Its articles such as these that make me wonder if Google is just hell-bent on world domination.  What gives?  Every day they seem to be trying to take over another market.  Is this not something we should be worried about or is Google turning the corporate world upside down for a good cause?  At which point does David become larger and more powerful than Goliath... when should we start rooting for Goliath to save us from David?

Google throws bodies at OpenOffice

Google takes flight

Google wants to dominate Madison avenue, too

Google Print Resumes Tomorrow

Is Google the New Evil Empire?

Google To Sell Over $6 Billion In Ads

Google the Agency, Google the Network

Here's my costume!!! Where's yours BIATCH?

Last night my wife and I went to Last Thursday, an event here in Portland, located in the Alberta district, that's fairly new but gaining followers.  

First, A little background: Every month, Portland hosts First Thursday, whereby dozens of art galleries, mostly in the Pearl district, open new shows.  The public is invited to hob-nob with other art enthusiasts to peruse the new exhibits where running into the artist of a particular show is common place.  Oddly enough, my wife and I went to our First Thursday together this month as well.  

Back to Last Thursday:  A few years ago, a few smaller galleries in North East Portland decided to snub First Thursday and begin its own tradition.  You guessed it, Last Thursday.  As its name entails, Last Thursday happens on the last Thursday of every month.  Supposedly, so many people show up in the warmer months, that the streets are teeming with festivities and swarming with people -not what you'd find happening First Thursday.  Sadly, last night was cold and rainy but to our surprise this didn't perturb Portlanders from enjoying themselves (rain never does).  Granted, the streets weren't abuzz and the swarms of people were smaller groups trying to stay warm and dry but Last Thursday was still happening, and a happening place to be.

When we first got there, we decided to grab a bite to eat at the Vita Cafe, a local organic, vegan restaurant.  To those of you who just read that and huffed, you obviously haven't eaten there.  Despite my love of cheese and everything dairy, the food was nothing short of stupendous.  Not wanting to over stuff ourselves (we are both skinny), we ordered one meal and split it.  Glad we did because the portion was big and the meal itself was delicious.  Noticing that they also had good looking deserts, splitting the meal allowed us to enjoy our own desert.  We both love desert, then again, who doesn't.  As the dinner, the desert was to die for; rich, creamy, sweet, we couldn't finish.  Let me remind you, the desert in a vegan restaurant is also vegan.  I must admit, I was a little skeptical but that quickly vanished once I took my first bite.

Once that was over, my wife and I took to the streets and started hitting the galleries.  The art work was surprising good for the price.  Not to say everything was affordable, but there were pieces that we could afford, not that we were out art shopping... not that night at least.  It's just nice to know that I "could" buy something rather than see works from artists that start out in the tens of thousands of dollars.

In between the galleries, people had tents set up and were selling their wares.  From food to arts and crafts to a few brazen artists setting up their own sidewalk studios displaying their master pieces, some of which I noticed were exceptional pieces worthy of gallery space.

Despite the rain and cold weather, my wife and I LOVED going to Last Thursday and look forward to making it a regular stop from our hectic lives.  Who knows, perhaps one day, I'll be going not to look at other artists but to support my wife as she displays her art in a gallery.  I'll say this now, when that day comes I'm going to be the proudest person in the crowd.

Kind of like getting kicked in the balls, a woman in southern Oregon is finding out the hard way that a winning lottery ticket, worth about $1 million, in her possession is not legally hers after authorities found out that the ticket was purchased with a stolen credit card.  To compound her troubles, she now faces several theft-related, forgery and methamphetamine charges to boot.

After visiting the Oregon Lottery headquarters in Salem, the woman left with an annual installment worth about $33,500 (the $1 million is to be paid off in yearly installments for 20 years) which the police failed to turn up after serving a search warrant at her home. 

Without a doubt, Christina Goodenow you are today's dumbass!  Congratulations, I hope the Oregon Lottery commission uses the rest of what used to be your winnings for a nobler cause.  Perhaps 20 school districts in that area could use an extra $33,500 dollars this year.

