales tax increase" as it is all over the place lately.

Not surprisingly, you'll find me voting no next Tuesday morning.

Knowing Enough To Know I Know Nothing

It takes every fiber of my being to resist arguing with folks on the usual suspects: religion and politics. And it's not for the reason you might think. Sure, I hold very controversial positions (read: atheist libertarian) on each subject, so I'm bound to disagree with just about anyone I talk to. But that's not why I resist the urge, generally speaking.

I read a lot. I try to keep up with the basics in news, particularly politics, science, and other geeky things related to my career in software. It takes a lot of my time. I imagine many folks choose other things instead. Or choose to read different topics than I do. That's fine, of course.

But if all of this absorption of knowledge so far in my short life has taught me anything it is that things are always more complicated than they seem.

A WPF SearchTextBox control

Something missing from WPF (and the toolkit and even the extended toolkit) is a good reusable search box control. Well, now you too can have a pretty good one (if I dare say so). The need for one is so apparent that even Microsoft singles it out as a specific control in their guidelines*, which I used extensively to design the look and behavior of this control.

Too busy to read the details? That’s fine.

(Don’t forget to change the namespaces and image paths!)

See another of my custom WPF controls here.

Updated (9/27/2011): Added Luna.NormalColor.xaml and Classic.xaml files for XP and classic theme support.

The Library of Yore No More

A couple friends of mine are pursuing a Master’s in Library Sciences. To be honest, I can’t quite grasp why you need a master’s degree to be a librarian, but in fairness I will simply plead ignorance of what skills/knowledge is required for the job.

Best of luck to the both of them, in all seriousness. I hope they find it an enjoyable and lucrative career, I really do.

But I think they are entering into a dying field, propped up on crutches by the government’s monopoly on libraries and their IV trickle of money.  The very concept of a library is quickly becoming deprecated.

Biting the Hand That Feeds

Last year in Massachusetts*, Gov. Deval Patrick used a special power to reject 235 of 274 proposed rate increases by state health insurance companies. This, of course, did not sit well with said companies and they went to court over it and, in the mean time, stopped creating new policies. Unfortunately for them, a judge quickly ordered them to return to business as usual.

I can't say for certain what his rationale for it was, but I am confident it involved some form of "protecting the people" kick to it. Health insurance is "too important to deny" folks, since it is for so many a matter of health and sometimes life or death, theoretically. So to allow these companies to start denying customers would be, in some way, tantamount to murder, however tangentially or indirectly.

Optimizing For Enjoyment, or Crowd-Sourcing Cool

Part of the reason I’ve resisted social networks for so long is the huge time sink they inevitably become. And in-between my day job, playing video games, and the various necessities of life (sleeping, showering, shitting, etc.), I have to squeeze reading news, hobby code projects, watching videos, and writing these posts. And that list doesn’t include the highly variable friend/girlfriend time, either. If I tried to add “check Facebook" into that I’d be screwed. Something would have to give, and I like all of the things currently on the list.

Because that’s the crux of time constraints like life: you have to optimize for enjoyment as best you can. There are only so many minutes in the day. How will you best spend them, more or less?

This Just In: Cigarettes Are Addictive

Just in time for summer are the FDA’s new cigarette rules, specifically these totally rad image warnings to go into effect later this year in September. Ah, the nanny-state.

Here’s what we all need to tell the FDA: get off my dick.

Dynamic Data: to a faster, more featureful future of releases

We’re (read: me and the sole intern) making a big push to impress internal clients (read: other employees) and my boss and her boss with some of the newer technology and features available in .NET 4.

And His Name Is Weiner!, or This Has to Be an Elaborate Joke

Good ol’ MovieBob sums up my feelings on this Weiner case better than I could.

And then there’s this FTFA:

Along the way he made many, many double entendres.
…
"This is part of the problem with the way this has progressed and one of the reasons I was perhaps, you'll forgive me, a little stiff yesterday," he said.

Wow. Do skim the rest, it’s really bizarre stuff.

Frankly, I didn’t even know who this guy was yesterday, and I still haven’t checked don’t care what his actual policy positions are, but I gotta say I kinda like the guy. With as many Politician Sex Scandals! as there are each year, it’s really refreshing to see a guy not do the usual “No comment, no comment, oh you found evidence, shit, in that case I acted wrongly and I’m resigning effective immediately!” song and dance.

