Wait a sec, did I read that right?

I thought this would have been fine ...

I had to read this several times, have some coffee, stop drinking for a week and then mouth out the individual syllables out loud. Yes, it really does say this.

Honestly, there's no shopping here. Start a project to use MSMQ and then try to directly set the correlationId of a message. Easily repeatable.

No man is an island, no company is perfect, software is hard.

Soft Issues - everyone's got 'em

Things humans are good at:

So I'm playing with Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 and the entity framework. One of the nifty new features I noticed when making a new "ADO .NET Entity Data Model" was the option to "Pluralize or singularize generated object names". The created items then just make more sense and it is a welcome addition.

Never mind the fact that my database table "Octopi" did not translate to "Octopus" as we would all expect. That is an edge case for sure and I don't really use Octopi that much. My issue is how it took my table named "Movies" and ended up with the singular model name "Movy". You could argue that the spelling is kinda cute, but you couldn't argue it is correct.

I'm just saying ...

No we won't learn

Not more than a couple days of dealing with an obscure OSQL parsing bug (see link) that we should have known about, we QA-catch another that we already knew about.

If you fully qualify a table in another database and give it an alias, OSQL command parsing will not use the alias. That is you cannot

SELECT something FROM foobarDB.dbo.footable AS otable WHERE otable.someColumn IS NULL

The "otable.xxx" will cause an error as it cannot find that alias.
2005 et.al. seem to be fine.

Summary of Summer

A friend of mine, a life-long resident of Los Angeles California, moved Minneapolis Minnesota and I was giving him some perspective on the seasons where I grew up. Discovered something myself in doing so.

"The thing I grew up with and remember the strongest about the seasons was that when it was the middle of Summer you could hardly wait for winter, and when it was the middle of Winter, you could hardly wait for Summer. Seasons all have their good and bad points, you just have to learn to take advantage of them when they are there. The biggest thing I miss is that change. I have been living in a 22 year long Summer now and its more than a bit annoying. I miss the beauty of the trees in the Fall, fresh fallen snow and the quiet it brings in the Winter, the smell of mud in the spring after the first good thaw. Hmmm, can't think of anything nice about Summer. Oh well."

Just listen to me fool

You cannot have a valid process until you have a process that you manage. That means making sure it happens and listening for changes that are needed and adapting to them.

Open Letter to all Credit facilities

I find your security challenge questions and requirements an invasion of my privacy. You don't need to know anything about me in that detail. As an industry with everyone asking this kind of information, I am being forced to expose MORE data about myself then ever before and I find that MOST offensive.

Find another way or foist your draconian rules on those who have been lax enough to be victimized by fraud - not generate data for future attacks for all.

SS

Counter Rant on R&B

The Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam can be found in Moosylvania, on the waters of Veronica Lake, near the Isle of Lucy, not far from Whynchataka Peak. One can also visit Bullwinkle’s alma mater Wossamotta U. or Rocket J. Squirrel’s alma mater, The Cedar Yorpantz Flying School. R&B was my favorite cartoon when I was little, then it disappeared for about a decade or so, then some network started rerunning it, and the reruns were even funnier because I had collected enough information during that decade to understand all (or most) of the jokes that flew right over my head when I was little.



The whole thing is so littered with cultural, historical, and cold war references that they should probably put out a set of DVD’s with a footnote option that allow you to turn on explanatory text at the bottom of the screen, like footnotes in other classic literature such as I was forced to read in high school and college. I wouldn’t need the footnotes for R&B but a lot of people would, especially younger or dumber ones.



Regarding the ‘Title or: Subtitle’ format, I’m not sure if it was ever a common practice before Bullwinkle. The other well known example is the complete title ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’. R&B came out in 1959 and Dr. S was released in 1964. When I lived in Menomonie and they were talking about starting up the draft again, my roommates and I and a ‘Hell no We Won’t Go – or – I Always Wanted to See Canada’ party. We even made and displayed a title sign at the party, magic marker gloriously emblazoned on tan cardboard. They liked R&B too.

On Rocky and Bullwinkle

I have to explain a lot more references in conversations these days. At first it was funny, now its disturbing. I found myself trying to explain Mr. Peabody just two weeks ago. There are no current cultural references to engage this level of humor with so the attempt falls flat. Now it has to be simple, abrupt and fit in a five second sound-byte to be valid. Everyone knows Gilligan though, that's safe. I pick Maryann by the way - always have. Don't know anyone who picks Ginger so why even ask. Really.

The wife sat down with the kids every night for several weeks and they went through the entire Monty Python Collection. All of it. They then did the same with the entire original Star Trek series and have just finished all the movies of the same genres. We feel strongly that this will give then a good religious, political and moral grounding in life. I probably should get the original R&B also so we have someone to talk to about it when we are in the old folks home.

Maybe Faulty Towers also, and some Bob Newhart. Yeah. That would cover it.

My favorite ranter

My friend KB who-should-have-everything-he-ever-says-published-but-is-never-published says:

Well I remember a night, all those years ago, down at ‘Bachelors 3’ when we were sitting around as usual and I predicted the impending extinction of the guitar as the dominant instrument in popular rock music. Not an unreasonable prediction given the popularity of the euro-synth pop, synth laden dance pop, and a general adoption of synthesizers as instruments rather than the 70’s use of synthesizers as, well, whatever Keith Emerson and Rick Wakeman were doing with them. Well, I was wrong. Just about everybody in the music business worth listening to now, new and old, still uses guitars.

On the same night, or another night just like it, I didn’t make a second prediction. But I was talking about investments, mutual funds, the financial world in general with (or at) Greg. While doing so, I was waving my arms around and being generally more animated than should be necessary while talking about such matters. Now, everyone does that.