Lovely Weekend

30 June 2008  |  Categories: Personal  |   |  No Comments »

I had a lovely weekend.  I used the weekend to just chill out.  Friday night we watched the new Futurama movie "The Beast with a Billion Backs".  It was funny but it was nowhere near as good as "Bender’s Big Score".

Saturday we hung about the house all kind of doing our own thing.  I started reading a new Sci-Fi book.  I have decided to try and keep recreational reading to the weekends so I can spend my time during the week doing other things.

Sunday I mowed the lawn and enjoyed the weather.  The temperature probably didn’t make it higher than 75°.  We opened up the house and I spent some time reading on the back porch.  It was one of the nicest weekends I can remember.

Microsoft Does Something Right

27 June 2008  |  Categories: Tech  |  Tags:  |  No Comments »

I really hate to praise Microsoft but I have to say they have really made a few excellent products lately.  First, I really like Windows Live Writer its not perfect but its way more enjoyable to use than any web interface for posting to a blog.  I have investigated many weblog engines and played with the web forms they use for posting new content and I much prefer a desktop application for performing that task. I really wish there was a weblog editor for the Mac that was as good as Windows Live Writer.

Whoo! Newsgator Toolbar

27 June 2008  |  Categories: Tech  |  Tags:  |  No Comments »

Newsgator toolbar is finally working for me in Firefox 3.  I had some weird errors previously where the Newsgator toolbar wasn’t working for me in Firefox 3.  I am really glad to have my subscribe in Newsgator button working again.

A Zune in the Wild

12 June 2008  |  Categories: Tech  |  Tags:  |  No Comments »

I saw my first Zune in the wild today.  I have seen one other Zune before but I am not counting it because it was owned by a Microsoft employee. 

As I was on my way to work I saw a guy jogging through my neighborhood who had a Zune strapped to his arm.  This wasn’t a flash based Zune either it was the hard drive model.  I just felt sorry for the guy and I wondered if he had actually chosen to purchase a Zune or if it was a gift that he didn’t feel like he could exchange without hurting someone’s feelings. 

Firefox 3 RC 2

6 June 2008  |  Categories: Tech  |  Tags:  |  No Comments »

I have been running the Firefox 3 beta’s for a while now because Firefox 3 performance is so much better than Firefox 2.  The stability is better and the memory usage is a lot better. 

I overrode the compatibility checking of extensions in Firefox 3 in order to be able to run a few extensions that it was a real pain to live without.  As I have been running Firefox 3 I check each morning for updated extensions.  Yesterday one of the extensions I was waiting on NoSquint updated to support Firefox 3 RC 1.  Then I noticed that Firefox RC 2 was out and I updated to it.  Then NoSquint was listed as not compatible again which keeps me running with the compatibility check off.

The extension I am waiting to finally support Firefox 3 though is the Newsgator toolbar.  I really wish they would release an update so I can go back to subscribing to rss feeds with one button click instead of using the clunky method on the Newsgator web site.

Little Videos

30 May 2008  |  Categories: PersonalTech  |  Tags:  |  No Comments »

I have had a Canon A510 digital camera for two or three years now.  I love this camera, its pretty fast and the pictures are pretty good.  I am pretty clueless when it comes to photography, my skill level amounts to selecting the preset mode for indoor, outdoor, and kids/pets. The camera has a feature that I had never actually used before the ability to capture small videos.  We were at my son’s baseball game last night and I decided to give it a try.  I got a couple of nice little video’s of him at bat.  I connected my camera to my Mac and imported the photos and videos.  iPhoto showed the videos just like it does the pictures.  It was so quick and easy this kind of thing is why I love my Mac.

Finding Reports in SQL Server Reporting Services

7 May 2008  |  Categories: Tech  |  Tags:  |  No Comments »

Since I had to do this recently I thought I would document it here.  The reports in SQL Server reporting services are stored in the Catalog table of the ReportServer database.  The report name is stored in the Name field the Path field stores the URL path to the report.  So if you wanted to see a group of reports take the first part of the path value and plug it into this URL http://servername/Reports/Pages/Folder.aspx?ItemPath=/pathvalue.