When I blog, there's a good chance that I'll want to, or have to in some cases, make an update to that entry.  When I do, I like to call out the update so that the average reader knows.  Some examples:

Gorilla to scientist, I'll roshambo you for that banana
Yeah, just try and remove something from Google
Kingston 512MB PC2100 RAM

Now, when I do this, I have to select my font color and bold "update:"; basically give it the exact look and feel each and every time.  Being a programmer, I like to simplify my life by creating a method to keep me from having to duplicate my efforts each time.  With that, I've created a simple content filter that will render my updates the same time, every time.  Just add the following in the content filters section of dasBlog

note: You may want to change the look and feel unless you like my burnt orange color scheme.

\$update\((?<expr>[\w\s\d\W\D]+)\)

<font color="#cc6600"><b>UPDATE: </b>${expr}</font>

The only difference that sets this apart from some of the built in content filters is \W\D regular expression filters; these simply allow non-digit and non-alphanumeric characters thru.

\D  # NOT a digit
\W  # NOT an alphanumeric (word) character

Now, there are changes that can be made to the above such as changing $update to $u for simplicity.  You could also change so that it uses <span>'s with css classes for better control of future color scheme changes, which I highly recommend.

UPDATE: This is what an update to this entry looks like using the $update content filter.

Enjoy.

My wife had to read a few articles last night for her Art & Design in Contemporary Society class last night when she came across a great quote on life, I thought I'd share.

"To live' means to proceed towards death.  On the way, one came across things that blocked one's path.  These things called 'problems' had therefore to be removed.

'To live' then meant: to resolve problems in order to be able to die."

--Vilém Flusser, The Non-Thing

Quick note this morning.  About 2 years or so ago I signed for dictionary.com's word of the day email.  Cool I thought at the time, I like words and I like it when words are emailed to me... and I like it even more when those words are explained or "defined".  All kidding aside, I enjoyed this little feature because expanding one's vocabulary is never a bad thing.

Back to my dilemma: I'm not quite sure when, but one day I stopped receiving the word of the day email.  At the time, I figured that they didn't have enough people or that they just discontinued it for bandwidths sake.  Never-the-less, it stopped.  So yesterday I get the strange email that I haven't seen in years -word of the day.  Huh, imagine that.

Now I'm left pondering, why am I getting these emails again?  Did they actually have a bug in their code that made them think they were sending thousands of emails a day but actually none were getting out?  Or did they get enough subscribers again to warrant starting it up again?

Who knows and who cares, I enjoy receiving them.

Todays word:

   bruit \BROOT\, transitive verb:
   To report; to noise abroad.

Sitting in my office, 9 stories up, I sit next to a window with a southerly view.  For a few weeks now, I've noticed huge flocks of geese flying over our building.  Now, for the most part, they're going south -makes sense.  But every so often, I notice a flock of geese flying north.  Let me next state that it's late October.  Why are geese flying north?  Is this Darwinism at its worst (survival of the fittest).  Are these geese flying the short vee pattern to school?

I'm sure this is a normal phenomenon that I'm witnessing due to the fact that I've never sat in a position to notice the pattern.  Perhaps these are local geese that are just flying from one lake to another here in Stumptown preparing for their trek to the south.  Unfortunately, I have my doubts about this theory.  I'm thinking that these geese are being led by a male goose who just can't bring himself to ask for directions.  "Excuse me Mr. seagull, could you tell me which way is south?” asked the leader of the flock as a wide eyed seagull stares back wondering what the fuck this other bird is saying.

Who knows why these geese are flying north and for that matter, who really gives a shit?  In the end, enough will make it south to repopulate those who didn't make the trek.  Speaking of which, another flock just flew over our building, heading no doubt to Canada.

Just passing along a tidbit I read on blurbomat.com this morning.  The entry, titled It's Called Denial, basically describes it.  Why do Mormons like this administration?  Don't they question what is going on over in Iraq?  Or how the president is going to pay for things like the Katrina disaster without raising taxes and doing nothing but cutting taxes for corporations and the rich alike?