May Movie Review

Short blurbs and A-F school-like grading of movies I’ve seen this past month, plus initial reactions to any upcoming movies for which I’ve seen trailers. My grading tries not to account for my enjoyment of the movie (i.e. Plan 9 would get an F but I'd still laugh a lot).

The Green Hornet*

C+ Everything about this movie was just okay. The acting was passable, the script could have been worse, and the action and special effects were certainly there, I guess. It wasn't a waste of time, but...

Martyrs

B An interesting mix of real psychological horror and more traditional monster fare and it's mostly well done and sorta plausible even, removing most of the supernatural suspension of disbelief usually required. Thankfully it tends to favor the unnerving/creepy over the cheap spooks. Felt like two movies, though, what with the very different second half.

Mikadroid

D+ Low-budget, bizarre, hokey, and Japanese — yes, it's got all the ingredients for a niche cult flick and I see why it holds just such a status. While it's god-awful, you can tell the creators were having a ball being mostly-independent and that it was a labor of love. Especially enjoyed the character designs in the DVD extras.

* I actually saw this last month but forgot to include it in April's movie reviews.

Implicit Stance

Last month I sent in a short essay that basically introduced my idea of implicit stances to The Bible Geek. It was read on the April 18th podcast. (This wasn’t my first question/commentary sent in and responded to, though.) I plan to elaborate more on implicit stances in the future, as it is sort of one of my pet ideas I’ve been mulling over on the side for some time now.

What follows is my email to him copied mostly verbatim.

The Post Apocalypse Post

By now you’ve probably heard that the Christians are still here.

I enjoy The Thinking Atheist’s videos. They’re always impeccably produced, with an air of quality and refinement far above what you usually get on the Tube of You.

That said, I always get slightly unnerved watching them. They always feel as though the writers are barely holding back jumping for joy when they get to slam Christianity on something (in this case, the false prediction of Harold Camping). That often-thinly-veiled jubilation at making digs at religious folks always irks me, but admittedly never enough to turn me off from watching them.

I guess it is because even if I agree with them on the whole there not being any gods thing, I don’t find any joy in making cheap shots at “the other team”…

You gotta admit: with as much trashing as Christianity gets every day, there are next to no violent acts performed in response. Unlike certain other religions, Christians seem to be pretty good sports at taking it and respecting free speech. I’m not saying heated debates don’t rage on YouTube every time any religious video is posted, but that’s a far cry from shootings or, worse, beheadings.

Of course, if you ask me, I think that Good Natured Sport quality stems more from the kind of people that tend to be Christians rather than anything inherent to Christianity itself (or said unnamed religion). Christians tend to come from well-to-do, relatively-free countries like the US and UK, which I think explains most of the tolerance displayed. It is inherent to the culture rather than the religion, really, since I don't think most people take their faith that seriously.

WCF: pilot license required

Listening to this Hanselminutes yesterday, I heard some great stuff from the always sagely Glenn Block on WCF. He’s apparently moved to that team (after working on MEF) to do something called Web API.

His analogy of WCF to a Boeing 747 cockpit had me fist pumping in shared understanding. I’ve spent enough painful hours flipping switches and knobs hoping for that one combination that will make it work, half the time not really knowing fully what I’m doing. It really did feel like being sat in front of the controls to a commercial aircraft and told “Okay, make it take off.” A seemingly simple, everyday thing for a plane to do, and it probably only takes a few flips of switches and a gentle movement of the controls to do it, but knowing which out of dozens of instruments will do it… well…

The sheer cliff of a learning curve with WCF has always put a sour taste in my mouth. RIA Services is wonderful if what you really want is just a data source for, say, your Silverlight app, but for anything else it’s not so helpful.

And as soon as you need to set up service credentials/certificates and/or a security token issuer and other “advanced” stuff it really starts to hurt.

That and there’s no way to encapsulate stuff into helper assemblies since so much of it must be done in the config file and referenced assemblies can’t have their own config info.

Paternal pessimists

The other day, my significant other was describing a conversation she had with a friend. The topic meandered into politics in which they got into a bit of a debate on various issues, mostly ObamaCare and current things. After a bit of this, she told her friend "You don't seem to have much faith in people."

This simple statement succinctly sums up exactly my issue with most conservative and liberal opinions.

April Movie Review

Short blurbs and A-F school-like grading of movies I’ve seen this past month, plus initial reactions to any upcoming movies for which I’ve seen trailers. My grading tries not to account for my enjoyment of the movie (i.e. Plan 9 would get an F but I'd still laugh a lot).

