Christmas this year was reasonably good, all things considered.

We opened the season up with the 24: Season 5 marathon at our house on the 23rd. From 8:00a to 1:00a the next morning, Jack Bauer fought terrorism in my living room while Stu, Meaghan, Jenn, my dad, and I sat entranced by the action. Watching it marathon-style really is the only way to go.

Christmas Eve being the next day, we slept in a bit (watching TV that long is actually pretty wearing... sort of counter-intuitive, I know) and finished the last of the package wrapping. That afternoon we headed over to Jenn's parents' house to do some gift exchange and chat for a while with them. Jenn brought her Nintendo DS because her mom and niece both got them for Christmas and it was the first time we were able to play with some of the networking abilities. It's actually a pretty slick deal and we had a lot of fun with it.

After that, we went over to Jenn's mom's cousin's house and visited with some of her extended family. I'd been there once before, several years ago, but while I recognized faces, I'm horrible with names and had to be re-introduced to folks. I'm introduced as "my husband, Travis" now, which is still weird for me to hear.

Christmas Day I had expected to be at my parents' house early, but they had things to do, so Jenn and I exchanged gifts to each other in the morning and it ended up being a little after noon before we got to my parents' house. We talked for a bit and I showed my parents some of the gifts Jenn and I had gotten each other, then my grandparents showed up and we ate dinner... at 2:00p... which I guess is what elderly folks expect, but is still something I don't understand.

We exchanged gifts with folks, Jenn and I cheaping out taking advantage of the wedding this year and giving a lot of wedding photos. I got a few very cool things that I'm enjoying on my vacation, including The Unit: Season 1, Gears of War (and the strategy guide), The Beatles' Love album, and more energy drinks than I've ever seen in one place at one time.

All in all, a good Christmas, but nothing screamingly outstanding or exceptionally notable. Jenn and I have been talking about the fact that Christmas sort of loses its magic more and more the older you get. It becomes less about the wonder of the season and more about trying to arrange schedules, make sure everyone has a gift, get everyone together come-hell-or-high-water... it's not at all like it was when we were kids, and it's not like you see in the movies. It used to be, and neither of us are really sure where things went wrong. Maybe it's the age difference, maybe it's the turmoil of the year catching up to us, maybe it's something else, but it's not the way it used to be - the way it should be. We're going to have to look at how to change that for next year.

This year the holidays have had an unfortunate shadow cast on them as, on December 21, we had to put down Jenn's nine-year-old cat, Semper. She was losing a battle with fatty liver disease and pancreatitis, and there was nothing we could do to save her. It came on very suddenly, especially considering just two weeks before that we had taken her in for a routine check-up and her blood work came back fine. She was a bit overweight (20 pounds!) so we were in the process of transitioning her to a prescription diet food when this happened.

She didn't do much. She'd sleep most of the day away, rarely venturing out of one of her three or four known "spots" around the house. She didn't like people much and she was scared of everything. If you were in eyesight, she wouldn't eat, drink, or go to the bathroom - she'd hide. She liked to destroy anything she could get her gigantic claws into and she'd bite you for no particular reason. She liked tools, particularly the hammer, which she'd roll around on and sleep next to. She was dirty and oily because she had medium-long hair and was too fat to clean herself. She breathed really loud like she had respiratory issues even though she was just fine. Her skin was so pink you could almost see through it, particularly in her ears. We called her "The Tub" because she was so huge.

She was fat, she was mean, and she was a good cat. She left us unexpectedly, and our other cat has been wandering around looking for her friend, a friend that won't be coming home. She was a total piece of crap and we miss her very much.

My mom just called me (she works for the Fred Meyer book buyer) and let me know that the new Harry Potter book is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. No release date yet, but it's kind of cool to get information on the inside track.

I'm always on the lookout for tools, tips, and tricks to make my life easier. I read Life Hacker. I follow Hanselman's Ultimate Tools List (I think I'm on the list). The thing is, I hate cleaning but I haven't seen anyone provide a list of ways to help me so I don't have to clean my house. I've found a few things I use and like, so here's my list of things I use to make it easier to keep a clean place.

