Wednesday, December 10, 2008

I Need a New Business Idea - Minipreneurship

I certainly am not one to complain about my income. I love my job and I feel like I am compensated fairly for it. But, there's always room for more, am I right?

Actually, simply wanting more money is not my motivation for pursuing potential business ventures. Sure, more money would be great, but my real goal is financial independence. That is, not being dependent on that paycheck to provide for myself and my family. The goal is to create multiple streams of income, such that the paycheck becomes the source of funding for investments and other ventures, rather than the sole source of income. My problem at this point is not one of desire to achieve my goals, it is a lack of creativity in terms of coming up with ideas for new income streams.

I read an article this morning (I can't remember what the point was or what website I saw it on), but I do remember it talking about the growing number of "minipreneurs" in the United States. These are people who are, in increasing numbers, starting up small side ventures as a way to augment their incomes or ease the transition into a new line of work. The obvious benefit of this "micro-startup" strategy is one of decreased risk. A person can continue to maintain their day job while also generating income at night.

Anyway, back to my lack of ideas. I need to come up with 2 or 3 really good ideas for sideline ventures I can work towards in some of the limited time I have at night and on the weekends. As soon as I come up with something, I'll be sure to write about my success (or lack thereof). Wish me luck.

Lame Blogger

I realized just now that I haven't written anything new on here in a while... Lame blogger, that's me. I guess I have just been busy with work and family commitments. Or maybe that's just an excuse. Mostly I think it's just that putting my thoughts down into words is not a task that comes naturally to me. I have to really work at it. Which makes blogging seem like a chore most of the time. So, I just wait until I feel inspired to write something, which seems to happen infrequently, at best.

Well, I am going (once again) to challenge myself to get on here and post something new every day for an entire week, in an attempt to spark some new creative energy. I have taken on this challenge before, each time ending in a handful of posts at best. Maybe this time will be different.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

'finger food'

these were one of treats at our cub scouts halloween party last night.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Weekend Camping

This past weekend I was camping with our Cub Scouts pack. It was a great time, and we had the largest group I have ever taken. I think our previous record was like 45 or so, but this time we smashed that with 66 people in attendance! Believe me when I say that is a big group to deal with when it comes time to go on a hike, or cook meals, or pretty much anything ;) It was a great time, though. Here are a couple of shots I snapped with my phone on Sunday morning:

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I didn't take an actual camera, so I don't have any other photos right now. However, a couple of other people did, so once I get some of their photos, I'll try to get some more posted.  

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Anniversary Weekend Adventure

So, this past Sunday (Sept. 14), was my 11-year wedding anniversary.  Wow, it blows my mind sometimes to realize that I have been married for that long.  We've had our ups and downs for sure, but all in all, I am happier and even more in love than I was 11 years ago when we said our vows at the Fort Wayne Botanical Gardens.

To celebrate, we decided to do nothing.  No, really.  We made arrangements for the kids to be gone for the weekend, and we set off with no specific plans.  OK, now I should clarify this...  What we decided to do was get in the car and start driving and keep driving until we felt like turning around and coming back.  The weather in Fort Wayne was somewhat ugly on Saturday, so our only specific goal was to keep going until we found sunshine.  This trip was not about the destination (since we didn't really have one).  It was about spending time together and sharing a common experience.  We drove, we talked, we listened to music.  We wandered off the main highways just to see where we would end up (knowing that the GPS would bring us back to the beaten path if need be).

For the curious among you, we left a little after noon and headed south, after a quick look at the radar showed the most promise of sunshine in that direction.  We got out from under the clouds and into full sunshine about an hour past Indianapolis, but we had it in the back of our minds that we really wanted to get all the way to the mountains.  We didn't make it that far, but that leaves another adventure for another day.  We stopped at a rest stop a half-hour or so away from Louisville, and decided that we at least had to go that far.  We crossed the bridge into Kentucky, took some pictures of the downtown skyline, and drove around the University of Louisville campus for a little bit.  Then, we got back on the highway and headed north.  On the way back, though, we chose to get off of the interstate near Brown County and just explore our way around the back roads.  We stopped in at Brown County State Park, but decided not to pay to go in, as it was already almost 6:00.  We wandered around the back roads for a while, meeting back up with the interstate near the southwest corner of Indianapolis.  A few hours later, we were back home at the end of a truly enjoyable day filled with nothing specific.

