I'm the son of Linda Whitehouse. My Dad Floyd and my sisters Stephanie and Heather are here. My other sister, Anne, is resting somewhere in south Florida - she just had a baby this weekend - Linda's 8th grand-baby. I think she may hit double digits eventually.
We're all here to celebrate Linda's retirement from the world of corporate accounting - I guess it's really just retirement from this fine company. She'll be keeping plenty busy with the Whitehouse Cattle Company but I think the returns might be slightly less complex for the farm than for oil and gas holdings and the variety of related companies - all the things she's been working on for the last 21ish years.
I have a lot of memories of this company. I spent quite a few days during busy season sitting in the Bass offices entertaining myself on an old Tandy computer, playing DOS games. Those days probably played some part to making me the computer geek that I am - so thank you.
I learned that the little black button under the desk shouldn't be pressed unless you want armed visitors to come and have an embarrassing little chat with you. I got to know some of you at office parties at my house in Weatherford and at company picnics where we had gunslingers and horse-back rides and live music and barbecue.
When I got married, I brought my wife Dawn up to meet you all. She had to meet the extended family. When we found out that we were having triplets, the people at this company were excited for us and when our babies were born 9 weeks early and placed in the NICU, you encouraged us, cared for us and prayed for us. I know that if I have warm memories as I look back on the time my mom has spent with this company she must remember her time here with great fondness and great pride.
It is certain that she has left an indelible mark on this company. She's always had a knack for seeing what needed to be done and set herself to the task of making sure things got taken care of. She's always believed in getting her hands dirty. She's added rooms onto our houses, replaced fixtures, painted, laid tile... Her daddy was a carpenter; a roofer. I guess it's always been part of her personality to have a vision, set a plan of action and work to complete the process.
I know that she has a vision for what lies ahead. Linda is not retiring to the farm to rest and watch the cows graze - she's embarking on her next adventure. She has in front of her a blank canvas and a picture is starting to take shape. She'll spend her time putting paint to canvas. She'll go camping and hiking and site-seeing with her husband and best friend. She'll attend most of the soccer games her grandsons play in and she'll attend more princess parties than she can count (and she's an accountant so you know that's a lot of princess parties). She'll plant new gardens and may eventually cover the entire farm in sandstone pathways.
Figuratively, she'll spend time putting paint to canvas and literally she'll be continuing to explore her artistic side. Last month, my wife's friend, Renee, came over to our house from Boston. She found one of Mom's paintings hung prominently in our living room and said, "only in Texas would you find someone with a painting of an oil rig in their home." Just like you see the work of her hand as you walk through my house and see the amazing paintings hung on my walls, and you see her influence in the personalities, creativity and work ethic of her children and grandchildren, I know that, for years to come, you will walk around the halls at Bass and see her hand in the makings of organization, processes and quality.
Mom, congratulations on everything you have accomplished here. You leave a legacy, a master work. You now move your focus away from the department and away from the company and onto things of more personal significance. We look forward to hearing about and seeing what you do next - whatever you decide to focus on, we know it will be remarkable.
I love you - congratulations!
I got a new phone recently (January?) - my 3rd or 4th Pocket PC... Anyway - when asked to register my OS, I went ahead and went through the process...
At least they'll let me know...
I clicked on an ad about a GTAIV sweepstakes. Well, turns out the sweepstakes entry period has expired but I thought the prize information was a little odd...
On or about April 23, lucky winners will be chosen from all entries to receive the following prizes:
Four Grand Prizes: Four winners will score a four-day/three-night trip for two to New York City to attend the Xbox LIVE Gold Party. Trip includes round trip coach air transportation for winner and a guest from a major U.S. commercial airport nearest winner's home, three (3) nights standard double occupancy hotel accommodations (one room, two people), ground transportation in New York to and from the airport and hotel, and $200 cash, awarded as a check from the Sweepstakes Administrator
- One Hundred First Prizes: Custom Xbox 360 Elite console
- Two Thousand Second Prizes: A Rockstar baseball bat
- Five Thousand Third Prizes: 500 Microsoft Points
- Three Thousand Fourth Prizes: 1000 Microsoft Points
- Two Thousand Fifth Prizes: 1600 Microsoft Points
- Five Thousand Sixth Prizes: One-month Xbox LIVE Gold subscription
- Three Thousand Seventh Prizes: Three-month Xbox LIVE Gold subscription
- Two Thousand Eighth Prizes: One-year Xbox LIVE Gold subscription
So, first think I saw was the baseball bat - sweeeeeet. The console would be awesome (can't have enough 360 consoles).
