Just returned from a conference in Las Vegas.  There is only one word to describe Vegas:  "DAMN!"

More later.

The Bugati Veyron 16-cylindar 1001HP supercar is the finest automobile ever made.  Ever.  Forget Corvette.  Never mind Ferrari.  Not even the vaunted Porche 911 can touch this.

You have to see this.  If you don't get chills, you are dead.

I'm on a roll tonight! 

Tonight's local newscast made sure to include the latest numbers of casualties in Iraq with a running total.  Now I am not belittling the sacrifice of the great men of our military; I feel the news media is.  You know, in this area, where there is a considerable percentage of military families, you'd think they would be more sensitive.  Oh, but that would be CENSORSHIP!

I don't yet have the numbers, but I am going to get them.  The Iraq war, and subsequent occupation, has seen one of the lowest casualty counts of friendly forces of ANY conflict on this scale.  I don't remember hearing the amount of whining when we were in Somalia, Bosnia, or Kosovo.  I do remember the occasional body count in the last two, but not like Iraq.  It's stupid.

And the protesters they always show.  Couldn't they find anyone better?  I mean these people are about as clueless as it gets!  I guess that is the problem, isn't it.

I know I am whining here, but I am spending some good money to get a degree in order to get a good paying job in the IT industry.  Oh, wait, I already have one!  Anyway, with 17 years in IT, I think I might one or two things, and have gained some predilections of technology, to be sure.

I don't appreciate the constant Microsoft bashing.  I don't care!  Yes, I like Vista.  Yes, I've gotten paid a crap-load of cash over the years supporting Microsoft products.  But guess what, I have other technologies too!  But to waste almost my entire evening evaluating reasons "Why We Hate It", Vista that is, I am annoyed, to say the least.  Evidently, the instructor downloaded the presentation from Apple.  At first I had fun disputing the stupid crap:  I had to spend tons of money to upgrade my system (uh... I spent $20 on a new USB Flash Drive to be able to use ReadyBoost, but didn't have to.), backup sucks (I love the improvements and especially the automatic versioning), harder to use (WHAT!?!), blah, blah, blah.

Glad my $800 is going to good use this semester...

Ok, I wasn't going to comment on the Apple ads.  They're pretty childish and outright lies.  But I will send money to the first person I see do a good parody of the Vista surgery ad.  PC's response should be, "I didn't have to upgrade, but why not?  How about you?"  Mac then gets ready for his upgrade by shooting himself in the head and is dragged off screen.  A new, bigger Mac shows up.  "Who are you?", PC asked shocked.  "Hi, I'm a Mac.  Sorry about the other guy, I needed an 'upgrade'."

Very intriguing "Quote of the Day" showed up on my Google homepage today:

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
  - Thomas Sowell

Upon following the link provided, you will get a longer, and rather more complete, version of the idea

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

Now, I really like this quote.  It matches my own world view that I have deduced from reading a lot of different material, better than most I've heard publicly, but I have never heard of Thomas Sowell.  That surprised me as usually characters of this nature are hailed as Nazis or Racists in the popular press.  I decided I wanted to include the quote on this site, but needed to do a little digging first.  I will not post quotes from individuals I don't wish to provide exposure to, unless it is to prove a point, usually negative, about that person.  This is what I found:

Thomas Sowell is an economist for Stanford University, is well published, award winning and respected social conservative, according to Wikipedia.  I did not read the entire article as it is rather lengthy.  But his focus seems to be in social programs and their failures in the 20th Century.  Many of the summaries of his work hint that racial oppression is not a significant factor in the last 3 or 4 decades in the problems of lower income groups.  Further digging turned up an interesting interview that included some more intriguing thoughts:

Thomas Sowell: A flat tax would not penalize additional efforts at an increasingly higher rate. This would reduce the discouragements to such efforts and to the taking of risks.

Interesting, I've been saying that a graduated tax penalizes the successful and ultimately discourages risk, but I am not an economist.  Not directly social, but a very important issue to me as a mid-income taxpayer.

Thomas Sowell: Affirmative action has been a boon to those blacks who were already affluent and particularly for those who were rich but has done little or nothing for those blacks who are neither. Moreover empirical data from other countries around the world shows the same general pattern from group preferences.

That's not a popular opinion, and bound to be viewed racially.

Thomas Sowell: The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them. If those who were enslaved were alive, they would deserve huge reparations and their captors would deserve worse punishments than our laws allow. But death has put both beyond our reach. Frustrating as that may be, creating new injustices among the living will not change that.

The "Back to Africa" plan in intelligent terms.  Also very controversial, and my point exactly; not that we should send the complainer to Africa, but modern day descendants are better off because of the suffering of their ancestors.  I will go one step further and challenge anyone to come up with an ethnic group that couldn't make that claim.

Now about this time, you are probably wondering why you haven't heard of this man before.  Surely the race-card toting headline-chasers would have exposed him as hateful and oppressive.  But I then found his personal site, including a biography.  Check it out yourself, but here is the surprise:

He is completely non-biased.

Some background:  A few months ago, I decided to put a little AJAX in an app I inherited.  The problem was a huge form that used post-back to fill some dropdown boxes based on values in other elements.  I coded the AJAX all from scratch, or near scratch anyway, mainly because ATLAS was still in early beta and this is a 1.1 app.  Anyway, everything worked well enough, or so I thought. 

This is where good end-user testing is so important.  You see, since I inherited this beast, I don't know how everything is supposed to work.  Some of the nuances are not always apparent to me and I might miss them.  For example, when creating a new form, a set a parameters will autofill the main form.  When I inserted my AJAX streamlining and tested, everything worked great from my perspective, a new form was created with some of the values prepopulated.   What I didn't realize was that the dropdown list was not being read correctly by the codebehind, because from it's perspective, it was empty the last time it saw it and was not reading the form post value.  I don't know yet whether this is my fault or the friendly designer who wrote this screaming... thing, but the end result is that not all of the values were filled that were supposed to.

