Found this on TechCrunch this morning.  Here are my results

SuperHero
You are Green Lantern

Green Lantern 90% Spider-Man 85% The Flash 80% Hulk 80% Robin 75% Catwoman 75% Superman 70% Supergirl 65% Batman 60% Iron Man 55% Wonder Woman 50%

Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Villain
You are The Joker

The Joker 74% Dr. Doom 72% Riddler 71% Apocalypse 70% Lex Luthor 69% Catwoman 65% Magneto 64% Green Goblin 58% Mr. Freeze 57% Venom 56% Dark Phoenix 55% Juggernaut 54% Mystique 50% Poison Ivy 45% Kingpin 45% Two-Face 30%

The Clown Prince of Crime. You are a brilliant mastermind but are criminally insane. You love to joke around while accomplishing the task at hand.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

So I'm here at the kitchen table tonight (my father-in-law over in the living room watching T.V. with the volume up a little higher than it should be and my wife downstairs asleep, exhausted from the holidays) and I just read an article at Time.com (Where "Check Please" is Your Call) about restaurants that let the customers pay what they feel "their meal is worth."  In some cases, for those who have no money, the restaurant trades the meal for one hour's worth of work.  With two restaurants now doing this in the U.S., one in Salt Lake City, Utah (One World Café) and the other in Denver,  CO (SAME Café) patrons seem to like it and abuse of the honor system is minimal.

The thing that got me was this sentence:

Since opening, one man has regularly come in and left money on the counter without eating, stating "I was blessed today so I though I'd pass it on." He's homeless.

Wow.  The selflessness of that just floors me.  I was expecting people who could afford more to leave more and the like but I was not expecting a homeless man to give to help others in such a fashion.  Like others out there, I've always seen people with down-n-out stories on street corners or highway on-ramps and thought "If I give him money, he's just going to spend it on booze or drugs".  Now though, I'm not so sure.  Tell you one thing though, I believe that there is more honesty there than in any corporate board room or politician out there.

Finally!  After years of wanting and always seemingly out of reach, we had DirecTV installed yesterday.  Good bye Comcast... and good riddens I might add. 

First off, let me just let everyone know the one, main question that I had that NOBODY could answer correctly or with such confidence that I would believe them: No, you DO NOT need a phone line to have DirecTV.  Personally, I've asked employees at both Best Buy and Circuit City and all have given me the same answer; "Yes, you NEED a phone line" - WRONG!

After calling DirecTV personally, mostly because of a mailer I received offering a bunch of incentives (way to go marketing department), I got the answer I was waiting to hear; "No, you do not need a phone line".  Straight from the horses mouth.  After hearing that, I promptly scheduled the nearest install date.  Two days later, an installer came out and gave me freedom from Comcast. 

Comcastic?  More like Craptastic.

I'm not going to compare side-by-side but I can tell you that the picture quality is great.  On top of that, the level of service I've received so far from DirecTV has far surpassed my 5 or so years with Comcast. 

Unfortunately, I still have my cable modem.  I love the speed but not the unexpected outages which can last for days.  Calling Comcast usually yields such responses as "have you tried rebooting the modem" or "there is someone working on a line near you, it'll be up sometime". 

I'll tell you one thing, once I'm eligible for Fiber I'm dropping Comcast... for good.

My wife always has a color scheme for her tree each year for Christmas... yes, we get his and her trees.  Mine has no scheme.  Gaudy is the word for that.

This year, my wife has a red and white tree, which turned out very lovely this year.  My one contribution; one green light in the midst of red and white that adorn the tree.  It drives her crazy but it's my way of letting her know that I love her.

Merry Christmas Honey

So, while I was out to lunch today I drove past this dog boutique (yes, dogs are special too) and I noticed that they had covered up a bigger than usual fake dog out front with a brown sheet, put garland around its neck and attached antlers to his head.  It was pretty cute, festive to say the least.  That's when I had a GREAT idea.  I know, odd place to get it, they usually come in the shower.

Ok, bare with me here.  So I see the mocked up reindeer/dog and think right away of deer.  Then I think of people hunting deer (I affectionately call these people redneck-dumbasses).  Then I think of the poor deer just foraging for food out in the woods one day when BAM (add a few more BAM's for the drunk redneck-dumbass with bad aim) the deer's life is over.  Out of nowhere.  Just like that.  I mean, what the fuck. 

And the thing that gets me, EVERYTIME, is the reasoning for hunting deer (or any other animal); "population control", "they'd starve to death without us thining the heard".  *cough-bullshit-cough*

Minus the trophy hunters of course, which is a whole other rant that I can't even begin to tap here.

So, my IDEA.  Thought I didn't have one eh?  We continue to allow drunk redneck-dumbasses, or hunters if you want to be all PC about it, to control deer populations with high-powered rifles and six-packs of Miller High Life.  But, in turn, we allow Fish & Wild Life officers and Park Rangers the right to randomly shoot hunters!  It's perfect when you think about it.  Hunters are doing it for the meat (well, we'll assume most do any way) so that must mean that they're starving.  And if they're starving, one could deduce that their population is getting out of control.  So, logic dictates that we need to thin their heard.  Irony dictates that process.

So, who's with me?

Ok, here's one for ya.

As I'm working this morning, I notice that it's 9:15am (I just look at the clock in the taskbar).  Then, as a little time goes by, I notice that it's still 9:15am.  Looks to me as if the program froze. 

So I double click on the time in the taskbar and what do you know, the clock is working fine but the display in the taskbar is frozen.  No biggie, it finally came back to life little while later but still, it's a rather peculiar screen shot.

Real quick; in order to run the debugger in Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista, you need to run the application as an administrator.  For the past few days, I've been doing this by right clicking the Visual Studio shortcut in my start menu and selecting "Run as Administrator".  What I really want is for Windows Vista to remember that I always want to run this program as an administrator.  So after a quick check I found that you can set it in the properties to do just that.

To be sure it works consistently, I changed the properties on the actual application found in: Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE

Only problem I found that I haven't figured out yet (mostly for lack of trying) is that opening a solution file (.sln) directly does not work.  Actually, it doesn't do anything; no prompts or IDE.  But for now, it's one less click. 

Well I've made the switch to Vista Ultimate over the weekend and so starts the fight with Windows to allow all of my programs to get along.  First on my list, Visual Studio 2005!

Installation was a snap, although there are known compatibility issues.  My first problem came when I opened up one of my solutions, a web application, and tried to debug it.  Bam! "Unable to start debugging on the web server".  Ouch, that hurt.

Ok, so I read up a little and find 2 great articles on solving the problem:

Scott Gu's Blog (Tip/Trick: Using IIS7 on Vista with VS 2005) and

Bradley Millington's Blog (Developing Web Applications on Windows Vista with Visual Studio 2005)

I followed both of them but still got the above error.  Don't get me wrong, you DO need to follow their solutions but you also have to do one more thing that neither outlined; change the application pool in IIS7 for the site in question from "DefaultAppPool" to "Classic .NET AppPool".

Here's how:

Open IIS7 and navigate to the Application under "Default Web Site"

Right click the Application and click "Advanced Settings..."

Select "Application Pool"

In the drop down, change to "Classic .NET AppPool"

Click "OK" and you're finished.