Last night we had a little scare at our house.  I already posted a warning on Facebook, but for those without accounts, here's what we experienced.

CAUTION: READ ON AT YOUR OWN RISK.  IMAGES MAY WARP YOUR FRAGILE MIND

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I've decided to separate my blog content into two families:

Observations on the decline of our civilization

Everything else

This blog - the original one, to which people might have subscriptions or links - will be of the "Everything else" variety.

The "observations on the decline..." blog shall, henceforth, be hosted here.  I'll continue to post to both blogs in my sporadic and haphazard fashion, but wanted to keep the content separate for the sake of the readers.  People who want to read about the funny hijinks of my children, or my wacky work foibles probably don't want to read the gritty details of how our society is precariously teetering on the edge of collapse.  Perverse as it may seem, I like to write about all of these topics and more.  Perhaps writing about non-collapse related content is a coping mechanism to remind me there's still a lot of joy in the world, or maybe I'm just barking mad, or I guess both could be true.

They say a house divided cannot stand, so perhaps I should re-title this entry "voluntarily dividing my tool shed"; I don't think tool sheds suffer the same fate as houses...

I was reading a post on another blog the other day, and noticed there was a nifty "Listen Now" button positioned near the top of each post.  Thinking it was a podcast version of the transcribed text below, I clicked it thinking to myself "Hey, I can multitask and do other stuff while just listening to this post.  I am the complete master of technology and productivity!"  More...

We've commented on the uncanny resemblance between John McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, and SNL's Tina Fey.  This appears to further cement Tina's ability to mock Palin, since she has managed an excellent dialect, as well.

Perhaps the likelihood of four years of Ms. Fey's ascerbic wit will be enough to take the wind out of the McCain/Palin campaign's sails, although I sort of doubt it.

Watch the video

LINQ...

Language INtegrated Query...

It's the first thing I wrote about in this blog.  I'm completely sold on the importance of this technology, and I still assert it will have a serious impact on many, many applications written for the .Net Framework, but the shipping product is just not complete, and it's incomplete in some really annoying ways.More...

This doesn't really require any setup from me.  It's a copy of Dr. Randy Pausch's famous 'Last Lecture'.  Dr. Pausch died July 25, 2008 of pancreatic cancer after recording this strangely uplifting talk on achieving one's childhood dreams.

Starting today, the Orwell Prize site will be posting Orwell's diaries in real-shifted-time; 70 years after they were written.  The diaries should be an interesting look into the personal life of an important author.  I'm curious to see what his day-to-day life was like, having heard he was something of an oddball.

Here's another article on George, written in commemoration of his hundredth birthday, and recognizing his elevation to iconic status by pointing out the inverse proportionality between reverence for the man and readership of his works.  Interesting article.  It also includes information on brewing the perfect cup of tea.  Now my life is complete.

Enjoy...

The other day a friend and I were discussing blog and forum software, and whether there were any good combination blog/forum products out there that were reasonably priced.

We'd both tried CommunityServer and found it was not really appropriate for our needs, and neither of us knew of any other prominent alternatives.  The reasoning for our discussion was that we'd both noticed a potential for dual-use web sites offering both blog and forum features; sort of a "here's what I think...discuss amongst yourselves" kind of an approach.

He is off now investigating the hazards of writing his own forum software, but while we were looking into ways to potentially allow single sign-on between BlogEngine.Net and [insert your favorite forum software here], we noticed something interesting...More...

I have to admit I'm something of a gadget freak.  I can rarely stay with any one device or service long before I begin feeling that the technological grass is greener in another vendor's pasture.  Until about a year and a half ago, that held true for web hosting companies, as well.  I tried a lot of them, mostly cheap, but then found one I was fairly happy with and stayed with them for some time.

Until they started messing with my friends and family.

After six or eight months with this host I felt safe recommending them to one of my friends as well as my father.  I'm nearly 40 - I should know better than to ever make such a recommendation, but one of my many weaknesses is an almost compulsive desire to help out, so I tend to do dumb things like suggest "good" web hosts.

Needless to say, both my friend and my father had bad experiences with the host, and neither is with them any longer.  That fact alone would not be sufficient to make me move, but I have had a glimpse at the way in which my father was treated during the period of time during which he was still interested in salvaging his relationship with the host.  Their behavior was very unprofessional and, at times, rude.  That attitude surprises me, since my father was calmly trying to get them to do a few simple things, like stop double-charging his credit card for their service.

Since I consider myself a man of action (sort of) I resolved to leave the current host even though they had not done anything untoward to me, personally.  In principal they had offended me righteously, and I would not stand for it.

I decided to take the opportunity to investigate the virtual private server (VPS) side of web hosting, and found prices had fallen precipitously since I had last looked.  I did a few hours' research, and decided to try a VPN for myself.  I won't name the company until I have formed an opinion of their service, but so far I am adequately pleased.  The support turnaround could be faster, but it could also be a lot slower or less competent.  The ability to completely control my web server is great, however, and I think I'm going ot really enjoy the "private server" world.

More as developments arise...

I've been doing a little reading lately on Erlang.  It's a functional language that offers a nifty set of abstractions useful for parallel programming, among other things and, while I can immediately appreciate its power, I'm reluctant to get too far into it because it represents a kind of significant departure for me in terms of both syntax and supported platforms (Erlang heavily favors Unix, although there is a runtime port for Windows, and Eclipse offers some IDE support to Windows users).  Additionally, Erlang is *extremely* strict about evaluation and assignment, disallowing any global state or multiple assignment to registers.  While I appreciate the purity of its intent, it's a little too much for me in everyday practice.  Of course, I'll keep playing with it anyway...

At the same time, I've been reading about the Parallel Extensions for .Net (Framework 3.5) and the activity on F# (a managed functional language similar in some respects to Erlang).  Between the Parallel Extensions' message-based task system and excellent additions like PLINQ (parallel LINQ), and F#'s functional approach, I think there may be something worth investigating further here.

I don't have all the details yet - very few, in fact - but I've seen enough to spend a little more time learning about this stuff.  More as the story unfolds.