Ok, so I signed up for a twitter account. It all seems really lame, but I thought I would check out a few of these “community” services.

You setup an account, trying to figure out a username nobody has used yet. Of course brettski is taken, I am usually late on that one (go figure). Once you set your username, password, and email account, they ask you for your email address and password for public email services (like Yahoo!) so they can check your address books for names that may have a twitter account. Like I am giving anyone any of my passwords, please. Who would do that, unless it was a total junk account? I just don’t want them to have that information. Sure it says, “We don’t store your login information.” Sure, whatever.

It is what it is, my lame existence on another lame web service, twitter.

Google Maps

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=48.063397,12.864304&spn=0.112887,0.246162&z=12

Now that my body has purged itself of some nasty virus, I am back to cleaning up my life. This time it was in the basement where I spent some time removing old hardware. A 21 inch monitor which a funky wave at the top of the screen. It’s just too damn big anyway. Three computers (don’t laugh too hard), dx4-100, k6, and Sun Ultra 10, all gone. Get them OUT, I just can’t take the clutter. I am so bad at this too. I look at my first laptop (which I didn’t pay for), I can’t use at all anymore, and have a hard time getting rid of it. I mean I can’t run anything on it, it’s a freak’n 386sx-25 with 2MB of ram. It still runs if you believe it, though the 40MB HDD sounds like it’s going to break apart. I used that thing in my last years in college. Well, GONE, in the trash, enough is enough.

I even got my wife a little involved this weekend, she filled a whole bag (one of those tall paper yard waste ones) of kids close that have cluttered up their rooms forever.  By my estimation there is another 12 bags of clothes on an unused bed.  All in good time, keep the momentum going.   Purge, purge, purge!!!!!

As written in the Chicago Tribune and consumed at Yahoo.com

Nobel winner sorry for Bush comment

Published July 13, 2007

DALLAS, TEXAS — Nobel Peace Prize winner Betty Williams apologized Thursday for saying she could kill President Bush, remarks that shook up the International Women’s Peace Conference in Dallas.

Yes, you read right, “Nobel Peace Prize winner… apologized … for saying she could kill President Bush…”
I guess the peace really isn’t in her?

Wow, I was pretty excited when I read this morning that SourceGear has created a stand-alone version of it’s excellent diff tool, DiffMerge! Eric Sink wrote about it on his blog June fourth. I have been using SourceGear’s products for a few years now and am very satisfied with them. I was even able to get their Vault application to work at my web host.  DiffMerge has always been bundled with Vault and I was impressed with it the first time I used it.  I even created a shortcut to it in my vault folder.  I was never sure why SourceGear didn’t do that?

Give a try, I know you will be very happy with the product.  Plus it works on multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, and Mac!

The Piano Man returns! Wow what a really fun concert my wife and I experienced last night. I had never seen Billy Joel live before and am so glad I had the chance to. He is so incredibly talented.

My opinion of the night, a good time. The music was excellent, though not flawless, but honestly I don’t give a damn. The six person band with Billy were all having such a good time on stage, you could see it, you could feel it. My biggest mistake was reading local reviews of the concert on the way into work. Man what assholes, these writers where just looking for dirt to write about. Like this article by Bob Gendron of the Chicago Tribune, who couldn’t rip up Billy enough, he killed him with his pen. There was an OK article by Jamie Sotonoff of the Daily Herald, but some comments out of context or plain silly.

Billy really adds a personal touch to his performances which just made everything more. After the first song, “Angry Young Man”, Billy indicated that he was actually Billy’s dad, and Billy had asked him to play for him tonight. 🙂 Billy also made some other comments about his added years like, “I may have a lot less hair, but I am getting more head!” Before one song (can’t remember which one) he says, “I can’t believe I am still doing this.” Well I’m glad he still is.

A few songs later, the crowd was given a choice to choose one of three songs for Billy to sing, “Vienna”, something else, and “Captain Jack.” While naming the songs to choose from, Billy indicated that he cannot sing all the songs, which brought some moans from the crowd. Then Billy said, “I am going to be 58 in a few weeks, we cannot cover all the songs.” A few more moans and Billy followed this up by thrusting his pelvis up from his stool and grabbing his nuts, to laughter from the crowd. Just 12,000 people having a good time.

