There's always a "cool-factor" invovled with working with beta software and trying the latest products out before anyone else.  It's definitely quite exciting to see some of the new features of Office 2007 in action and actually dig into Project Server 2007 and SharePoint Services 3.0.

At the same time, it's also incredibly frustrating, especially if you're the one that has to set up the beta environment .

I've been hunched over my PC and laptop over the last 4-5 days trying to get Project Server 2007 to install on a VM image and it has been downright painful.  From the dreaded "Thread was being aborted" error to the  "Object reference not set to an instance of an object.." error.  It has been slow and painful as each failed install took tons of time and there have been few answers on how to deal with these errors.

With regards to the first type of error, you may be able to solve it by following the warning in the documentation (starting the SharePoint Services Web Application service).  In my case, I believe the process was actually timing out on me.  Initially, I was trying to do the install over remote desktop from my laptop to my desktop.  The documented fix did nothing for me after several tries.  After switching to the desktop, I was able to work around this.

With regards to the second error, well, I'm still working on that, but it seems that to provision the PWA website, an Active Directory domain account is necessary.  Don't ask my why as I have no clue why this should/would be the case.  Apparently, it's fixed in Beta 2 Technical Refresh.

It was also fun coming across the superficial SQL Server collation error reported by SharePoint Services 3.0.  I was on the brink of uninstalling and reinstalling SQL Server before I stumbled on the Microsoft Communities thread.

All in all, this has been brutal weekend.  I'm simply drained from having to deal with this.

Steve Irwin, Mr. Crocodile Hunter himself, has passed away.

It's the kind of news that sets you back and leaves you kind of lost.  At least to me, Irwin was an icon in many ways.  Here was a man who had made a career--a very successful one at that--doing what he genuinely loved; one could not imagine him doing anything but what he did.  In addition, Irwin's love and respect of Nature, his sense of presentation, and his appeal helped to bring more audiences, young and old, a better understanding of our natural world.

Aside from that, Irwin had an aura of invincibility...as if he could always escape Death himself as he had done time and again on his show.  And with his openness, you felt like you knew the guy...as if the Irwin that you saw on TV was basically the Irwin that you would expect to see in real life: friendly, inquisitive, open, honest, and fun loving.  I think these qualities make this loss even more saddening as we all felt like we knew him personally.

So it was quite shocking (really quite shocking) to read that he had passed.  At least he died in pursuit of what he loved: helping people all over the world explore the natural world from their armchairs.

Welcome to another entry of Random DevTools!  It's been quite a while since the last post, but the wait is worth it!

Well, what we have today is a general tool that's sure to help anyone out.

As a developer, I spend so much time launching a variety of applications.  Visual Studio, web browers, digging through my project directories, Query Analyzer, and so on.  It can be quite tedious to have to trod through the Windows Start menu.

Fortunately, there are a variety of application taskbars out there like ObjectDock, for example.  But I've found ObjectDock to be a little too fancy for my simple needs and a little too resource intensive on my laptop.  In addition, I recently had a weird error with it on my wife's laptop where it would cause the task bar to disappear (even though I did not set the option in ObjectDock)...took quite a while to figure out that it was ObjectDock causing it.

Enter Kana Launcher.  This is exactly what I've been looking for in terms of application task bars.  It's small, simple, lightweight, easy to use, and performant.  What I like best about it is that the little floating task bar shows up where your mouse is, so getting to the application you want to launch only requires the minimal amount of mouse movement.

Kana Launcher also has a full size listing (like a context menu) with folders where you can organize all of your applications and what not (the floating task bar is a subset of the full list).

Best of all, it's free (and we always like free on the Random DevTools list)!

Note that you can add all sorts of launchers to it.  You can open up to a specific folder.  You can open up FireFox or Internet Explorer to a specific URL.  You can
launch command line applications with arguments in it.  All you have to do is create an application shortcut on your desktop and then drag it over to the Kana Launcher.

Perhaps I was being a bit delusional.  I really thought that Team USA could win it all this year.

Alas, it was not to be so. 

Team USA lost to Greece 95-101.  While Team USA only lost by 6, the game itself was never really within reach of Team USA after the half.  Greece held onto their halftime lead for almost the entire second half and even extended it to 14 points on solid defense, great movement by their gaurds, and solid offensive execution.  The Greeks ran the pic-and-roll to perfection and simply relied on the American's stagnant offense to deny posessions.

Growing up, one of my best friends was half Greek.  I can pretty much predict that there's going to be a lot of celebration by the Greek community tomorrow.

The poor shooting really did the team in.  Aside from Carmelo Anthony and Kirk Hinrich, the rest of Team USA was just stone cold from the floor, and most importantly, from the line.  Clank after clank from the charity stripe.  Terrible.

