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...

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

Microsoft® VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) is a really cool idea.  It combines a lot of common concerns for a lot of developers, offering a one-stop shopping experience that's really appealing. 

It's comforting for most people to be able to manage their version control from the same interface in which they are making the changes necessitating the control of versions.

It's useful to be able to see what other members of one's team are up to, and tie issues to actual change sets in code (and be able to report on it all).

It's empowering to be able to apply custom check-in constraints to force comments on code changes (or integrate one's own time tracking, as we have done where I work).

But I'm not writing to discuss all these points.  The points above are well-documented by Microsoft® and require no further lobbying from the likes of me.  I like VSTS, to be sure, but there are some shortcomings, in my opinion.

Last Friday was going to be a big day for my team.  We were about to implement a code branching strategy for our version control system, which was needed, but had been badly applied in the past and which was the cause of a certain amount of angst among the senior development staff.  I was in charge of implementing the changes, which included adding a new layer to our folder hierarchy and moving all active development into that folder.  In my experience with version control systems, it is usually an exceptionally bad idea to change the folder structure while there are pending changes in the system, so I sent a preparatory email to the affected developers (a relatively small, manageable number of people) to please resolve their pending changes before I began the update.More...

Everyone's been to the fair, right? The state fair? The county fair? A travelling carnival? Chuck E. Cheese's? If so, you've more than likely seen (if not played) some variant of the popular game colloquially known to me as "Whack-a-Mole" or by its more obscure moniker "Mole Whack-Em".

For those who haven't enjoyed this passtime, the rules are simple: artificial mole-shaped puppets pop randomly out of roughly mole-sized holes cut into a game board. The player, holding a mallet, tries to strike (or "whack") the artificial moles as quickly as possible since their appearance is timed and, if left unwhacked, they will disappear into the dark belly of the game board whence they came.

A simple game concept, and great fun for all.

Now, consider a version of "Whack-a-Mole" in which the mole-shaped puppets pop up, but do not recede if they are not struck.
Additionally, consider that our hypothetical version of this game has an infinitely large (or at least some very large) domain of potential mole-shaped puppets.
Finally, assume that the game board is free to grow as you play, allowing for an indefinite number of visible mole-shaped puppets at any given time, all waiting for you to clobber them with your mallet. More...

Dismayed at low recruiting numbers in the Army and Marine Corps, U.S. officials have decided the best way to cope is to simply change their criteria for entry into those armed forces to allow more convicts into service.

I found this partial breakdown of the waiver grantees interesting: More...

It might be said that lately I have been ill.

I've had (as Christopher Walken put in during his infamous Blue Oyster Cult skit on SNL) a "fever". 

Unlike Mr. Walken's compulsion for cowbell, however, my penchant has been for pasta.  I should point out, though, that cowbell is a close second, even so many years past BOC's glory days.

It all started a little more than a week ago while I was watching reruns of Molto Mario, Mario Batali's short-lived cooking show for the Food Network, recently revived in syndication by the Fine Living channel. 

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