Rue Plumet

Click “more” to see a list of all of the interesting web sites I found this week. I keep track of my favorite sites using del.icio.us, a free web site where you can access your favorite links from any computer and share them with friends. You can also see all of my favorite links (not just the ones from this week).

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Gloria has her pod at work decorated for Christmas again this year and, as hard as it is to believe, it’s even more insane than last year. She added a few thousand more lights on top of what she had before and when you see it in person it’s kind of mind-boggling. The pictures don’t begin to do it justice because more than half of the lights are blinking on and off, so you can’t catch everything in one picture.

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The MPA (Music Publishers Association) announced yesterday that they are now going after sites that post song lyrics on the internet. Why in the world would they do that? The number one use for those sites is to look up a snippet of a song you heard on the radio so you can find out who sings it so you can buy the album. If you force all of the lyric sites to shut down, how will people find out who performs a song so they can buy it? I realize that the lyrics to songs are copyrighted, and if the industry really wants to shut down all of the lyric sites, they have the right to pursue it, but come on. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. This has to be the dumbest business decision I’ve seen in a long, long time.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas around here. The weekend after Thanksgiving Joy and I hung our wreaths outside and set up the Christmas tree, so that has been done for a while. The employee Christmas lunch at my office was today, and tonight I enabled the share on my computer with all of our Christmas songs so the mp3 player downstairs can see them (we leave them disabled during the year because Christmas songs in the middle of summer are kind of random). I think we’ll probably decorate the tree some time this weekend, which will be fun. Hopefully Charis will like seeing all of the ornaments. We still have some Christmas shopping left to do, and we hope to get the bulk of that done this weekend, too. Plus our Sunday school class Christmas party is Saturday night.

It’s hard to believe that Christmas is only a little more than two weeks away!

I thought this was kind of cool. There is a guy out there who started with a single red paperclip and he keeps trading it for something better with the goal of eventually trading to get a house. So far his trades have gone from the paperclip to a fish pen to a cabinet knob to a coleman stove to a generator to “one instant party” (a beer keg and a neon Budweiser sign) to a snowmobile. I think it’s a clever idea (I wish I had thought of it!) and it will be interesting to see how far he can go.

• One Red Paperclip Blog

OK, so maybe I’m not good enough to actually make money bowling, but it is fun every now and then. We went bowling with our small group from church tonight, and though I didn’t do too well (112), we did have a good time. I did much better (168) when we went with a different group of friends a few weeks ago, but I think I was just lucky that night.

We used to go bowling all the time in high school when they had “Rock and Bowl” at the local alley where you could bowl from 8 PM until midnight for a fixed price with really loud rock music and a disco ball. Crazy times. Anyway, tonight was “all you can bowl” minus the rock music and the disco ball. After the first game, we just started bowling crazy stuff like fastest roll (they have a little thing that tells you the speed of your ball) and slowest roll that was still a strike. Alex, a guy in our group, had a stylish sling-the-ball-from-the-side-with-massive-spin move that we all tried to copy without much success.

Every time I go bowling I am reminded of how much I liked duckpin bowling (kind of like candlepin in the Northeast) when I was younger. We had a bowling alley near our house in Virginia that had several duckpin lanes, and it was a blast. I think I’d go bowling more often if we had some duckpin lanes around here, but there aren’t any in the entire state, so I guess that won’t be happening any time soon. I guess I’ll have to keep that in mind if I’m ever on a trip to a place where they have a few duckpin lanes.

Click “more” to see a list of all of the interesting web sites I found this week. I keep track of my favorite sites using del.icio.us, a free web site where you can access your favorite links from any computer and share them with friends. You can also see all of my favorite links (not just the ones from this week).

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I spent a good portion of the day up in my attic. I installed a new antenna so we can receive our local high definition stations on the television in the den. I still think it’s bizarre that you use an old-school tv antenna to receive HD broadcasts. That seems kind of backwards, doesn’t it? It seems like you should get HD by some kind of futuristic system that doesn’t require wiring, grounding blocks, coax converters, or any of that stuff. Oh well, maybe some day.

I started working at 8 AM because the weather forecast was calling for rain starting mid-morning, so I wanted to get the outside portion of the work done before the rain arrived. I got the cable line run from the attic down the side of the house next to the drain spout (so that it is mostly hidden from view) and then I got the entry point drilled through the brick on the side of the house just as the rain began. That still left quite a bit of work inside the house, but at least that part of the job was dry.

I needed a few parts to mount the antenna, so my dad came by and we went to Radio Shack, Home Depot, and Lowe’s (what can I say, I’m cheap and I was shopping around for the best deal) to get a few things. Once we got back to the house I got the antenna mounted in the attic and then escaped from the fiberglass coated prison just in time. I hate that stuff.

Then I had to finish the wiring from the wall in the living room (where the cable came in from outside) over to the den. That wasn’t too big of a job, and then I was finally finished. Thankfully, everything worked perfectly on the first try, and before long I was watching the end of the SEC championship game in crystal clear HD.

We switched all of our major projects over to Visual Studio 2005 today at work. Overall the switch to VS 2005 seemed to go a little more smoothly than the switch from VS 2002 to VS 2003, so that was a nice surprise. All of our projects converted over without any problems and it only took about three hours to get everything to full compile again. So at this point all of our projects are now “error” free, and we’ll take the next few days to get rid of all of the new “warnings” that have appeared with VS 2005.

From the brief time I have spent with SQL Server 2005, I don’t think that transition will go as smoothly as the Visual Studio transition. We rely heavily on SQL Server scripts and the scripts generated by SQL 2005 are signiticantly different from scripts generated by SQL 7 or SQL 2000. I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that changeover pans out in the coming weeks.