I'm surprised I don't see more people having this on their wall. After all, there are so many who do believe that the bible contains absolute truth. Perhaps the answers in genesis people can start selling these.

Mary makes a great decepticon, eh?

Wow! I sure make a great autobot!

It used to be so good.

Well, my media center went down hard yesterday. I have a Dell Dimension 1505, and I've generally been happy with it. For a while last year, I was having some issues where XP would blue screen, and I would have to reset my CMOS (through a jumper of all ways) to get it back. That went on for a little while, but it doesn't happen anymore (I don't totally remember what I did to fix it). Well, since then, I've upgraded to Vista home premium (which I love), and I've been good for a while.

Last night, Mary sent me a text message that the media center wouldn't reboot. I guess it rebooted once with a BIOS message (she didn't write it down), then it wouldn't boot again; it powers up, beeps, then sits there frozen with the 1 2 3 lights on. No video, no nothing. Time to get troubleshooting.

First, the manual that I downloaded from the Dell site says the following for these lights:

"Another failure has occurred.

• Ensure that the cables are properly connected to the system board from the hard drive, CD drive, and DVD drive."
• (other statements that imply that the system actually makes it partially through the boot sequence, which mine doesn't)

So, I open it up, reconnect the cables for the hard drive and DVD drive, still nothing. I fooled around with the cables a bit and at least got what appeared to be a bit farther in the initial diagnostic lights sequence; it appeared to settle on 2 3 for a while, then jumped to 1 2 3. 2 3 is a hard drive failure, and it says to reseat the cables, etc. Great.

I do all that, even try connecting an old drive up to the SATA cable, and it still doesn't work; it just sits there at 1 2 3.

Let's call Dell. I usually tell people that I'm very happy with Dell's phone support. The online chat sucks something fierce, as the people on the other end are clearly sitting in India with a script that they follow and most of the times I've been on there, they absolutely will not veer from their scripted steps to troubleshoot. Bad news. So, I skipped the online chat and went straight to the phone.

Well, I'm now about 3 hours into my joyous hold experience. I sat on hold initially for long enough to drain the battery on my phone (I'm betting it was around an hour of continuous use), then I had to plug it in and call back. After another hour, I got to a person. She read through her script, got some information (a couple bits of information was asked for a couple times), then said that she couldn't help me, but she would transfer me to the support line. "It might be a couple minutes," she told me. Well, I sat on that for another hour, at least. I sat and played my guitar (working on My, My, Hey, Hey) while the hold music came and went. Every so often, the line would go dead, and I'd yell out "hello," hoping that someone was on the line. No luck. So, I sat and sat, played my guitar, played my guitar, yawn.

It is now 1.40pm, and I finally got a technician (native english speaker), and had had me hook up a monitor (I have this connected to my television). As these things go, hooking up the monitor fixed everything, so I booted up and everything was fine. Talk about egg on my face. In any case, I don't try to sound like I know anything when I'm talking to the support people, so it isn't like I was an arrogant "I know what I'm doing" person. Oh well, things are working again.

However, the point of this is the fact that Dell support has gone WAY downhill. I literally waited more than three hours to hear a voice that could help me. UGH!

Well, ever since I won the Zune at CodeMash 2007, I have been listening to a lot more music in my car. Well, when I had the 6-hour drive to Washington, D.C., in August to go to the Agile Conference, I thought I might enter the 90's (or is it the 80's) and start listening to books on tape. Well, after searching around the internet for a good source (read: lots of selection and cheap), and I was astounded. What is up with charging $20 for a downloaded book. UGH! Deciding to make lemonade, I started searching for podcasts to start listening to. There were, of course, the standard ones like Hanselminutes and .Net Rocks (which I don't listen to as much anymore), but I found two other really great ones:

Astronomy Cast

After seeing Lawrence Krauss in August, my interest in astronomy was re-kindled. So, I went looking for something to listen to. What a stroke of luck that I stumbled upon AstronomyCast. The hosts are Pamela Gay, a physics professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Fraser Cain, the publisher of Universe Today. I love how they describe the show as a "fact-based journey through the universe." They strive to not just explain what we know, but also HOW we know it. This is important, as they discuss topics such as The Big Bang, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. It is very educational for me to understand what the lines of evidence there are for these. Of course, everything seems to always point back to the Cosmic Background Radiation, which is pretty cool. Also, as an added bonus, Pamela Gay has one of the sexiest voices I've ever heard.