The player I'm most disappointed in is LeBron James.  Anytime the ball touched his hand, the offense seemed to stagnate as teams simply let him dribble it out and played solid defense as he lowered his shoulder to drive.  On the other hand, the player that impressed me the most was definitely Carmelo Anthony who quietly played an excellent tournament, showing amazing versatility, maturity, and range (not to mention his shooting touch).

I also wonder if the offense would have flowed more smoothly if Brad Miller spent some more time in the lineup.  Miller, who, like the Greek big men, is adept at running the pic-and-roll and he has the range to finish inside or out.  Not only that, Miller is a superb passer and a very solid big man.  It's too bad that he didn't get a lot of playing time.  It seemed like Coach K chose to use a smaller lineup for better mobility, but in doing that he sacrificed a great deal of interior defense which allowed the Greek team to get layups almost at will.  While Miller isn't going to give you spectacular blocks like Howard or Bosh, his defensive footwork is excellent and a better outside shooter than either.

The most interesting stat of the game?  Greece had zero offensive boards in the first half.  Jim Durham commented that they made such a high percentage of their shots, there were no offensive boards for Greece to grab.

So what's next for Team USA?  Well, they play the winner of the Spain-Argentina game tomorrow so it's not guaranteed that Team USA will even medal at all.  It can be argued that both Spain and Argentina are better teams than Greece.  Would it be a total disappointment if Team USA didn't medal?  Well, let's put things into perspective; these guys had about three weeks to practice and this team is extremely young.  Let's not forget that they finished 6^th in the 2002 World Championships, so this is a step in the right direction and certainly a learning experience for them.

How can Team USA get better? 

First of all, Team USA needs more no-hesitation outside shooters.  I wonder how this game would have played out had JJ Reddick been available or if Adam Morrison had made team.  "Ammo" is one of those fearless shooters who would have been perfect for this team. 

Second, LeBron needs to watch some tapes of this game.  With him at the helm, the offense stagnated tremendously.  He was Anthony Mason-esque with his over dribbling and use of his shoulder to try to power through people.  LeBron needs to look to make the pass earlier in the posession and make some cuts to get towards the basket.  When he's good, he's good.  But in international play, LeBron was merely so-so.

Third, Coach K needs to spend more time on defense for the next competition.  The US is hindered by the fact that they can only play man-to-man as it would appear they never practiced the zone.  Greece had the luxury of going to either man coverage or zone, depending on how Team USA was doing.  Shooting poorly?  Switch on the zone D and essentially shut them out.  Hot shooting?  Stick to man deny the ball and lock up the shooter.  These are the exact tactics that the Greeks used. 

Fourth, get more defense oriented point veteran gaurds.  Chris Paul had a terrible game and couldn't make any shots; he looked lost on offense for the first time in the tournament.  Not only that, Team USA point gaurds simply didn't command the pace and flow of the game by initiating the ball movement.  But this is an error of youth and inexperience.  With Chauncey Billups at the helm, Team USA would have had a better chance to win this game.

Fifth, Team USA needs some offensive sets in the half court.  I mean, they must have known that they couldn't possibly run every team out of the gym, right?  They must have known that they would eventually have to play some solid half court ball, right?  Well, if they did know, they didn't show it at all.  Nothing fancy; just some easy sets/schemes to break out the zone and get out of a funk.

Well, it'll be interesting to see if they even medal this time around.  Regardless, big props to these guys for playing their hearts out and commiting the time for Team USA.  I'm really looking forward to what these guys can do with a bit more time to gel and play together.

And yes, I stayed up all night to watch this game.

A patriot is a person who loves his or her country.

Who among you loves your country so much that you have come here today to raise your voice out of deep concern for our nation - and for our world?

And who among you loves your country so much that you insist that our nation's leaders tell us the truth?

Let's hear it: "Give us the truth! Give us the truth! Give us the truth!"

Let no one deny we are patriots. We love our country, we hold dear the values upon which our nation was founded, and we are distressed at what our President, his administration, and our Congress are doing to, and in the name of, our great nation.

Blind faith in bad leaders is not patriotism.

A patriot does not tell people who are intensely concerned about their country to just sit down and be quiet; to refrain from speaking out in the name of politeness or for the sake of being a good host; to show slavish, blind obedience and deference to a dishonest, war-mongering, human-rights-violating president.

Read the rest of the transcript here.

