When you've been working really hard and you need to take a break from it all on a Friday night, it's a fact that pizza just isn't the same without spending it at Nona Emilia's Italian Restaurant consuming mass quantities of peperoni and cheese pizza with Rich Claussen! Check us out...

One of the people that have I've had the honor of taking seminar classes with, and instrumental in helping with the scope of The Puzzler - 3d Style senior project is Rich Claussen!

Rich along with Scott Hanselman, Jay Bockelman, and Sean hefty have all been instrumental in providing me with much needed critique/feed back about the senior project code and ASP.NET web-based UI useability. Without there observations and ideas, I would not have made it as far as I have with this 3D version of Scott's 2D puzzler final project every one gets to do at the end of his C# with .NET class.

Here's a shot of us taking in some much needed instruction at Patrick Cauldwell's Applied Web Services CST407 seminar:

We had some great discussions about photo editing those huge 14 mega pixel photographs that monster of a Kodak/Nikon DCS Pro 14n camera (that I own) has taken including some (some what intensive) discussion about the “Scott Hanselman method of photography.”

I will miss Jim Blizzard very much, we had some great times at Portland Nerd Dinner before you got the offer in Tampa Florida.

Apparently he doing quite alright according to his blog. Thanks for the good times Jim! We'll miss you...

One of the finer places in Portland to relax in Portland is most definitely the Portland Chinese Garden. Although we haven't made it a habit of going on a regular basis, but right around this time of year, the garden erupts with music, song, and dance. This year for Chinese New Year's, it is the New Year of the Rooster. The song and festivities most definitely reflected this! In this photo, both Jill and I are taking our time in Tao's Tea House at the Garden with afternoon Emperor's Gold Tea and Tarra Root Moon Cakes.

If the consortium of Nerds in Portland is endorsing a flick, its simply must worth while.

Calling all nerds, Calling all nerds!

You DO NOT have to be a Microsoft Developer to get the best out of being a nerd. Lets drive this caravan to more than 50 of us going to see The Hitchhiker's Guide on April 29th. Rich Claussen has the inside scoop. Don't miss it!

Hitch Hiking can take you many places...

Last Wednesday night, our gang (Jill my wife, Friend Erindale with her daughter Joya), had the distinct pleasure of hanging out with Heather Alexander for the night listening to some great Celtic Fiddle Tunes and Johny McEldoo drum beats at the Luck Labrador in Multnomah Village!

Having to deal with Senior Project on a near full-time basis was the perfect distraction for just a few short hours. Here is our portrait:

A good friend, and the best technical Ally, Scott Hansellman, was graciously generous to help he out of an IIS web app debloyment blowout.

The snag: Having two virtual directories point to the same physical directory on the webserver machine, and then changing the access rights for the aspnet_wp.exe script executer thinking would fix the problem.

The solution: Eliminating the duplicate vdir by checking the process model in mahcine.config, then execute aspnet_regiis.exe -i, and then iisreset.exe.

Extra cudos to Scott for helping to run these steps that resulted in getting The Puzzler - 3D Style back underway without the senior project schedule slipping.

Side comment about blog shares: I sort of like the idea of getting “blog credits” for linking out to places like blog shares to promote the idea of getting people to post more of their public lives online. I haven't gotten a whole lot of credits, but I'm sure that will increast in the coming years.

I ran into a bit of an issue today regarding the MS SQL Sever 2000 NT Service not successfully starting (over and over) after I had change the Administrator account's password. This, of course, became abundantly clear after checking the system event log.

Some how, I don't know why yet without doing further research on msdn, this also changed the logon for the MSSQLSERVER service in the services administration snapin.

Of course this was immediately remedied by changing the service log on back to the local system account instead of the administrator's account. How it got that way, I still have no clue without more research. If any one reading this has any ideas as to what would cause this, please do leave a comment, or email --> matthew@klump-pdx.com. Thanks everyone!

This is in my response to the revolution started by Rory's post here. I know this is a little late reaction with senior project in progress, but here goes:

I'd have to say that the best damn book *ever* I've read, the one book that turned my life upside down, the one book that forced me to throw away the chains of emotional survitude to people that did not care, the one book that made me strive to climb to the highest levels of being the “nerdy engineer” I am today is: <>

“You Can Become a Super Salesman!!” by Paul R Kenian

You guessed it folks, when I was handed this by the multi-level marketing freek show at Quixtar, it made more sense to have choice B) the life of a dedicated engineer, than choice A) their way, or any one else's (no reference to my current employer is being inferred in this post or any other for that matter).

No one at “the phone company” reads my blog of any kind, so I'll leave that blasted disclaimer off.

If any one reading this has a similar story to tell, please do! Blog it, email it, comment on it, but DO NOT keep it caged! Let the animal out every once and a while WITH OUT the disclaimer...