Sometimes though, you have to question things, like where the so-called weapons of mass destruction are?... or what an insurgent really is? (in Iraqi terms its nothing more than a citizen of that country who's had enough and wants us out)  Listen, I'm not an idiot.  I know that terrorists are NOT flocking to Iraq, as the president would like you to think.  By calling the insurgency a "terrorist uprising" shifts the view that if you are against us, you are a terrorist.  Sound familiar?  We have that going on over here in America right now.  If you are against the war in Iraq, you're un-American -that's bullshit, propaganda bordering on McCarthyism.  

We're no longer liberators, we've become invaders, occupiers -unwelcome guests who wont leave and don't get that they are no longer wanted, no longer a help!

Utah, wake up!  President Bush and his cabinet are doing this country a great disservice.  As Richard Cohen of the Washington Post says in his article Hold Bush Accountable (not his choice of titles by the way), we need to "Impeach George Bush" but even he knows, just as I do, that congress won't let that happen.

This is all like a bad dream that I can't wait to wake up from.

This weekend was a hard weekend for me.  Without going into detail, I'll just say that I'm so glad that my wife is understanding, caring, and most of all loving.  Her weekend was no picnic either; she has her own stresses so my incident didn't help her at all.  We got thru it, and I learned that what I thought was controllable is not and I'm going to make an effort to control it -I have to, and I will.  It won't be easy but I need to put forth effort to show her that I care and that we mean the world to me.

This should make perfect sense to my wife, not so much anybody else.

Honey, I love you more than you'll ever know.

Oh, the visual I had when I saw the title to this article, Nut-cracking gorilla surprises scientists. 

I pictured two scientists walking down a corridor when out jumps a gorilla, a "nut-cracking gorilla", who, just as swiftly as he appeared, kicks one of the scientist square in the balls.  Just as quickly as the gorilla attacked, he's gone, leaving the scientists curled up on the floor in the fetal position feeling shocked, violated and most importantly, surprised. 

Hell, what's more surprising then getting kicked in the jewels by a fucking gorilla?  Honestly, what?

UPDATE: I can't believe I did that.  I posted this entry off of the title of the article alone, I didn't actually read it.  Oh am I glad that I went back.  Apparently the surprising thing about the gorilla isn't that he's cracking nuts, it’s that he's using 2 rocks to do it the job.  NOW THAT IS FUCKING SURPRISING!  Instead of kicking the scientist in my mock dramatization above, he jumps out and with 2 rocks in hand, smashes the scientists little boys with them -ouch!

Dude, this gorilla needs to be working with the Marines.  I think we may have found something that would actually terrify terrorists. 

I wasn't going to blog today, but I just couldn't pass this one up.  So, I'm surfing the web - it's what I do here at work for about 7 hours out of my 8 hour day - and I come across this article posted on cnn.com.  I read the first paragraph and was shocked; Texans back the president’s nomination for the Supreme Court, Harriet Meirs.  Wow!  That my friends, I did not see coming.  What are the odds that the oil slut we have for a president from Texas would find friends from fellow oil whores in his home state?  I sure as hell didn't.  Thank you CNN for reporting this.  (Please note; last sentence is laced with so much sarcasm that I actually have to note it)

Come on people, wake the fuck up!  It's not news that Texans back president asshats nominee for the Supreme Court, they're Texans - they're obligated to.  Why on earth would they go against the one man who has brought so much revenue into their hollow, gold-digging existence.  It's not news, it's propaganda.  "Ooooh, Texans back the Supreme Court nominee, I guess president [namedeleted] is smart.  I too will back his nomination" said the dumbass.

Fuck that, I think for myself.  I'm a democrat out of necessity.

UPDATE: Not all Texans are dicks, just the oil whores.  The rest of you are cool in my book.

Basically describes my weekend.

Aint't she a cutey?

If you've been reading the comments for my last entry, you'll know that the conversation has turned to shit.  Ironically, that brings up something that I'm currently going thru right now.

First a little background.  I'm a private shitter.  I do not like dropping the kids off while anybody is around.  Ask my wife, we don't dump in front of each other and I'm ok with that.  Maybe it was how I was raised but I like privacy.  How does this affect me today, simple.  All fucking day I've had to take a shit but each time I go, there's been somebody in there using the facility.  I've gone to the bathroom 5 times now (all on the 9th floor thank you) and each and every time I've gone in one or both of the stalls has been occupied.  5 times today, I've had to fake peeing at the urnial because there is no way that I'm going to walk, look at the stalls, and walk out.  What the hell is that person going to think?  So I fake it.

