I finished listening to the first season of the Ricky Gervais Show today, on my way home from work. Here’s a recent article about Karl Pilkington, “the odd-thinking fall guy” of the show, as the article puts it. I did enjoy the show, though it falls into a bit of a predictable pattern after a while. Still, I think I’ll pop for the second and third seasons from iTunes.
Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow
Here’s a good article about the decline of Roger Rabbit at Disney. I loved the original “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” movie. I’m not sure I care that much about Roger as a theme-park attraction, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
Espresso’s New Wave Hits Town – New York Times
Here’s a good article on coffee in NYC from the New York Times. Maybe I’ll hop over to one of these places the next time I’m in the city.
Adium
Some time ago, I tried to set up an IM client on my Mac that would connect to my company’s Sametime server. It might have been an older version of Adium, or it might have been Mercury. I can’t quite remember. Either way, I couldn’t get it to work, and just gave up. Well, I took another shot at it today, this time using the current version of Aduim, and it worked like a charm.
The official Sametime client for Mac is in beta right now. It looks pretty good, from what I’ve seen, but it’s nice to have something that works well in the meantime.
Right Stuf Geneon Sale
Right Stuf International has a bunch of Geneon DVDs on sale, 10 for $50 or 25 for $100. I have to admit I got sucked in on the latter deal. They had a bunch of stuff listed that I’ve been meaning to pick up, plus some stuff I was just curious about. I should be buried in anime DVDs in a week or two. Anything I don’t like can get traded off on Peerflix.
DragonCon
I’ve been thinking about going to DragonCon for the last few years, but I just haven’t done it. Too much other stuff going on, generally. Look at what I missed this year, though: Klingons on motorcycles!
computer books
I just finished ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer’s Notebook. Looking back through old posts, it appears that I’ve been working my way through this one for quite a while now. Oh well. The next book in my stack is Expert C# Business Objects which, according to Amazon, I bought on Sept 20, 2005. So I guess it’s about time to crack it open, right? Of course the C# 2005 version is out now. I’d like to read that one instead, but I don’t want to just toss out a $60 computer book. I guess I’ll start reading the one I’ve got, then maybe think about “upgrading” to the new one if it’s really interesting.
ASP.NET 2.0 – client callbacks
The client callback mechanism in ASP.NET 2.0 was apparently changed during the beta, at some point after the book I’m reading was written. To their credit, O’Reilly covers this in a doc file posted on their site.
Also, this page at the quickstarts.asp.net site describes the current mechanism briefly, and this article on the MSDN site gives a bit more detail.
eBay weirdness
I was looking for something on eBay today, and stumbled across a very odd seller. He’s selling some pretty pedestrian stuff for really high prices.
- An old bag for $1005.
- An old SCSI controller for $1030.
- An old dot matrix printer for $1010.
- An old Reader Rabbit title for $1010.
I wonder if he just got the pricing wrong somehow, accidentally adding $1000 to everything. Or if this is part of some kind of weird plan, setting up an ID that’ll be used for a scam at some point.
ASP.NET 2.0 ObjectDataSource
The ASP.NET 2.0 book I’m reading has a simple example of using an ObjectDataSource bound to a GridView. I’m always a little suspicious of wizard-generated stuff like this, but I’m willing to give it a try. The example in the book did not actually work, though, and a few minutes of poking around didn’t reveal anything obvious that I’d missed.
This article has some good material on the ObjectDataSource. I suppose it’s something I’ll need to look into a bit more, in general.