I've just returned from Fiji with a useless iPod (the screen is completely blank, but everything else still works) & find that a whole slew of new music is due out soon.  Time to set aside some of that wedding cash for some trivial CD purchases instead of plates & silverware...

May 10
Weezer - Make Believe
The first single, 'Beverly Hills', is currently #1 on iTunes.  I haven't heard much about what to expect from the rest of the album, but if it follows their current pattern of bubblegum -- goodalbum -- bubblegum -- goodalbum, we're due for some bubblegum.  I thought their most recent effort, Maladroit, was far superior to The Green Album in both substance & style.  It was panned by critics, though, much the way that their 2nd album, Pinkerton, was reamed after its release.  Pinkerton is now considered by many to be Weezer's best album, though, so perhaps Maladroit will eventually gain some respect.

May 30
Oasis - Don't Believe The Truth
I've loved just about everything these guys have ever done, with the exception of 'Shakermaker' (it literally is the Coca-Cola song "I'd like to teach the world to sing") & 'Digsy's Dinner', so this is the one I'm most excited about.  I've already got the leaked MP3 of the first single 'Lyla.'  Many Oasis songs have a familiar feel, and this one is no different -- it sounds a lot like the Rolling Stones song 'Street Fighting Man'.

Noel Gallagher's hype is always a must-read, so I encourage you to click the link to his track-by-track breakdown of the album. He describes "A Bell Will Ring" as "Elvis on Red Bull."

Another plus: Unlike the latest Travis & Radiohead CDs, none of these songs seem to be anti-Bush.

June 6
Coldplay - X & Y
Critics and fans loved their previous album ('A Rush of Blood to the Head') so much that it's hard to imagine this one will meet expectations.  Chris Martin has been building hype for a few months with his "it's the best material we've ever done" talk, but he also said that Coldplay might retire after 'Rush of Blood' because they'd never top it.

As Jasper said after awakening from his cryogenic slumber in Apu's frozen food section:
'Moon pies' ... what a time to be alive.

Plagiarized straight from Slashdot:

German electronics company Kleinhenz is shipping a network-enabled Linux system built into an RJ-45 Ethernet jack.

[Slashdot]

Seriously...RJ-45.

This morning the WashingtonPost.com website had an image and front page story about the DC Police having a gay liaison unit.  This was accompanied by several random photos of officers engaged in gay related instruction or other activities.  One in particular had an office joyously pointing at another while leading a seminar to teach the other officers about how to "deal with the gay community."  What stuck me as funny was the fact that in the background, the blackboard had several words written on it.  Gay, Lesbian, etc.  And then I saw it, the word Bisexual misspelled as Buysexual, with the uy with a large bold I imposed over it.  Buysexual? Seriously, are these the people who we want protecting the gay and bisexual population?  Do they drive around like they are a 1930's comedy act, running around their jail car making other funny jokes while fighting hate inspired crime against the buysexuals?  Well, I just found it extremely funny and quite ironic that in attempting to show the help that the police are providing for the gay and bisexual community, the wash post has published a picture that shows some extremely misinformed or juvenile jokes.  I mean really juvenile, how juvenile, well, I found it funny.

So DC is getting a baseball team, and there is no other place I would like to be on the night of April 14th than at RFK stadium to watch them play their first home game.  Well, if I was to get this shot I would have to be one of the first in (virtual) line at 12:00pm on Sat, March 26 on ticketmaster.com.  I had worked out a plan, I would try to buy only 1 ticket.  Sure, I will be going along, but hey, I am there, and buying just one tickets will allow me to sit in a MUCH better seat than top row dead center upper deck.  There is nothing I hate more than bad seats at a baseball game.  So I had a plan, I would be sitting at my computer @ 12:00 today, just waiting for the tickets to go on sale, and I would get my lower reserve seating and watch the game with glee.

A few days ago, the nationals decide to hold a lottery for first picks at the reamining 5000 of 46,000 tickets.  I entered my name but was not chosen.  There goes 1600 of the 5000, so about 3600 tickets left.  Well, I still had Saturday.  My wife was going to be getting home just after midnight on a flight Friday night, so she would probably still be sleeping by the time I was going to be buying my single ticket.  I was in the hospital last weekend (would have seroiusly affected my chances of a ticket if it happened this weekend), so no questionable late night food this friday night. I had plans at noon on Saturday afterall.