I'm sure to most people, especially with gasoline prices just over $4.00 a gallon, this would seem like a somewhat insane thing to do. On the surface, I would agree.  But, honestly, how many people spend thousands of dollars on 'vacations' that do nothing but stress them out and cause conflict?  Does my $150 for gasoline and food really sound outrageous?  I don't think so, especially since I would say that it ranks up there as one of the best road trips ever.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Labor Day Weekend Camping Trip

This past weekend, I took my son and a couple of his friends on a camping trip, partially as an early birthday present (his birthday is today, Sept. 2).  I had decided to go the Family Camp Weekend at the Anthony Wayne Scout Reservation so that we could take advantage of some of the activities that the boys enjoy there, but don't get to do much of when we go for Cub Scout Resident Camp.  For example, they open up the BB gun and archery ranges, which are both popular activities with the boys.  During Resident Camp, however, they usually only get to do each of those one time, which is kind of a let-down after the waiting around they have to do.  This weekend, though, we were able to pretty much do as much shooting as we wanted, within the three-hour window when the ranges were open!

We went up Friday night, got registered, and had camp set up by 7:30 or so.  We spent the rest of Friday night just hanging out at the campsite, enjoying a nice fire, and roasting hot dogs and marshmallows.  The boys also enjoyed throwing a football around for a while.

Saturday, we ended up being pretty busy.  The waterfront opened up at 9:00 A.M., so after breakfast we got our swim trunks on and headed down.  We swam for a half-hour or so, and then got dry and grabbed a canoe, loaded our gear in, and set off across the lake.  By the time we got back, it was pretty much time to head back to our campsite to have some lunch.  After lunch we grabbed some bait from the trading post and hiked to the far end of the lake for some fishing.  We didn't catch anything big, but we had fun anyway.  We hiked back to camp around 1:45, changed back into dry clothes, and hiked over the shooting ranges so that we could be there when they opened at 2:00.  By 4:45, we were getting pretty hungry, so we went back to camp and started a fire for dinner.  After a dinner of hamburgers and hot dogs grilled over the fire, we enjoyed a relaxing evening of hanging out at the campsite, throwing the football around some more, and of course, s'mores and hot dogs.

Sunday morning, we ate breakfast, broke down camp, and headed home around 10:00.  All in all an awesome campout!  As much as I enjoy camping with our Scouting unit, it was nice to just have a small group, no outside schedule, and much less responsibility and structure.  We were able to just do our thing and have a blast.  It's pretty likely that I'll go back for the Family Camp Weekend over Memorial Day.

Here are a couple of pictures I took with my phone (next time I'll take a better camera).  My son (Will) is the one in the yellow shirt:

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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Long Day

Yesterday was training and go-live for a project that I have been working on, and it made for a really long day. Got up at 5:00 A.M., worked on-site from 7:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M., and then went back at 9:00 P.M. and worked until 1:00 A.M. 15 hours onsite, in total. I'm tired today...

Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Diet, Exercise, and Motorcycles

So, I have this longstanding agreement with my wife. If I "get buff", I can buy a motorcycle. Seems simple enough, and also seems like it should be adequate motivation. However, I have just never been able to stick with it long enough to really make a difference. As such, I have never been able to cash in on the wager. The enticement of the motorcycle, it seems, has not been sufficient.

More recently, I have been unhappy with my overall fitness level. Maybe it's because the years of office jobs are catching up with me. Maybe it's because I'm in some sort of pre-pre-mid-life crisis. I don't know. I do know, however, that I simply cannot stick to an exercise program if I have to figure it out on my own.

A month or so ago, my wife stumbled onto a book entitled "Buff Dad" by Mike Levinson. The title is corny enough, but the summary on the jacket got my curiosity up. His program is all about balanced nutrition with an emphasis on foods that assist the body's natural mechanisms for testosterone production, which is necessary for effective muscle building. The workout routine is designed to achieve results quickly without having to spend hours in the gym. I know I sound like a commercial here, but bear with me...

