The word on the street is that the .NET User Group install fest has been rescheduled for next week Tuesday the 18th.  If this turns out to be the case I will not be able to make this, and you will miss my riveting grok talks on Client Application Services, Extension Methods, and Compact Framework 3.5.

I will be in Indianapolis on invitation from a little company called Klipsch Audio Technologies, where I will be doing some listening of upcoming products and a Podcast with an acoustic engineer or two. 

A note to Asp.Net developers:

I cannot think of any valid reason why <div> tags opened in one UserControl should not also be closed in the same UserControl.  In fact, closing <div> tags from UserControl1.ascx in Default.aspx or in UserControl2.ascx makes markup extremely annoying to maintain. 

That is all.

I shall be attending the Wisconsin .NET User's group holiday bash tomorrow night, after I attend my four year old's holiday play at her daycare.  I'll be there late, but I will have at least one 'grok-talk' style quick presentation and perhaps two if I get some time tomorrow.  I hope to see some famliar faces there.  I've been out of the UG loop for quite a while but my wife will soon be working days so I can rejoin the world of user group goodness.

So I'm driving home today, nearly to my daughter's daycare, waiting to turn left in the small town where I live.  The light just turned green and before any cars moved I get completely crashed into by one of those enormous dodge trucks.  I haven't been in a 2-car accident before (I'll have to blog the story of the amazing rollover Festiva some day) so I was a bit stunned but we pulled over to the side of the road.  The guy who hit me was very apologetic, said it was totally his fault (he did completely nail me going 30mph or better while I was at a stop), we called the cops to file the accident report and as soon as the officer showed I up I said "Listen, I need to pick my daughter up from daycare, it's $1/minute if I'm late."  He asked if it was such and such daycare on such and such street and I responded in the affirmative.  He said to go on and he'd get the other guy's statement and meet me at the daycare.  Such is the benefit of living in a very small town I suppose.  I had called my wife, who is a 2nd shift nurse, and she cannot leave work even for a few minutes unless it's the most severe emergency; google "patient abandonment" for fun.  The standards our health care providers are held to is absolutely insane.  When people say doctors and nurses are overpaid I shake my head in utter disbelief.

At any rate, I have some back and neck pain: perhaps from whiplash and perhaps from shoveling snow all morning but I'm getting checked out by my doc tomorrow to make sure nothing is amiss. 

I posted about my AIM6/vista issue, which soon escalated to "your hard drive seems to have gone bad at the exact time you were reinstalling windows" according to Dell and leaving me stranded for 3 days total.  Things like this make me so angry I can't see straight sometimes, I lose a lot of time when I have hardware issues and the person on the other end of the connection who is not particularly fluent in English often does not seem to care too much.  The guy who hit me was so apologetic and forthcoming with his insurance information that I walked away with my car bashed up, back pain, and the prospect of inconvienient car-in-the-shop, but overall far less disturbed than a simple electronic failure had made me.  Principles are important.

The damage is not as bad as I originally thought.  The guy's tank truck was barely scratched.

It would appear that AIM6 has the ability to completly fry a Vista isntallation.

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1185469&SiteID=17 and other threads. Windows Media Player, the Network List service, WMI, and msinfo32 are (seemingly) permanently crippled by this according to various threads.  All of this because I got tired of Trillian misbehaving on Vista.  Now I know better.  I suppose I'll see if Office Communicator has made it's way into MSDN and start backing up for a rebuild.

Call of Duty 4 for the PS3 is astoundingly good looking, good sounding, and fun to play.  I got this last night and playing in my home theater was some of the most fun gaming I've been able to do in a while, the multiplayer is surprisingly good.  I did not enjoy the multiplayer in the previous call of duty/medal of honor games.  I think I'm going to have to accept that as a 30 year old parent who's done some hand damage through years of overworking I'm never going to have the great FPS reflexes I used to but the game is still very fun to play online.

In other news, the Pope looks nice in his red cowboy hat:

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20071130_pope_blasts_atheism_in_new_encyclical/

Definative evidence was presented today, it's going to be a boy.  The picture below is not a picture of the male evidence, as such a thing might get me into trouble in this day and age.  I confess I was seriously hoping for a boy, not that another little girl would have been bad.  I joke that Brooke (she's a bit of a tomboy) is "boy-enough for me" if we had another girl, but this is great.  No name choices yet, I'm researching things are a little different but not too weird. 