Roomba - Roomba is my #1 weapon in my passive-aggressive fight for a clean home. Roomba is an automatic vacuuming robot made by iRobot. It has a home base that it charges its battery on, and when you're ready to vacuum, you pick it up and put it in the middle of the floor, turn it on, and away it goes. When it's done, it parks back at the home base and recharges for the next time. All you have to do is empty the dust bin and periodically clean the brushes (which I find easier and, frankly, more novel than pushing a vacuum cleaner by hand). I have two of the Discovery SE models (so I can do two rooms at once) and I love them. They do a great job (and you won't believe it until you empty the dustbin and see how much it picks up). Plus, if you ever have any issues, iRobot customer support is actually a great experience. I've called them twice (once I had a problem with one of the wheels and once I had a home base charger issue) and both times were hassle-free and satisfying. Any issues I had - resolved, no questions. If you have to choose just one of the things on this list to pick up, make it a Roomba.

Scooba - Scooba is the cousin of Roomba. While Roomba vacuums, Scooba mops. Most of my downstairs is hardwood and it gets nasty. Scooba to the rescue! Technically Scooba does some vacuuming, too, but not as much as Roomba. I usually run Roomba over the hardwoods to pick up any debris and then follow up with a Scooba run. Again, you won't believe how much gunk this thing picks up until you empty the dirty water tank and see it - it does an awesome job. The only thing I've run into is that on a large floor like mine you need to break it up and run in sections - something easy to do with the "virtual walls" both Scooba and Roomba have.

Kaboom! Never Scrub - I found this one by accident at the local supermarket and figured I'd give it a run. The idea is that you put this device in-line with the pipe that fills your toilet bowl and the water runs through a chlorine filter to kill any bacteria and add some bleach to the water to stop anything from growing. This thing is amazing. I have one of these in every toilet in the house. You still have to clean the outside of the toilet, but nothing grows under the rim or in the bowl. Note that if the toilet doesn't get used (never gets flushed, or doesn't get flushed often), then water won't be running through the filter and stuff will eventually start to grow. We have one bathroom that rarely gets used; we flush the toilet once or twice a week to make sure it stays clean.

Caution: if you have pets that like to drink out of the toilet, this isn't for you (or you'll have to make sure you keep the lid closed).

Scrubbing Bubbles Automatic Shower Cleaner - Hang this in the shower and, when you're done, push the button. Fifteen seconds later, it sprays a cleaning solution around in the shower that gets rid of soap scum and mold. Do this daily and it'll clean up a dirty shower or keep a clean shower clean.

Placement on this is key - if you put it somewhere so the spray head can't shoot solution to one area of the shower, it won't get clean; if you place it too low, it won't reach everywhere because the spray head isn't a fire hose. It generally is supposed to hang from your shower head, but we have one of those removable massage heads so I put a plastic hook in the shower.

I've found that, while it keeps the orange soap scum out, you do occasionally have to give the shower a good scrub to get rid of some of the more built-up scum. We have glass doors on the shower and still have to pay a little attention to them. Not as effective as the Kaboom! Never Scrub, but pretty darn good.

Plink - Less a cleaner and more of a freshener/deodorizer. Drop one of these in your garbage disposal and run it to get rid of the stink and give it a nice fresh lemon scent. You still will have to clean out your garbage disposal as usual (you do clean it out, right?), but in the interim you can get rid of the stench.

What gadgetry and doo-dads do you use to keep your house clean?

UPDATE: It appears that the "youparklikeanasshole" site I visitedis actually an infringment on an existing product that has been sold for a while. I've removed the link to the site out of respect to the original idea distributors, however my two cents:

First, when I was in grade school a friend of mine gave me a "leave-behind" that looked veeeery similar to this. It didn't actually say "you park like an asshole" on it, but it did refer to the driver as an asshole and had a checklist of infringements on it. That was over 20 years ago, and somehow I'm in doubt that it was produced by Cold Cocked Cards. It looked like one of those jokes you see posted on the wall of your local auto body shop, photocopied to death. If I recall correctly, it had Mickey Mouse on it with his middle finger out.

Second, the addition that the youparklikeanasshole site provided that made it cool was the ability to upload and categorize photos of the asshole parkers. Connecting the real-world leave-behind to the online world is a great idea and is what pushed it over the top from an "interesting idea" to a "cool site." It might be in Cold Cocked Cards best interest to either partner with youparklikeanasshole or settle or something because the photo upload thing is an idea that shouldn't be missed.

