Dear Mister Jones

I don’t know how many of you have been following the story over at CanGoogleHearMe.com. It’s about a guy, Aaron, who has an idea and decided it was important enough to him that it be heard, so he flew to California with the intent of camping out in Google’s lobby until someone agreed to hear him out. Well, he actually got a meeting with them, and they liked the idea enough to tell him to put some proof of concept together and come back. That started a year long adventure where Aaron and some programmers he recruited met regularly and worked late into the night on many occasions to be ready to go back to Google to show their stuff. Well, it’s been a year and now they’re on their way back to California to meet with Google again.

I am located in Idaho and know two of the programmers on Aaron’s team really well - which is how I first heard about the experiment and met Aaron. I’m amazed at what they’ve accomplished and at their ability to realize an idea. Wish I could be with them this week in California as a fly on the wall - it’ll be fun to hear their stories first-hand when they return.

Good luck guys! I like the pseudo-realistic plastic airplanes they sell in the airplane gift shops, if you’re bringing back souvenirs

If your users suddenly begin complaining of ‘page could not be displayed’ errors when accessing OWA (or any web page hosted with IIS, for that matter) - it could be that they’re victims of your IIS server refusing connections due to low available nonpaged pool memory.

If your users suddenly begin complaining of ‘page could not be displayed’ errors when accessing OWA (or any web page hosted with IIS, for that matter) - it could be that they’re victims of your IIS server refusing connections due to low available nonpaged pool memory.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Then I got cold, and a little hungry. So I came back home, made myself a turkey sandwich, and ordered the book so I could go to the woods vicariously from the comfort of my couch. Since it would take several days for the book to arrive, I played Guitar Hero and got my highest solid note-run ever.

Pretty productive day, I’d say.

Some other articles that you might find interesting:

• Go on the Guitar Hero Tournament circuit (seriously)
• Careful, you can hurt yourself playing Guitar Hero (this guy broke his knee!)
• How to play Guitar Hero (because it’s so hard)

Sometimes the quickest way to accomplish something in Windows is with a simple batch file. The best example would be when you want to run a command and append the contents of it to a text file for later perusal. Occasionally, I’ve had a desire to run multiple commands and append them to the same file, but I like to separate the output from the various commands by some whitespace to make it easier to look at later. I’ve always just echo’d some arbitrary character to the file to cause blank lines to show up, like this: echo _ >> somefile.txt

I realized today that there’s actually an easy way to simply echo a carriage return or line feed instead, by just issuing an echo command followed immediately by a period (no space in between), like this: echo. >> somefile.txt.

Thought I’d share it with the rest of you who didn’t know this already. Those of you who knew, you can pin a rose on your nose, and just don’t mock me too much.

Other articles you might find useful:

• Using a For Loop on Windows

My wife began buying the Adams 100% natural peanut butter way back before “Trans Fats” was a hated phrase among the health-conscious crowd. It’s good for you and I’ve even grown to love the taste, but I hate opening a fresh jar of it. The peanut oil separates from everything and rises to the top over time, so when you take one out of storage, it’s all at the top just waiting for someone to dare dip a knife into it.

There’s never any extra room at the top of the jar, so no matter how carefully you stir, you’ll end up with peanut oil all over outside of the jar - meaning there’ll be less to mix with the actual ‘butter’. So when you get to the bottom of the jar, you’ll end up looking like my pet Labrador did when we decided to give him a spoonful when we were kids. Not to mention that paper towels never seem adequate for sopping up the overflow.

Well, it only took me a decade to finally realize there is a better way. With one simple trick, you can have a virtually spill-free experience preparing a fresh jar of peanut butter for your bread.

Store the jar upside down.   By doing this, the oil ends up at the *bottom* of the jar, making the process of mixing it all up a mess-free endeavor. Now if only I could find a chocolate bar hard enough to quit breaking in half during the stirring process…

Hare are some related articles that might interest you:

• Revealing Trans Fats (FDA article)
• Trans Fats 101 (University of Maryland Medical)
• Try a Peanut Butter, Bacon, and Banana sandwich!

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and
blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails.
You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at
night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only
love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or
know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only
one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what
wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust,
never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never
dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a
lot of things there are to learn.”

– T.H. White, “The Once and Future King”

Using the adfind and admod command line utilities, it is easy to delete disabled users in bulk from your Active Directory. Read on for an example of how to do this.

I feel sorry for the Jar Jar Binks guy. I remember seeing little shorts on the Star Wars site leading up to the release of episode 1, where the Jar Jar guy would take us around and show us stuff on the set. I’m sure he was thinking about how great it was going to be as a permanently remembered part of the next great Star Wars trilogy. Now I’m sure he dreads going over his resume. It’s not like showing off a Golden Raspberry award is going to garner a lot of job interviews.

“Wait, you’re that guy?!”
“Yes, I’m that guy …”
“Dude … I’m sorry.”
” It’s okay, I’m over it now - just don’t ask me to do the voice, okay?”

The guy who did the voice for Chewbacca, however - he’s probably invited to enough parties to be swimming in chips and guacamole every day of the year.

“Come on, do the growl one more time!”
“Well, it’s actually more like a gargle and clearing the throat at the same time.”
“Whatever man - do it like where he’s mad and ready to go wookiee and rip my arms off!”
“Oh, all right …. (growl/gargle/clear throat)”

Funny story - I just did some searching to find out who ‘owns’ the voice of Chewbacca, so I could link him in above. Well, it turns out that the voice of the Wookiee was actually a mix of sounds put together by sound designer Ben Burtt, and consisted of animal sounds from walruses, camels, bears, and badgers.  One of the more important voices was that of Tarik, a black bear from the Happy Hollow Zoo in San Jose, California.  Kind of sad, really - to discover that there’s not a real voice out there that is responsible for the voice of Chewbacca. Despite, that, however - that hasn’t stopped just about every young man from the age of 12 to, um, 99 from trying to wookiee up and make the sound themselves.

This guy seems to be closer than anyone else I’ve ever seen: