greg hughes - dot net

I've never met Rory and he just moved from Portland, but he's funnier than heck to read, and when he said to TP (like as in Tee-Pee) Chris Sells' blog - since Chris is out of town - well, I obliged (as have many others). Unfortunately, in my creative translation I managed to make the page scroll to the right about the same distance as it scrolls up and down... OOPS.

Now I remember, pretty clearly, why I am not a cat person. Probably also why I (subconsciously) had not committed on my own to this animal.

No real sleep last night, claw marks in my hands (I was nice, they're just small and very sharp), cat pee in my carpet, meowing every five seconds since God knows when last night.

Argh.

At least I have the Internet to figure out how to make this cat happy (if that can even be done - I'm probably naive here, which is just another sign that I am not a cat person).

And before anyone from the we-know-who's-really-in-control camp throws snide remarks, I realize that the problem may actually be that I am not a cat's person. I'm fine with that.

I dunno. Nice little cat, and a very nice gesture, but I just dunno ... We'll see.

In this day and age, it's not unusual for people who live next door to each other to not have the first clue about who their neighbors are, what they're names are, or anything at all about those people over there that apparently get in their cars and go someplace each morning (probably to work).

It's not that way for me. My next-door neighbors are great people, friends of mine, and pretty fun (sometimes down-right amusing) to spend time with. They have great kids and good hearts. We hand out and do things together now and then. So, I consider myself very lucky, indeed.

Case in point: My birthday is coming up in a few weeks. They wanted to do something nice for me (which is really very cool). So, what did they decide to do?

Well - long story short - I now have a cat. To go with my dog.

Now, before you freak out and cry foul, please relaize a couple things: First of all, I was asked about the whole adopt-a-cat thing a couple days ago. I just hadn't actually committed to doing anything about it. But that's cool. Also, I have been talking about getting a cat for a while now. So this is not completely out of the blue. And the standing offer is that if it doesn't work out, the neighbors will take the cat into their family (and then they'd have more pets than kids, heheheh), so I do have an “out” there.

Hey, but it's an awfully nice cat. Sharp claws, yes - but nice. And she's fixed (apparently yesterday), so no worries about more of the same down the road. And perhaps most importantly, she's alive. Had she not been picked up from the pound by my neighbor yesterday, she'd have been put down by now. So, all in all, it's a good thing.

Truth be told, I've always been more of a dog person, but cats are okay. Besides, I live in the woods, so there's plenty of practical reasons to have a cat or two around the house (Note: one is enough for now )

In reality, it's a very nice - and thoughtful - birthday gift. Pretty darn cool.

Not that I would know personally, since I don't work there, but many friends and colleagues of mine who are Microsoft employees definitely enjoy it there. All I know is, they get together and play ice hockey. In my book, that really says something.

Jim Edelen points to Maxim Karopov's site where Maxim provides a very good description of what SharePoint is and how it's all broken down. At the end of the article there's also a good list of Sharepoint bloggers that have sites with interesting and decent content.

I have not blogged much about this technology in the past few months (in fact the last time I wrote about it was on my old blog), but we are in the end game of a SharePoint deployment and ramp-up at my company. I was involved in speaking at a few of the launch events last year, and we were an early adopter of much of the Office System in this latest version. It's been quite a ride. I'll try to remember to post some experiences here as we continue, but for the developer side of things, I will have to leave that up to Travis and others.

That reminds me - I am looking to hire a developer that knows ASP.net and specifically has some Sharepoint 2003 abilities. If anyone knows someone who happens to be in the Portland, Oregon area (or plans to be) who fits the bill, drop me a line at ghughes-AT-corillian.com (just reformat the email address of course ).

This is kinda cool: “Search Google for sites added today, yesterday, within the last seven days, or last 30 days.”

http://www.freshgoo.com/

Sidebar cool thing: If you refresh that page, you'll see a bunch of funny modified Google logos. Kept me busy for a little while!

KC Lemson, who works on the Exchange team at Microsoft, asks if there are any IT bloggers out there who are actually blogging about IT. She's soliciting links from anyone who does, or from people who know of good ones, to see if it would be worthwhile to put together a list.