Yesterday marked exactly one week on the Buff Dad program, and I have to say that I feel so much better than I have in as long as I can remember. It sounds like a cliche, but I honestly feel different. I have more energy and I just plain feel better. The nutritional side of the program is designed such that I don't really feel deprived in any way, and the fact that I feel good makes it easier to make healthy choices.

As for the workouts... Wow, when I read through the book, I truly thought it looked like it wouldn't be that hard. I was wrong. The first day kicked my ass, and I didn't even finish the whole thing. If I hadn't already been motivated to change things, that would have been the final straw. Clearly I was even more out of shape than I was ready to admit. The good news is that a week later when it was time to go back to the 'day 1' workout, I was able to finish it and I could tell that the preceding week had made a difference.

So, back to the motorcycle. The past has shown that the lure of the open road has not been enough to keep me working out. But, this time, all the right pieces are in place and I am confident that I am making changes that will not only fulfill my end of the motorcycle agreement, but will change my life for the better.

Friday, July 18, 2008

Change TableAdapter Connection Programmatically

I ran into an issue on a project today. I was using DataSets created in the Visual Studio 2008 DataSet designer to facilitate data access in a handheld application I am working on. The problem arose when I realized that I wanted to be able to programmatically specify the connection string to be used at run-time. I realized that as I was creating TableAdapters in the DataSet designer, it was hard-coding the connection string into the generated source code. It didn't occur to me at the time that this would be a problem, as I was really just experimenting and testing anyway. Well, when I was ready to set the connection strings in code, I couldn't find any visible properties or methods to allow it! AAH!

Well, after some Google searching, I stumbled onto what is one of those "so simple, I'm kicking myself" answers. In the dataset designers, if you click on a TableAdapter and look in the properties pane, one of the properties of the TableAdapter is ConnectionModifier. By default, mine were set to Internal, making the connection object and it's associated connection string invisible to the rest of my application code. By changing the ConnectionModifier property to Public, I now have access to the connection object of my TableAdapters, and I can set/change them programmatically at run-time.

Saturday, July 5, 2008

SourceSafe Issue - Files were moved

So, I sat down an my dining room table this morning with my laptop, all set to get some work done. I connected to the VPN and opened up Visual SourceSafe because I needed to see about some changes that someone else was working on with one of our projects. To my shock and disbelief, there was nothing there. And by nothing, I mean nothing. VSS showed no projects at all.

I connected into the server via Remote Desktop to see if I could figure out what happened. I looked at the folders where the VSS database is stored, and it seemed to be in order. So, I ran analyze.exe to see if there were any corrupted files or whatever. This is where it started to get interesting... Analyze.exe wouldn't consistently run without crashing with nothing more than a very not-helpful Visual C++ Runtime error. GAH!

I rebooted the server and ran analyze.exe again. Same crashing! I ran it again, and noticed that it was indicating a whole bunch of files that it couldn't find, all of which were in the same folder. That folder on disk was indeed empty.

After nearly 3 hours or trial and error, rebooting, Google searches, and IM sessions, it occurred to me that if the folder in question had been moved for whatever reason, it might be causing the symptoms I was seeing. So, I started looking through the rest of the folders in the VSS 'data' directory, and sure enough, the 'A' folder had been moved to inside the 'E' folder (you have to have seen how VSS stores it's files for that to make sense). So, I copied the contents of this misplaced 'A' folder back to the correct 'A' folder (data\A), and ran analyze.exe again. This time it ran properly, and was able to correct a few other minor issues! Woot!

So, I opened Visual SourceSafe back up, and sure enough, everything was back to normal. Too bad it took me 3 hours on a Saturday morning to figure it out...

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

I spend a lot of time here...

This is my workspace for the first 40 hours of the week.

I'm really not a techno-elitist... Well, sorta.