Now it's almost quiting time and I still have to drop the kids off at the pool.  I'm going to give it one last shot, if someone is in there, I'm going to building 3 -hey, I need to see this wall writing myself anyway

Well I'm off.  Wish me luck.

UPDATE: I give up, I'm waiting till I get home.  This is bullshit!  Can't a man poop in peace?

Here's a question I asked myself the other day for my side project that, for some reason kept eluding me.  Googling for any type of help returned either basic web.config settings or detailed explanations of how the web.config worked.  None however, gave me what I was looking for.  Looking back, this article that I read a while back had the answer but I was quick too overlook it because it didn't address my problem directly.

The question I had was this; on my secure site (protected by Windows FormsAuthentication) how would I allow certain pages to be excluded (I.e., ForgotPassword.aspx) from authentication?  Sounds easy enough and I know that it's possible, but what is the syntax for it?  Oddly enough, none of my past projects, personal or professional, had ever run across this scenario.

One way that I know of off hand to solve this problem is to create a directory, my case I called it \Common, and add a web.config to that location allowing access for everyone.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <authorization>
            <allow users="*" />
        </authorization>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

Side note for those of you that didn't know, each directory can have it's own web.config, each inheriting from the the web.config in the directory above it.  The top level web.config, the one we all primarily work with, inherits from machine.config, located in the \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\CONFIG directory (your version of the .NET framework may be different).

This directory access could also be done via the top level web.config as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <authentication mode="Forms">
            <forms name="AuthCookie" path="/" loginUrl="Login.aspx" protection="All" timeout="10" />
        </authentication>
        <authorization>
            <deny users="?" />
        </authorization>
    </system.web>
    <location path="Common">
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users="*" />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
</configuration>

So, the above directory access worked, but I wasn't satisfied with it.  I want to modify my top level web.config to allow one or a few pages to be unsecured.  Creating unsecured directories to allow only a few pages access isn't efficient or clean for handling a small number of pages.  On the other hand, if I had a large number of pages, that solution would be optimal.

So low and behold, while working on an internal project yesterday (one of which I had yet to work on) I found the answer to my problem staring me in the face.  By adding location to the configuration node you can allow access to one or a handful of pages.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <authentication mode="Forms">
            <forms name="AuthCookie" path="/" loginUrl="Login.aspx" protection="All" timeout="10" />
        </authentication>
        <authorization>
            <deny users="?" />
        </authorization>
    </system.web>
    <location path="ForgotPassword.aspx">
        <system.web>
            <authorization>
                <allow users="*" />
            </authorization>
        </system.web>
    </location>
</configuration>

An easy answer to an simple problem that nobody seemed to address directly.

My wife and I were recently exonorated in small claims court from a shady collection agency called Sunwest Financial located in Portland, OR (I'd link to their site or yellow pages entry but I can't find either).  My wife goes into detail on her blog about our ordeal with this company.  If you or someone you know who has a less than perfect credit past and is summoned to small claims court (by Sunwest Financial or not) know that you HAVE RIGHTS and you don't have to take this kind of scare tactic from a collection agency.

We won our case because Sunwest Financial was banking that we wouldn't even show up to our initial hearing, thus giving them the right to start seizing our assets.  We did show up and we fought back.  After rescheduling because the plaintiff had to pick up her kids (likely story) they failed to show up again, causing the judge to dismiss the suit.

My wife and I feel that they didn't have a case and we were prepared to fight and WIN.

You have rights as a debtor.  Don't let some company like Sunwest Financial push you around.

Side note: You know you're dealing with a shady company when their representative shows up in court in jeans and a T-shirt playing scratch-it lottery tickest!  Dumbass!

Ok, the first test failed but that was an error on my part -didn't set up the POP3 mail account correctly. So once again, I'm testing the dasBlog mail-to-weblog feature. One question I'm curious to see how it handles is what category, if any, it will assign this to. Let's just hope this works.

