What a long day it’s been so far. Woke up at 5:00AM to get to the airport 2 hours before my flight. Yeah, I’m one of those have to be early to not stress kind of folks. We landed on time and I made my way to baggage claim. First noise I heard? Slot machines of course! Good grief, do folks never stop playing??

My bags got there just in time for me to catch my shuttle from Reno to Lake Tahoe. It was a nice drive. One of the highways (for folks from the city a freeway is big and busy, a highway is two-four lanes with turns along the way) had signs every couple hundred feet. “Drive 50 Please!”, “Save our kids, drive 50!”, “Slow, slow, slow down” and on and on. Wow, do people really come ripping through here at 90+MPH or something? And if they did, would they be able to read the signs before they passed them?

Got dropped off at Harvey’s and made the very quick walk across the border to the Rodeway Inn. There was no sign (not even a tiny scrawled message) saying exactly when you entered CA. Odd, very odd. Anyway, I’m in my room at the Rodeway Inn hanging onto their wifi by a thread. It’s a nice place. Not fancy, but nowhere near a dive either. And they have cable!! Ooooh, cable…..

Shortly I’ll be off to trot over to Harrah’s to meet up with the other attendees that are starting to straggle in. More later, as I’ll try to post at least once or twice a day.

I was getting ready for Gnomedex and being the schedule geek that I am, I put every item on the current schedule in Outlook so I could sync it to my Pocket PC.

For those who want to do this but are too lazy, you can pick up a copy of a PST that has just the Gnomedex 2004 events in it. It should be compatible with Outlook 97+ even though aI created it in Office Professional 2003.

Note that I have a few quirks in here that may bug you: 1) I always put “@x - subject” as the subject (where x is a time) so I know when the event truly starts. I often put up-front leeway in my appts so I can schedule getting to places and not worry about if I have the time. Plus, it makes the reminder pop off a bit earlier. 2) I’m staying in South Lake Tahoe, CA, so the first appts of the day are all starting an hour ahead with a reminder of 1 hour. This way I know to get my tired ass out of bed and down the street into Nevada.

Hope this helps some of you out!

It looks good that NASCAR is going to be brought to a strip of farmland between Marysville and Arlington. International Speedway Corporation, who builds these tracks is said to make an announcment Monday; however, the Seattle Times reports the following from a conversation with Snohomish County Executive Aaron Reardon:

He later called the reporter to see if a story on the decision would be delayed. When told it would not, he then said ISC will be in Snohomish County on Monday to announce its decision. But he insisted he didn’t know what the decision would be.

“I feel good about it,” he said of the impending announcement. “I think it’s a positive sign that they’re coming to Washington state.”

But after his telephone conversation with a reporter, Reardon inadvertently left his phone off the hook and could be heard telling other county officials in his office that he was only “playing dumb” and that he had told another official Marysville would be the site.

Hilarious!! What a huge mistake for someone in his position. Busted!

I’m not normally a fan of NASCAR, much preferring to watch real racing, but I’ll likely shoot up for a race or two if it gets put in.

I’m a member of the FreelanceSeattle.net mailing list, and a question was posed today about Seattle blogging resources and gurus. I thought I’d take a moment to make a consolidated post of the resources I know of so that they all appear in one place.

Seattle area blog meetup group - This is a group of Seattle area bloggers who come together monthly to talk about anything blog oriented, as well as just about anything else
Bellevue-Eastside blog meetup group - Same as the above, but more focused on Eastside bloggers
Seattle area blog list with feed of posts about Seattle - List your blog here if you live or work in the Seattle area
Seattle Metblogs Blog - A newspaper of sorts if you will run by prominent Seattle bloggers with content about Seattle

Below are links to the most prominent bloggers in the Seattle area. This list is far from comprehensive as there are so many “gurus” in the area it’d be incredibly hard to list them all.
Robert Scoble - The Scobelizer
Dave Winer - Scripting News
Jeff Barr - Runs syndic8.com
Anita Rowland - The organizer of the above mentioned meetup groups.
Julie Leung - Running “Emotional Life” Session at BloggerCon 2004

If I’m missing anything, please let me know and I’ll either update or let the comments add to the content. This way the folks at FreelanceSeattle.net or anyone else looking for a list of Seattle area blogging resources can come and find all the links they need to get started in blogging.

My advice is:
1) Go to Seablogs and start reading the local blogs to get a feel for them and what they are used for. It’s also a great way to get to know some of the Seattle area bloggers.
2) Go to one or several of the meetups and start talking to the people who attend. They are all incredibly smart and very open and willing to share their experiences.

Good luck and welcome to the world of blogging!!

Well, it’s official, someone I don’t necessarily personally know over at Live Journal decided to hot link some of my library pictures without having the dignity to even attribute them.

Because of this, I’ve had to ratchet down my server and redirect all hotlinks from unapproved domains to a “this person is a thief” image. Bloody shame too, as I really hate to be a prick, but on the other hand, I work hard to take good pictures and I won’t stand for someone passing off my work as their own.

In the spirit of giving credit where it’s due, HTML Basix has a page that allows you to create a .htaccess file on the fly to use Apache’s mod-rewrite module to accomplish this. Took me 2 minutes to do that.