The wheels kind of shoot off around 3, 4, 5 and then 6, 7 and 8... Aren't those groupings kind of backwards? Why is 5k 1month gold subscriptions the sixth prize and 2k 1 year subscriptions the eight prize? Shouldn't both groups be in the other order? How much you want to bet MS legal had to get involved and there's actually some reason to put those in backwards order?
I don't know - I wish I saw this before the 14th so I could enter. I'd probably win but miss the notice and have the prize pass on to another winner *cough*SXSW*phizzpop*GH3*cough*...
Tonight I've been thinking about that face Deryl gives me when I try to explain that it's OK for me to say some feature request is "easy". It's that look that says, "silly PM, you're dangerous and you should be destroyed."
First off, I'm no PM (never really was <rimshot />). I am, however, probably dangerous but that's why I'm trying to redefine Easy and Hard. They sound like opinion words - you would think you could convince someone that some problem has an easy solution and some other problem's solution is hard.
I theorize that "easy" and "hard" are statements of fact. Here's how:
An easy problem is one that's been solved before by someone who is accessible to consult on solving the problem again. A hard problem is one that hasn't been solved before by anyone who can be consulted with. Moderate problems fall somewhere in the middle. Where else?
An easy problem may have a solution that requires months of effort to implement. This is something the feature requester typically doesn't understand. They see the feature implemented right over there. They just want the same thing. That's ok - it's an easy problem but it's going to take months to make it happen.
Likewise, a hard problem may have a solution that requires minimal time to implement. The New York Times Sunday Cross Word is a hard problem but give me a week and I'll "implement" the solution (I'll get the answer from the key in the new paper)...
So, within a closed set of consultants, it's possible to ascertain to 100%
certainty that a proposed problem has an easy or hard solution (assuming
there's no debate on the congruence of the two problems - give me a little
wiggle-room here).
So, using my definitions, there's no need to go around putting down rabid
PMs (at least not for saying something's easy)...
It's tax time! I know you're about as excited about it as I am but it's can be a little better... If you do your own taxes, you may use TurboTax online which is a great, easy tool to get your taxes done even if they're a little complex (I itemize my deductions, have 4 kids, sold stock...).
Every year, the first thing I do when going to start on my taxes is hit google for "turbo tax discount" - this year I found a 25% discount on filing my taxes through Fidelity. I think I've found up to 45% in years past but I'm happy with 25%. If you're going to use TurboTax this year, use this link to get started through fidelity's website: http://personal.fidelity.com/planning/tax/do_your_taxes.shtml.cvsr
Silverlight DevCamp is this Saturday at the Improving Enterprises offices in Dallas. I begged Chris Koenig to let me video intro speaker in the morning and I'm going to hang out a bit and do a little hacking. I'll get the video up on my new Streaming Silverlight account on live.com before I leave so for the 16,000 of you who wanted to attend but learned that only about 100 will fit, watch the intro here on Saturday afternoon, get some pizza and beer and pretend you're cool like the rest of us.
I've got some nasty smudges on my laptop where my palms rest. I guess I spend so much time working on my laptop that I've worn off the laptop surface. I've been looking for a sticker like you put on the back of a laptop to put around my keyboard and touchpad but I'm not having much luck. Anyone found something like this? I know we've got a lot of laptop users at Telligent.
I might just buy a vinyl sticker to fit my laptop and cut it down to fit around my keyboard.
Maybe I need to find a vendor and create a site selling palm rest stickers - anyone looking to invest? :)
So I'm looking to buy a convertible this year. I've always been partial to convertibles but when I wrecked my bike, I determined that I'd never ride again and would simply replace my bike with a topless cage (or like my daughter Brianne explains, "a car without a lid").
My quandary is now whether it would be better to buy a convertible in the winter or if it would make any difference at all. I'm sure if I asked a salesperson somewhere that would give me a number of arguments about how right now was the best time to buy a car but I'm looking for some unbiased advice.
I'm going to buy a used car (I don't believe I'll ever buy new again). I'd like to buy from an individual but I rarely find listings from individuals. Do you think the time of year will make a difference assuming that I'm probably going to find the car I want on some used lot? If so, what month do you think would be best? Is late Feb too close to spring?
