BlogCoward

Bettye Lavette - Talking Old Soldiers

jdn — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:55:21 GMT

An absolutely amazing song. It’s hard to add much to this.

A cover of an Elton John song (which I now have to lookup), it’s dark and bitter. I like it.

It's funny I remember, oh, five or six years ago I'd say
I'd stand right here at this bar with my friends who passed away
And drink three times the wine I can drink today
Yup, I know how it feels to grow old

I know what they're sayin' son
There goes an old frenzy broad again
Well, I may be mad at that but I've seen enough
To make a young man go out his brains

Enjoy.

Okay, maybe not: Recurring Macbook Air Sleep Problems

jdn — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:50:04 GMT

I had previously posted about how setting a startup disk seemed to prevent a recurring problem with my MacBook Air being unable to wake up from sleep. I didn’t understand why it would work, but it appeared to.

Looks like that was premature, as the problem has occurred twice the last two days, and the startup disk is still set.

Back to the drawing board.

SQL Server: How to document and configure server instance settings

jdn — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:07:08 GMT

For my own future reference, from SimpleTalk.

Jeff Beck – Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers

jdn — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:25:56 GMT

As partial penance for a previous post (say that five times fast), here’s a seminal guitar instrumental.

I saw Jeff Beck once, appearing in a bill with SRV about 6 months before the helicopter crash. A great concert, even greater in retrospect given what happened.

He’s one of the few guitarists that I know of that uses tone to signify change in emotion as effectively as he does (David Gilmour is probably the only other guitarist that uses this technique regularly. That I know of, of course.).

There are many other YouTube videos of him performing this song but the original is the best.

Enjoy.

ProSQL Trump Cards

jdn — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:18:58 GMT

These are funny.

If you don’t understand why they are funny (which might not be for the obvious reasons one would think they are funny), don’t worry about it.

Repost: MoreSQL

jdn — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:36:15 GMT

Here is a post that announces the MoreSQL movement.

For true fun, read the comments.

Fix: Getting rid of weird Asp.Net MVC 3 “?area=” links

jdn — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 06:27:58 GMT

This is potentially a fix without a problem, but…

Using syntax like this (I’m using T4MVC here):

@Html.ActionLink("Home", MVC.Home.Index())

I expect to have the link rendered as:

http://localhost/

Yet, sometimes, it would render as:

http://localhost/?area=

WTF? What’s with that? There is (AFAIKT) no functional difference between them, but I found it annoying.

My google-fu failed me for quite a while until I saw a random comment in some post and found that if I used this syntax:

I always got the right rendered link.

Why? I don’t know. I feel like I should know. I thought it might have to do with RenderPartial vs. something else, but that didn’t seem to be it. I’m tempted to say it is due to T4MVC, but don’t know why it would be specifically.

Anyway, just a note to myself that, if I’m feeling anal about links, this gets rid of the issue.

Guilty Musical Pleasure : Colbie Caillat – Fallin’ for You

jdn — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:47:22 GMT

I like Colbie Caillat’s music. There I’ve said it.

I realize that I’m not her target demographic. I also realize this is somewhat disturbing, if not downright creepy. But dammit, I can’t help it.

There is a particular cognitive dissonance when the shuffle play on my Zune pairs this with, say, King Crimson, but what can you do.

I've been spending all my..time
Just thinking about ya
I don't know what to do
I think I'm fallin' for you

I've been waiting all my.. life
and now i found ya
I dont know what to do
I think I'm falling for you...
I'm falling for you...

So, here in a sound check for her world famous Walmart tour, displaying incredible guitar chops…Enjoy.

Or not.

Repost: Fix MacBook Air Sleep Problem

jdn — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:27:18 GMT

I’ve posted previously about problems that I’ve had with my MacBook Air 13” (2011 edition).

An additional one that crept up was its maddeningly random inability to wake from sleep. I typically take it to a client site everyday (or elsewhere when I’m travelling) and put it to sleep for the commute each way, and on too many numerous occasions, it failed to wake up, requiring a full power cycle, and then hope I remembered to save everything before it slept.

This post details a fix that, after a week or so, appears to have resolved the issue. You have to go into System Preferences and select a startup disk.

Why does this work? I don’t know, and neither does the original poster, but it appears to work, at least for some.

Repost: Comments Commentary

jdn — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:03:37 GMT

Via John Gruber at DaringFireball, Matt Gemmell has a post that describes the pros and cons of allowing comments on a website.

I’ve long been of the view that you really should have (moderated) comments if you want to say that you have a blog. Of course, given that Gruber doesn’t allow comments, I’d then have to figure out what DaringFireball is, if not a blog, and if that’s a difference that makes a difference.

In any event, none of the comments in the linked post favors the Rob Conery patented “turn on comments until you start getting comments you don’t like, then start deleting those, and then close them entirely, and then complain about the comments that disagreed while acting unreasonably wounded about it” system.

Anyway, if comments commentary is your sort of thing (which, let’s face it, is a somewhat esoteric topic), give it a look.