I stumbled on a post by Don Demask on the subject of tech/IT recruiter etiquette. Or rather, I should say, the lack thereof.  I've touched on a similar topic in the past (in fact, one of my first posts on this blog!) after I was simply driven mad by rude headhunters (one that kept asking me to doctor my resume) and many that implicitly discriminated by age by asking my graduation date (this is a very dirty tactic that they use to figure out where to bracket you in terms of rate, salary, and position, irregardless of your actual skill and knowledge level).

Since I graduated from Rutgers in 2003, I’ve already worked for six companies (that’s including my current employer, Zorch Software). Of those six, three of them were acquired through recruiters and there were many other times where I’d come across these sometimes very curt “professionals” as I was searching for better opportunities.

Of the many, many recruiters that I’ve come across, I would have to say that only one sticks out in my mind as being truly a professional: a Mr. Seber, who helped me obtain my first position out of college. He offered me great career advice, guidance on proper behavior on the client site, information regarding education, and was always open to listen to me bitch and moan from time to time.

These days, I’ll drop by and listen to his band play once in a while and we are still in contact.

While there have been a few other very courteous and polite recruiters that I’ve come across, the vast majority of them are simply rude, unprofessional, and lazy. One of the laziest and most annoying tactics that this type of recruiters use is to simply spam email lists with random positions; as Don calls it, “trawling” for potential respondents.

“Hot .Net Position in Chicago!”

No thanks!

I’ve seen worse though as I’ve even gotten emails that didn’t completely populate the formatting fields in the subject line and emails with bountiful spelling mistakes (what a terrible professional statement that makes).

Perhaps what annoyed me the most is that many recruiters simply didn’t bother to read my resume. In order to cut down on responses from jobs offering salaries below my desired range, I explicitly stated, in bold, the minimum salary and rate I would consider. And yet, I’d still get calls and emails about positions obviously outside of the range. I added a location restriction so that recruiters wouldn’t call me about positions in PA or Chicago or Alaska (yes, I once had a call about a position in Alaska, I shit you not). And yet, I’d still get calls and emails for positions all over the country. I added explicit descriptions of the types of positions that I was interested in. And yet, as my resume would pop up on the keyword ".Net", I was contacted regarding any position that required .Net.

After a while, it was clear that I couldn’t leave my cell phone number in the resume as I was getting calls on client sites even after explicitly stating that the cell phone was for after hours contact only. Beyond that, I finally wised up to the spamming by recruiters that didn’t read my resume by using a “code word” and adding a simple request on the last line of my email: “Please add the text ‘DICEREF’ anywhere in your email message to bypass my spam filter; thank you for taking the time to read my resume!”

In the end, I can’t help but feel like…a piece of meat to these people. The sad thing is that, invariably, someone will respond to these low-lifes, which simply acts to encourage the continued practice of trawling for candidates.

It’s a lose-lose-lose situation for the recruiter, the employer, and the consultant. The recruiter loses potential responses from top candidates by not putting in the effort to sort through the resumes and use more refined searches. The employer obviously loses out because many top candidates simply will not put up with this type of recruiting (I truly believe only desperate developers respond to these emails). And consultants lose out as--who knows--the employer on the other end may be the perfect match.

So what can be done to fix the system? One idea I had early on was to implement a recruiter rating system much like Amazon z-shops and eBay have seller ratings so that potential candidates can see how other candidates were treated and perhaps even create a personal blacklist of recruiters. If you continually get spammed by a particular headhunter, you can enter a negative review and add them to your blacklist. The number of people who blacklisted the recruiters would be visible on the job posting and sortable in a recruiter listing so that candidates could simply find the cream of the crop recruiters and reward them for their practices. Not only that, you would be able to put a threshold where if a recruiter has a certain number of blacklist entries, they won’t even be able to see your profile in searches.

While such a system would invariably cause an initial revenue drop for Dice due to recruiters boycotting them after being blacklisted too many times (good riddance!), I think it would ultimately lead to more quality job posts, more thoughtful recruiters (even if superficially), and happier candidates.  As it is, to me at least, craigslist has become perhaps an even better way to connect directly with employers (it's how I got my job at MediaWhiz).  Dice would be wise to act on this proactively and try to help candidates connect with the quality recruiters out there.

So what do you think? Any stories to share?

An interesting side effect of releasing XNA Express is that there seems to be an uptick of interest in C# and the .Net platforn in general.  A 4 page thread sprang up last night on NewGAF and the community is absolutely bubbling to get their hands on it and create some homegrown games.

I added my $.02 in an earlier discussion:

As a CS major and having written code in multiple languages, I'd have to say that C# is my favorite general purpose programming language. Having written Java for 4+ years as well, I have to comment that the jump from Java to C# is relatively easy and fairly natural as C# basically took Java as a starting point and improved upon it in many ways. As for C/C++ developers, generally speaking, C# can do anything that C++ can do via unsafe code blocks that allow direct access to memory regions (typically protected by the managed .Net runtime) in addition to directly interfacing with Windows APIs via PInvoke. The language is far more like Java than C++.