So here's where my post title comes in:  When I put the AJAX calls in, I did not change the code-behind.  I simply added my JavaScript and disabled the elements' autopostback attributes.  When developing systems I don't understand, I make as little impact as possible and comment like hell, so someone can come in behind me and fix what I broke.  I also CYA in comments for who requested what changes and why.  Fixing broken code reminds me constantly about the importance of good commenting, despite that I don't do very good job of that in my original code.  Anyway, the implementation of some business logic features and these got rolled up, tested of course, and deployed late yesterday.

Well, this morning I get a frantic call and a HD Ticket:  Yep, the form is not populating all of the values.  It needs to be fixed immediately!  And behold!  It only took 15 minutes to find the cause and simply turn on the autopostback and disable the JavaScript.  All in the aspx file!  If I had removed or commented the methods in the code-behind, I would have had to recompile everything and risk version conflict; I had started on the next set of changes, of course.

So there's a lesson here, I think.  Although it is not the most efficient coding technique in the world, there is ample reason to not remove a method that you think is unused, especially if you do not understand the total impact of a change.  Let it sit there, all it is hurting is a tiny amount of overhead and some compile time.  This time it really saved my bacon!  Next time it will probably bite me.

Disagree?  Send me your exeriences in comments!

Once again it is time for me to rail against the ignorance that is Daylight Saving Time.  But I will spare the vehement accusations of stupidity of the whole system and concentrate on our state of resolution.

I have always advocated removing DST entirely and possible all American timezones as well.  Why not simply use GMT?  It's all just arbitrary numbering anyway; after all, I use 24-hour time myself.  Anyway, the U.S. Congress, whose record of learning valuable lessons from the past include issuing yet another dollar coin the size of a quarter after the last two incarnations failed, decided to change DST this year.  But instead of a move toward elimination, they decided that it should come 3 weeks earlier and last longer.  I think it is now the norm, not the exception!

"Who cares?", you say?  How about every IT shop that does any business on this continent!  I will be working on Sunday to ensure all of my systems don't mysterious choke because of syncing issues, as will every other responsible admin and/or developer that has servers in this country.  Hopefully, it will only be the 30 minutes it takes to validate functionality, but who knows.

Sometimes I am SO proud to be American.  Yeah, whatever...

Came across this freaky site today.  http://imminst.org/  I wonder if TC is a member?

Here's a fun thing to do at work, but only if you sit close enough to the microwave with the numbers that don't work so good:

When you finish zapping your stuff.  Discreetly hit the '1' button as you close the door.  The next person to use it may not clear the keypad before entering their time and be surprised when their lunch goes for 12 minutes instead of 2.

Ha!

Or just (Democrat) politics, as usual.  Only days after Gore conspicuously accepted the Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, a propaganda piece on energy depletion, ABC News exposes Gore as a incredible hypocrite.  It seems that Mr Environment uses 20 times the amount of energy as the national average.  While I don't condemn him for that practice, despite a personal feeling that it is a ridiculous inefficiency, I do find him in contempt of humanity and desire his public exposure as a fraud.  This is the politico that is constantly harping that I, and you, are destroying the planet through frivolous activities as driving to work and heating our homes.

Shenanigans!!  I am calling Shenanigans on Al Gore.

The man is a dratkcuf.  If I find out that he was behind the DST embarrasment, I just may have to start a crusade against the corrupt bastard.

Yep, John Scalzi's latest is ticked off the list.  I have literally read all of his fiction to date.  (Well, I only listened to The Sagan Diaries, though I am glad I didn't waste my limited reading time on it.  I didn't even listen to all of it, it was a bit too much fanboi for me.)  Don't let the goofy cover art or the odd name dissuade you, The Android's Dream is right up there with the rest of Scalzi's titles in quality and enjoyment.

The story of Harry Creek, UNE Diplomat and retired Combat Veteran, follows the mystery of the Evolved Lamb, the hostile alien nation of Nidu, and a chase through the galaxy.  Creek is the only one with enough answers to unravell the tangle, at least with the help of his rather unique AI.  As the opposing factions start closing in, it looks like there is no way out, but for an interesting twist hinted at by the Churches secret AI that brings the whole mess swirling into a very interesting climax.

Scalzi's 3rd major novel has absolutely nothing to do with the previous two books.  TAD stands alone, so far.  It is the story of inter-system intrique in the style of Robert Ludlum, with the humor of Christopher Moore, and the sci-fi flavor of Robert Heinlein.  Good, not great, plot twists mixed with just the right amount of believable future tech make a balanced story that I really enjoyed.  I was very impressed by the InfoSys tech that Scalzi invented for this book, seeing as I am in the industry and he is not.  Some cute holes, but nothing to gripe about.  Well, done, John.  I am still a fan!

Did I do a review of Agent to the Stars?  I can't remember.  It was not actually published, but was released as a CC LIT copy on scalzi.com.  It was much later published by Subterranean Press, a niche publishing house, for a limited collectors run.  I did not purchase it, but did read the LIT version soon after getting my IPaq 2 or 3 years ago.

And sorry for the bad review.  Just not on top of my game tonight...

I heard from a reputable program this morning that up to 83% of Americans believe that Christianity, including Creationism and the Resurrection, is true.

Yet, strangely, as many as 40% believe that astrology is also true, despite the fact that it is entirely contrary to Christianity.

I know what I believe:  Sometimes it is embarrassing to be an American.