# Tuesday, November 27, 2007

It's 10 o'clock, do you know where your cross-dressers are?

Fox News is reporting:

Cops: McDonald's Workers Attacked by Cross-Dressers

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

MEMPHIS,Tenn. —  A troublesome trio of transvestites allegedly laid siege to a Memphis McDonald's restaurant Sunday night, sparking a brawl with the restaurant's crew, according to reports.

Police said they were working on a more detailed description of three men dressed in drag who came into a McDonald's restaurant and started swinging.

Restaurant employee Martez Brisco was working the drive-through window when he reportedly got into an argument with the suspects. When Brisco ignored them tapping at the window, they came in.

"They come to the window, 'Tap, tap, tap.' I'm still ignoring them," Brisco told WMC-TV. "I guess that just pissed them off worser."

Click here to read the WMC-TV.com report.

The transvestites allegedly struck the manager with a tire iron, and when he swung back, the drag queens took off their stiletto boots, removed their earrings and prepared to attack. The manager, Albert Bolton, was covered with scratch marks after suspects clawed him with their fingernails.

Bolton grabbed a pot of scalding french-fry grease and hurled it at his attackers. One of the cross-dressers then smacked Bolton with a wet floor sign, sending him to the hospital in an ambulance, WMC-TV reported.

Before driving off, the three attackers smashed the drive-through window.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

There must be NOTHING to do in Memphis these days. (thanks Anna)
Current Events
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 3:44:35 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Grumpy Tuesday

Today has been named Grumpy Tuesday.  The best way to illustrate the reason is to give you a brief timeline of the last 12 hours:

Yesterday:
10 PM MST- Leave for Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport
11:30 PM MST - Depart on Jet Blue Flight for John F. Kennedy International Airport

Today:
12:30-1:15 PM MST - Really great turbulence over Texas
6:15 AM EST (4:15 AM MST) - Arrive at JFK having not really slept on the plane.  Thankfully, we flew JetBlue so at least I got to watch trashy television.  Why is MTV running spring break 2007 content? and why did I watch it?
6:45 AM - Get in cab stand line at JFK to get cab to my apartment
7:25 AM - Due to really fun traffic on the Van Wyck arrive at my apartment
8:25 AM - Landlord and contractor arrrive at my apartment to remodel my bathroom - first day task: demolition.

9:00 AM - Time of blog entry (everything beyond this is... the future)

9:15 AM - Head to Gym around the corner to shower (cause my bathroom is being demo'd)
9:30 AM - Drop clothes at home and head to work.
10:15 AM - Arrive at work
12:00 PM - Fat Sal deliver's on Two Slice Tuesday - I know I'm exhausted casue that sounds really good right now
4:15 PM - F2F Interview with a potential hire
5:30 PM - Limp home from work because If I stay longer my head will explode
6:15 PM - order thai food delivered for dinner. Hello chicken pad kee mao and beef panang with extra vegetables and maybe some tum yum goong
6:30 PM - Stare blankly at some television until I either pass out or become truly comatose
8:30 PM - Realize that I've lost the battle and crawl into bed.

If that doesn't clarify why I might call this Grumpy Tuesday I don't know what else will.  As I write this, on the other side of the wall are two men with hammers knocking out plaster and tile.  In a way I'm glad that they are there, otherwise the only conclusion I would be left with is that the pounding was inside my head.
metadata
Tuesday, November 27, 2007 9:14:11 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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# Monday, November 26, 2007

Rubio's Fish Tacos - Mmmmm

I love going to Phoenix for many reasons (of course family, etc) but a awesome fringe benefit is Rubio's.  I grew up in Southern California and love Baja style mexican food and a Rubio's fish taco does the trick. I went to their website and punched in New York City I got the following message:

There are no Rubio's Fresh Mexican Grill locations matching your search criteria near New York City, New York


It would seem the closest Rubio's to me is just south of Denver (or 1,776 mi – about 1 day 3 hours driving).

At any rate, two Fish Tacos Especial hit the spot.

Food
Monday, November 26, 2007 6:35:13 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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JSLink.VS - JSLint add-in for Visual Studio

By Predrag Tomasevic.

Visual Studio Add-in that uses JSLint to verify JavaScript files that are part of Solution

I have yet to put this in and play with it.  But it looks like just what the doctor ordered.  I am still ramping up on JavaScript.  Hopefully between this for VS 2005 and the yet to be worked with Intellisense in VS 2008, I may have half a chance at moving up the learning curve quickly.

ASP.NET | JavaScript
Monday, November 26, 2007 2:35:19 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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A cool little quick and dirty CSS Layout Tool - Layout-o-Matic

Layout-o-Matic, A quick and dirty way to get a some HTML and CSS for you're desired layout. Sure, it's simple to do this yourself, but if you can get it for free in 60 seconds I'm all for it.

What you get:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta name="generator" content="http://www.inknoise.com/experimental/layoutomatic.php" />
    <style type="text/css">
        #container {
            width: 760px;
            \width: 780px;
            w\idth: 760px;
            border: 1px solid gray;
            margin: 10px;
            margin-left: auto;
            margin-right: auto;
            padding: 10px;
        }

        #banner {
            padding: 5px;
            margin-bottom: ;
            background-color: rgb(213, 219, 225);
        }

        #content {
            padding: 5px;
            margin-right: ;
            background-color: gray;
        }

        #sidebar-a {
            float: right;
            width: ;
            margin: 0;
            margin-left: ;
            padding: 5px;
            background-color: rgb(235, 235, 235);
        }

        #footer {
            clear: both;
            padding: 5px;
            margin-top: ;
            
            background-color: rgb(213, 219, 225);
        }
    </style>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="container">
        <div id="banner">&nbsp;</div>

        <div id="sidebar-a">&nbsp;</div>

        <div id="content">&nbsp;</div>

        <div id="footer">&nbsp;</div>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Got this from the post The Best CSS Tools which seems to be a total regurgitation of stuff long seen before. I just like the look and name of Layout-O-Matic.