So Friday night, my wife calls and her flight is first delayed, then cancelled, she is rebooked on a Sat. morning flight.  "Oh no," I said to myself, "but the ticket."  Not to worry, she was going to get in by 10:15am, plenty of time to make the 10 minute trip from the airport.

Just prior to takeoff from Dallas, there is a weather issue that causes a delay.  "Oh no," I said to myself, "but the ticket."  Not to worry, they will be in by 10:58 am, still plenty of time.

I arrive at the airport to see her flight is not even on the board, and it is 10:52 am.  Surely something is wrong.  Yes, indeed, National airport has had a security breach in Terminal B, evac everyone and rescreen, this means all planes are holding on the runway.  Well, it is 11:15 at this point, my tickets go on sale in just 45 minutes, but maybe there is still hope? 

At 11:30 I start to get a little nervous and antsy. I call my wife, who mind you has already been attempting to get home for over 24 hours now.  I inform her that I may miss the chance to buy an opening day ticket.  This is a BIG deal for me.  A HUGE DEAL!  She is none too amused.  She is now furious with me that I would be worrying about that when she is stuck on the friggen runway.

At 11:45 she is finally off of the plan, and we are heading down to the baggage claim. Wow, am I ever surprised, the belt is not running and no bags are coming through.  At this point I start to think "Oh no, I might not get my ticket :-("  Then the belt starts running and voila, her bags are one of the first few out!  I grab them and begin to dash to the car.  My wife, walking behind at a normal pace.  It is 11:47 at this point, and we are heading to the garage.  I have 13 minutes before my ticket may be gone. 

Now I don't know how, but we had little traffic and I made every light, EXCEPT FOR THE LAST TWO, I COULD SEE MY HOUSE AT THIS POINT!  It is 11:59am and I am less than 50 feet from my house, sitting at a light.  The light changes to green and I whip into the alley and jump from the car.  I left my wife to park it.  I ran into the front door, ran up the stairs, and plopped down at my computer.  It is 12:00:05!!!!!. I don't know how, but I still have a shot at this!!! 

In my weeklong of planning for this moment, I emailed a link to the specific event page on ticketmaster to myself.  So I opened my email, clicked the link, and as fast as I could think, the browser was open, I was selecting 1 and clicking on the next button.  The next screen is teh image verification screen, where it shows you a cryptic word and you need to type it in.  I got a tough one to read, but somehow I was able to enter the word correctly and it went to the waiting screen, "Your wait time is 10 minutes." It says... WHAT?!?!?! I know for sure now, I will miss out on my tickets. I can just think of all of the people buying up the singles left over now than all of the pairs and such have been bought.  Then the 10 minutes jumps to 1 minute, and then less than 1 minute.  My heart is racing and I just want 1 lowsey ticket, just one!  I don't care where, just give me the shot at ONE TICKET. 

Then it pops up, 1 ticket, section 225, AMAZING SEAT!!!!!!!!!!  I quickly go through the checkout process, I have my ticket, I HAVE MY TICKET!  I would like to thank the little people I stepped on in life to get to this point.  It is one of my proudest moments.  I have a single ticket to a major even in the washington DC area.  I HAVE A TICKET!!!!  I tell my wife, she really doesn't care, but I care oh so much.  My pathetic life has been building to this moment for the past week.  No matter what was done to keep me down and ruin my plan, I overcame.  I won.  I got to buy something that I really wanted to buy. Oh Joy.  Oh happy Day.

As I write this, it is 12:50pm.  All tickets for the game are sold, but that matters not to me, as I have my ticket.  I have my ticket.

Hrm, wonder if Doug got one?

So a few weeks ago I started looking into the best way to send a file using a web service.  I was able to quickly develop a method that passed it along as a Byte Array, and this worked well, but proved to be slow when processing larger files.  So I started looking around more, and I found Microsoft's Web Service Enhancements, previously know as the Web Service Development Kit.  With WSE, you can use SOAP Attachments using DIME.  This was easy to implement, and worked well, until I tried to upload a very large file.  A large file results in the error
"Microsoft.Web.Services2.Security.SecurityFault: Message Expired ---> System.Exception: At least one timestamp has expired"

I looked around and found some references to changing the Web.Config and adding something that would change the TTL of the request.  so I added

<Microsoft.Web.Services2>
  <diagnostics />
  <security>
   <timeToleranceInSeconds>1200</timeToleranceInSeconds>
  </security>
  <tokenIssuer>
   <autoIssueSecurityContextToken enabled="false" />
   <ttlInSeconds>1200</ttlInSeconds>
  </tokenIssuer>
 </Microsoft.Web.Services2>

This still did not solve the problem.  So I am now stuck, anyone else have any x-perience with this problem?

