Ok, so it’s completely unrelated to VB in every conceivable way .

I just came across a very nifty way to tie your shoes. It’s called the Ian Knot and there’s a very good pictorial writeup (and video) about it here.

I’m not going to repeat his pictures here, but it’s essentially, just:

1. make a crossover knot, the way you would normally start to tie your shoes.
2. In the right hand, make a loop exactly like you normally would, with the string going up, over your finger and down.
3. In the left hand, make the same loop, but with the string starting below your finger and coming up over your finger towards you.
4. then just push the two loops through each other and tighten.

Check out the site above for pictures. It’s easier to see it than describe it.

But, it IS amazingly fast, and easy.

I can see doing a lot of things "online".

Email? GMail is pretty dang slick, with a spam filter that's second to none.

Stock Portfolio and watchlists? Sure.

Craig's List Searches? Right there on my homepage.

Word Processing? Spreadsheets? Hmmm. Google apps is definitely interesting, although I tend to want to keep my files close at hand.

Personal finance information? Huhwhaaaa?

Call me old fashioned, but the thought of putting access info to my entire checkbook/credit card/bank account/investment accounts online just seems a little, uh, risky?

Hell, it's probably all already out there, but is it really a good idea to put concentrate all that in one place, online, in the ether on someone else's server?

Hmm, looks like somebody already has. But wait, this is great. Check out the bold restriction in their terms of use. Why oh why would anyone put private info on some company's server when said company says up front not to put financial info there. Damn, I hope they have a good E&O policy!

I suppose SalesForce.com asks their customers to do it every day (after all, isn't your company's client list a bit like your ledger?) and nobody has much of a problem with it.

So maybe I am old fashioned.

Then I saw this (from the QuickenOnline.com website):

Build your whole financial picture for up to 5 years.
Most banks keep your online data for only 60 to 90 days. 
With Quicken Online, you build your whole financial picture 
from the day you start. We keep active customer's data for up to 5 years.

5 whole years! How generous! And I guess after five years, all that data would be useless to me?

Um. I don't think so.

Guess I'll stick to the tried and true for now.

NASA has a nifty little "picture of the day" feature that you can add to your Google Homepage.

A picture that came up just yesterday shows the shuttle lifting off against a gray sky. Here's a snippet (from http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_940.html):

But the thing that struck me about this is how much our space program is beginning to resemble the Millennium Falcon.

The rusty tanks, the patchy paintwork, using a stapler for repairs. It's starting to look like the shuttles may have made the Kessel Run a few times themselves.

(Detail from above)

Compare to this 1983 picture from the Wikipedia entry:

And this about 20 months before the first shuttle launch (again from Wikipedia):

Clean and sparkly

Cripes, it's 2007. Shouldn't we be flying something like this:

from www.starwars.com

and not this:

from http://www.art.net/kiyotei/blogs

This project has been out a LONG time (looks like it was last messed with in 2001), but I hadn't seen it before and the specs are definitely worth a read.

Essentially, as a project, these guys built a pretty simplistic programming language that ends up looking very similar to a Shakespearian play.

Like I said, you gotta read the specs to fully appreciate it.

Variables are declared in the Dramatis Personæ section. They enter scope not by virtue of functions but by Enter, Exit and Exeunt declarations.

Here's a small sample:

Outputting Input Reversedly.

Othello, a stacky man.
Lady Macbeth, who pushes him around till he pops.


                    Act I: The one and only.

                    Scene I: In the beginning, there was nothing.

[Enter Othello and Lady Macbeth]

Othello:
 You are nothing!

                    Scene II: Pushing to the very end.

Lady Macbeth:
 Open your mind! Remember yourself.

Othello:
 You are as hard as the sum of yourself and a stone wall. Am I as
 horrid as a flirt-gill?

Lady Macbeth:
 If not, let us return to scene II. Recall your imminent death!

Othello:
 You are as small as the difference between yourself and a hair

Anyway, pretty clever, funny stuff, that is, as long as you'd find this pretty clever and funny (and if you haven't been to http://xkcd.com, it's worth the trip).

Paul Moller (the aircar guy) has finally made at least one of his designs available for sale, the Volantor.

Ok, it's a tad goofy looking, and at 125k$ plus, it's bit out of, oh, damn near everyone's, price range, but still, it is for sale.

Personally, I'm waiting to see the first M400 flying around.

The amazing thing to me is that this guy has been working on this idea since the 60's, developing all sorts of technology in the interim to fund it (and contribute to it).

Dr. Moller, keep it up!

How's this for a rough IT problem. Apparently, the ISS is having some difficulties getting several fairly important systems back online after some problems.

Of course, if they need computer help, I'd love to offer to take a trip up to help debug things .

Wouldn't that be an awesome GeekSquad tech call!

Completely unrelated to programming, but very cool anyway.

Mexican geologists discovered a cave filled with giant (and by giant, I mean some as much as 36 feet long) gypsum crystals. There is a great picture of it in the latest National Geographic.

At this point, I'd love to include a picture of one of the crystal caves, I'm just not sure about copyright issues surrounding doing so. I suspect it would be ok, but better to err on the safe side.

Anyway, check the full article here. Be sure the next through the pictures.

