It would appear that I did not blog my 2007 goals, the meeting of which were a mixed bag.  I do have some solid 2008 goals.

1. Debt:  Jen and I have never very agressively went after paying off the student loans and credit cards but carrying debt has started to bother me a bit more in light of the current state of the economy, and I'd just like to have that $$ to spend and save every month.  An aggressive but attainable 2008 goal is to reduce the debt by 33%.
2. MVP: I'd like to keep my Microsoft MVP - Solution Architecture status.  I need to seriously get my arse in gear on this one, but since my wife starts on days next week I can get back into speaking engagements and such.
3. Total home organization: This one is hard to explain without making me sound like an OCD nutjob.  There are various things all over the house that are just sitting on the floor of the closet, etc. because there was no other place to put them.  I spent a rather large amount of time this past fall setting up shelving, getting rid of moving boxes, and buying storage bins but there's honestly not a single room in the house I could call "done" except maybe for my kitchen.  I'm hoping to get this task to 90% before Kid #2 is born.
4. Save: I save a fair bit every month and I usually drain the accounts 1x per year in order to purchase some kind of toy, usually audio/home theater related.  In 2008 I want to save enough to take advantage of this poor real estate market and buy some land.
5. Let it go: This one is a bit personal, but I'll vaguely phrase it as "I don't have time for people who don't have time for me", no matter how much history there might be.

I have some other minor goals that are not official Resolutions.  There are some home improvement projects I'd like to get done, I'd like to build a great team at work (unfortunately largely out of my control), I'd like to build my cellar up to about 50 bottles of wine, and exercise a little bit. 

Unlike every other database I've ever heard of, MySQL does not support expressions for column defaults, so for example 'DateTime Not Null Default now()' is not legal.

Lame.

Carry on.

http://thirstydeveloper.com/2007/12/23/Episode6ProjectEuler.aspx

My podcast regarding Project Euler is up. Go check it out.

I installed Beta3 of the ADO.Net Entity Framework today as well as the Visual Studio integration tool and started using it on a project that's not mission critical.  So far my only complaint is that it does not (seemingly) include the capability to apply a Regex to the Table Name-->Entity Name process.  For example, I've gotten into the habit of naming tables in the plural, so "select * from Questions" seems natural, however having an object of type Questions annoys me.  Once I think of (or see someone else's) a means of testing performance vs. raw SQL and decide to actually use this I suppose I can rename my tables, seems a shame though. 

Oh, and, I would like for it to be an actual "shipping" product.

Hmm, it's been a while since I've posted anything worth reading to anyone but my Mom!  I shall soon remedy this.

I'm in the process of securing the approval of Klipsch for my final edited version of the Podcast I did this week, so that should be up on KlipschCorner.com soon.  During this endeavor, I thought of an excellent idea for code/architecture podcasts, which I will not share until I have an example.

I've had the good fortune to actually interview some people lately.  Yesterday I thought up my favorite new interview question

"If you were interviewing me and wanted to stump me with a reasonable .NET question, what would it be?"

I need to qualify what "reasonable" means or come up with a better way of stating the challenge to avoid lame questions.  Yesterday the question I was asked was "What is the default file size limit for the FileUpload control in ASP.Net?".  Legitimate question to ask a senior .NET person or too specific to know unless you just used it this morning?  I'll let you be the judge.

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.