Go Pats!

The Patriots are just amazing to watch this season.  It’s interested to see how bad (or is it just “equal”) the rest of the league is… I mean the pats game just started and the defense scored a touchdown in less than 2 minutes.  The offense hasn’t even been on the field yet

 

Mosquitos and my Oldest daughter.

So apparently Mosquitos love to attack me and my oldest daughter.  This is no fun as I hate using Deet if I can avoid it… but seeing that where I live there are lots of mosquitos… well sometimes you just gotta put on the repellant.  Having said that we often don’t always apply it “in time”, and so the itching of mosquito bites starts (for my oldest).  Inevitably, the constant and vigorous scratching leads to her breaking skin and bleeding.  Once the scabs are there… she constantly picks at them.

We are at our WITS end as to how to stop this.  Does anyone have any ideas?

We’ve tried positive rewards, negative consequences, ignoring it, nothing seems to work.

Please help!

 

Pat or Puck

Pat or Puck

Originally uploaded by hooligan495

And here’s pat

 

Wolfgang Puck or Pat Campbell?

Wolfgang Puck or Pat Campbell?

So I was at whole foods tonite with the kids and my oldest says: ” Dad there’s pat!” I’m like “where” and she points to this can of soup.

What do you think? (yes you have to know pat)

 

Does sending a message to a state senator help?

So the whole gay marriage ballot initiative is bothering me.  In my mind ballot questions only serve to get our representatives out of having to make a decision that they think would have negative political ramifications on their candidacy.  Look at the income tax ballot questions too… legislature ignores those in order to balance the budget (or at least attempt to ). 

So I think I’ve determined that both my representatives want the ballot question.  (they are opposed to gay marriage and want to put the question on the ballot so that they don’t have to “take” responsibilty if a ban passes… knowing that a ban is immoral and discriminatory.)

I wonder if sending them a letter will do anything?  I tend to doubt it… what do you all think?

 

Flickr

So I just signed up for a Flickr account and have started posting photos there of my family mostly.  Right now they are private pictures… I’m trying to decide if I want to make them public or some of them public.  But if you have a Flickr account and want to add me as a contact… My flickr name is “hooligan495″

 

Ahh… Spring!

Spring is here!   Woo Hooo!  The weather is warm but not too hot.  Cool at nite but not too cold.  I think Spring is my favorite season of the year.  Sorry I haven’t posted much recently.  I’ve been working pretty hard at work these days.  We are coming to the end of a Sprint and as the Database guy I’m in demand.  So I’m trying to keep ahead of the crowd.  We’ve come up with a pretty good approach that I want to write about in a subsequent post.  Anyway, back to spring… The only think I don’t like about spring is the ticks.  We’ve already found 3 of em on myself and the girls.  UGH.  They are small.  The size of a deer tick but I think they are just regular ticks in the small development stage.  At least I hope so.  They weren’t embedded just walking around so that was good. 

 

Happy Birthday to me… yesterday

So yesterday was my birthday.  Heather made me a cake and let the girls decorate it.  OMG was it funny… They used every sprinkle,jimmy, confectionary item in the house on the cake.  It was hilarious.  (I gotta get a flicker account and upload some pics).  They were so proud!  and when it came time to eat it … they dove right in!  (there was a lot of that gelatinous coloring stuff that you use to write with on it.)  Our teeth were stained with blue and green food coloring

 We had a blast.  My oldest had to have the 3 (I’m 37) that was in the center of the cake.   I just couldn’t say no

Fun was had by all… Except heather… She had to work last nite…

 

FxCop and you

So I know this blog says I want to talk about .NEt and I do have a couple of posts about it in the pipeline but work’s been pretty busy lately so I’ve only been adding to them incrementally.  Soon I hope.  But I did want to take a little time to talk about a lovely {sarcasm} tool called FxCop.  FxCop is a code analysis tool that analyzes your code for a few different things: Coding style and coding efficacy.

Basically you take your project/solution and you compile it. Then you run the FxCop too against your Dlls.  As a result FxCop measures how good your code is against a set of built in (and extensible) rules.  These rule range from spell checking to actual errors.  The tool basically runs like a compiler and spits out errors and warnings (you can customize what is an error vs warning based on your project’s coding standards).  But some of the rules are just bizare.  I find myself in a rush to get my project building because we are in this stage where we are running the tool with a big bang effect (we have a lot of code that we didn’t used to run it on … now we are and we gotta get the world building again).  In this rush I am questioning the value of some of the rules as they apply to my project but I am just changing the code to follow them because it’s easier than changing the rules…

For example I have an Enum that has 3 values A=1, B=2, C=3  (if you don’t know what an enum is post and I’ll update with a definition).  FxCop yells at me that I should have a value of None=0.  So I put it in… But I really don’t need one and it could lead to confusion later… ugh… The things we do in the name of speed… So I added a comment like //TBD: Remove this later…. hmm…

I don’t like it  

 

Most disturbing…

In another “I Just don’t get it” moment… I was riding into work today and NPR was talking about Iraq and the surge and whether or not it’s working… from the sounds bites I’ve been hearing I’d say … no… But a more statistical slant should probably taken.  Since the surge started how has the deathtoll (both American and non american) changed… for the better? For the worse?  I think that’ll be my statistics project for the week. 

Now to the “Disturbing” part.  For the first time ever I had to turn off NPR.  I was revolted and horrified when I heard the adoption stance Russia is taking and the description of the conditions over there.  Russia is disallowing Foriegn adoption… “Temporarily”… In the face of this, orphanages are so full that hospitals have rooms full of infants that are going neglected… Children are tied down and or their mouths are taped shut.  They are and I quote “Rotting in their own filth because staff are too overworked to take care of them.”   OMG… I am saddened that children are kept in this way.  Angered at a government that would essentially refuse help.  I know there must be people in Russia trying to fix this and I wish them all the best and all the luck.  Man there is so much that is incomprehensible to me in the world these days.  I wonder to myself… What can I do?  I am afraid that I’ll be desenitized to this over time… I don’t want to rail about it in this post just once … as a salve to my conscious.

hmmm…. This requires more thought.