Tim Tebow

Like him or not, you have to respect him. Much to my dismay I sat and watched him single handidly beat my beloved Crimson Tide Saturday afternoon.

There are rumors of him getting a second Heisman Trophy this year, and I believe he deserves it. Without Tebow Florida would not have had a chance against Bama or Georgia or many of the others. He is possibly the single best College Football player I have ever seen play the game. Over the past several years I grew to dislike him, because of all the press and how people worshipped him.

In the recent months I started paying more attention to him, and quickly realized there is a lot to this young athelete. Initially he had stated he was going to forgoe the NFL for life as a missionary. I was thinking WOW, now there is a man with strong religous beliefs! I then thought, you know if he went on to play and be successful in the NFL he could do more to spread the word of the Lord there than he could in some wilderness. I also thought that if he didn't want the money, then he could still live a life of poverty and donate his proceeds to the needy. I read today that his coaches believed much as I do and he is now announcing he will make himself available for the NFL draft, stating that with the publicity and money that comes with an NFL carreer would allow him to do more for the church and his community than he could as missionary.

After reading that article I respect him now as a person as well as an athelete. Hats off to you Tebow! I hope you get the Heisman again and go on the have a great carreer in the NFL.

New York Work

Upcoming Work in New York

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Custom topo maps

This is a link to a custom topo map I created for an area where I do some nature photography. Great site!
http://www.mytopo.com/review.cfm?mytopoid=28507567BD

If GM Falls

I am not a big fan of government intervention into business, but after reviewing the repercussions of GM falling, I think that something needs to be done to prop this industry up.

Look at some of the outcomes of just one of the big 3 falling:

• Car dealers, already crippled by the credit crisis that has sapped their customers as well as their showroom, would be forced to close. Surviving dealers could convert to imports, which are expected to recover more quickly than the domestic chains. In total, the center estimates nearly 975,000 supplier and auto-related jobs would be lost in the first year.
• On a local level, families and businesses in factory towns across the Midwest and elsewhere would be crushed, as revenues and customers disappear. The center estimates that 1.7 million non-industry jobs would be lost due to the impact on auto industry incomes.
• Tax revenues would suffer as employees lose their incomes. The center estimates the shutdown of all three Detroit automakers would reduce U.S. personal income by over $150.7 billion in just the first year, costing $60.1 billion in funds for police departments, parks, highways and other government services.
  

(Source: Center for Automotive Research)

If we lose $60.1 billion in tax revenue, then taxes will be forced on to us at an even more alarming rate than it already is and Obama is already planning to up our taxes, this would give him the justification to do that. Not to mention, that those of us in the non-auto industries will be forced to take the brunt of the taxes to prop up the rest of the economy as it is.

Not to mention the cars in the US would start to look like the cars in Cuba, none of want that.

Verizon Speeds (again)

Interesting connection speeds. I was connected "With National Access" speeds which max out @ 128Kbs (not much better than dial-up) unplugged my wireless adapter from my "Cradlepoint MBR1000 router",  plugged the wireless card it into my laptop and started the VZaccess access client and went into the setup (ctrl-d passwd daigvzw) and set it to HDR (High Data Rate) only mode and reconnected it to my MBR and boom I am now back to broadband speeds or close to it anyway Downloads are still faster on my Satellite connection, but VPN and SSL is unreal slow there.

Protect Your Rights!

If you care about your personal rights keep up with the topics!

I have never been a political activist, but as the times are starting to change we are going to have to watch the issues more closely and as important issues come up get other people involved to contact congressman and senators to let them know how the public truly feels. With one party having such a majority in both the house and the senate as well as the presidency, the checks and balances are no longer as strong as they once were.


So much for "I support the Second Amendment"

Media reports say Barack Obama has selected Eric Holder as his Attorney General, and that Holder may already have accepted the offer.  Holder, as Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno during the Clinton Administration, said that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right, but instead protects the right to have a firearm when serving with a militia. After leaving office, Holder stuck to that assertion when he signed Janet Reno's brief to the Supreme Court in the Heller case, which stated, "The Second Amendment does not protect firearms possession or use that is unrelated to participation in a well-regulated militia."
Remember the first thing to completely controlling a populace is the disarming of the citizens. Also remember two of the many reasons we had a revolution in this country, the unfair government taxes and England's attempt to disarm the public by taking their firearms. Obama supports both of those initiatives. The assault against our rights are already starting and not only stopping with the 2nd amendment. But also the 4th. It doesn't stop with the Democrats; Since 9/11 Bush completely ignored much of the constitution (much as Abe Lincoln did prior to the Civil War)  There is an assualt against the 4th amendment taking place right now in Washington, D.C. (The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.) As unusual as this sounds the ACLU and the NRA; usually staunch opponents of each other; are on the same sides of this issue.

Washington, D.C. is attempting, even as the ACLU of all people are taking a stand against it. Maybe they figure they have to do this before the Supreme Court decides it is against the Constitution to ban hand guns, but they are planning on searching and seizing all hand guns in the DC area. They say it is strictly voluntary, and those being searched are under immunity from prosecution, so long as they do not find a gun in your possession! (what the hell is the immunity for then?)

Look at what some people are having to say about this topic.
Johnny Barnes of the ACLU:

"If the founding fathers were not concerned with the British troops coming into their homes, we would not have the Fourth Amendment. That is why we have it. And they condition passage of the Constitutuion on passage of the Bill of Rights. This is not something to be taken lightly." (The same thing can be said of the 2nd ammendment)

Bill Tucker of CNN:

"Critics don't want constitutional rights sacrificed for some quick fix as they call the police plan."

