I decided this morning that I cannot stand patriotic art.

There’s some sort of local event going on to honor the memories of the people who died in the 9/11 attacks (which I think is fine). Part of that event has a sort of gallery of objects created in memory of these people. The majority of this is what I would call “patriotic art.”

Patriotic art, at least in the US, is probably the most contrived form of attempted emotional manipulation ever. You’ve all seen this in one form or another in your lives. For US people, patriotic art looks like this:

Take an airbrush - it’s always airbrushed - and draw a bald eagle. Throw a waving US flag in there somewhere - maybe the eagle is carrying it, maybe it’s behind the eagle, maybe it’s just blowing in the wind. Doesn’t matter - just put a flag in there. Now put one or more soldiers/firefighters/police officers in the picture in a position that looks like they’re overcoming impossible odds. If you choose soldiers, you have your choice of wars: Revolutionary, WWII, Vietnam, or Desert Storm. Make sure any soldiers you have in the picture are carrying rifles. Now throw some blue sky and the optional “POW/MIA” flag in there and you have patriotic art.

You can see this crap, larger than life, printed on t-shirts, motor vehicles, or inspirational posters.

I’m as patriotic as the next guy. I feel bad when tragedy strikes and I’m proud when the citizens of our country rise up together to overcome difficult times. But I can not - nay, will not - stand for this ridiculous form of art anymore. It’s not an homage, it’s a disgrace. I don’t care if you successfully completed the free art test from the correspondence school. This is crap.

Add one to my [long] list of pet peeves:

I cannot stand it when people clip their nails at work.

I’ll accept it if you have to fix a hangnail or something, but if you feel the need to deal with your nails at your desk, step back and take a long toke off the reality reefer: No one wants to hear your stupid nails being clipped, nor do they want to step in/sit in/touch the clippings that are no doubt flying all over your cubicle.

We have restrooms for personal grooming. Better still, try dealing with things like that at home. That clip-clip-clip sound coming over the wall is worse than scraping on a chalkboard. Do something about it.

I have this feeling that I’m not going to get anything done today. I have meetings booked solid on my calendar from 9:00a until noon, then they start again at 1:00p. I might be able to work for a couple of hours this afternoon. Maybe.

Plus, today should be the last day of this way-too-long project I’ve been working on. I’m anxious to get off of it because the next project I’m going to be on looks like I’ll get some really good stuff done. (Rather than working on a hacked-together prototype, I actually get to put effort in to make production code - a much more satisfying endeavor.)

I got a copy of VisualMake 3.0 from the Xtras.Net Developer Network (which is cool - you should join) and played around with it.

Hmmm.

Right now I use NAnt to automate my build processes. It’s a pretty flexible tool, and while it does require you script (rather than having some GUI to drag and drop tasks or organize the thing - hey, there’s a cool product idea… a real GUI editor for NAnt scripts, but something easier - and cheaper - than NAntpad), it’s also pretty accommodating and flexible.

I was hoping VisualMake might be a good, GUI alternative. If not for corporate/work projects, at least for my home stuff.

No dice.

I posted a review on it at Xtras.Net, but the long and the short of it is that VisualMake would be great for some straightforward builds, but it doesn’t seem to know Visual C++ projects (.vcproj), nor does it know setup projects (.vdproj). It also can’t open web projects via a URL, so you have to manually find those and add them.

In VisualMake’s defense, NAnt doesn’t do web projects, either, so it’s not like it’s missing functionality; I just figure when you’re graphically adding a solution (drag and drop) that includes web projects, a good GUI should automatically add them for you… at a minimum, it should determine if the project is on your local machine and start looking in the IIS metabase for the physical location. VisualMake doesn’t do that.

It does have some nice features, and I think for large Windows or console applications, this would be cool. Solutions that have a lot of dependencies and all generate .DLL files. I, unfortunately for VisualMake, don’t work in that world. All of my solutions have one or more web projects, a setup project… none of which works well with VisualMake.

Guess I’ll be sticking with NAnt.

Looks like I’m getting quoted over at Hanselman’s site. Go check out this article on the Laws of Prototypes at Tim Weaver’s site and tell me I’m wrong when I say the guy hit the nail on the head. I couldn’t have said it better myself.