I've converted my primary computer to Vista and Office 2007. So far I'm pretty happy but I've been told the new OS smell wears off really quickly.
I've had some fun with a couple issues. The best issue is my external display. I'm running a Dell Inspiron 9400 with ATI Radeon Mobility X1400. I have a dock that I sit my laptop on and have an external display that sits to the left of my laptop. When I sign onto my computer, Vista always sets my external monitor to the right of my primary display rather than the left.
When I go into my settings and move the monitor back to the left, it works correctly until I have to log into my machine again (when I come into the office in the morning, get back to my desk after a meeting, my screen saver comes on...)
There are plenty of people out there with this issue (google: vista external display switch sides). A comment by J. Quick on Rick Strahl's blog suggests that the issue is caused by TMM or Transient Multi-Monitor Manager. This is a task you can find running in the Task Scheduler.
Following Quick's advice, I disabled the TMM job and killed the one that was running and then even rebooted but this didn't fix my problem. I guess I'll keep searching...
Gordon Keith played this song about the Patriots scandal this morning on 1310 AM The Ticket in Dallas. The song is great - it's not your standard sports tribute song (it's actually really good).
I greatly expanded my knowledge of Community Server and especially CSS by trying my hand at building a custom theme for the Community Server extravaganza last week. While working on my entry [VoteForMeNow! :) Look for OOTO2K7], I found a number of things I wanted to do. One of them was to put the window focus on the username field when you hit the login.aspx page.
In your typical ASP.Net site, you can drop a Page.Form.DefaultFocus = txtUsername.ClientID; in your page_load and that would give focus where you want. The problem with login.aspx is that the login form is a templated control and you don't have access to "username".
This was a little trickier than I expected and I'm fairly certain I haven't done it the best way but here's a way that works. Why don't you fix it and leave me some feedback :).
The login form for CS in the common dir of your theme so for most of you it's probably something like /themes/default/common/login.aspx.
Add this block to the top of your page above the <asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID="bodyContent" runat="server"> and when your page renders, a focus script will be added to put your user's cursor there in the username field where they can type+tab+type+enter and they're signed in.
<script language="C#" runat="server">protected override void OnPreRender(
EventArgs e)
{
UsernameSeekAndFocus(Page.Form);
base.OnPreRender(e);
}
private void UsernameSeekAndFocus(
Control parent)
{
foreach (
Control child
in parent.Controls)
{
if (child.ID ==
"username")
{
Page.Form.DefaultFocus = child.ClientID;
return;
}
if (child.HasControls())
UsernameSeekAndFocus(child);
}
}
</script>
I just saw an ad for Zenview displays. They've got like 50 configurations of two to seven displays for monitors ranging 17" to 30" each! Check out this setup:
I'm not sure how I could use that setup but I'm willing to try. You know... my birthday is just around the corner...
I got tired of seeing my wallpaper on my second monitor all skewed on my 1024 wide by 1280 tall vertical secondary display so I decided to do a little research and see if anyone had a good way to put a different wallpaper on each display. I think I hit gold!
Customize your XP desktop by going to your display properties (control panel or right-click your desktop and select properties). Select the Desktop tab and click on the Customize Desktop... button. Select the Web tab and add the images you want on your desktop. Hit OK and get out of the properties boxes.
On your desktop, you should have the images you selected. You can drag these around (including a second desktop), resize them, do whatever you need... When you're done, you can go back and lock the desktop items from the Web tab you added the images on.
I am a laptop user and drag my laptop around with me all day so I'm constantly turning off my secondary monitor and hooking my laptop up to an analog projector with different display settings than my digital external on my desk... My point being, the solution I found needs to handle a lot of display switching to work well for me. I've found that it's not perfect but it works quite well. I don't lock my desktop items so that I can easily slide the images around when my display gets messed up but I've been pretty happy with this solution.
My wife told me that this wasn't really that funny or that rare of an occurance but it made me chuckle. This is a sign for red seedless grapes.
We published our first episode of TelliCast on the Telligent Blog this week. We've recorded several episodes related to Community Server and we'll be publishing more in upcoming weeks. Take a gander, send me some feedback, suggest topics and let me know when you'll be in Dallas and we'll make you a guest!
We've also published the episode on YouTube so search for Telligent or CommunityServer or TelliCast.
Some upcoming topics:
CodeSmith
Community Server Books
Morpheus
Chameleon
Telligent Life
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