American Marching Band Empties Collective Spit Valve Over Vestiges of Youth

In Canada, we celebrate Victoria Day every year on the Monday preceding May 25th, in memory of Queen Victoria (1837-1901). I'm not sure why. In Victoria, where I live, the conjunction of the Day with the eponymous City means we must have a parade. We have had for 107 years. "Every minute of this 2-1/2 hr parade will leave you entertained" touts our official tourism website. Well, whatever. Somehow I end up watching every year anyway.

A lot of American high school marching bands show up for the event, and they're mostly really good, for high school students trapped in polyester. Part of the fun (every minute, folks, EVERY MINUTE) is to try and guess what the hell tune they're playing. Sometimes it's obvious ("Louie, Louie"), sometimes it's more challenging, as you strain your "top of the pops" trivia skills to the limit. One in particular had me stumped. The tune was tantalizingly familiar - I could even hum along - but I couldn't for the life of me name what it was. My sister didn't know. My wife hadn't a clue. I was like, I KNOW THIS, but I couldn't identify it. Until suddenly, as the last rank of tubas was passing, I had it: Ozzy Osbourne, "Crazy Train".

Ozzy Osbourne? OZZY? OSBOURNE!? Now, I love Ozzy, but for me, that song is a symbol of my long-hair headbanging days. You know, rebellious youth and loud, possibly Satanic music. And here they are, these kids, turning my rebel anthem into an easy-listenin' family-parade-day brass-n'-woodwinds favourite. I hated every one of 'em. Then I remembered who was wearing the burgundy and gold, one-size-fits-none bibbers and jacket with matching spats for a two mile stretch on a public street in front of 90,000 spectators. And felt a lot better.

Loosing It

Loose and lose are DIFFERENT words in the English language. For the love of GOD, if I see one more person use "loose" when they mean "lose", I'm going to gnaw a hole in my belly and pull out enough intestine to strangle myself out of sheer blighted hope in the human condition.

It's because yesterday I was using a third party control for a popup calendar. The control itself is great, and I was perusing the list of control properties, when what to my wondering eyes did appear, but the CalendarPopup.EnableLooseFocus property. The say what? Uh... some kind of focus where the rivets have joggled free and are rattling around because I prefer that over a TIGHT FOCUS? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Doesn't the Law of Grammatic Entropy which governs such words as qwik, ez, and donut (nee quick, easy, and doughnut) DEMAND that longer words collapse to shorter ones due to the overwhelming pressure of human laziness? How then the extra "o"? It's actually more work: the finger expends double the calories as it redundantly hammers the key. Obviously the Grammatic Entropy law is being counteracted by the Law of Orthographic Horsepower which says that if one letter is good, more must be better.

Next on the block: its versus it's.

Good bye, David

David Kirk died yesterday - cancer took him at last. He did quite a bit of work with us in the past before he got sick, and Kathy and Denise counted him as a good friend.

I didn't know him quite as well, but I worked with some of his code. That may not seem much, but it always showed invention, clarity and attention to detail in an environment that doesn't particularly reward good behaviour seeing as it's completely hidden from the ordinary human being. I respect that.

Running multiple websites on XP Pro

IIS Admin is a beautifully simple tool to use when doing web-based developing on an XP workstation, and it makes my life bearable some days. It's a blessing to be able to create a directory structure for each client project that actually replicates their real-life site from the web root down. Nathan told me about it. Thank you Nathan Mayr, I'm naming my children after you. Yeah, all of them.

From the website: "IIS Admin is a small tool for for use on Windows XP Professional. As you may have noticed, Windows XP Professional's IIS installation only allows one running website at a time. This is where IIS admin enters the picture, it allows you to easily create multiple websites on Windows XP Professional and quick switching between them."

I like the very understated "as you may have noticed" bit. It's more like, "as you may have wept tears of bitter frustration into your keyboard such that the individual keys rusted shut."

Andornot in Boston

Not much of a rant, nor a muse. We're all in Boston, attending Inmagic Dealer Days. Or more accurately, we're done attending dealer days and now are trying to relax even though the hotel bar closes way too early. Somehow I've not been able to sleep well, though that is normally NOT a problem for me. I could use a bucket of Visine.

Inmagic ODBC permissions when ASP.NET impersonates

With ASP.NET set to impersonate a non-anonymous Windows account, I found the Inmagic ODBC driver flipped a henry when asked to perform a SELECT MAX statement. The error returned was "ERROR [S0000] [Inmagic, Inc.][DB/Text ODBC Driver]Unable to do ORDER BY".

It turns out that read/write permissions on the Documents and Settings\[machinename]\ASPNET\Local Settings\Temp folder are required (this is an XP machine I'm talking about). (Thank you Filemon.) I assume the ODBC driver requires some workspace in order to sort the records and pick the most maxest one. I don't know if this is the case with any ORDER BY clause or what. The ASPNET account has full control of that temp directory by default. Giving the Users group read/write access cured this otherwise intractable phenomenon (the Windows account in question was a member of the machine's Users group).

If you're wondering how to flip a henry, use your imagination.

Andornot Film Festival

Long in the making, short in the viewing, fair-to-middling in the amount of edifying content; this short film sucks away 5 minutes of your life and never gives it back.

Synopsis: Andornotter Peter Tyrrell looks back with fond memories at crusty old Andornot and Inmagic websites regurgitated by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, then introduces the new Andornot website with the help of Benny Goodman and His Orchestra. 5 mins.

http://www.peaeater.com/AndornotWebsite.wmv