Baseball Mogul 2006 was released today & so I immediately downloaded & installed it during my lunch break.  I have no real sense of how this game compares to previous editions but one of the new features is "player personalities."  I really didn't know what to expect from this feature but when I opened up Juan Gonzalez's profile, under "RUMORS" it said "Gonzalez misses Dean Palmer."

Now that's genius.

Prepare to lose your mind:

The Hasselhoff Recursion

I heard on The Tony Kornheiser Show this morning that James Carville thinks the reason Tom Davis is going after Major League Baseball (Davis is heading up the steroids inquiry) is because his constituents in northern VA were denied their own team.  So in other words, Davis is getting back at baseball for not giving him a team.

I guess I could believe that theory, since I know Carville has good political instincts, but if spite is involved, I'd have to imagine it's about 1% of his motivation.  And certainly spite isn't the motivation of the millions of fans who also want this inquiry to go forward.

March on, Tom Davis, march on!

I visited Bull's place this weekend and was introduced to Pikmin 2.  It looked like any typical Nintendo platform-specific game: lots of cutesy creatures making weird noises and trapesing around in a silly cartoon world (alex refers to these as "Carrot Games" -- I'm not sure where he came up with that, but I think the name is appropriate).  As one might expect, I really didn't understand the game at first and really didn't want to understand it, but after a little while, I really got hooked.

So who wants to come over and play my new Game Cube?  No, no, just kidding --I didn't go that far this time, but if any of the other carrot games are that good, I think I may be able to convince Michelle that we need a cube.

I'm trying to find a more elegant or old-school solution to a SQL problem:

I have 3 tables defined as follows:

CREATE TABLE Customer (CustomerID int, CustomerName varchar(50));
CREATE TABLE Customer_Account (CustomerID int, AccountID int, AccessLevel varchar(50));
CREATE TABLE Account (AccountID int, AccountName varchar(50));

So basically, the Customer_Account table explains the M:M relationship between Customer & Account.  A customer can have access to multiple accounts at my bank with various levels of access.

Because he likes wasting trees & postage, the bank manager has decided to send a report to each Customer that lists the Customer's access level to EVERY Account at the bank.

Answer #1:

DECLARE @CustomerID int; --Not needed in MySql, but definitely in T-SQL
SET @CustomerID = 5;

SELECT c.CustomerName, a.AccountName, (SELECT ca.AccessLevel FROM Customer_Account ca WHERE ca.CustomerID = c.CustomerID AND ca.AccountID = a.AccountID) AS AccessLevel
FROM Customer c, Account a
WHERE c.CustomerID = @CustomerID;

Example Output:

CustomerName	AccountName	AccessLevel
Bob Jones	BJones Checking	Owner
Bob Jones	TJones Checking	Parent
Bob Jones	SSimpson Savings	(NULL)

Anyone care to offer a better solution?  Whenever I use an inner SELECT I feel like I'm cheating because I don't know a smarter way to solve the problem.

I am going to post the story here since it is on Drudge itself and will eventually be moved.  But here is the link to the story. I am just wondering WTF is up with Columbia, I mean seriously?

Arrested donkey released
Thu Mar 10 2005 10:40:17 ET

A donkey detained in Colombia for his role in a motorcycle accident has been freed after three days incarceration, El Tiempo newspaper reported Thursday.

Known as "Pacho," the donkey in question was held by authorities in the northeastern city of Arauca after a motorcycle hit the animal in the road, causing the driver to suffer severe injuries. Pacho received injuries to his head and one leg.

Human rights activists and Pacho's owner balked at the decision to hold the animal while investigators looked into the accident.

"When there is an accident where there are grave injuries, the vehicles involved are always held (in custody)," explained Diana Rojas, a spokeswoman for Arauca police.

Weather.com, in my opinion, has always been on the bleeding edge of nuisance advertising.  They've consistently shown that they'll splash anything on their site for a buck, be it a banner ad, a popup or a Flash cartoon animal that dances across the page.  Now they're offering Weather Gold, a $19.95 service that allows you to log in and view weather.com without the banner ads.  What's strikes me is that for most sites, I would think the $19.95 price tag was outrageously high.  But with weather.com, I think they may actually have lowballed that one a bit...