Anyway, it sucks when someone steals your idea, so I hope things pan out for everyone involved.


Original entry...

My friend John just sent me to my new favorite site: youparklikeanasshole.com. Maybe I should submit some of my Traffic Assholes to this one.

There have been all sorts of power issues since a windstorm that hit last Thursday, but on Saturday a transformer caught on fire and blacked out the entire city where I live. We had gone out to dinner Saturday night and all was well; coming home, it was like driving into an abyss. No street lights, no traffic signals, no lights in any home. The airport by us also had no power, which was pretty crazy because it always has lights going.

We drove around downtown Hillsboro to see how far the blackout went, but we never really found the end. It was sort of like a crazy science fiction movie where a giant EMP goes off. Power was restored for us at 5:53 the next morning.

I picked up some new CDs on Saturday because I was needing a little bit of new tune-age. I can't see buying from iTunes anymore because I can't un-DRM it (haven't really mucked with myFairTunes, but Stu says he can't get it to work) and I'm really not satisfied with 128kbps compression.

Placebo - Sleeping With Ghosts: I actually bought the import version of this, and not for the Sleeping With Ghosts album, but for the bonus second disc the import version comes with containing cover songs Placebo has done. Specifically, I was after their cover of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill," which is absolutely stellar. The rest of the bonus disc is good, as is the Sleeping With Ghosts album, but the killer tune for me is "Running Up That Hill."

Nelly Furtado - Loose: The song "Promiscuous" just would not leave my brain so I had to get this. The rest of the album is pretty good, too, though I feel like the first half is stronger than the second half. The first half feels sort of hip-hoppish, while the second half feels like it takes of on this latin tangent that I'm just not as into. Still, it's pretty good, and I think it'll grow on me.

Real Life - Send Me An Angel (The Best of Real Life) - These guys were one-hit-wonders with the song "Send Me An Angel" and I've only ever had a worn-out tape with it, so it was time to step up to digital. The rest of the songs on here are pretty lame, but the two versions of "Send Me An Angel" make it worth it (for me).

Most of the rest of the weekend was spent in last-minute scrambling about in preparation for Christmas this coming weekend. The 24 marathon is at my house on Saturday, so the weekend is totally out of commission for anything last-minute. I got a little bit of gaming in on the ol' Xbox 360, but not much. I think I'll try to play a little more tonight because I miss my digital buddy.

I'm really not sure what this is - if it's some sort of "viral marketing campaign" that I'm not smart enough to get, or just some experimental thing - but it's tied to Microsoft Windows Vista somehow and it's intriguing. There are these episodes telling the story of this guy, Demetri, and his odd psychological issues. I haven't watched all of the episodes yet, but I will. How can I not?

Granted, I'm slow to find this stuff, but EGM has a couple of hilarious articles where they have kids from today play classic games like Space Invaders and Tetris. The reaction of the kids is too funny and makes you feel kind of old.

Article 1 - November 2003: Pong, Donkey Kong, Handheld Football, Tetris, Super Mario Brothers, ET, Space Invaders

Article 2 - 2005: Punch Out, Adventure, Legend of Zelda, Star Wars, Defender, 720°, Grand Theft Auto, Gunstar Heroes, Galaga, Street Fighter II

I wrote a couple of days ago about having to re-image my work machine. Got an interesting email from a fellow named David Groves about an application that may be the answer to my issues: HyperOS. Looks like it's sort of a cross between ghosting and multi-OS booting where you can have several copies/versions of Windows running on one machine and easily back up/switch between them.

I've considered running my development environment in a virtual machine but I've never wanted to incur that overhead. Even with all the optimizations in the world, with the hardware I'm using the overhead of a VM makes it noticeably slower than running natively and I need more speed, not less. This HyperOS application looks like it gives you the best of all worlds. Maybe I should try it out.

Perhaps once every six to twelve months I end up flattening my work computer and getting the IT folks to drop a fresh, clean image on it. I install, uninstall, re-install, and generally mess around with the thing, so after a time it really starts running slow and unreliably.