Sucker Punch (IMAX!)

A- Visually and aurally stupendous. Home theater won't do it justice. Yes, there's a lot of geek pandering, but it's surprisingly more deep and meaningful. A few problems with its convoluted story and, in particular, ending hold it back from being perfect; it nevertheless delivered everything I want in a movie.

True Grit

B+ The acting is solid, and I see why it's the girl's break-out role, but the whole thing is still a remake with a limited scope. It ends up lacking the punch that a revenge story should have and has a rather unsatisfying end. Decent as far as Westerns go, though.

The dreaded 'has not been pre-compiled' message

If you're "in-the-know" you've probably since stepped up to Web Application projects over the more ASP Classic-style Web Site projects. Along with that comes the Web Deployment Projects, which have had a version out for every Visual Studio since 2005. This project is basically a nice(r) front-end to MSBuild that lets you pre-compile the app, leaving only .aspx marker files instead of the raw html/code.

During your travels, you're bound to come across the infinitely misleading error after deploying your site using said deployment project:

The file 'MyPage.aspx' has not been pre-compiled, and cannot be requested.

Your first thought, like all of us, is "Umm, yes it has been pre-compiled. I just built the deployment for it, the page is a marker file, everything is in a .dll in the bin folder!"

And you're right, the page was properly pre-compiled. So why are you still getting this message?

It's a misleading one because generally the problem involves missing references on your deployment server/location. Something isn't installed into the GAC that your app is expecting to be there or you didn't include all assemblies in the build (Copy Local was set to false or something like that). What happens is the ASP.NET engine locates the marker, goes to find it in the assembly, fails to load it (because of missing reference) and thus is left with nothing, so it ends up throwing a "cannot find file" type error. That's not entirely true, but it doesn't know the difference. It went to load a page and got back nothing (because the loader failed to load it due to the missing assembly references).

Nine times out of ten it's a missing reference, though. Make sure all of the non-framework assemblies you've added have Copy Local set to true. If you've installed stuff into your development machine's GAC (ASP.NET AJAX Extensions was a common one back in the day) that hasn't been installed into the deployment server's GAC, either install it or include the assembly outright instead of relying on the GAC. ReportViewer references often cause this too since each Visual Studio version uses a different one (and generally doesn't include older versions).

ItemsControl hidden feature when binding to a list

I've been battling (and finally, at last, solved) a particularly annoying problem lately which I was convinced for the longest time must be a bug. As usual, it was instead an undocumented feature. I tried to wait to write this so I wouldn't still be fuming after having torn my hair out for hours on end. I'll attempt civility, but if you detect a tinge of frustration you'll know why.

New PC: retrospective

It's been about three months since I completed putting together my new PC. How has it served me? Do I have any regrets or complaints?

Debating politics with libertarians is boring

It's gotta be frustrating as hell to debate politics with libertarians. Not just because we're nutso and constantly at odds with both major political parties, but because it's the same damn answer from us most of the time: "Not the gub'mint's job!"

Intersection of geek and libertard

A big deal in the world of programming has to do with what's called "separation of concerns." Put simply, parts of a system (in this case, a computer program) should have as little overlap as possible. This ends up making things more modular, which is techy-talk for having individually replaceable (or change-able) parts. Think of it like parts in a car. You can usually replace your tires without fear of screwing up the starter, because the two aren't really connected even though they both go into the making and design of a car. You can do this because parts of a car are distinct and discrete. Tires come off. Seats and doors and windows are removable.

Be passionate, but humble

We have a duty to base our judgments on the best available information. This is not only because we owe it to other people to represent the issues fairly, but also because we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales. A great wrong has been done by this movement. We must put it right.

Coming from a prominent enviro-nut, that line is sure to cause a lot of turmoil for greenies and the guy that wrote it is effectively going to be disowned. Without getting into the debate on green issues too much (which, despite my slur earlier in this paragraph, I'm not completely against), I found this conclusion extremely well-stated.

Alcoheimer’s

This might seem at first like an odd observation, but I sometimes think drunkenness might be the closest most people get to experiencing debilitating dementias like Alzheimer’s disease.

Okay, a couple to-be-sures:

• Alzheimer’s et. al. is far, far worse than getting tipsy
• Being sloshed is nothing like forgetting your loved ones

But that’s why I said closest. It still may be far off.

Hear me out.