I think that's a great idea. There are tons of blogs by developers and about specific products, etc., but not that many that are about IT operations and management. I hope this takes off, and it's already made me think a bit about some things that I could be blogging that I have thus far ignored.

From the logs of the original computer geeks, the actual description of the first computer bug. So, that's where the terms “bug” and “debug” come from.

Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1945. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found". They put out the word that they had "debugged" the machine, thus introducing the term "debugging a computer program".

In 1988, the log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia.

“You can start a very long and pointless discussion by wondering about this topic on the net.”

Yeah, no kidding. Nothing says lame quite like “THAT'S NOT HOW YOU PRONOUNCE THAT!”

Gimmee a break...

Read here: http://www.eeng.brad.ac.uk/help/.faq/.unix/.pronun.html

I was going to be on an airplane about now, landing in sounthern California, but plans changed and so I won't be flying there for a few more weeks. But that's okay, it means I have a four-day weekend that I can spend getting things done around home. I am rather looking forward to that. Not quite as much fun as visiting a friend in California, but that's okay - It will just be more fun when I do get to head that way.

So this, I think, will be lawn and garden weekend at my place. Last weekend, the neighbors and I went to the home-improvement box store across the river over there in Warshington and got materials to build a whole slew of raised garden beds. So, I have a lot of cedar planks, stakes and other stuff just waiting for me to get my act together and start building. I'll go into town and arrange for a truckload of good garden soil to be brought in (the soil here in the hills is rocky and kind of clayish, so ammending is important). Then I can throw my back out moving soil into the raised bed frames. Woo hoo!

The other thing I need to get done is preparing a temporary pad for my new spa/hot tub to sit on. Not sure when it's going to be delivered, but I made the purchase recently and am looking forward to it - and so is my back, let me tell you. I say “temporary pad” because I am hoping in the future to add a deck to the house and move the spa up onto that. Big dreams, but hey - gotta start somewhere, right?

With the weather as nice as it's supposed to be, I am also thinking a trip to Brown's Camp with the 4-wheeler might be in order. Maybe - if not, plenty more weekends ahead.

Mostly I am just looking forward to doing a lot of whatever I want and not worrying about anything else. The blackberry is set to not receive emails, my desk phone is set to go straight to voice mail rather than ringing my cell phone llike it usually does, and I'm ready to disconnect for a few days. I need it.

Wow.

http://www.kartoo.com/

That's cool stuff. Enter a search term/phrase and see the relationships and relative validity of each result. Uses flash, which (for once) is cool (yes, I think flash is entirely over-used).

Bookmarked. Should be fun to watch this grow.

Gonna be a busy week. I'll be in San Diego visiting a family friend starting on Thursday, and won't be coming back til Monday night. Looking forward to it - he joined the US Navy a while back, and he's stationed on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier (the USS John C. Stennis), so I will get to see what a floating city looks like on the inside. That will be fun. 5,000 crew on one ship - amazing!

I also have lots of planning to get done at work on a pretty big project we are trying to get wrapped up. Need to get that one done before the next ones start. Luckily, the next few won't be quite as monstrous, but one thing is for sure: There's more than enough on the horizon to keep all of us very busy for the foreseeable future. It will be nice to (hopefully) turn some of it down a notch, though. I'm ready for a bit of a break.

On top of that I am working on plans to extend a deck off my porch at home and to get a garden planted. My neighbors and I are going to work on the gardens together, it looks like, which will be fun. Gardens are certainly a lot of work, but that's the kind of work I don't mind doing - the kind that yields results you can actually (literally) get your hands around. the biggest risk is the deer that roam around here, so I am thinking some sort of fence is in order. I thought I might even try the human hair trick, although I have heard mixed reviews about whether it really works, and now I am doubtful. There's always technology to do the trick if need be. Apparently that one also works on Moose. Well, in that case I guess I need me one of those eh? Nothing like electricity to solve a problem. Or you can just spray.

Anyhow, I am looking forward to the trip to California, both because it will be good to see a friend and because I can certainly use the break in my hectic routine, which these days pretty much consists of work and church stuff and then more work. So - it will be nice.

Hmm. That was pretty random.