Categories
Blogging Life

Saturday Night, Pioneer Place, Blogging

Last night, a friend and I headed out around Central MN, we ended up going to the Pioneer Place, which both of us have heard of, but never ventured into. It is a theatre, that has a little bar in it. Almost feels like a “nice” house party. There was some guys playing acoustic guitar and piano. Very laid back, no smoking (yes!) and just a cool atmosphere.

It is kind of funny, because earlier in the night we talked about going to see Amadeus which is playing there right now. Obviously we needed tickets, but we just weren’t thinking.

Anyways, I recognized one of the guys up on the little stage, the piano/harmonica player. Earlier this week I was getting made fun of #1 because “blogging” was on the front page of the St. Cloud Times, and #2, because I didn’t make the article 🙂 – anyways, I read the article and it covers the blogging life of Jeff Lee, who run’s a blog called “View from the Cloud”

I snapped a picture of them playing, sounded really good too. Something I could see myself doing if only I could find someone to play with 😛

Jeff Lee at Pioneer Place

I’ve been doing alot of blogging lately, and really started a few years back, but I never really got into the St. Cloud blogging scene. Seems that SCSU Scholars just wasn’t my type of read. I’m more into technical blogs, and also friends that keep their blogs up to date [everyone is a blogger! – one post and gone for a year :)]. I’ll probably subscribe to Jeff’s blog now that I have met him, so that is kind of cool.

In any event, I think I’ll probably be hanging out at the Pioneer Place more often. I’m pretty sure they have Wi-Fi too. What I need to do is drive around and find all the hot spots, or, I could just buck up and pay the extra $ to have my phone (Pocket PC 6700, which BTW, I probably have sold more of them than salespeople at Sprint – I think I probably sold 2 last night just showing mine off) as a modem, which I just might have to do.

Fun times, as usual 🙂

Categories
Blogging

How to be a better Twitter'er

If you want to become a better twitter’er (to many t’s, e’s and r’s)  take a look here.

I’ve found that if you follow some of the people who post every 5 minutes, its way to much coming at you. I turn off following them and maybe check on the site once or twice a day, other than that, make sure your friends are following you. I’d like to get into the @Username: stuff, plus direct messages.

What would also be cool is integrating location info in the txt updates. Take my Pocket PC 6700, hook up the bluetooth GPS, and then publish up a link to Google Maps or something with the location of where I’m twittering from. Maybe that could be my next little side project 🙂

 

Categories
Life

Happy 311 Day

Happy 311 Day everyone! Although this year, there is no 3-11 day show in New Orleans, but hopefully next year. I so want to go next year!! As you can see, I’m donning my 311 gear!

 Picture 5.jpg

Categories
Life

My Mii can hit triples like Sam Crawford

Looks like my Mii can hit triples every time he’s up to bat accordning to Jen. (btw jen, thanks for nod, how about a link?) That rocks. Although I’ve heard reports that when he plays catcher, he sometimes misses sac flies. Oh well right?

The Mii/Wii system is pretty cool. I think if they made it easier to register consoles with your friends it would open up tons of possibilities. Also, if you could just play against your friends over the network, that would be awesome!!

Playing the Xbox 360, I see how easy it is to connect to friends and play, and with the Wii, it’s just cumbersome to get going.

I subscribe to Nintendo Power (yes folks I’m stuck in 3rd grade when it comes to video games), and they have a new game coming out, MySims. Looks pretty cool, but you have to design new characters in the game. Why not let you use your already pimped out Mii? And, if you want to really go Mii crazy, Kyle has some tips on how to get rockin.

Oh, and who is Sam Crawford you ask? Why, none other than the all time career triple leader in MLB. Ty Cobb is a close second though.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

Executing MDX – Errors

So, a while back I fired up Visual Studio 2005, and was making some Reporting Services reports. I need to do some custom MDX, and was getting errors trying to exceute it. WTF right?

Query preparation failed. -> Error in the application. (msmgdsrv)

Nice error, as always. So, did some digging, and actually found a hack around it, since running the update that was supposed to fix it didnt seem to want to work.

Query preparation failed.
-> Error in the application. (msmgdsrv)

Brian Welcher has a blog post describing the work hack around it to make it work
“To manually correct this, ensure the versions of msmdlocal.dll and msmgdsrv.dll in the following directories match the versions in the %Program Files%Common FilesSystemOle DB directory.