Being drunk puts you in the weird state of disconnect. You are impaired but aware. Your actions, mostly physical but also things you say, seem disconnected from your mental state a bit, like the two aren’t fully in sync. You are aware completely when you misstep or misspeak things, knowing you wouldn’t normally do so, and also knowing that it’s the weird sensation causing it. (This might be why drunk people are so often keen on stating that they are drunk.) You are completely aware but also a bit helpless and must witness your own humiliation.

From what little I know of dementias, this seems to be on that same track. They are aware of the things missing, though they are still missing and unknown. They know there’s a bathroom around here somewhere, or that they have a child all grown up that looks like… something. It’s frustrating to them, but only because they are aware of the impairment.

Much like severely shit-faced folks, extreme forms of dementia probably do leave them with little recollection, but for the vast majority of cases I think the similarity is there.

Of course, it’s only a glimmer of what it must be like. None of us normal folk can possibly know without actually having Alzheimer’s (and who would wish for that?) but, like I said, it’s gotta be the closest we’ll get to experientially understanding it.

Coincidentally, I made this observation whilst a bit drunk myself…

Enforcement via necessity

At work we’re about to begin a new project. Aside from the thrill of starting something new, we’re also going to try a new (for our team at least) development methodology: agile development. With the iterations and user stories and everything.

Admittedly, it’ll just be two of us including myself but it’s a start on the path to modernizing and I’m certainly down with getting more familiar with industry proven strategies. It’s good for my career and I agree with a lot of the principles. I can’t say the same for some of the others I work with, though; in fact, the further we get along with this and the more we fold others into using it, I can foresee a few being dragged kicking and screaming. Some just want to show up at 8am and leave at exactly 4pm.

We’re going to be using the latest and greatest Team Foundation, SharePoint, Visual Studio, and Expression Studio. We’re going to use .NET 4, WPF, and MVVM. In all likelihood we’ll probably also use MEF as a simple and easy dependency injection container. I’m certainly looking forward to it.

I haven’t seen it in practice yet (since we haven’t started just yet), but it seems to me that a nice bonus of using inversion of control, dependency injection, and the model view viewmodel patterns is that they almost fit in perfectly with agile. Breaking things up into tasks (based on user stories) and iterations fits great with an application built incrementally. Using interfaces and injecting dependencies means we can have a lot of “ghost” services that seem to exist but have no substance. We can then write a lot of the application parts discretely and as a team without too much stepping-on-of-toes, and just plug in the missing parts as we fulfill tasks.

Not surprisingly, one of the best ways to enforce something is to make it a necessity. By choosing these patterns it seems like it will help a lot as far as keeping us true to the agile method, mostly by reducing the friction between the development method and the design methods. It’ll be like choosing to park in the furthest spot from the office everyday to necessitate a bit of daily walking exercise.

Switching to a new development approach can be a big upset for teams, even if they’re enthusiastic about trying it (as I am). Even going into it positively, I’m still going to face a lot of “getting used to” things and learning as I go. That’s not hard in of itself but it’s an overhead cost when your real goal is to develop software since the learning curve will eat into your coding time and efficiency. Still, I think it’ll be worth it.

I’m endeavoring to write more on agile, design patterns, and the technologies as we use them.

March Movie Review

Short blurbs and A-F school-like grading of movies I’ve seen this past month, plus initial reactions to any upcoming movies for which I’ve seen trailers. My grading doesn't account for my enjoyment of the movie (i.e. Plan 9 would get an F but I'd still laugh a lot).

Tangled (3D!)

B+ I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought, the songs were few and not terrible (though a bit forgettable), the animation top notch, and the tone and story generally fun and rarely lagging. Still, it was very Hollywood safe (like Megamind) and very much standard Disney fare.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

B- Visually superb, keeps up the pace well, a good solid adventure flick that's easy to follow. Easily the weakest of the Narnia films thus far, due mostly to the source material. The cantankerous cousin stole the show for me.

The guild consensus

Like most people, I take my car to a mechanic when it’s time for an oil change. Despite claims otherwise, I happen to be a fairly capable human being. Sometimes I even use my brain. I’m fully confident in my ability to learn and apply basic car maintenance skills. I don’t for two reasons:

• I’m lazy
• I’m lazy I’d rather leave it to an expert

Specialization, as I’ve mentioned before, is a wonderful thing for humanity. It is what has given us such a wealth of choices and what allows us to master so many different things as a people. It can be daunting at times, but without it we’re merely collectively scratching the surface.