UPDATE: It works!  But no on the category.  I'll research if it's in the works or if there is a way to set the category from within the email message.

wife: "You're quick"
me:   "That's what they tell me"
wife: "Sometimes that's not a good thing"
me:   "That's what they tell me"

Those were the magic words we heard in our small claims court case today.  I can't get into details but, WE WON!

WOO HOO!!!

I've owned the xerratus domain for a couple years now.  Prior to being my blog, it was the site that hosted our family’s pictures.  Google, doing just what they do, scanned my site and listed it's contents sometime back, no big deal.  A few weeks back, I decide to move the family’s pictures to a less public domain and use xerratus as my blog site.  All was going smoothly until I tried to remove the old content.

First, when I did a search for xerratus I got the blog home page -perfect!  Underneath were the family picture directories and I wanted them gone -expected results.  After a perusing Google for a few minutes I found that you can submit pages and/or directories to them for removal as long as they return a 404 error.  I can do this as the current site doesn't use any of the old directory structure.  Roughly a week later I get an automated email from Google stating that they removed my urls.  Sweet!  On top of that I read about the robot.txt file that you can place in the root directory to tell spiders/bots what to scan and what not to scan.  I add this, just as a precaution.

The day I get the email I search Google for xerratus again and voila, it's only grabbing the new blog content.  Google did its job perfectly, so why do you ask is Google today’s Dumbass?  Simple.  Today, I did a search for xerratus (don't ask why) and every piece of my old site is back up again and my blog is nowhere to be found!  WTF!  Do I have to submit the urls again?  Is the robot.txt file just a false security blanket to make people think that Google isn't trying its hand at world dominance?  

Fuckers!  

At least Microsoft's search has it right!

UPDATE: Well, I checked today and all seems to be back to normal.  One directory from my old site is still listed but I'm sure it'll be delisted in a few.

Finally, Chipotle restaurants are moving into Oregon.  Actually, this started more than a year ago and I salute them for it.  You see, I lived in Denver, CO for about 5 years during the time that Chipotle started out (I've been to the original hehe).  There you couldn't drive a few blocks without running into one, which was a good thing for this burrito junkie.  Then the tech market dropped and I had to move to Los Angeles.  Yes, LA, the city that sucks unless you're a famous millionaire.  But I digress. 

Upon arriving in LA one of the first things I began doing was plotting where the closest Chipotle was.  Luckily for me, there was one in Marina Del Ray, about 5 miles from where I lived at the time.  So all was good, or so I thought.

At the first opportunity, I got out of there and moved to Portland (and I LOVE it).  First thing I do of course, map out the closest Chipotle -which happened to be 3 hours away in Seattle.  NOOOOOO!  So began my painful withdrawal from their delicious burritos.  Then one day, while on lunch from my employer at the I passed a sign in an empty lot on NW 7th and Broadway that said "Coming soon, Chipotle".  YES! 

Within 6 months it opened and I'm glad to say that I'm addicted to their burritos again.  Of course, never being satisfied, I'm now asking the question, "when are they going to open a Clackamas location"?  I drove past a sign downtown the other day near Pioneer Place that read "Coming soon, Chipotle" so they are expanding.  I know of 2 Beaverton locations but nothing on the southeast side. 

The area I'm in is a pretty up and coming area (around SE 82nd and Johnscreek Blvd) and, in my opinion, is a prime spot for a Chipotle location.  So if you happen to be a mover and/or shaker and can make things happen at my favorite burrito restaurant, please open one here.  At the very least, you'll have about $10 from me and my wife every weekend

So get off your butts and let's get this show on the road already.  And if there are plans for one in Clackamas or if you know of a Chipotle here that I'm just missing, please tell me... please... for the love of Bob, I need one!

After much talk and procrastination, my wife and I decided to start our own blogs.  We're both fans of dooce (she introduced me to her) and I'm a fan of computerZEN.  Now, at first she was into it but school keeps her busy so I was worried that she'd lose interest.  Oh no.  All day today, she's playing with her blog between her painting and writing homework assignments.  I'm now finding myself yelling (I say that lightly) at her to get back to doing homework. 