Credit also to HipToBeASquare for the temporary stop sign graphic I found on images.google.com (Hey, at least I downloaded it and put it on one of my servers… until I get around to making my own (This calls for a really creative graphic…)

EDIT - BTW, if you do want to hotlink something, feel free to shoot me a mail and I’ll likely throw you in the approved list if you agree to attribute the pictures…

I decided to give my current laptop one last try and in doing so give it some juice. I went on a memory search, and found a fairly cheap store on eBay. I followed a link to their memory configurator and fell in love. This store was OemPcWorld.com.

Other interactive find the right memory applications left me with a “am I really sure this is the memory I need” feeling in my gut. They send you through and give you the type. In my case, the only response I got was DDR PC2100. No mention of pin counts or the fact that I should look for SODIMMs. I only found all this out later. Other sites are very lacking in definitive memory purchasing. Taht and their product pages are fairly non-descript.

At OemPcWorld.com, they pull you through a few drop downs to determine your system type and then not only give great specifics, but they also link directly to their in-stock products that are meant for your system. No mistakes possible at all! They even keep your system name listed in your cart to make extra sure you are on track. Now, I’m a 10+ year techie veteran, but this is the only site that left me feeling 100% confident I was buying exactly what I needed. Memory is tough to figure out now a days…

Next kudo goes to their slick cart system. Very step by step easy to follow. But the cool part is the upsell mechanism they put in! As a web developer I dropped my jaw to the ground at the sheer brilliance of it. Right before teh payment step a screen popped in to the process that offered me a static wrist guard at half price for this order only. They knew I might want/need one and put it right in front of me at just teh right time. I didn’t order one, but the way it happened made me feel so happy that someone was getting things right!!

The last kudo goes to their customer service. Very fast, very responsive. I paid for Fedex 2nd day shipping so I could get the order by Friday to use the weekend to do my system overhaul. Having ordered Wednesday, I felt safe it would work. But then I wondered when they shipped orders out. Turns out any order after 10AM PST gets shipped out the next day. That would have put my memory here Monday (RATS!) So, I called at 3PM PST just after ordering to see if there was any possible way to have them drop the shipment today so it would get here Friday. Two minutes later I got the, sure we can do that for you answer, and an hour later their system sent me a “your order has shipped - here is your tracking number” email.

Their prices are very good, AND they offer RAM buy-back! If you want to send old memory back to them, they’ll give you a credit on your invoice! Can you believe that! Who the hell does that??!

If you need memory for anything, you need to go to OemPcWorld.com to buy it. Hands down.

Several weeks ago, Oprah gave away hundreds of new Pontiac G6 cars to all of the audience members. Pontiac agreed to pay the local sales tax and licensing fees (as well as donate the cars!)

Oprah spent nothing and got tons of press. The members of the audience? They got “free” cars. Well, not really free at all. Turns out they have to report the value of the car as income on their tax return, thus making them have to spot upwards of $7000 for their “gift”. What a travesty to those in need! A lot of these folks may not be able to afford the taxes on this gesture…

See articles at the Chicago Sun Times and NBC5.com.

An exerpt from the Chicago Sun times says:

That’s because while Pontiac agreed to pay for most of the local charges – things like state sales tax and licensing fees – the recipients have to report the cars as income once tax time comes.

By adding $28,500 to someone’s income, it can push them into a higher tax bracket – which means they will have to pay about 25 percent or more of the car’s value in taxes. And for a nearly $30,000 car, that probably means, for most of the recipients, shelling out $7,125 for the “free car.”

Via Drudgereport…

I’m in the market for a new laptop. The one I have now has been working pretty well, but it just wasn’t made for the work I throw at it. It constantly complains and limps aloing like a lame dog.

I need a developer machine. One that can natively run IIS, SQL, several IDEs, Enterprise Manager, and more all at once. It needs to never warn me that it is running low on virtual memory (I run a LOT of things simultaneously and this machine seems to be on the low end of the RAM pool.) The one I have now came with Windows XP Home and every once in a while wonders how I tricked it into installing IIS in the first place.

In retaliation for the work I make it do, it stopped allowing me to burn CDs on the internal CDR drive. Not good considering that is my main method of backing up eveything…

Major considerations: price, screen size, built in WI-FI, weight, and battery life. I’d love for it to have a built in CDR or DVD+-R (big bonus for DVD+-R since I have an 8MB digital camera.)

My initial thought was AlienWare, but those boxes are pretty expensive, and their customer service is getting slammed on Channel 9. I won’t stand for crappy customer service. Next thought was VAIO, but they’re kind of pricy as well.

Do any of you developers use laptops as exclusively as I do that can recommend something or at least give a quick pro/con of you current setup to give some more to think about for narrowing down the ultimate portable work station?

I’ll be heading to Gnomedex at the end of the month. It’s a three day conference which looks to have an incredible lineup. You should seriously consider attending if you have any involvement with online content of any type. Check out the lineup and pre-register while spots are still open.

If you’re going and would like to meet up while you’re there, feel free to shoot me a mail and we’ll schedule some face to face time.

For those who don’t know, I’m a Penn State alumnus. With that comes a great fondness for our football program and Joe Paterno. After last season’s dismal performance, we had a lot to look forward to this year. The team has improved greatly and stands the chance of a good year.

After today’s victory over UCF, we’re 2-1. While we played a solid game, our turnovers could easily have killed us. 4 fumbles and 2 interceptions??! Holy crap! If we expect to have any chance against the fairly solid Big Ten this year, we need to get that completely out of our system. There’s no way that having that amount of turnovers in a conference game will still allow us any chance at a victory.

Maybe it’s getting to be about time for JoePa to retire…?