All because of that annoying thing called time. We only get so much of it.

Thoughts preceding the anniversary

Okay, I know everyone and their grandma has already busted him on this one:

“If you like your current health plan, you can keep it.”

Still, just taking the statement at face value, isn’t it kinda admitting you’re not really changing anything significant about the health care system?

Part of the reason health care is so broken and expensive is precisely because of the generous all-you-can-eat buffet-style plans that exist today that abstract away the cost from most customers. If we shopped around for health care like we did cars, well…

But admitting that the law won’t change it betrays the fact that it isn’t really going to do anything to fix the underlying problem, and instead do a lot of little things that ultimately complicate the system further and drive up costs.

I guess it is no surprise then, here on the (almost) one year anniversary.

Omake Bonus: The PPACA started life as the “Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009” with the stated description as “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes.” If I had to guess (read: pure speculation with no proof) this bill started as something else and was “re-appropriated” (see also: gutted and completely rewritten) so as to fast-track ObamaCare by skipping that annoying committee part. Let’s hear if for parliamentary procedure and legislative integrity. (So sorry, armed forces folks; maybe you’ll get that tax credit some other time!)

Crushing

I gotta admit, the more I listen to Rand Paul (and watch his videos) the more I like the guy. And it’s more than just his politics: I even like the way he talks and his stupid hair. Take that however you will.

Sure, he’s not really a “true” libertarian (whatever that is) so there’s still plenty I disagree with him on, but Sweet Christ on High it feels like ages since the Senate was graced with such a no-bullshit small-government mensch.

And the best part is that so far he’s not just all talk.

title

Nerdy paraphrasing

On the drive home from seeing Tangled (in 3D!) today*, Crystal and I had a pretty lengthy discussion which I realized could be summarized as this:

Men’s brains are overclocked 5Ghz single cores and women’s brains are stock 3.2Ghz hexa-cores.

* We saw it at the local dollar theater, which explains why we're four months late seeing it.

Admitting ignorance and conceding to consensus

I try to stay at least peripherally aware of many things so as to not feel like a complete idiot should said topics come up in casual conversation (or even in rants as I typically spout spittle-wise at my poor beleaguered girly mate at home). Some things I get to focus more on than others, often because I’m simply more interested in one. Politics, current events, philosophy, you name it — many of the things, and much more, that I choose to discuss here. There are many I’ve yet to touch on that I plan to some day (at least my excuse for not writing more often can never be for lack of ideas; I have a notes file with a dozen or more topics and I forget to add many more every day).

One that I know will be a bit of stickler is climate change. Sure, as if my stance on religion and my crazy notion of principles and individual rights wasn’t whack enough.

Fascinating interconnections

I’ll probably touch on this same riff many times over the years writing entries, but I can’t stress enough how the internet makes possible bizarrely random and awesome connections.

Case in point, I bring you this gem. I don’t know what to say about it. It floored me.

What floors me again and again, long after the surreal effect of watching this dude, and on many other videos and things, is how I ended up there. I won’t go into how, specifically, but I’m sure you can guess based on the fact that the video doesn’t get much traffic that it is fairly obscure all things considered (even within the microcosm of YouTube).

What particularly interests me is thinking that this guy had no idea how far reaching, both in number and in distance, the impact of his preparing, recording, and posting publically this video would go. That some guy and his girlfriend in Arkansas would find themselves late one Monday night jaws agape and eyes wide trying to take in all of this weirdness all at once and going into overload.

Who else has seen it? Who were they with? Where were they? In a weird way, I’m connected, if only on one common strand, to all the rest who saw this, and yet it’s likely we’ll never know, never meet, never cross paths, or anything beyond this one common ground.

And this kind of ethereal “connecting” of shared experiences happens so often each day to us all. Sure, as humans we’ve always thrived on shared experiences, but only the internet really makes possible this kind of mind-boggling distribution.

Just wow.

Also, the video. God damn.

An ASP.NET Repeater control that supports an empty template

One thing that always bugged me and felt lacking from the otherwise useful Repeater control is support for an empty template. Some of the other templated controls have this, but not Repeater. And yet, so often I'd want to have something nice to show in the case that there wasn't anything to repeat.

When underwhelming is a good thing

I'm always a bit astonished at my unastonishment upon finally trying out some new Microsoft three-letter acronym*. I suppose I should be used to it by now, but the experience never fails to be peculiar.

