Pop Quiz: What do you get when you stick a guy that has been trained in classical guitar infront of the TV too long?

It's been a long and fairly stressful week. Not that anything has gone wrong. Things are going good at work and I'm very excited about our Five Year Wedding Annivesary coming up. I can't believe it's already been Five years. I must confess I think my Beautiful Wife is as Lovely and Wonderful as ever.

So I'll talk about work for a minute. I know I haven't been talking about it much lately, or much of anything lately. And for that I apologize, the updates have been slow in the coming. I think it is somewhat related to work. I can talk a little about what we've been working on, however I won't bore you with the technical details. So we are revamping a major system that alot of our members use. Because what we are working on has just an impact on our members, there have been a lot of sleepless nights and late night coding sessions. It's not been terribly unusually to receive an email from someone on my team at 4am. So because of my attention being focused there, I just haven't had very much to write about.

Now, on to the Wedding Anniversary, I don't know why but the five year anniversary seems to be a little milestone for most people. I guess five years is went you are not considered newlyweds anymore. That being said it feels like just yesterday we were married. The past five years with my Beautiful Wife have been wonderful and I look forward to a lifetime more with her.

Well, It's 5:30am, so I get my oatmeal cooking and my day started. Have a great day everybody

Lately I’ve been shooting film. I think it has to do a lot with the fact that I’ve been reading The Ansel Adams Photography Series 2. I’ve finished the first book in the series “The Camera”. I’m in the middle of the second book “The Negative”.  So in a climate that seems to be moving away from film, with new digital cameras popping up left and right. I know shooting films seems like a step back, but sometimes you need to go back to the roots to move forward. So like I said I’ve been shooting film and really enjoying it. I’ve been using my old Pentax Spotmatic II. It’s interesting to me that in photography getting the exposure, aperture, shutter speed, framing are virtually the same between digital and film or analog as I’ve heard it called as of late. Somehow I get an enjoyment from film that isn’t exactly the same as digital. It’s a more tactical and auditory experience. The feel of a all metal camera. Advancing the film with a thumb winder and the sound of it advancing. Winding the film at the end of the roll. All of theses things add to the enjoyment of photography for me.

Well so now I have to get my film developed and of course I want a digital copy of my images. Surprisingly enough I’ve been using Costco for my developing and they’ve been doing a pretty darn good job and at a really reasonably priced. They’ve done a great job on the scans. However there was one little thing that was missing. I really wanted the exposure information attached to the jpeg. I admit that I’ve been spoiled by my digital camera that way. So I’ve been keeping a note book and noting all of my exposure settings for each image. So now I have my digital versions of my film photos, and I have my exposure information now, I just needed a way to merge the two. After a google search I found Reveal 1.0. It’s open source software that runs on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, and lets me edit the EXIF information my jpegs. So now I have a great method for affixing my exposure information to my digital images. Reveal is a very easy to use program with a pretty straight forward interface. I do have to admit that this isn’t a complete EXIF editor, however it does have the basics and fits my needs pretty I well. 

Being a software developer I am always interested in where the next big improvements will come from in the way we interact with the computer. Currently we have ergonomic keyboards and mouse, some people have tablet pc's that allow them to use special pens (stylus) to input text right on the screen just like writing on a notepad. While that method does work well for some people, it seems like a combination of the old way and the current way. Pen and paper being the old way and  keyboard being the current way.

 I stumbled across this article this moring on digg.com that just blew me away. the article is by Jefferson Y. Han on Bi-manual, multi-point, and multi-user input on a graphical interaction surface. While the text of this page may not capture your imagination, the demo will. There is something so natural and tactile about the way he is interacting with the screen that it makes sense to me that this will be the way we work with computers soon.

So this is a complete rant. Last night, I was up till 11pm working, then woke up at 4am this morning completely on fire from the a niacin flush because of the my medicine, and who knows what else. So I had to take a shower to cool down, and man was I dragging. Then I ended up catching a later train because I was so tired. Then that train was late, so I ran to the platform at 7:59am to see the 8:00am, however the doors were closed. Then the train started to move and I waved to my friends on the train, then the train rolled 30 or 40 feet and stopped. However the conductor didn’t feel the need to open the doors for the three of us standing there wanting to get on the train. I can see my train friends saying to open the door, but no, they just sat there for 5 minutes with the door closed and then pulled away. So I had to wait for 25 minutes for the next train, so of course I got to work late, then of course I get in the elevator and there is the CEO. Man, are you sure it isn’t a Monday? 

So my Sis and I had an interesting little Comment conversation yesterday and today on my photoblog. Since the conversation had almost nothing to do with the image I figured I would move it over here to share with all of you.

Re: Hello Dolly Great, Now I'm going to have that song stuck in my head all day long! *little laugh* Sis Sunday, January 22, 2006 9:18 AM

Re: Hello Dolly Sorry Sis, it was the only name I could come up with for this image. How about another line from a movie. "Woman, woman woohoo man, she was a thief you gotta believef she stole my heart and my cat. Betty, Judy, Josie and those Hot Pussycats ... Girls of cartoons will leave me in ruins, I want to be Betty's Barney... Jane get me off this crazy thing called Love"  - So I married an Axe Murder Russ Sunday, January 22, 2006 9:24 AM

Re: Hello Dolly Not to correct you, but to correct you. ;) Its Woman, Woe-Man, WOAH-Man! At least thats what the script said. ;) sis Sunday, January 22, 2006 7:52 PM

Re: Hello Dolly For your so I married an axe murderer fix, I give you the script! http://www.weeklyscript.com/So%20I%20Married%20An%20Axe%20Murderer.txt sis Monday, January 23, 2006 3:07 PM

It's been a while but here is a post about code. You've been warned.

This morning I was working on bit of code. I prefer to write my ASP.NET with code-behinds, however for this project certain pieces are inline pages. I'm a team player so I'm writing inline pages.
Well after adding a function that returns some javascript to the page,  I got the following error: "CS1010: Newline in Constant". So what the heck does that mean I wonder to myself, so I google the error and come to find out it is a know issue.  If your code is writing out a "</script>" tag to the page, it causes this compile error.  The work around is to split up the tag. "<" + "/script>".
Fun stuff. Here is a link to the <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=827420">microsoft knowledgebase article</a>.

Happy Coding