To begin with, the development environment has been made "stupid-friendly" so that even programming newbies can jump in and start writing code and testing in a matter of minutes. Now you can debate whether this is good or bad (many, including myself argue that this is a bane as it means that there are an excess of sub-par "developers", but regardless, it's a well designed development environment that still has all of the advanced features used by more seasoned developers available).

In addition to this, C#, as a language, particularly in 2.0 and in the specifications for 3.0, will allow for programming constructs that are simply not possible in many other general purpose programming languages. As C# has evolved, it has started to bring in many features of functional languages (such as functions as first class objects in 3.0 spec) and dynamic languages (such as runtime type inference, also in the 3.0 spec). In fact, if you look at the C# 3.0 spec, you'll start to get the feeling that it's starting to become quite like JavaScript (a dynamically typed, functional language and my personal favorite). C# (and the .Net Framework in general) has been designed first and foremost, in my opinion, for ease of use and expediency for rapid prototyping and RAD-style development (and of course, Java elitists will knock this, but realize that it is also capable of more advanced development styles that most .Net developers simply don't utilize since they stick to what's available out of the box).

The Express products from Microsoft are top notch. Considering that they are free, they are pretty ****ing sweet (I myself don't use them day to day as I use the full retail versions, but I've tried all of the Express products and they are basically castrated versions of the full blown product with some usage and licensing limitations).

For learning C#, in my opinion, the absolute best book to start with is Pro C# 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Platform, Third Edition. This book covers many aspects of the .Net Framework that every .Net platform developer should be aware of. It leads by simple *running examples* with full source code and contains a wealth of information on advanced topics that are not touched upon by many lesser books. I've found, after reading this book, that every "advanced" .Net platform question that I've been asked on interviews in the last 2-3 years is covered by this book. Fear not, though, the information and examples are well written and well thought out so that it's easy to follow and not only for "Pros" as the title would suggest.

As for how to start with .Net development, as I mentioned, C# and .Net are "stupid-friendly". This means that generally, for beginners, command line compiling is a thing of the past; you simply download Visual C# Express (it will install C# compilers and tools for you), create an appropriate project type (Console application is a good place to start), fill in some code, and hit Ctrl+F5 to run your code. It's literally that simple to get started. Visual Web Developer Express versions should also include a built in web server that it uses by default when running web code so setup is trivially easy if you're interested in that.

As a reference, it's a good idea to pick up the .Net Framework SDK as it contains documentaion and additional tools that are userful for all developers: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...4-C96D69C35DEC

Microsoft also has a subsite dedicated to kind of teaching beginners how to write code with more interesting examples (articles on the 'Net and in books typically cover console applications to demo language features and use business application examples otherwise as most users are are professional developers), including game code: http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/. So Coding4Fun is a good place to start with more interesting code examples in .Net.

There's a link off of the Coding4Fun main page to a series of webcasts on video game development in C# and a two part series on how to write Soduku in C#, WPF (next generation presentation API for .Net), and XAML.

In the past, I've also taken a look at .Net games development. One of the engines I was looking at was the Axiom engine (which seems to be inactive). You can find other engines via Google.

Ah yes, and the other engine that I had looked at was formerly known as RealmForge and currently known as Visual3D.Net, which used to be completely free (but now has a few different tiers). Of course, you won't need these once XNA comes out, but in the mean time, if you have interest in trying to write games on the .Net platform, these are good places to get a head start.

I figured I'd cross post this here as there are a few good resources and starting points in there for anyone thinking about starting to learn C#.

It will certainly be interesting to see how the community over at NeoGAF proceeds and whether this initial bubbly enthusiasm holds over a long period of time.  But I think it's good any time you get people interested in your products and solutions that otherwise wouldn't be (musicians, students, graphic artists and so on, to name a few).  Microsoft definitely gets bonus points for releasing XNA Express and opening up XBox Live!

There's an interesting thread on Fark about one Raed Jarrar and his experience at JFK airport.

To summarize, Mr. Jarrar had been wearing a t-shirt with the text "we will not be silent" in both Arabic and English.

What followed is perhaps every immigrant or non-anglo's worst nightmare.

It's an amazing account that must be read.  It raises the obvious question, "What the fuck is going on in this country?"