These new-fangled technologies, patterns, or what have you always start out as these nebulous and ethereal things tossed around in typical techno-babble jargon fashion. "I suggest using an MVVM pattern with IoC and one of the popular DIFs in WPF. Also, have you considered trying out MEF or MAF?" Any normal person would be justifiably dumbfounded by the preceding statement. (Is it any wonder IT folk are rarely invited to parties?)

I don't mean to diminish any interest in said technologies, as they very often end up being pretty cool and useful. My unastonishment upon using them is probably more related to relief at them not being as terrifyingly complex as I always for some reason assume them to be. Perhaps I've been scarred too much in the past learning about horrifying CS theories, NP Hard problems, and complicated algorithms by long-dead fellows (Dijkstra, you are the bane of CS sophomores).

At any rate, I'm once again in the position, this time with regards to MEF. I finally took a stab at it in a little side project I've been doing at work with the free time I've had lately between major projects. It's pretty neat, allows for a lot of customizability if you want to sub-class stuff, and isn't as bad as I was dreading. As far as DIFs go, it works fairly well, though as most people will point out its main goal isn't specifically IoC and as such it doesn't put emphasis on being the best and most usable IoC out there, but it can be used as one provided your needs aren't too complicated.

Omake Bonus: At first, I thought people were typoing when they said MAF…

* Interestingly, this phrase can be represented as exactly what it describes: TLA

January and February Movie Review

Short blurbs and A-F school-like grading of movies I’ve seen this past month, plus initial reactions to any upcoming movies for which I’ve seen trailers. My grading doesn't account for my enjoyment of the movie (i.e. Plan 9 would get an F but I'd still laugh a lot).

Megamind (3D!)

B+ Biggest weakness is that it is very Hollywood safe; and yet, it's well written and casted, so still very enjoyable. But don't expect anything revolutionary, experimental, or artsy.

The Social Network

A- Well acted and the dialog is quite sharp and witty, but the story feels a bit mundane at times due to its "based on a true story" reliance. A definite drama; don't expect much else out of it.

Sucker Punch Trailer

Daddy likey. I hope this is good, but kinda like Tron: Legacy even if the plot is weak the spectacle alone will be worth it I imagine.

The dumbest guy in the room

In a room full of senators, their staff, press people, and the president, the one who is least qualified to be making executive decisions on far-reaching policy is the president himself.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

I’m all for hyperbole, but…

It amazes me sometimes the vitriol espoused by some people over various political folk (Mrs. Palin, I’m thinking of you in particular). The hatred they arouse is truly awe-inspiring at times, but I only sort of understand it.

Let’s get a few obvious things straight: Obama, Palin, Biden, you name any one of these “controversial figures” and I’ll strongly disagree with them on many different topics. I’ll vent frustration over the dumb things they say or the bad policies they support. There are only few times, likely, you’ll see me agreeing with them on anything.

But hate? I don’t think so.

In fact, I’m sure that, were I to meet any one of them in person, I would be struck fairly well by how charismatic they were. Obama, Bush, Clinton… any one of them would be impressive in person. I’ve not met any of them personally nor been anywhere near them (and I doubt I ever will) but you don’t get to be President of the United States without having a bit of charm and presence.

Well, not usually.

Spoiler alert: the state of the union is strong

The always-sarcastic-but-in-that-cute-and-quirky-feminine-way Katherine Mangu-Ward over at Reason sums up my feelings on the SOTU:

Last year, 48 million viewers saw the speech, clocking in at about 20 percent of the U.S. adult population. That's nothing to be ashamed of. We should be happy that 80 percent of American adults found something better to do at 9 p.m. on a weekday than listen to a politician talk.

I happened to be one of those unfortunate 20 percent last year, but only because I was following along as Reason live-blogged it. And I did it again this year, too. I swear next year I’ll actually try to have some alcohol ready for the annual drinking game fun.

As for my reaction to the actual speech… see also.

Practicing with columns

Communication is such an important skill in so many careers and yet it seems it is often taken for granted. Part of the reason that I do these long pseudo-essays in semi-formal op-ed style is to really force myself to practice writing. I spend a lot of extra time trying to be careful about sentence structure, word choice, and style.

In college I got a lot of practice out of necessity; many assignments required writing, and sometimes lots of it. Now that I’m in the professional world, the obligations are far fewer. Sure, I write instructions, documentation, and long emails sometimes, but not nearly as often to keep up my “strength” and most of the stuff I write day to day for work are hardly a literary exercise. Forwarding jokes, pictures, and blurbs to co-workers doesn’t count.

