Random Thoughts of Jorriss

Ever since I was a kid I’ve been infatuated with the Incom T-65 X-Wing starfighter from Star Wars. Maybe it had something to do with my parents both being in the Air Force. I remember playing the original X-Wing game for hours on end. Now I can have my own life-sized X-Wing! For an opening bid of $40,000 or a buy it now price of $80,000 a mock up of the famed X-Wing fighter can be mine. If I can only talk my wife into buying this instead of making home improvements but now I’m just dreaming. Via Engadget

Things like this make me so very glad that I never lived on campus at UM.  This was taken straight out of The Hurricane, the University of Miami’s school newspaper. That same newspaper is sent to alumni around the country including alumni with a whole lotta moola. I wonder how those alumni will feel about this kind of stuff happening in the buildings that they helped built. What are some of the weird things that you have seen a roommate do? Let me know in the comment section.

I caught this on Boing Boing. It seems that there’s a growing rise of teens in the UK using their cell phones to record themselves assaulting innocent bystanders. This phenomenon has been labeled “happy slapping”. Blogger Alfie Dennen has mashed together a few of these videos into one video. But be warned, this is some disturbing stuff. With people getting kicked in the head and being knocked off of their bikes. The UK really needs to throw these criminals in jail. Who’s with me?

Since the last time I posted about my basketball team we’ve won one and lost the last three. To be more precise, we’ve barely won one and gotten spanked the last three games. But I did play decent last night. I was four for six and one of two from the arc a total of nine points. I don’t know what it is but we can’t seem to put a full game together. I truly believe that this team is better than its record. We need to play better transition defense and we need better ball movement. In other words we need to play as a team. I really hope we win next, week we need it.

A while back we (us VB devs) were told that there will be no refactoring support in Visual Basic 2005. Although disappointed, I was looking forward to edit and continue and generics. But low and behold Microsoft has surprised us! Refactoring will be supported via a FREE download. Carl Franklin shows off the new refactoring tools in a two part video (part one, part two).  The implementation of these tools is impressive. Modal dialog boxes are a thing of the past replaced by an elegant flash-esque interface. The refactoring tools allow you to modify your code without getting in your way. Simply amazing.

Recently, I had to rewrite this fairly large stored procedure. This stored proc aggregated a fairly large amount of data hence the reason we had to rewrite it. (Although, this was not the reason that was communicated to me about the rewrite. So, of course I went down the aggregated path then got into a heated argument about it. Talk to me people!) While rewriting it, it was clear that nested stored procedures would be the best approach to take. Of course while debugging it I ran into the "An INSERT EXEC statement cannot be nested" problem. While researching the issue I ran across two excellent articles written by Eralnd Sommarskog, a SQL Server MVP. The first article describes how to share data between stored procedures. The second, titled The Curse and Blessings of Dynamic SQL, discusses dynamic SQL in depth. My solution to the problem was to include the “INSERT INTO” in a dynamic SQL statement within the inner stored proc. This way the outer stored procedure can use the INSER INTO table EXEC sp_name syntax. It might not be the best way to handle the problem but as always time is of the essence. It’s now done and I’m interested in to see how well it performs.

My boy Jason from the U has opened a blog. From the look of things he’s going to speak his view on the political side of things. His first posts discuss Russia trying to honor Stalin and his take on the illegal immigrant issue. But liberals beware J’s views lean slightly towards the right. So if you have a hard time dealing with reason and logic you might not want to read J’s blog. But if you don’t subscribe already!

If you thought yesterday’s video was amazing then you’ve gotta see this. This video shows a kid playing Dance Dance Revolution while juggling three pins on one of the fastest levels. He’s simply amazing. With moves like that maybe he can get a job working for our government. Via Boing Boing.

It looks like I’m late for this. Star Wars tickets are already on sale at MovieTickets.com and Fandango.com. I guess I have to get my crew together for Star Wars sooner than I expected. Anybody interested in catching Star Wars: Episode III on Friday, May 21 or Saturday, May 22 let me know.

So I get this e-mail from a friend of mine, Brent, from the U. He now works for the government doing something-or-other for African countries. As far as I know he works to give American money away. Not that there is anything wrong with that… Anyways, the e-mail points to a video of the government signing. The video starts off pretty well. You can’t go wrong when Condi Rice is involved. It goes on for twenty minutes blah-blah-blah and then some thing goes horribly wrong. Right at the end of the video (21:20), a tall gangly, goofy looking white guy is shown in the middle of the screen. I swear it’s the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. It reminded me of that Bigfoot video from the 60’s. The other weird thing is while the camera and everyone else is following Condi out of the room. Bigfoot looks right into the camera. It’s like the devil peered into my soul. I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight. I guess Bigfoot now works for the government now. I hope he doesn’t make a mess in the Oval Office.

I just saw on the TechEd website today that TechEd is sold out! Whew! Got in just a nick of time! Those videos must of done some good...