My History Can Beat Up Your Politics

Bruce Carlson does a great job of taking current political issues and topics and presents them in light of 200+ years of history of the American government. I like his direct approach to giving the facts, as well as linking the probably cause and effects over time. I love early American government history, and it is great to have a source for understanding some of the historical reasons for where we are today.

Well, I'm heading to Manhattan on Friday to attend my very first XPDay. Mary and I are leaving on Friday and coming back on Monday, so I've got to figure out some stuff to do on Sunday and Monday. I've not been to an XPDay before, so I'm very curious to see how it will be. I'm staying at the Intercontinental Barclay. I got it on Priceline, so we'll see how it is. I haven't booked a hotel reservation on Priceline before.

I'm just chock full of conferences; I got back from Agile in August, am going to XPDay in October, going to SDTConf in November, then finally CodeMash in January. Hurra! I definitely get a lot out of these conferences, so I'm always excited to go.

Well, trying to write what I think (not that I know anything about it) is more Ruby-ish code, here is a mixin for the Array:

class Array
    def mergesort
        return self if (length<=1)
        half = (length-1)/2
        firstHalfOfTheList = slice(0..half)
        secondHalfOfTheList = slice((half+1)..(length-1))
        sortedFirstHalfOfTheList = firstHalfOfTheList.mergesort
        sortedSecondHalfOfTheList = secondHalfOfTheList.mergesort
        merge sortedFirstHalfOfTheList, sortedSecondHalfOfTheList
    end
    def merge(first, second)
        merged = Array.new
        firstlength = first.length
        firstlength.times do
            fp = first.shift
            secondlength = second.length
            secondlength.times do
                sp = second.first
                if sp < fp then
                    merged << second.shift
                end
            end
            merged << fp
        end
        merged + second
    end
end

I went to the Pittsburgh Coding Dojo last Thursday with my friend, Nate. It was a lot of fun. The topic was sorting, specifically the merge sort. I decided to write it in Ruby, since I'm working on learning the language. In any case, Greg Akins said that it looks like when he was writing Ruby, and people would say that it looked an awful lot like C# in Ruby. In any case, here's the first pass (complete with rspec tests). I'm going to turn it into a mixin for Array.

class MergeSort
    def sort(list)
        return list if (list.length<=1)
        length = (list.length) - 1
        half = length/2
        firstHalfOfTheList = list.slice(0..half)
        secondHalfOfTheList = list.slice((half+1)..(length))
        sortedFirstHalfOfTheList = sort(firstHalfOfTheList)
        sortedSecondHalfOfTheList = sort(secondHalfOfTheList)
        merge sortedFirstHalfOfTheList, sortedSecondHalfOfTheList
    end
    def merge(first, second)
        merged = Array.new
        firstlength = first.length
        firstlength.times do
            fp = first.shift
            secondlength = second.length
            secondlength.times do
                sp = second.first
                if sp < fp then
                    merged << second.shift
                end
            end
            merged << fp
        end
        merged + second
    end

end

describe MergeSort do

    def check_sort(list)
        s = MergeSort.new
        result = s.sort list
        result.should == list.sort
    end
    it "should return empty list if empty list passed in" do
        check_sort []
    end
    it "should return the same list if the list is ordered" do
        check_sort [0]
        check_sort [1]
        check_sort [1,2]
        check_sort [3,6]
        check_sort [3,6,9,20,100]
    end
    it "should sort a two element list" do
        check_sort [2,1]
    end

    it "should sort a four element list" do
        check_sort [1,0,3,2]
    end

    it "should sort a six element list" do
        check_sort [1,0,3,2,4,5]
    end

    it "should sort a three element list" do
        check_sort [1,0,2]
    end

    it "should sort an eleven element list" do
        check_sort [3,6,2,8,23,45,1,36,77,99,10]
    end
end

What do you know, I have a video posted on the web from my last show at the Winchester. It is my cover of Grandma's Feather Bed by John Denver.

You can also just watch it here:

Ever want to see Jesus kick the shit out of Noah? Here's your chance: Bible Fight.