CSS
Monday, November 26, 2007 1:31:21 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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# Sunday, November 25, 2007

NYTimes travel to Seattle on the Cheap

All this makes me miss the food (beer / coffee / seafood / donuts) of Seattle.  6 plus years after leaving Seattle I still import all my coffee from there.

Frugal Traveler | Seattle
By MATT GROSS
Published: November 25, 2007
To the Frugal Traveler, no phrase is more inspiring than “happy hour.” In Seattle, those 60 minutes of joy have been elevated into evenings not only of cheap drinks but also of discount gourmet snacks at the classiest restaurants.

Drool

...Daily Dozen Donut Company for a sack of the signature treat ($2.10 for 12), fried up fresh before my eyes on a conveyor belt that bathed them in oil.

I've never really taken a look at the NYTimes travel guides.  I don't recognize most of the places on the list
Food | Seattle
Sunday, November 25, 2007 5:41:45 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Looks Like VS2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 have ben released

Scott Guthrie's blog has some details about the release.  I'm a bit behind on this one, but some of the highlights I keyed in on:

ASP.NET AJAX and JavaScript Support

.NET 3.5 has ASP.NET AJAX built-in (no separate download required).  In addition to including all of the features in ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET 3.5 also now includes richer support for UpdatePanels integrating with WebParts, ASP.NET AJAX integration with controls like <asp:menu> and <asp:treeview>, WCF support for JSON, and many other AJAX improvements.

VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 also now have great support for integrating JavaScript and AJAX into your applications.  You can learn more about this from my blog posts here:


My plan today is to see if I can't develop a basic Silverlight 1.1 application.  I have this idea for a rich interactive display on top of XPlanner (everyone's favorite project tracking tool at my office) called TaskBored that would give you a view of open stories and the tasks associated with them as if it were all sticky notes.  The desire for this view came out of our planning process, and while we've pretty much left this technique behind as impractical the view of the work ahead it produces is useful.
ASP.NET | Scrum
Sunday, November 25, 2007 5:12:28 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Hockey In Phoenix

Watched the Phoenix Coyotes spank the Toronto Maple Leaf's today. While a hockey game in the burbs of Phoenix is considerably more tame than a Rangers game at the Garden, it's still a rollicking good time. 

<sarcasm>Good news for those of you who like to package your entertainment you can get all you can eat packages starting at $30.

"All You Can Eat" menu items include:

  • Hot Dogs
  • Fountain Drinks
  • Popcorn
  • Nachos
  • Peanuts

Sign me up!</sarcasm> 

Actually, for someone who follows no sports what so ever, I really enjoy a hockey game.  Moves quick, it's rockus, and well the fights are pretty freakin' cool.

Entertainment | Food
Sunday, November 25, 2007 1:19:22 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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# Thursday, November 22, 2007

Getting on to Turkey Time

So this year my wife's mother opted for a bacon and maple turkey.  It smells pretty great sitting on the counter resting.  There was in interesting tidbit in the New York Times about carving turkey, Butcher’s Method Takes Carving Off the Table.  I'm interested to give this a try especially with the bacon and maple on the outside as every slice can have some skin.  I would love to say I'll report back, but I might be a little to tryptophan'd out. I'll see if can manage to get a picture online. My wife's mother sets a nice table and cooks pretty good too.

Quick, update... It worked great.  Totally manageable and everyone got nice big juicy slices of turkey.
Food
Thursday, November 22, 2007 6:47:05 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Thanksgiving Day... Watching the parade

Man, the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade is pretty ridiculous. Will Santa ever show up and end this misery?
Entertainment | metadata
Thursday, November 22, 2007 1:56:40 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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# Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Full disclosure

The tag line making the easy impossible is not mine. It's an homage to a former boss, Bruce, a bank vice president, who taught me about negotiating and doing buisness at my first corporate job. I think he actually used it as his IM tagline (he may still). At any rate, he's a great guy who taught me a lot.

I don't claim to be the guy who "makes the easy impossible", but I sure know him well.

metadata
Wednesday, November 21, 2007 6:34:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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# Tuesday, November 20, 2007

So I've started blogging.

There are several reason's I've started blogging.  Obviously, the first would be I feel like I have something to say... skipping to the end of a bunch of reasons... My mentor's comment about my site, "It's a little thin."  And in fact, it doesn't much matter why.

At any rate, I am just getting started at this.  I'm using dasBlog and liking it pretty well. There is some fiddling I had to do to figure it out, but that is more likely due to my refusal to read the documentation. I'm trying to figure out what to put on this page photo feeds, rolls from other things I read, widgets, and whatever else.  So dear readers (both of you), what should I do here?  What would you like to see?

metadata
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 8:27:56 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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Taxonomy - My inagural post category

Yesterday, I was flying from Phoenix to Denver all the while watching the landscape below me and reading Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger.  I saw the author speak at the ClickZ.com "ten years..." dinner and was sufficiently impressed that he had something worthwhile to say that I was pleased to discover a copy of his book in the swag bag.  I'm only half way in, but his general gist so far is that the material nature of objects imposes limitations on their organization in space and the web blows the lid off of that as the web offers infinite categorization of objects.  I'll tell you later if I recommend the book, but so far he's made some interesting points.  So if you get a free copy, read it otherwise - hold the line.

I am more or less fascinated with Taxonomy, so it's pretty fitting that my first post where I inagurate both my blog and my first category is taxomonious (not sure that's a word.)
Taxonomy
Tuesday, November 20, 2007 6:56:49 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
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