I read an editorial recently by Ted Pin over at SQLServerCentral.com, and I have to agree with him 100%. His beef is with the term "IT guy". That is, even though many of us work in IT, we don't necessarily like to be referred to as "IT guys"... Why? Well, because of the common perception of what "IT guy" means. If you've ever seen the "Nick Burns" Saturday Night Live skits, you know exactly what I'm talking about. The general population equates "IT guy" with the rude helpdesk guy that they are forced to call when Excel crashes, or worse yet, with the Beetle-driving Geek Squad from Best Buy... To put it bluntly, I don't fall into this group and I don't want to be categorized as though I do.

What I have beef with is the broad categorization of any person who works "with computers" for a living all into the same group of "IT guys". And my beef breaks down into two parts.

First, there is the "guy" part of the title. By tacking on "guy" at the end, it cheapens the whole thing. To quote from Mr. Pin, "When we refer to other professionals, we definitely don't say "the plumber guy," or "the doctor guy," or "the lawyer guy." If you say those out loud, the inclusion of "guy" somehow changes the connotation, and not in a good way. (Try it.)".

Second, is the grouping of all technology professionals into this one group of "IT guys". I think many professional software developers (or data warehousing experts or enterprise architects, or many others) would agree that being grouped together with pre-entry-level helpdesk techs is irritating. I imagine that most neurosurgeons wouldn't want to be categorized together with CMAs (certified medical assistant) and be called "medical guys". I mean, let's be honest here...

Before I offend anyone else, let me clarify something. I am in no way saying that there is anything wrong working the helpdesk (or any other job, for that matter). I know where I came from, and I have held a wide range of IT jobs from helpdesk to network administrator to webmaster to developer to consultant. I have been an "IT guy", and there is nothing wrong with it. I'm really not trying to be elitist.

Having said that, I still don't want to be called an "IT guy", because I feel that my experience and skills separate me from that title. Does that make me an elitist? I guess it kinda does. Oh well.

Monday, June 30, 2008

Test post...

This post is just a test to see how well Windows Live Writer works with Blogger...

Is the "final frontier" getting more dangerous?

Due presumably to the fact that I work "with computers", people often ask me about things like internet file-sharing, DVD copying software, etc. Typically, they want to know if whatever they are thinking of doing might be illegal. Of course, since I work "with computers", that makes me an expert on US and international copyright laws... Anyway, I generally tell them that this is a very gray area and that the best course of action is to steer clear of anything questionable.

As the Internet has matured, lawmakers have been slow to address the changing techno-landscape, due in small or large part to a lack of understanding of the possibilities/dangers that exist. However, in recent years, lawmakers at all levels have enacted a hodgepodge of legislation creating a whole new category of potential criminals who use their computers instead of guns. The problem with these laws is that they seem (in my opinion) to have been fueled largely by pressure from the entertainment industry as well as fears of terrorism. Laws created out of pressure from industry are going to naturally represent the interests of that industry and not necessarily the best interests of the legislators' constituency. Furthermore, laws created out of fear are going to tend to be overreactions that are not necessarily the most well thought out.

What we now have are a lot of laws that can indeed be enforced to punish legitimate offenders. However, there is also a great deal of room for otherwise honest, law-abiding citizens to be caught up by laws that allow a great deal of latitude for interpretation or by laws that they didn't even know existed. The point I am trying to make here is that in their attempt to regulate the "final frontier", lawmakers have (arguably) made it a more dangerous place for the average person.

TechRepublic has published a short summary of recent cyber-legislation that reinforces my viewpoint that it is just best to steer clear of anything even remotely questionable. The summary is entitled "10 ways you might be breaking the law with your computer", and can be found here. I would strongly recommend reading it and deciding for youself of the "final frontier" is getting safer, or more dangerous.

New Blog...

So, I have switched blog services (again). I was using Windows Live Spaces, which certainly had it's good points (like integration with Windows Live Messenger). However, I never really liked the advertising at the top, or the sort of 'heavy' feel that the whole thing seemed to have. A lot of things just seemed to bog down the overall experience. I also wanted to move to something a little more customizable. Not that I will end up finding time to actually do it, but at least I have the option...