My latest task is to produce reports useful for fraud detection. We’ve recently had incidents in which users from Vietnam opened up several accounts via stolen credit cards, deposited money via Paypal, then commit a charge back.

Wow. All this time, I̵ve tried to follow various Asp.Net Forums, only now to discover that each forum is syndicated via RSS! Nice!

What is the proper way to add three hours to a DateTime for the PST timezone? Is it this?

Lately it seems that everybody is playing “six-degrees of separation” by sprouting a social networking service. Some of the most prominent are Friendster.com, Tribe.com, MySpace.com, and Google’s Orkut. The promise these services make is that by joining, you’ll be where all your friends are and in the process make new friends and business contacts, though in reality they tend to look like glorified dating services. Look around the blogosphere and you’ll find several opinions concerning the problems and weaknesses of these services. For example, Dare’s take on social networking services, Warren Ellis’s evaluation of Orkut, and Don Park’s suggestion for improving existing services. Robert Scoble, a popular blogger, points out in this blog entry, that none of these networks interoperate. A person ends up entering his data into each site over and over again.

Yesterday Akumi, Laura, Judy, and I drove to Mountain High (not a reference to smoking out) for a day of snowboarding. This would be my second time snowboarding since the big Conversion from skiing. Right now, I would rate myself as an intermediate snowboarder and advanced intermediate skiier.

I“ll be there! Microsoft Dev Days Event.

That’s a question I’ve been asked several times, and to be honest, I really didn’t know all the details. Till now. Read on.

Interesting news item I found

This site has several photographs and movies of NASA experiments where they pop water ballons in 0 gravity. They simulated the 0 gravity effect of being in outer space by flying an airplane in an elliptical orbit.

I just finished reading the Log4Net Introduction and FAQ and realize I’ve been missing out all these years. I won’t retrofit my current App (just yet), but I definitely need to give Log4Net a try with future projects.

Scott Hanselman asks the question Should one go to Production with a Debug build? Although I find that an intriguing question, I’m more intrigued by the fact that his company exclusively uses Log4Net exclusively.

Ok, I admit it. I’m a unit-tester-aholic. I’m compulsive about it. Sometimes going overboard:

So I was off to a running start with my ambitious new goals of contributing to several open source projects and creating a blog worth reading. But as my wife so keenly pointed out, as soon as I get an inch better, I try to take it a yard.

I thought this was a joke until I realized that it was on Yahoo news. Bush and Cheney say we attacked Iraq because Saddam COULD HAVE made weapons of mass destruction. “Could have”. Gee, well North Korea “could have” made WMDs. Should we attack them? How about India who DO have. Heck, with a bit of time, I think I have enough intelligence and skill to make a WMD. Should I expect an airstrike on my apartment sometime soon? I hope not, my wife would not be pleased.

So I keep blabbing and blabbing about my new RSS Feed. I keep imploring you to get an RSS aggregator and subscribe to my feed. What the hell am I talking about?!

My latest tech toy is an HP Scanjet 5530 Photosmart Scanner (wow that’s a mouthful). The defining feature of this scanner is the photo feeder built in. Simply add a pile of photos (around 24 max at a time) into the feeder, press a button, and go watch your Tivo’d episode of 24 while your photos scan (it doesn’t take all that long).

Stephen Wolfram’s 1000 page tome, A New Kind Of Science, is fully online. http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/

Oh my fucking lord…

This is just too funny! It’s a skit about a white family with an unfortunate last name which sounds just like a terrible racial epiteth, “Niggar”.