This time, my problem ended up being that I installed Notepad++ (which I'm not linking to so no one falls into the same hole I did). Turns out if you use the menus in Notepad++ to associated document types with it, it deletes the old document type and creates one central type in the registry that it associates with the document extension. So if you associate XML, LOG, CONFIG, and TXT with Notepad++, they all become "Notepad ++ Documents" and if you change one to do something, all of them change.

This is particularly troublesome in the case of "BAT" - batch scripts. I associated "BAT" with Notepad++ and it removed the ability to execute batch scripts because "BAT" became a "Notepad++ Document." I futzed around with the registry and trying to recover from backup, but it was no use. Time to re-image.

I got the machine re-imaged on Friday at around 2:00p. I was up until 1:45a Saturday re-installing everything that wasn't included in the image. After final tally, there were over 45 applications, utilities, and other tools I installed. And that didn't count doing things like checking out the source to all the stuff I have to build.

But, hey, it's running totally fast now. Hehehehe...

I blogged before about the Burger King video games for Xbox, but I didn't know they also have a Dance Dance Revolution tie-in. I'm not sure if the game marketing thing is ridiculous or a stroke of damn-well genius.

I realize I'm probably the last to get on the boat with this one, but I came across the Yahoo! UI Library this morning and it's pretty cool stuff. It's an open-source set of UI components for creating rich web applications. Items I know I've had to write that are included:

• CSS-based grid layouts
• Client-side JavaScript logging for debugging and testing
• Client-side tabbed content

They have a lot of other neat stuff, too, like menu controls, treeviews, animation libraries... it's pretty slick. I'm going to have to play around with this and see how it works. It looks promising.

I was talking to Stu this weekend a bit about the recent release of .NET 3.0 and all the things it professes to do. They've added some huge features to .NET and they even offer some free online training on it.

But here's the deal: I do most of my work in .NET 1.1 right now. Financial institutions are slow to adopt new technology and there really wasn't any super-pressing need to convert to .NET 2.0 when it was released. Granted, we'll be moving to .NET 2.0 soon and do some work with it for internal tools, but production work still gets done in .NET 1.1.

For the .NET 2.0 stuff, it was pretty easy for me to grasp. They added a few new programming constructs, a few of the things I commonly do in ASP.NET are easier, and the rest of the stuff, for the most part, felt like they just solidified a good existing framework.

For .NET 3.0, it's a new situation. There are whole gigantic architectural additions that have been added. Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation... valuable stuff, but not trivial in size. Reading through some of the doc and examples, it doesn't look like it's super trivial in implementation in many cases, either.

I know a lot of pretty decent developers, but some fairly key .NET 1.1 concepts still escape them. Databinding is a concept I hear a lot of confusion over. Reflection is another one that stymies folks. Academically, they sort of "get it," but when the rubber meets the road, it's still pretty confusing to them.

Which brings us to the question: Is .NET becoming too complicated? Previously these large foundation-style blocks seemed to live as "Application Blocks" that the Pattens and Practices group put out. (Which, in my opinion, many times were far, far more complex than the 80% case will need.) You could fairly safely ignore these huge blocks and still be pretty sure you could write a good .NET app. Now they're part of the framework, so they're a lot harder to ignore. Was that a good decision?

Back in college, we wrote some simple Windows apps in C++. As such, I had a peripheral interest in seeing how the various class libraries grew up. I can still read the code I wrote for those apps. It makes sense. Have you written a Windows app in C++ recently? Tried to read the code for it?

I'm afraid that's what's happening to .NET. New features needed? Sure. I mean, who can question the value of a whole workflow foundation built right into the framework? But the complexity of these things will be such that you'll have a difficult time finding anyone competent in all of it. Developers will be forced to specialize because there won't be enough time in the day to keep up with all of the latest developments.

The people I feel afraid for are the developers coming out of school today. Or the developers who will hit the job market five years from now. I've been in on .NET from the ground floor, so there's a lot of background knowledge I take for granted that I've gained as I've worked in it and been present for these latest developments. I can't imagine what it will be like coming in at square one right now, trying to write a "Hello World" app in C# and then figuring out where to go from there.

The learning curve is only getting steeper, and it's just like what happened with C++. They're great new features, but are they worth it?