In all seriousness, I'm so happy that she's getting involved and picking it up all so quickly.  She's absolutely impressing me and I couldn't be more proud of my little new-found blogger. 

Now, if she could only learn HTML so I wouldn't have to update her site

Well, I knew I wasn't immune to being entered as the daily dumbass but I just didn't think that it would come so soon.

This morning I added an entry about the dasBlog calendar control and a styling issue I was running into last night while working on it.  Upon reviewing the post, I noticed that I put in the incorrect css class that corresponded with the HTML example.  So, I went back and retrieved the correct version and found my problem immediately:

.sideContent
{
    text-align: left;
}

You see, my problem was with alignment and I was having a hard time figuring out why I couldn't center align it -Duh!.  To fix, I created a new css class, changed the calling <div class="sideContentCalendarControl">...</div> and viola, it worked.

.sideContentCalendarControl
{
    text-align: center;
}

So I can officially say that today, I'm a dumbass!

So last night, I'm putting the finishing touches my theme for dasBlog when I ran into a strange little quirk, perhaps someone out there can help me.  First off, let me say that I'm a big fan of using style sheets, gone are the days of using <font /> tags, no-breaking spaces, and the <center></center> tags. Although I have to admit, the <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"></table> tag is still very useful and is the only way I have found to get the footer to always stay at the bottom of the page so I'll never drop that altogether, but that's another entry.  For now, lets get back to the issue at hand.

UPDATE: This has been fixed and yes, I'm an idiot.  See dumbass entry above for explanation.

One of the last things I wanted to do was to clean up the calendar control a bit: expand the header where the month and year are and center it, put a border around the current day, and center the entire calendar in the sidebar.  All was going well, until I tried to center the entire calendar.  I tried doing the following:

the obvious:

<div class="sidebar">
    <div class="sidehead">Archives</div>
    <div class="sidecontent centered">
    <%radio.weblog.drawcalendar ()%>
    </div>
</div>

.sidebar
{
    padding: 10px;
    background-color: #FFFFFF;
}
.centered
{
    text-align: center;
}

then I tried breaking it out

<div class="sidebar">
    <div class="sidehead">Archives</div>
    <div class="sidecontent">
    <div class="centered">
    <%radio.weblog.drawcalendar ()%>
    </div>
    </div>
</div>

.sidebar
{
    padding: 10px;
    background-color: #FFFFFF;
}
.centered
{
    text-align: center;
}

then I tried inline

<div class="sidebar">
    <div class="sidehead">Archives</div>
    <div class="sidecontent">
    <div style="text-align: center;">
    <%radio.weblog.drawcalendar ()%>
    </div>
    </div>
</div>

.sidebar
{
    padding: 10px;
    background-color: #FFFFFF;
}

But nothing was working.  I put a border around the sidebar container to see if it was actually the width I specified in the style sheet (25%); it was and the calendar was still aligned to the left.  What's going on?

This all took about 20 minutes out of my life, I want them back Hanselman (just kidding).  So needing to get to bed I did something I'm not proud of, I used a center tag -don't hate me. 

<div class="sidebar">
    <div class="sidehead">Archives</div>
    <div class="sidecontent">
    <center>
    <%radio.weblog.drawcalendar ()%>
    </center>
    </div>
</div>

.sidebar
{
    padding: 10px;
    background-color: #FFFFFF;
}

I know it's ugly, but it works!  Why does this work buy not the CSS version?  When centering items I always default to text-align: center; is there another way I'm just not seeing?  I don't want to float the object, but it sound a bit more logical (note; I haven't tried anything else yet, I'll do that this weekedn).   Somebody please help, I feel dirty knowing that there is a center tag floating around my site.