Via slashdot: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/28/2342211&from=rss

Of course the states are going to say that MSFT needs to be monitored.  The politicians gain tremendous power by punishing businesses and restricting free trade.  As Google and other companies come testify for the states against Microsoft  I'm reminded of several quotes, and a little company called "Standard Oil"

First, the quotes:

"Maybe I did well and maybe I led the battle but nobody ever said we were going to win this thing at any point in time. Eternal vigilance is required and there have to be people who step up to the plate, who believe in liberty, and who are willing to fight for it." -- Milton Friedman

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others: or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.
--Thomas Jefferson

Companies seeking to use government force to succeed where their own efforts in the marketplace have failed should be aware that what goes around, comes around.

Standard Oil:

I don't have the exact historical dates and percentages in front of me, but Standard Oil went something like this: Standard Oil had over 90% of the market for Oil in the United States at one time.  As the politicians and the public got behind the idea of Trust Busting, competitors to Standard Oil were slowly gaining market share, and the competition forced the price of oil down.  At the time the Standard Oil "evil monopoly" was broken up it had roughly 60% market share and the inflation adjusted price of oil was lower than it had ever been.  Politicians treated this as a great victory and it was sold to the public as a great victory.  The free market had already done what the goverment sought to do, and justice, property rights, and freedom were compromised to punish an "unpopular" company.

http://www.syncmyride.com/#/home/

I wonder if there's a developer program...

Thanksgiving has come and gone and I had an absolutely smashing time with my family, especially my dad.  The apple (me) fell perhaps a bit further from the tree (dad) than he would sometimes prefer: I'm a college guy and mostly a software nerd, he got electronics training in the Navy and is more of a hard core electronics nerd.  I write software and he fixes GE's MRIs.  MRI is just insane to read about: Magnets who's strength is measured in Teslas, titanium/niobium coils, and superconductive circuits that lose less than .001% of a charge in 1000 years.  Dad and I completely rebuilt my center channel since I had just ordered a new sqauker (mid-range horn) diaphragm, and he was very disappointed in my soldering job so all the solder points were re-done and the internal wiring was cleaned up with zip ties and such.  If I ever sell the thing I'll take a picture of the internals to show what a top-notch job was done.  As part of this whole effort, he diagnosed some possible issues with a free osciliscope I inherited: someone smart enough to fix insane superconductive electronics is pretty handy to have around.

Another place where the apple was flung far is metaphysics: I'm an atheist and my father was raised (and raised us) in variants of the Babtist religion.  A lot of red wine into the second night of the visit we had covered:

• Religion and why it has no bearing on my life and why that doesn't make me a bad human being
• Technology
• Wealth
• Relativity (space time, the train and some of Einstein's gedenken experiments)
• Health care: dad had a great (if depressingly Orwellian) observation about health care.  As the goverment gets more involved in our health care decisions, how long will it be before a helecopter flies through my neighborhood with a diffration horn  screaming "Time to wake up and exercise!!  Keep health care costs low, citizens!"   My solution: health insurance does not "work" using the current popular definitions of "work" without an army of healthy people bearing the costs for those who are not healthy.  Get the goverment out of the health care industry alltogether and you won't find yourself doing pushups at the point of a gun.

"You're not as far into la-la land as I thought" was my father's final judgement on my night of philosophy and politics.  I meet incredibly few Objectivists in day-to-day life, but the more scientific and rational someone's job is the more I find them coming around to my way of thinking.  The world is not populated by John Galts, we wouldn't recognize it if it were.  There are great masses of "Eddie Willers" who can be reached.  Recall Eddie Willers from Atlas Shrugged: 3rd in command, not a Prime Mover, always playing the supporting role to Dangy Taggart.  Eddie is rightfully counted by Rand as one of the heros of the book though.  He rides on the rails made of Rearden metal and he could never have created the metal, the bridge design, or the engines propelling the train, but he also does not seek to enslave the minds who did create these things.  My dad perhaps could not have invented the superconductor system in one of GE's MRIs, but he's smart enough to know what it took to make the thing and can fix the thing when it goes down.  He's smarter than 99.999% of the people out picketing for "universal healthcare." 

Inside a piece of technology like an MRI is a glimpse of the astounding effort, resources, and intelligence that it takes to make our standard of living possible.  I hope the scientists and engineers who work on them gain astounding wealth, and I hope GE makes hundreds of millions of dollars on MRI technology: it's the only reason this life-saving technology exists.