I'm still waiting for nascarnet.com to roll out this service.  I check out the latest mods every day and am getting really sick of those donkeyD.com ads.

I just got back from a wild weekend in Vegas and thought I'd share a few thoughts.

Schmold'em
The biggest thing I noticed was the growth of the Texas Hold'em fad.  Last time I was in Vegas, I didn't notice a single roped off "Hold'em Room," but this time they seemed to be everywhere.  There were waiting lists of up to 1-2 hours just to sit down with 7 strangers to play poker.  What's it going to take to end this thing?  Maybe Go Fish or Old Maid can make a run later this year.

People still suck
Cabbies in Vegas are paid by clubs for each guy that they drop off, so early in the day several cabbies told us to call them when we headed out and they'd take us for free.  Of course, when we actually hailed a cab that night, the SOB pretended that he had no idea what we were talking about and insisted on being paid.  My "f*** you, d*ckhead" approach didn't seem to smooth things over, but good ol' Bull was willing to play along and paid the guy in full.

Denny's
There are zillions of cheap buffets in Vegas, but if you're just wandering the strip looking for food, the only thing you'll find is Denny's.  I must have eaten there 4 or 5 times in one weekend.  So if you're heading to Vegas, be sure to bring a hotel guide so you have some idea of where to get cheap food.  Bourbon Street has a $7.77 lobster & steak dinner that I'd highly recommend.

The Nationals Suck
The oddsmakers at Aladdin's had the Nationals at somewhere between 150:1 and 300:1 to win the division.  I knew this year was going to be tough, but those are Cleveland Browns-type odds (yes, the Browns are 150:1 to win the Super Bowl).  The Indians were 3:1 to win the AL Central, so I dropped $100 on that.  Of course, the first headline I read on getting back to DC was that C.C. Sabathia is hurt.  Go Tribe!

Well, it may not be called Meet the Schlongsteins, but it seems that there IS a Meet the Parents 3 in development: Meet the Little Fockers.

Ha.  Ha ha.  I would make a comment, but I'm laughing way too much at that hilarious & clever title.

At long last, visitors can view all of Shiny Donkey's fake banner ads in my new Banner Ad Gallery:

http://www.shinydonkey.com/bannerads/

Since one of the primary purposes of this new section is to draw traffic from people searching the internet for silly stuff, I wanted to establish permanent links w/o affecting the underlying database.  So if someone searches for "ben affleck" and Google tells them the banner ad is on page 1, they will still be directed to the correct page, even if that ad has been pushed from page 1 to page 4.  The only unfortunate side effect of my somewhat bizarre approach is that the first page on the list will typically have fewer than the 5 ads per page.

So if someone said to you:

"They found me.  I don't know how, but they found me!"

Wouldn't it take a lot of self control not to immediately blurt out "Run for it, Marty!"?

I would say yes, but apparently I'm the only one around here who thinks that way...

Shiny Donkey has been pretty quiet lately, so my apologies to the 2 or 3 constant readers out there.  Hopefully this won't cause everyone to start reading The Last Word instead.

So since my life is consumed by wedding preparations these days, why don't I talk a bit about that...

What's with Washington, DC requiring a blood test for Syphilis prior to getting married?  According to the DC supreme court's website, cousins can get married but those afflicted with Syphilis cannot.  Since I know practically nothing about the disease, I really don't know if DC's decision makes any sense.  Is it curable?  Is it terminal?  I know Al Capone died of Syphilis, but I thought modern medicine had solved that one.

Speaking of Syphilis, did anyone catch Sean Penn's douchebaggery the other night at the Oscars?  Talk about not have a sense of humor...  Chris Rock's Jude Law jokes were a bit harsh and not really all that funny -- but somehow calling attention to them 2 hours later seemed even worse.  Heck, even Tim Robbins was able to laugh when Chris Rock said that when Robbins isn't impressing us with his acting he is "boring us with his politics."

With all the money that he has, you'd think Penn would have had that pole removed by now.

Speaking of poles (or "polls"), be sure to vote in the latest shiny donkey poll, "Which film should have won Best Picture this year?"

Hells yeah; word is starting to get around about the "Hello My Future Girlfriend" mini-site:

http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-55470.html  (As you might expect, many users prefer the guy with the big hands over Mikey)