Ronald Hampton, National Black Police Association:

We shouldn't be letting the police in. I served there (Washington, D.C.) for a quarter of a century. I wouldn't let the police in my house.

Lou Dobbs of CNN:

Well you know how I hate to take a position, but what idiot came up with this direct assault on constitutional rights? I mean, what — the people of Washington, D.C. ought to be telling somebody to stick it big time.
...
Who in Washington got this idea? The mayor? Who is this? The chief of police? (The answer was the chief of police, who was in the interview at the time)
....
The chief of police — these are the people who don't trust the people of Washington, D.C. to have a gun to protect themselves in their own homes.
....
Yes, well — I'll tell you what the chief and whoever is with the chief on this — go read the Constitution of the United States. You are out of your mind. Cut it out. This shouldn't even be a matter to take up with the ACLU or anyone else. How about that simple decency, intelligence and common sense? How about just the absolute enrapture that you might have with American values?

The idea you would knock on a man or woman's home, on their door, unbelievable. These — what are these people — what are they doing? They are not going to just let this stand, surely.
....
Who is the one person with this idea? There's always one person. I'd like to know who the hell that fool is. So to speak.

If the ACLU, National Black Police Association, CNN and the NRA are all on the same boat; thinking the same thing about the illegal seizure of weapons being a problem, (if I am agreeing with the ACLU) there are bigger problems on the horizon! Keep informed on the issues, not just these but everything that defines us as Americans!

Health monitoring in ASP.Net

Another good article from Mads, wish I would have known about this years ago!

Health monitoring in ASP.NET 2.0

ASP.net Performance Tuning

Here are a couple of tips on ASP.net performance tuning from an excellent article on the MSDN site

• Tip 8—Run IIS 6.0 (If Only for Kernel Caching)

If you're not running IIS 6.0 (Windows Server™ 2003), you're missing out on some great performance enhancements in the Microsoft Web server. In Tip 7, I talked about output caching. In IIS 5.0, a request comes through IIS and then to ASP.NET. When caching is involved, an HttpModule in ASP.NET receives the request, and returns the contents from the Cache.

If you're using IIS 6.0, there is a nice little feature called kernel caching that doesn't require any code changes to ASP.NET. When a request is output-cached by ASP.NET, the IIS kernel cache receives a copy of the cached data. When a request comes from the network driver, a kernel-level driver (no context switch to user mode) receives the request, and if cached, flushes the cached data to the response, and completes execution. This means that when you use kernel-mode caching with IIS and ASP.NET output caching, you'll see unbelievable performance results. At one point during the Visual Studio 2005 development of ASP.NET, I was the program manager responsible for ASP.NET performance. The developers did the magic, but I saw all the reports on a daily basis. The kernel mode caching results were always the most interesting. The common characteristic was network saturation by requests/responses and IIS running at about five percent CPU utilization. It was amazing! There are certainly other reasons for using IIS 6.0, but kernel mode caching is an obvious one.

• Tip 9—Use Gzip Compression

While not necessarily a server performance tip (since you might see CPU utilization go up), using gzip compression can decrease the number of bytes sent by your server. This gives the perception of faster pages and also cuts down on bandwidth usage. Depending on the data sent, how well it can be compressed, and whether the client browsers support it (IIS will only send gzip compressed content to clients that support gzip compression, such as Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox), your server can serve more requests per second. In fact, just about any time you can decrease the amount of data returned, you will increase requests per second.

The good news is that gzip compression is built into IIS 6.0 and is much better than the gzip compression used in IIS 5.0. Unfortunately, when attempting to turn on gzip compression in IIS 6.0, you may not be able to locate the setting on the properties dialog in IIS. The IIS team built awesome gzip capabilities into the server, but neglected to include an administrative UI for enabling it. To enable gzip compression, you have to spelunk into the innards of the XML configuration settings of IIS 6.0 (which isn't for the faint of heart). By the way, the credit goes to Scott Forsyth of OrcsWeb who helped me figure this out for the www.asp.net severs hosted by OrcsWeb.

Rather than include the procedure in this article, just read the article by Brad Wilson at IIS6 Compression. There's also a Knowledge Base article on enabling compression for ASPX, available at Enable ASPX Compression in IIS. It should be noted, however, that dynamic compression and kernel caching are mutually exclusive on IIS 6.0 due to some implementation details.

Visual Basic Functions in C#

Visual Basic functions in C# 2.0

by Mads Kristensen

Yet another great and useful article from Mads


If you used to be a VB developer, but for some reason are writing C# now, you probably miss a couple of functions. I remember being a little frustrated when I did the conversion from VB.NET to C#. It was March 2005 and I made the shift on the .NET 2.0 beta platform. I couldn’t understand why C# didn’t have some of the simplest functions like IsNumeric() and IsDate(). Also Left(), Right() and Middle() were missing. You could add a reference to the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace, but that seemed like overkill for a few simple methods.
So I decided to make my own static class in C# 2.0 called VBFunctions that would implement exactly the four methods I was missing so much. This seems pretty basic and it is. But I use these functions again and again and now I have a single place to find them.

Prepare for growing projects

Another excellent article from one of my favorite bloggers! This article discusses items that are often missed from the start and makes our code a mess to keep up with!
Prepare for growing projects