Yes, yet again I have purchased tickets to Burning Man scheduled for August 28 through September 4, 2006. And you better believe I am bringing the prep back!

I am absolutely livid with my company’s bank right now and I need to blow off some steam. We had two recent deposits reversed because of a missing endorsement. This is odd because I am always careful to sign every check. Well it turns out that they changed their endorsement policy on March 31 and didn’t bother to notify us.

UPDATE: I updated the article a bit to better explain decimal expansion to negabinary

Downtown Los Angeles experienced a huge march today to protest bill HR 4437 and support immigrant rights and immigration reforms. I had been waffling about attending since I really hate driving to downtown (bad traffic and parking), but realized that since both my mother and my wife are immigrants, I ought to come out and show some support. An IM from my friend Kyle telling me I won’t regret it also served to jolt me out of my complacency.

Scott Hanselman mentions a new book in which he is one of the coauthors featured on the cover. Yes, they do look like they are throwing the twelve sided dice on a table with meticulously painted miniatures. If you have no idea what I am talking about, you have never embraced the inner geek.

I hear from a fairly reliable source that after the World Cup, Zinedine Zidane plans to move to Los Angeles to get into some kind of entertainment. That in and of itself is not exceedingly interesting. However, this source also tells me that Zidane has been offered a spot on the Hollywood United roster thanks to the other ex-French national team player, Frank LeBeouf.

Well this post marks my 1000th post on this blog. Since I am totally on board with the base 10 system, that makes this noteworthy to me. If we all used the hexadecimal system (base 16), then this post would be my 3E8th post which really wouldn’t warrant me even mentioning it in the first place. Be glad we are on base 10.

Scott makes a great distinction between Open Source code and Source Out in the open.

This weekend I went to see the Los Angeles Galaxy play with my wife and some friends. What a disappointing game that was! Despite having discount tickets (only $10) we felt totally ripped off. During the whole game, my teammate and I were joking that “Ronaldinho would’ve made that play.”

In two earlier posts I presented a couple of SQL stored procedures that I promised to tie together. The first procedure generates a random time of day and the second can be used to FTP a file from within SQL Server.

This is another useful Sql Server Stored Procedure I found on the net written by Nigel Rivett.

Here is a function that will generate a random time of day. Later I will show why I am posting this particular query and how I am using it. It comes in useful when trying create random scheduled jobs in SQL Server. I made use of a technique for generating random dates via Jon Galloway.

I noticed the following checkin message in the subtext commits mailing list today (this is the mailing list in which we can receive Subversion checkin notifications).

I recently moved my blog off of WebHost4Life where I have had it hosted for a couple years now. Apparently the traffic on my blog was causing a load on their servers. I never fully believed it was my blog’s fault since they didn’t give me any convincing evidence.

Jeff has a great post in which he compares UML to circuit diagrams and then asks, why doesn’t UML enjoy the same currency for software development?

So after a few humiliating losses (in both soccer leagues I play in), we finally have a convincing win last night (5 to 2) in the Olympic league (the more competitive one). I even had a goal off of a dangerous cross that the defender tried to stop, but ended up deflecting it into the goal.

I love working with other developers who are really excited about technology and the work we are doing. As is characteristic of such an organization, there is a constant flurry of IM messages and emails with links to interesting new technologies and topics.

My blog now supports CoComment tracking. Let me know if you run into any problems with posting comments.

Steve Harman reports that Subtext reached 1000 downloads just recently on SourceForge.