Gaming table UPGRADE

Experiment: 20090715

Under the heading of "better late than never" we have the entry of a much delayed blog post about the new downstairs gaming table. Over the winter it became very obvious that the old gaming table with it's covering of five year old shelf-paper needed a major over-haul so after the removal of the two middle legs (much hated and always in the way) all of the old shelf paper was painfully striped off first by hand, then by razor blade, and then finally (because I was about to take a hatchet to the whole thing and start over) by use of a wire paint-stripper cup brush. Once the basic structure of the table had been laid bare I slowly built the finish back up with three layers of latex base, a massive amount of sanding, four layers of white board paint, and three layers of very nice green semi-gloss latex. I think the final product turned out rather well.

G-FORCE

Adventure 20090711

Kathy and I were lucky enough to be invited to an advance screening of Disney's new movie G-FORCE 3-D, and I have to say that I was quite impressed. I'm not a movie critic, and frankly would never want to be one, but what I look for in any movie is a sense of immersion. It seems to me that too often the gimmicks available to the movie industry distract and subtract from the experience rather than draw the audience further in. I generally gauge a movie by how often my attention wanders from the screen and using that measure G-FORCE did surprisingly well. Now don't get me wrong, this is definitely another movie targeted at the family audience with the intention of making large profits off of toy sales, but is that really a bad thing? Frankly, my life is complicated enough right now, and a little break for some mindless entertainment was greatly appreciated. My suggestion is that you see this one in the theater, pay the extra for the 3-D, and let yourself revel in the ability to take your mind off of the hook for two hours.

What I learned at CodeStock 2009

Adventure 20090626

One of my recent long term projects has been an attempt to upgrade my programming skills to "Developer" level, and during one of my research session for that goal I stumbled across a development conference being held here in Knoxville less than a half mile from where I work. I really enjoyed CodeStock and thought that I would share which of the sessions I attended and the links to the nifty tools everyone provided

Friday Sessions:

• Mindstorming 101 by Nathan Blevins. Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 2008 R2 is definitely under the "Cool Tools" category and is what I will be using during the design phase of creating my robotic minions.

• A Developers Guide to SQL Server Integration Services by Robert C. Cain

• Open Spaces track facilitated by Alan Stevens and the Friday lunch discussion of "Job advancement that doesn't suck"

• 5 Classic Patterns in Everyday Code by Brian H. Prince

• Back to the Basics: A Programmer's Primer Programming in C# by Keith Elder

• The Basics of ASP.NET by Jeff Blankenburg

Saturday Sessions:

• Getting started with WPF by John Kellar

• Regular Expressions Revisited by Colin Neller. Regulazy by Roy Osherove is an excellent free mini-tool for working with and testing Regular Expressions. The Added Bytes Regular Expressions Cheat Sheet is very nicely formatted and is now hanging on my cubicle wall.

• Be a Better Developer by Michael Wood. Mike Wood was by far the best speaker of the convention, and during his session I ended up taking dozens of little TODOs for books I need to read or re-read, lectures I need to watch, and better habits I am going to try and develop going forward. Some of the highlights are re-reading Getting Things Done and making a habit of re-reading it again every year, reading How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci, reading Code Complete, watching the Last Lecture series by Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, making a habit of finding and using one new keyboard shortcut combo each week, and making a habit to do a "Better than" Google search review of all tools every half year or so.
  

• jQuery 101 by Rod Paddock

• How to make your application awesome with JSON, REST and WCF by James Bender

Greg's Birthday and Thermite Experiment Part Two

Experiment: 20090515

When I asked my friend Greg what kind of cake he wanted for his birthday this year he said "You make great Red Velvet Cakes with the White icing... (yeah, I'm in a predictable rut...). As for shape, well feel free to think Steampunk." And thus, as foretold in the prophecy, his doom was sealed.... Err.... I mean, so then I made him a perfectly nice and normal cake with lots of Steampunk-ish flourishes.



After the cake had been devoured we headed out into the backyard for a second try at the Thermite Experiment. This time we increased the quantity, mixed the ignition mixture in with the thermite, wrapped a full coil of magnesium ribbon around the two iron bars, and used plastic army men to show the extent of the heat.







Here's a quick video clip showing just how much more energetic this attempt was than the last one.



And finally, just to add a finale to our geek extravaganza we finished the day with a Diet Coke and Mentos fountain.

Hank's Graduation

Adventure: 20090509

This Saturday Kathy, Carrie, and I went to watch Hank graduate with his second Associates Degree from Pellissippi State Technical Community College. Luckily they have professional photographers for these sorts of things because out of just over a hundred shots I got two that didn't end up completely a waste and a brief segment of fuzzy video footage....