Reading List–A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity (Bill O’Reilly)

‘Bold Fresh’ is a departure from my previously-posted reading list, but it was well-worth the detour.  I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I started reading even though I have watched O’Reilly plenty of times on The O’Reilly Factor.  I appreciate his fair treatment of people from all places on the political spectrum and his critical approach to everyone on both sides of the aisle is a welcome departure from the obvious left-wing bias that dominates the American news media.  But the book isn’t really about that.

‘Bold Fresh’ is the story of where Bill O’Reilly came from, his philosophy on life and his work, and the origins and reasons behind his philosophy.  I could literally go an and on about specifics of what is contained in the pages of ‘Bold Fresh’, but I won’t, as you can (and should) read it for yourself.  I can say that after reading it, I have a much greater understanding of O’Reilly’s work and a tremendous amount of respect for him as a human being and as a man.

His fiercely-held belief in self-reliance (as opposed to the entitlement mentality) and standing up for what you believe really resonates for me, and I hope to live up to that ideal even half as well as he’s been able to.  O’Reilly’s viewpoint on holding people accountable for their actions is also something I agree with wholeheartedly.

O’Reilly writes extensively about his belief in the power and necessity of deep, meaningful friendships as an fundamental piece of keeping a man centered and on track.  I have done a fair amount of reading on this topic as well as self-examination and observation of my life the lives of the men around me, and I agree with O’Reilly 100%.  This is an area that many men (myself included) struggle with today; many of us have isolated ourselves from deep friendships with other men, and I believe we are all suffering for it.

All in all, I found ‘Bold Fresh’ to be a really enjoyable read.  O’Reilly’s philosophy lines up closely with my own, and the book has strengthened my resolve to live up to my own ideals.  People who already dislike him will probably not enjoy the book, as his approach tends to be somewhat polarizing.  But, for anyone who either already appreciates his style (or are neutral), go get this book and read it.  Today.

Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation in Online Communication

A few moments ago, I put forth a question to my Twitter and Facebook followers, and it only seemed apropos to pose the question here as well.

Is it really that difficult to apply elementary levels of grammar, spelling, and punctuation to online communication?

If you spend any amount of time whatsoever in the world on social media, it would seem that the answer is a resounding yes!  It seems that people largely believe that it is far too much trouble to apply those basic rules of grammar that Mrs. Finkelstein beat into them back in the second grade.  And if people (in general) believe otherwise, their actions don’t seem coincide with their words.

To me, this is not a matter of formality or tailoring your behavior to the circumstances.  I have heard some argue that social media specifically, and electronic communications in general are by their nature less formal than other types of interaction and therefore do not require the same level of formality.  I disagree wholeheartedly.  I do agree that there different audiences and situations allow different levels of sophistication in language.  However, that doesn’t mean that there is ever a circumstance where simple, basic grammar, spelling and punctuation shouldn’t be followed.

When you send a Tweet, post a Facebook status or comment, send an email, or submit a blog post, you are adding to a permanent electronic fingerprint of yourself.  Like it or not, how you say things often leaves just as strong an impression on people as what you say.  Leaving out all of the capital letters and punctuation from a Facebook status is the online equivalent of showing up for an office job with a wrinkly, dirty shirt, torn up jeans, and hair that hasn’t been washed or combed in a week.  It leaves a bad impression on people.

What impression do you want to leave?

File Lock Problem in Visual Studio 2010 Build

I have been banging my head against my padded cubicle wall for several days now in frustration over a build error that keeps popping up in Visual Studio 2010.  When attempting to debug, or even just build without launching the debugger, I keep getting an error that looks like this:

Unable to copy file "obj\Debug\MyProject.dll" to "bin\MyProject.dll". The process cannot access the file 'bin\MyProject.dll' because it is being used by another process.

For the first couple of days, I just grumbled angrily to myself and restarted Visual Studio whenever this happened, which it did not do consistently.  Sometimes it would work correctly for dozens of build/debug sessions, only to pop up at random times seemingly chosen to maximize my irritation.

Anyway, I did some searching around, and this is a fairly common complaint, with a fairly simple workaround.  I actually saw several different approaches to this, but the most elegant was the one I found here.  His sample assumes you are writing Visual Studio add-ins, but his fix works for Web Site projects, and should work for other project types as well.  I won't go through explaining the details of this problem, as the post linked above does a good job of that, but I will provide the fix here.  Simply add the following lines of code to the pre-build event command line of your project (the linked post provides a screenshot of what this look like in Visual Studio):


if exist "$(TargetPath).locked" del "$(TargetPath).locked"
if exist "$(TargetPath)" if not exist "$(TargetPath).locked" move "$(TargetPath)" "$(TargetPath).locked"

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...

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.