Doing these posts forces me to organize my thoughts and express them intelligently and, if possible, entertainingly. It’s not easy, and I don’t claim to be particularly good at it yet. I’ve only been doing this a few months now, but I hope that after a couple of years I’ll be able to see some progress. At the very least I’m hoping I’ll not lose the practice I gained in school getting a creative writing minor (as an aside to my computer science major). Better yet, I hope to improve. Only time will tell, though.

Don’t get me wrong: I am interested and passionate about the topics I discuss here, but I admit that it’s also a good way to force me to practice writing. Being able to express ideas clearly and successfully and persuasion… these could be very useful skills to have in the future.

New PC assembly: it’s LEGO for adults

I’ve always enjoyed putting together computers. As a geek, cars were never really my area of expertise and it was nice to have something “hands-on” that I felt confident about. So when deciding on my new PC, I looked forward to getting to build it up. Really, though, it’s nothing to be too proud of: as Jeff said, “It's dead easy, like snapping together so many LEGO bricks.”

Manufacturers make it really simple and just about everything is color-coded these days. But it’s been fairly straightforward for as long as I can remember, even back in the Windows 95/Pentium days.

Underground Allure, or The Silent Libertarian Killer

As a [relatively] recent college grad I can still remember the smell of piss-drunk baseball-cap-wearing douchebags and the nasal voices of this-jacket-ironically-doesn’t-fit-well my-hair-is-ironically-the-same-as-it-was-when-I-got-out-of-bed indie fucks. Countless experiences with said groups have been etched into my psyche. This isn’t me on the psychiatrist’s bed unloading, though. It’s no longer harrowing; just stay with me for a moment.

One of the great many tropes I witnessed first-hand so much was the classic “It’s popular; now it sucks”. That link to TVTropes is an excellent article summing it up and I suggest you skim it now. It’s particularly funny to anyone who’s seen friends or idiots at parties do it because of how true it is.

New PC specs: wedding performance with practicality

Computers can fill many roles in our lives, and their flexibility and adaptability is part of what makes them so ubiquitous. The basic design hasn’t changed much since von Neumann and the market has simply grown and grown meeting every conceivable need. You’ve got ultra-portable netbooks, home and office laptops, family desktops, power gaming rigs, and various flavors of file and web servers.

In my case, we had just about all the good stuff already. A decent laptop to use on the couch, a slightly aged performance desktop for gaming use, and a Windows Home Server for backups and media storage. I set out to build a gaming and developer machine that would last for many years to come, plus so I and the missus would both have a full desktop to use. As such, I did not attempt to skimp on quality, but I was practical and wise where necessary.

Welcoming a new family member

Isn’t it adorable?

In my many years of using computers, I’ve never truly gotten to build a “dream machine”. I’ve always made do with Frankenstein monsters that I’ve cobbled together with a part bought here or there to keep going as the technology progressed. Or the dreaded “family computer” that’s shared and was purchased by parents without so much as a keen eye for specific hardware.

Mostly it has been a matter of money, which I did not have previously at my disposal. Even after getting a job, necessities took priority like mattresses, furniture, appliances, etc., and before you know it I’m still without a decent home computer of my own.

Well, this Christmas, I decided to change that finally. I would build exactly what I wanted, with little compromising.

My goal, as you’ll soon see, was future-proofing. I intend to spend well, but wisely, in order that this last for many years to come by anticipating future upgrades.

In the next few posts, I’ll cover both the specs and why I picked what as well as a fun adventure with photos as I put ‘er all together.

Facepalm

The media:

Within an hour of Saturday's tragic shooting in Arizona, the Twittersphere had quickly seized on a map put out by Sarah Palin's political action committee last year that had gun-sight images over the congressional districts of House Democrats she wanted to win for the GOP in 2010.
[…]
"The way that she has it depicted has the cross hairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have got to realize there are consequences to that action."

My reaction:

The weather outside is frightful

It always amuses me to watch the local collective freak-out whenever the weatherman declares “Snow’s a’comin’!” Bread, milk, and eggs go into zombie apocalypse rationing and schools and banks close faster than a cock-tease’s legs.

What can explain this mass hysteria? It isn’t like snow is unseen in these parts — in fact, we usually get a good dusting once or twice a year at least. And yet, without fail, it’s always like this.

