No, not me personally. But I was looking up something on google, and the screenshot below shows one of the suggestions. Weirdly, it also had the most estimated results, too!

For the record, I was looking up “AST Time zone”. I was fairly certain it was Atlantic time, but I just wanted to double check. Weird, eh?

A google search for AST time suggests other things

So I was having a rough day to day to say the least. That is, until I got a little email at about 5pm. And that email? It was this:

Yes, that’s right - I finally got beta access to Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. (Read about it on Wikipedia) I’ve been nothing but smiles and in the absolute best mood ever since! Why? I applied to be in the beta almost 2 years ago.

To give you a sense of scale, since I applied to the beta, I’ve:

• Lived in 2 cities
• Met, then proposed to, my Mishka
• Had 4 different jobs in 3 cities
• Been published in 4 magazines and 2 newspapers

So yeah, you can say I’ve been waiting.

And sadly, I’ll need to wait a little longer, too:

Only 25% done downloading after 3 hours.

But that’s A-OK with me because I FINALLY HAVE BETA ACCESS! HOT DAMN!

I mean, look what I’ll be playing soon, so very soon.

And I’d love for you to join me too - if you pre-order the collectors edition (I’ve ordered 3) then you get an automatic invite into the open beta which will be coming up in a few months - AND you’ll be able to play with ME! So do it!

Pre-Order Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Collector’s Edition

Sometimes I really get awesome speeds from my Comcast internet connection.

PS: If you have a USB thumb drive sitting around, I heartily encourage you to check out PortableApps.com - all the apps you can carry around your neck. Works wonderfully, too.

Sometimes when I’m leaving feedback for stuff I bought on eBay, I make it a tad off the wall.

Although Max already posted this over at the MNSpeak water cooler, I felt it was odd enough for me to repost as well. One more reason to not live in Lakeville besides the fact that it’s Lakeville comes from their very own Police Department and an article from the Pioneer Press - Lakeville Police Surprise Sleeping Man With 3am reminder to lock his doors.

Yes, they went into his house and woke him up at 3am to remind him to lock his doors. Awesome.

Complete article text is after the jump, in case you can’t see it.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve never heard of Woot.Com, then consider yourself lucky. Woot is a Dallas-area based wholesaler that pioneered the ‘deal a day’ internet business model. Their slogan is “One Day, One Deal” for a reason. At midnight central time every day, they put up one item that’s been substantially discounted. Then you can buy up to 3 of them until midnight the next night, or until they sell out - whichever happens first.

As you can imagine, it’s fairly addictive. Some of what they offer are incredibly cheap and seemingly worthwhile you can’t help but order several of whatever it is.

Then there are the woot-off’s. Woot-offs are when they put an item up at an even better discount, for a limited amount of time - probably because they are in short supply. A lot of the time it’s something they had up earlier, and sometimes it’s brand new stuff.

Woot-offs are pretty awesome. I love them, my bank account does not. Especially if you’re on twitter, and decide to follow Woot. And then you turn on device updates, so you get an SMS/IM when there’s a new item. And twitter actually doesn’t break that day.

What happens?

You end up with a lot of stuff you probably didn’t need, but now you can’t live without.

Like what, you may ask. Well, lemme show you what I bought today. I’m such a sucker.

Kevin Holman, who writes a lot about SCOM2007, posted an article some time ago with a bunch of extremely useful SQL queries to use with SCOM2007. Over several installments, I’ll take that file and show you some useful SCOM PoSh tools you can use to - including a set of cmdlets I wrote to help the process out.

First, let’s take the actual file itself. I’ve taken it and cleaned it up some, changing formats and fixing errors I found, and made it into an actual .SQL file you can use inside of SQL Studio.

Download the file, and save it somewhere useful. SQL Studio 2005 likes to save query files in My Documents\SQL Server Management Studio\Projects, and it’s the first place it goes when you select open, so that makes a great choice.

If you’re not used to SQL server, you might want to know how to use this file. When you open up the file, you’ll notice a ton of different queries - surely you don’t want to run them all at once¹ - and you don’t have to. To run an individual query, simply highlight it and either hit F5, or click on the execute button.

That’s all there is to it. If you wanted to take it a step further, you could hardcode the database name and user before the table name (So instead of “from ManagedEntityGenericView” you’d alter it to (In my case, yours may be different) “from OperationsManager.dbo.ManagedEntityGenericView”. That way, you don’t even have to worry about switching which database to use before running it.

Next up, how to make these more useful to you on an every day basis. And if you’re not one to blindly download things, read on for the pasted SQL file.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. And don’t call me Shirley [↩]

I was messing around with code this week and a thought hit me - wouldn’t it be cool if someone animated the MN DOT traffic map? Hell yeah it would be! So I wrote a bot, called SnapShot, that sucks images off websites at a regular interval. Aimed it at the DOT website, and waited 24 hours. Then I took the 2100+ images and some Nekromantix and pow, there you have it - a neat little video. Check it out below!

