Ness’ Outpost

Lauren and I went to the auto show in Toronto this weekend. We saw lots of cars that I will likely never be able to afford and maybe a few that I could.

I’m re-rung! This time with a size 7.

And just in time too because this weekend I’m off to the autoshow in Toronto to geek it up with some mechanically like minded people and then it’s off to Laruen’s for dinner.

While changing for ball hockey at lunch today I noticed my iron ring was not in it’s normal spot (on my right pinky). I could have sworn I had it on this morning, but it was slipping off more often in the past month or so.

A replacement will have to be procured shortly.

A Lube, oil and filter with a tire rotation at my local GM Goodwrench service station and a remote encoding with a free top up of my washer fluid came to $75.

Does that seem expensive to anybody else? I know mechanics charge by the hour, and apprently I needed two guys. One for the work and one to push the buttons on the computer to encode the remote. I wonder if I could have encoded it myself. I’d like to pull one apart and see how it works, but now that I’ve paid to have it activated I don’t want to break it.

Anybody have the car lift wedges I can borrow to do my own oil changes? I’d appreciate it.

Rich and Jen tied the knot yesterday in a lovely service in Hamilton. The speach went pretty well on my end. There were quite a few “um’s and ah’s” as I parsed though my notes filtering out some stories on the fly to shorten it but Jen brought the house down to tears with her speach and Ray had a very moving one as well.

A great day for all with lots of smiling and hugs which makes the whole thing official.

Congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Burgess.

I spent far too much time today trying to get my Windows Mobile application to try and run a script before building the application. Everything, even MSDN articles told me that the C# IDE could run pre-build scripts, but I couldn’t find them in the properties of the project where it is said they would be. By building a Windows CE application there is lots of little stuff that isn’t supported. But this isn’t really tied to the run-time or other applications. This is the IDE that isn’t behaving the same as documented.

So it looks like I’ll have to run the shell script to update the version manually. This is such a simple thing to do in most development environments. Perhaps even so trivial I’m not seeing the answer, but like I said this isn’t normal Win32 development - the embedded environment seems to have some subtle differences.

I miss make.

I did my “proof of concept” demonstration for the service department this morning. It went pretty well, the demo went smoothly, but I didn’t cover all the little things that seem cool to me but in reality aren’t all that interesting to people who don’t deal with the inner workings of software.

The two interfaces were described, one being wireless and on a handheld scanner and the other a web based front end. The web service which was the unsung hero of the demo didn’t get any exposure but made the whole thing work, but only I could see the SOAP messages flying though the air!

I took a quick snapshot of my workspace. There isn’t anything magical or proprietary in the image so don’t get excited, but this is where I spend 8 hours of my waking week days. :)

Notice the wireless AP, handheld Symbol scanner and the stack of books, the top one is a C# and .NET development book. The two sheets of paper on the wall marked up with a highlighter is a packet trace of my first web service bug. Now sitting there as a prize for a job well done.

Today I was shaggy. I have a presentation on Monday so I figured it was time for a haircut in Milton. My barber was in Niagara Falls - where I used to live - and now I’m in Milton so it was time to try and find a new one.

A quick search showed two in Milton on Main St. Both Kurt and I thought Tony’s Barbershop had a good ring to it so I drove down there and checked them out. Tony’s was just what I was looking for, it is an ol’ time barbershop.

It wasn’t fancy with post modern art and furnature. It was homely and inviting. There was a coat rack that was kind of wobbly but held your coat. Four basic chairs supported customers as they queued up for a cut with the days news paper spread out all over them for customers to read.

The storefront is narrow but runs all the way to the back. There were two barbers on duty on Saturday morning an older gentleman and his successor, who knew his craft quite well. My beard was well taken care of with careful trimming and edging. The cut was smooth and slow, no rushing to get on to the next customer which causees the odd “oops” that you sometimes hear on the back of your head. Instead of using a dry razor or the close trimmer to shave the back of my neck I was treated to some heated shaving cream and a straight blade with aftershave and talcum powder to sooth my sensitive neck.

An amazing cut, all for only 12 dollars! Tony’s is the only place for me to get my hair cut in Milton.
They are the last of a dying bread of barbers. If you want the salon or spa feel - go somewhere else - but for a great cut check out Tony’s.