About midway through the show, Billy had a long-time roadie sing AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell”, while he played a guitar. He did an OK job, the voice was almost there, it was fun. I see now, what really happened to Bon Scott, he didn’t really die, just became a roadie for Billy Joel the last 25 years. Again the damn critics tore this apart, saying he was just strumming his guitar for a while and looking out of place, then leaving the stage for a while. Well yeah, you dumb-asses, the man needed a break. He just spent an hour or so on stage and took a break. It was the whole reason for the song. Something a little different to allow the star to take five. I would like to see any of the damn critics play for over two hours straight.

For a while Billy’s piano retracted back into the floor–it rotated too, as Billy stated after the first time it changed direction, “That is all of the special effects you get tonight. The piano goes this way, then back that way.”– and he stood at a microphone and sang, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, “Big Shot”, and “Innocent Man”; among some others which I don’t remember the songs. I never seen Billy rock like this before, it was new and fresh to me. He seemed a little awkward, but always having a good time.

The last song of the night was “Piano Man”. Billy had just played, “Only the Good Die Young” and “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” as part of his encore. Big cheers for the whole band, the crowd going wild. All the lights go out except for the spotlights on Billy. This brought huge cheers in appreciation for his performance. Billy walks toward the rear of the stage and heads stage-left away from his piano. A few boos come from the crowd. So billy moves toward his piano and receives cheers from the crowd. So he steps away from the piano, and now the crowd getting into it, boo. Then he steps toward the piano again, cheers. He does this a little bit, goes back and forth quickly to see if every one can keep up–laughter (everyone having a good time). He moves back to the piano a last time and has a seat, to a huge roar. Billy plays a quick classical piece, just a few bars, breaks, then goes right into “Piano Man”. Spine tingling, I tell you. Billy was obviously tired at this point but still pounded it out beautifully.

All I can say is Thank You Billy Joel, it’s a night out I shall remember for some time.

Song List

“Angry Young Man”
“My Life”
“Everybody Loves You Now”
“The Entertainer”
“Captain Jack”
“Allentown”
“Zanzibar”
“New York State of Mind”
“Root Beer Rag”
“Ballad of Billy the Kid”
“Movin’ Out”
“Innocent Man”
“Don’t Ask Me Why”
“Always a Woman”
“Keeping the Faith”
“River of Dreams”
“Highway to Hell”
“We Didn’t Start the Fire”
“Big Shot”
“It’s Still Rock & Roll To Me”
“You May Be Right”

Encore
“Only the Good Die Young”
“Scenes From an Italian Restaurant”
“Piano Man”

I actually completed this a couple of weeks ago–none the less I am still pretty excited about it. I was looking for some ways to help increase search engine rankings with my EVE Tools page. Since I have put this stuff together and some people find it useful, maybe others will to and provide some feedback on stuff they would like to see, or just tell me it sucks, none-the-less, it’s always a nice feeling when people use your stuff.

Knowing that I could never have enough content to continuously add to Brettski’s EVE Tools, I needed some other way to keep new content flowing to the site. The EVE-Online news feeds came to mind.  Of course, there is always new information coming out, I just need to read the RSS feeds and display them on the site.  Like any good hacker, I started researching the art of consuming RSS feeds, since its something I have never done before.  It seemed pretty simple to pull off by writing a class, then I started to think about caching, etc. and got lazy and looked for a tool.  There was some stuff on Codeproject, and here and there.  Then I ran into Dmitry Robsman‘s blog on msdn.  What a life saver, rsstoolkit, this little tool of his, written for .NET 2.0, met most of my needs and was a snap to implement.  I now have EVE’s feeds on the site and could develop my own feeds if I ever wanted to, though can’t think of any reason to do so at this point.

If you are looking to consume or add rss to your site, look into the rsstoolkit, it works pretty well and saved me a whole bunch of time.   Thank you Dmitry.

I am very happy and proud to see my great city, Chicago, has been selected as the possible US site for the 2016 Olympics!

Congratulations Chicago! Go get them Mr. Daley.