Reminds me of that really cheesy movie from several years ago, The Core. If I'm remembering correctly, they used a big drilling machine to drill to the earth's core, but on the way, they fell into a huge cavern full of giant crystals. In the movie, I think they were diamonds (of course). Life imitating art? Should I really call The Core art? I'm just not sure...

Ok, you've got a nifty idea for a site, maybe it's personal stuff, maybe it's something more involved. You could put it up on that free space your ISP gives you. And then you get to hassle with it every time you have to change ISP's because Comcast gets bought by TimeWarner, that decides to bail out of your area leaving it to verizon, which.... you get the picture.

Or, you can plunk down a few bucks a year, buy a domain name and then plunk down a few more bucks a month and buy some space on a professional hosting company. That way, the domain is yours and it won't change just because some bean counters at your ISP decide your city no longer forecasts to good market saturation, or whatever the jargon is. It also means an email address that won't change just because you ditch cable and switch to Dish Network (say that five times fast!).

There's a lot of hosting companies out there, and everyone has different requirements and demands as to what a good hosting company consists of. In my case, I wanted a host that would provide a decent amount of space, tons of email support, MS SQL and MySQL options, as well as Access dbs, and full support for .NET and some of the more esoteric web languages out there, like PHP, Ruby, Python, etc. so I could experiment with them, time permitting.

www.1and1.com looked pretty good, the price is definitely right, but they make you choose between Windows hosting, with .NET support and Linux hosting, with all the other languages. Not so good. But their domain registration is excellent and they provide free private DNS records, which is quite nice.

I ended up stumbling upon www.servergrid.com. They support all my requirements for 7.95$ a month, and they use HSphere for dynamic site management, which seems to work pretty good for me. I can host all my domains through one account, and just split my space up between them, which makes managing everything nice and tidy. Granted, I'm only running small sites, testing web apps, etc so I don't have huge demands, and your mileage may vary.

This site uses dasBlog for its content management. I had it installed, setup and running within an hour on my ServerGrid space (not including the hours and hours I spent coming up with the nifty graphics, layout, CSS and color scheme, but that's another story!)

I will say this though. I've started up support chats at one in the morning with these guys and there's always someone there that seems to know what they're doing. Good support goes a long way in my book.

I'm a bit of a toolhound, both of the physical variety (like screwdrivers, bitstops, routers and mitre saws) and of the more ethereal (clipboard loggers and macro recorders). Tools make the fun things even more fun, and the wretched things not quite so onerous.

And one really onerous thing for me is backups. They're a pain, and it seems it's always impossible to find what you need when you need it. I've got a pile of QIC-60 and QIC-80 tapes that there's no way I could restore even if I wanted to (note to self, burn them in the next trash fire...)

Anyway, I went on a search some time ago for a decent backup utility. Something free, or close, that was flexible enough for what I needed, simple enough that I'd actually use it, capable enough to make it worthwhile and fast enough to not get in the way.

I believe my search ended with FileBackPC.

It's a nifty little app that does a nice job of the "copy to a floppy" type of backup. Well, ok, maybe not a floppy these days, but plug in a 500gb USB2.0 removeable harddrive and this app is fantastic.

The good points:

• It backs up specified directories, with wildcards and all sorts of file filters
• It can compress and retain a specified number of "previous versions"
• You can specify sets of folders in "jobs" that can be run independently
• You can set jobs to automatically run, either on a schedule or on "an event" (like plugging in that USB harddrive!)
• It can reconnect to other machines on your network and back up files from the (great for small home offices with a server and several workstations or laptops).
• It can even run batch files and scripts to automatically execute processes before backing up the results of those processes. For instance, I have an item that uses the windows "backup" utility to create a single backup file of the critical system components and my Exchange server data, then I backup that file automatically using FileBackPC.

Off hand, I can't even think of any bad points, other than it's not an open source project.

I think my favorite feature is the backup on an event. I set several jobs up to execute when the X: drive comes online (that's my backup USB drive). So literally all I do now is plug in the USB drive, wait till it finishes the backup, and then unplug it and file it safely away. Slick. And it's got a nice reporting facility too, that makes it easy to see if there were any problems (open files, read errors, whatever).

And, since it's a copy style backup, it's blindingly easy to find that backup file when you need it. Get a couple of USB drives and be doubly safe.

Backup utilities definitely aren't my favorite things, but they're something almost everyone with a PC needs. I know this has probably sounded more like an ad than anything else, but it's not. I'm not getting paid by the FileBack people. This is one of those utilities that I've found so handy, useful and easy to work with, that I just felt like mentioning it.

I was looking for a particular reference book today and stumbled across a little book I hadn't looked at in ages. It was a favorite way back and it's still pretty funny now.

The book is the "Book of Minims" by Tom Weller. It's appearently out of print now, but Mr. Weller has made the whole thing available online here.

In case you're wondering, Minims are the opposite of Maxims, basically, sayings that sound like they have a deep meaning but in reality are so obvious or specific as to be useless.

One of my favorites: "Money is it's own reward".

Good stuff.

Everything has to start somewhere, so I guess it's come time to make my entry into the blogosphere.

If you haven't already guessed, I'm quite partial to Visual Basic.

I have a long history with the language, and I've spent my entire career coding off-the-shelf, commercial packages in it.

Still, there's always something new to learn and this blog will hopefully allow me to pick up a few more concepts as well and pass along some information that I've found useful.

We'll just have to see where it goes from here.