  • %Program Files%Micorosft Visual Studio 8Common7IDEPrivateAssemblies
  • %Program Files%Microsoft SQL Server90ToolsBinnVSShellCommon7IDE
  • %Program Files%Microsoft SQL ServerMSSQL.*Reporting ServicesReportServerbin”

I did that and it worked, which is great. But now I sometimes see some odd behavior with SQL and Visual Studio and I always wonder if something is jacked because of changing those dll’s. Well, hopefully I don’t see the issue the next time I reload my machine.

After installing Office 2007 Beta, SQL 2005 and then Excel Add On’s and God knows what else, it’s just amazing anything works on my machine. Fun stuff!!

Categories
Life Product Reviews

Microsoft Windows Movie Maker: I'm the next Steven Spielberg – "Star Wipe!"

So, I have a ton of pictures that I take with my Sprint Pocket PC 6700. I decided to take some and make probably the most basic movie, slideshow with some music. Works pretty well. You can just import the pics, import the music, say “AutoMovie” and then edit the beginning and ending credits.

The transitions are added automagically and it actually looks pretty good. Reminds of the time Homer tries to make a dating video for Flanders

Lisa: OK, I finished editing the gardening sequence. . .
Homer: OK, from here we star wipe to a glamour shot of Flanders paying his bills, then we star wipe to Flanders brushing his teeth
. . .
Lisa: Dad, there are other wipes besides star wipes. . .
Homer: Why eat hamburger when you can have steak?
Lisa: I’m taking my name off this thing.

Homer Simpson - Star Wipe

Anyways, you can publish out different formats (well, not different formats – just WMV from what I see) , but publish out different sizes (email, your computer, etc) which just makes the quality better or worse depending on size.

Might next gadget just might have to be a digital video camera. It’s only the next logical step. 🙂

Categories
Geeky/Programming

First-chance exception at 0x7c812a5b in : Microsoft C++ exception: CError at memory location

If you are programming and you have some calls to ShellExceute in your code, and you are debugging, you might see this fly across the output window

First-chance exception at 0x7c812a5b in : Microsoft C++ exception: CError at memory location

The app will be your exe name, and location will be a memory location.

You can reproduce this by calling ShellExecute with a url as the file param like so:

ShellExecute(NULL, “open”, “http://www.stevienova.com” , NULL, NULL, SW_SHOWNORMAL);

You should have a path to a file, but what Windows does is look for the http:// or .com and then does a lookup in the registry for the default handler, which more than likely is Internet Explorer, or Firefox, or whatever is your default browser. More info here

INFO: Use ShellExecute to Launch the Default Web Browser KB 224816

I haven’t tried catching the exception, but I can’t figure out a way to get rid of it. It doesn’t seem to hurt anything and actually doesn’t throw up an error. Just an annoying little quirk in Windows and C++.

I did a little digging on Google and didn’t seem to find any more info, so I guess it isn’t a huge deal. Ahh, the mystery of Windows!!!

Categories
Blogging

Twitter is Addicting

Been using Twitter this week, and now I have some friends on there, and it is really cool and addicting. I can see how this can keep you up to date with your friends and just is kind of fun. Its a good way do share snippets of info with your friends, semi-blog type app.

Categories
Geeky/Programming

ASP.NET C# – Grabbing a posted file and save to disk

Sometimes you want to grab a file posted to a page, maybe an image upload or other file upload

HttpFileCollection logFiles = Request.Files;
string path = System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[“LogPath”];
if (logFiles.Count > 0)
{
HttpPostedFile logFile = logFiles.Get(0);

logFile.SaveAs(path + System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString() + “.log”);
}

As you can see, I am setting the log path from the config. The reason for this is, the path to save to is absolute, something like c:blahblahwhatever

I am saving the file with a GUID as the file name, for uniqueness, but you can grab the name form the file object as well. There are some other gotchas. 4MB limit on files, unless you tweak the HTTP runtime in the web.config, also, you need to make sure that Network Service or ASPNET user has rights to modify the log folder you are writing too. Otherwise you can impersonate a user in the web.config, and make sure that user has rights.

Categories
Blogging

Twitter – What are you doing?

I signed up for Twitter this weekend. Its pretty cool so far. Just IM an address (gmail/aol, etc), send a txt, or update from the web. You can update people on what you are doing. Also, you can get alerts when people update what they are doing. I also put a badge on my blog on the right. Pretty cool app, form the same guys who made Odeo

BTW, my Twitter username is ScaleOvenStove