Well, I suppose I can’t complain too much. My employer is one of those that shuts down at the first sign of ice, so I do get a free paid holiday…

More photos here.

Timidity in fear of reprisal

I haven’t written much on here thus far about the big G, mostly because I went through my big non-theistic binge some two or three years ago. Had I been writing then I surely would have been overflowing with thoughts on the matter, but as it has since become more-or-less “settled” for me I don’t often find topics to discuss. I’m also not too keen personally on ranting about how there is no god.

As a libertarian (something I have mentioned a few times on here now), I’m much more of a “live and let live” kind of guy, and as such I don’t really desire to trample on other people’s faith. If you ask me about it, I’ll tell you honestly: I don’t buy it and I think it’s horseshit. But then, nobody asks me. Maybe that’s for the best, as I’d rather like to avoid the inevitable consequences that would cause.

But that’s what brings me to the table today: atheist cowardice.

Change of exam plans

So I didn't take the test like I previously mentioned doing. None of the usual suspects like laziness or money were to blame. I wasn't abducted by aliens and no dogs consumed homework. I just decided not to do it.

I stand by what I previously said about the certifications (though perhaps I downplayed the personal financial hit too much). My reasoning for delaying taking any exams for now came after making that post, though I suppose the seeds had already been planted. I've had a lot of time lately to get more and more practice with Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, and WPF, which I previously had little to none. As such, I started to feel that spending a hundred bucks (a little more, actually, even with the coupon) on a test that's now obsolete wasn't such a good idea.

I studied for it, though, and was very prepared to pass it. I still learned a lot, as a result, and I'm for the better I think, despite not having the credit for it.

The test was only the first in a series of tests to earn an MCTS, which could then be continued into an MCPD. Since I'm so late to the game, though, my book and practice material was for the original VS2005 version. According to Microsoft, though, the updated VS2008 one didn't necessitate knowing the new 3.0 material but even so there was a 2nd Ed released of the study book. Now that VS2010 has been out for eight months, the new 2010 exams are available. This time they didn't even bother updating 70-536 — they just dropped it altogether.

There are a lot of other changes to the exams for 2010, such as no longer having a combined Windows/Web über-MCPD (Enterprise Application Developer). With the dropping of the old 70-536 test, the paths of Windows or Web now really need you to pick one or the other.

Frankly, I don't know what to pick. So far, in my four years doing .NET, I've done both more or less equally. At any rate, that's my new dilemma. I think I prefer to take the updated exams for VS2010 now that I'm using it primarily, but I'm really not sure which path will be more valuable at this point.

Converting an image to grayscale in WinForms

A simple little helper static method to easily convert any image to its grayscale counterpart using older WinForms classes (System.Drawing namespace stuff).

Bird droppings

By now everyone’s heard of our dead animal epidemic. So far, there aren’t any real results in from the vets on why, so far as I’ve read. Still, it was parroted around all day today at work. We (that is, as our state) love getting our fifteen minutes.

While I’m interested to eventually hear what actually probably happened once they’ve had time to figure it out, I mostly just enjoyed watching the slams fly on /.:

Maybe the birds realized they were in Arkansas and figured suicide was really the only way out.
antifoidulus

I got arrested traveling through Arkansas once. They got me for contraband. I had a bunch of books. I got off on a technicality: no one could prove they were books....
Himring

The birds were hit by emanations from the Arkansas school system, and promptly forgot how to fly.
hyades1

And my favorite...

Arkansas - America's Somalia.
Alsee

As someone who’s not big on tribalism, I have no problem with people slamming our state. It’s often much deserved and I often am the one doing it. (As if I were somehow obviously exempt from the label “Arkansan”).

It's also an interesting live experiment in tangents as you can literally watch the conversation get hijacked by a vegan/PETA debate on eating meat and then one on existence of god. Great sociology fun! The tangential stuff easily makes up half or more of the comments, which is probably because just about anything is more interesting than Arkansas on a slow news day.

These aren't frosted, though

I've been doing a lot of hardware research lately towards purchasing parts for a new system (which I'll probably cover in great detail soon). One of the hardest decisions was the graphics card, so I spent an especially large amount of my focus on reading up on them. Since this started during the limbo before Radeon 6000 series cards came out, lots of review sites were posting the same AMD marketing material as previews before the hands-on reviews were possible. As such, I saw the following slide a ton of times:

And every time I saw it, I thought of these:

Spoilers: I ended up going with Barts.