Come on!  Can't we comment code and be nice at the same time?

   public static void ValidateUserAccess(SoftwareAppType appType,params string[] roles)
   {
      //-- TODO: Take this out! it's only for devlopment purposes stupid.
      #if DEBUG
      if(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["RequireLicenses"] != null)
      {
         if(!Convert.ToBoolean(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["RequireLicenses"])) return;
      }
      #endif

      //-- ensure the user has sufficent permissions
      bool hasRole = false;
      foreach(string role in roles)
      {

         if(!HttpContext.Current.User.IsInRole(role))
         {
            hasRole = true;
            break;
         }  
      }

      if(!hasRole)
         HttpContext.Current.Response.Redirect(URL.NoAccess + "?code=" + ValidationError.InsufficientRole);

      if((!SecurityManager.GetLicense(appType)))
         HttpContext.Current.Response.Redirect(URL.NoAccess + "?code=" + ValidationError.LicenseNotAvailable);

   }

Today, I'd like to kick off the Dumbass section.  Hopefully on a daily basis, I'll be posting the daily dumbass to the site.  If possible, a photo of said dumbass will be included.  From famous political figures, to that bitch who cut me off the other day, no one will be excluded.  

While there is no one today that has reached dumbass status so far, let me just say that in cases like this the default dumbass will be President Bush.  Lets face it, he's fucking this country like a sheep with his head caught in the fence.  After his reign, it'll take years for the U.S. to recover from his financial pilaging of our tax dollars.  Remember when President Clinton was in office?  We actually had a budget surplus!  Now we the current deficit is growing so fast it will probably be the largest this country has ever seen once he finally leaves office.  As my friends over at Fark would say, "he's an asshat".

I'm voting for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008!

Since I'm an avid user of dasBlog (this site is powered by it) I thought I'd pass along this alert from Scott Hanselman for other users of dasBlog concerning their comment blacklist.  Basically, Jay Allen, the person who updates the blacklist for dasBlog users apparently made a change to the list which is now converting the list to a regular expression, thus blocking more users than it should.

Please pass along,

Moving on...

So a friend of mine, who we'll call "James", starts a new job today.  James has been talking shit lately about commenting on my blog.  If you're an avid reader, you'll know that he has yet to leave a comment.  So I dedicate this entry this morning to him.  Bring it on biatch

In all honesty, James is a smart, talented guy who is going places.  If you happen to work for a software company in the Portland area and there is a new employee starting today named James (this is actually his real name -I couldn't resist), be glad that he's there and step up and buy the man a Starbucks coffee.  I speak from experience because I've worked with him for the past 4 months and out of all of the programmers that I've ever worked with, never have I had to post any of his code to thedailywtf. 

Good luck James (and let me know how you like it there, hint, hint)

I guess I spoke too soon when I said earlier "I got nothing!".

Today we had to bring our dog, Brian, to the vet.  Fortunately, he's fine but it cost us $438.00 to get that peace of mind.  It all started early this morning when my wife and I heard Brian peeing in our room.  First let me give you a biref history, we have 3 dogs (2 small 1 big) and a pee problem.  The small dogs make sense; small bladder long time indoors.  The bigger dog, we thought, was just seperation anxiety.  So, pee in our room is no big surprise, unfortnately.  So back to early this morning.  Brian pee'd in our room, and I cleaned it up.  Hey, an accident is bound to happen, right?

This morning we all wake up go upstairs and do our normal Sunday routine -read the Sunday paper and drink coffee.  After this small time of peace, we head downstairs and low and behold, we see more pee in the bedroom.  Great!  But I noticed something a bit odd, blood.  This is not good and we start to worry.  What this means in our eyes is one of two things; he either has a urinary tract infection or he has kidney stones.  Neither is a good thing.  So we decide to take him to Banfield pet hospital at once.  Long story short, he's fine but we had to go thru the gamut of tests to be sure.  But we are sure.  He's got a minor urinary tract infection that can be aleviated with antibiotics and water, lots of water. 

$438.00 is nothing when it comes to the health and welfare of our beloved animals; our family.

I got nothing!

Ok.  I think I've isolated my computer problem to a stick of bad RAM.  With that said, I just installed a new half-gig stick from Fry's.  All seems to be going well and my hopes are up but we'll just have to wait and see. 

Gotta get back, I'm on pet patrol today while my wife works on homework; painting a still life and taking a picture every 15 minutes from our balcony for a 3 second movie that she's making for her time-based art class.

Update: The computer has been up and running now for about 4 hours without the dreaded bluescreen-o-death. WOO HOO!