It starts out slow and ends slow - but it’s traffic from Midnight to Midnight, so what did you expect? Also, you’ll notice occasional ‘glitches’ - this is when I’d be downloading a picture at the same time their system was generating one, so I’d receive half an image or less. Opps. I have ideas for another one, which might be a little neater looking.

Additionally, I’ll be have a small exhibition at the Black Dog Coffee and Wine Bar in downtown St. Paul starting April 29th - come check it out

One of my bigger online pet peeves is the html tag target=”_blank”. If you create a link to a another site, and throw in ‘target=”_blank”‘, it will open it in a new window. Most sites don’t bother with it, some sites - such as the Google newsreader - use it because they should and a lot of other sites use it all the damn time.

Stop telling me how to open a link! I’ve found out how to stop that annoying trait, and you can use it too! If you’re using FireFox, like you should be, simply download Tab Mix Plus!

Tab Mix Plus has a ton of options, and can do a lot more then I’m using it for, but the biggest thing is it lets your browser ignore that stupid ass target tag and open up that link in the current tab you’re in. And all it takes is downloading it, then opening the options under Tools > Tab Mix Plus Options and changing the option for “Open links that open in a new window in:” from it’s default of “New Tab” to “Current Tab”. Click ok and you’re done - the power is back in your hands!

This is just a temporary fix though, as it works this way across all windows - including GReader. I’m going to either write a Greasemonkey script to do this on a per-site basis or work on my own plugin that has this behavior on, but can be overridden for specific sites - look for that eventually. Happy surfing!

I’ve been using the Firefox browser for several years now. Initially it was due to the heightened security it inherently has, because it doesn’t run ActiveX objects - but soon it became my browser of choice simply because of all the amazing plugins you can download for it.

There are many many lists full of what their authors feel are their ‘essential plugins’ and I will add to that with my own list.

- One of the first plug-ins I install is the amazing Foxmarks. Foxmarks is a bookmark synchronizer that automatically synchs bookmarks between 2 or more copies of Firefox. Since I have, at a minimum, 4 machines with Firefox¹ this is a necessity for keeping things in line. And when I’m not at one of my machines² then I can access all my bookmarks at my.foxmarks.com - which keeps everything organized exactly the way I have on my browsers end. It even includes a neat ‘preview’ feature that lets you see a thumbnail of the site in case you’re not sure it’s the one you want or not.

del.icio.us - Delicious is both similar to, and completely different from, Foxmarks. Billing itself as a ’social bookmarking’ website. When you come across a website you like, you save it to your delicious account and add tags to help you remember what it was about. Even better, you can search for tags to find content similar to something - like dogs, linux, comics, how-to to even stuff like Fauvism, luddites, and anti-consumerism. Best part - go to any commerce site online, find something you like and save it with the tag of ‘wishlist’. Delicious has a special link just for it.

DownloadHelper - Download helper is a small plugin that does what it sounds like - it helps you download media from websites. Anytime you visit a site and DH can help you, an icon next to your address bar lights up - clicking on it takes you to a box letting you know what it can download. Love YouTube? Finally you can download those videos! And more then that, you can download all the images on a web page with a single click of a button.

Exif Viewer - Exif is the EXchangeable Image File metadata that almost all digital cameras and camera phones have today. This data tells you a lot of interesting things about a photo such as what kind of camera took the picture, when and where it was taken, the focal length, shutter speed, and more! If you take pictures, you can learn a lot by looking at the information of photographs that you like. I use this constantly, and am always amazed and just what image files have hidden information in them.

Web Developer - Perhaps this plugin is aimed at the more technical user, Web Developer adds a new toolbar with various web developer tools. With it you can disable/change stylesheets, enable/disable images, disable javascript, cookies, etc and even mess with the information that forms send out. It’s invaluable for troubleshooting your own websites as well as making it easier to peer into the inner workings of websites you like.

Colorzilla - This is one of the neatest plugins out there. Colorzilla is a webpage DOM color analyzer. You activate it, drag the eye dropper to the color you’re curious about and click - voila, the color you seek is displayed before you in all its hex and rgb goodness. It comes in real handy for matching your website with widgets you find on the web.

Adblock Plus - This plugin needs no introduction. It is the defacto standard for blocking obnoxious ads you find online. It’s simple as 1. See obnoxious ad 2. Right click on ad and 3. Click on ‘Adblock Image…’ and boom, you’re set. You can even use wildcards to block a wide number of ads automagically. Make it even more powerful with the Filterset.G Uploader plugin. The uploader will automatically update your Adblock filters every few days with the ones from G. This makes it a no-brainer to block those ads.

AllPeers Beta - If you use BitTorrent at all, you need this plugin! It manages your downloads, automatically handles queuing and source monitoring and even lets you chat with your friends - all from right inside Firefox!

I use more then these, but these are the ones I ensure I install first on a new machine - so try them out and let me know what you think. What plugins do you use on your Firefox? I’d love to hear em!

1. 1. Work laptop 2. Personal laptop 3. Home desktop 4. Home server [↩]
2. Me, not around a computer? HA! [↩]