I don't know.  I find it quite scary as an non-anglo American.  While I'm from Taiwan, I wonder how I could be treated by anglo-American's should a war break out with China over Taiwan.  It's a scary thing.  I wonder how my wife
(of Polish-Italian descent) would be treated, sight unseen, as she bears my last name of Chen.  Would her appointments be declined?  Would people change tone once they saw her face to face?  How would people view me?  "Hey, I'm on your side!  Go Taiwan!  Go USA!"  I can only guess what the majority of US citizens of Middle Eastern descent, Muslim or not, are going through right now...

It's depressing in a way because, as Mr. Jarrar states, the very reason so many immigrants have come to call America home is because of the freedoms afforded to us and the Constitutional rights that America instills upon her citizens.

Raed asked of his interrogators:

"Why do you want me to take off my t-shirt? Isn't it my constitutional right to express myself in this way?" The second man in a greenish suit interfered and said "people here in the US don't understand these things about constitutional rights". So I answered him "I live in the US, and I understand it is my right to wear this t-shirt".

Zefrank sums it up best in this video:

As long as a small group of people can inflict mass panic across a large population, the tactic itself will remain viable.  One way to deal a blow to the effectiveness of terrorism is to deal with the terror itself.

The stupidity of the whole situation cannot be escaped: it's a freakin' t-shirt and security let him board the plane with the t-shirt anyways!

As we continue our fight to bring our style of democracy to the Middle East, ironically, we continue to see our rights and freedoms eroded.  Quite a quandary.  It's intriguing to think whether this is the brilliance of Osama in action.  Has he calculated this type of response in his attacks?  Has he forced the West into an anglo-Christian vs. Muslim battle (or at least the appearance of one) so that he might get more support and strength?  Is this how he wants us to react: to create another generation of dis-illusioned and malcontent Muslim youth to continue his Holy War?

While I do believe that Mr. Jarrar was intentionally trying to be provacative, I believe that it is his right to express himself according to the rights afforded to him by the Constitution.  Obviously, they did not deem him to be a threat to security as they let him on the plane after changing his shirt, but I can't help but feel how humiliating it must have been for him to have his rights stripped of him like that.  It would be one thing to request an extra air marshal to keep an eye on him...it's an entirely different story to confront him like this and violate his rights.

There are proponents of profiling that believe that this is the type of action that we need to take to increase the efficiency of our airport security and for the convenience other passengers.  But have we forgotten Timothy McVeigh?  Have we fogotten that white American citizens, working for the US Government, can be had for the right price?  In the end profiling would simply be a "feel-good" security measure that would in fact, decrease the security in our airports.  Even Israelis can find Arabs sympathetic of their cause and convince them (or perhaps force them) to spy on their country men for Israel.  What makes us think that the same couldn't happen with anglo-American's?

I really don't know where I'm going with this, so I'll offer some choice quotes from the Fark thread:

"ingvar" suggests:

If i was there, being an average-looking white (non-terrorist'ish) dude, i'd have stood up and said 'hey man, lets just swap shirts. they won't care if an average-loking (non-terrorist'ish) white dude is wearing an Arab Hate-Spech shirt, it'll just be like "fashion" to these moron's, so lets just swap shirts' .. and i'd let him wear my "Free Winona" or "OBEY (André)", or maybe "Nuke Gay Whales For Jesus" t-shirts

"Scandalous" raises excellent points against the "but it's a private jet" argument:

I cannot believe that I am arguing in support of Raed, but the "privately-owned jet" argument is not very persuasive for the following reasons:

1) Purchase of a ticket forms an express written contract, where the airline gets paid and in return promises to deliver the bearer of the ticket from place X to place Y, subject to certain regulations, and barring unforeseen emergency.

2) There was no unforeseen emergency other than that created by the airline in connection with Raed's shirt.

3) A statute, an airport rule, or an airline regulation are all examples of "certain regulations" in (1) above. The security personnel could not identify a regulation that could bar specific performance of the contract that the airline entered into. Hence, I am not convinced that such a regulation exists. I am therefore compelled to side with Raed in insisting that the airline carry out their side of the bargain.

"Mayhem_King" comments

He is misapplying Schenck v. United States. You can in fact wear a t-shirt that says, "I am a bank robber and going to a bank."

Clear and present danger was replaced with imminent lawless action.

If wearing a shirt with Arabic script is determined to create a lawless action, to be fighting words, or racially offensive, then a policy should be created and applied to everyone. In this case, an ad-hoc policy was created and applied only to him. That's the problem that I have here. If it is truly a problem to wear a shirt that has Arabic script, then add it to the growing list of policies. To be detained by Federal law enforcement until you change your shirt pretty much is a violation of free speach. That ad-hoc policy wasn't being enforced by a private company, it was being enforced by the Government.

mrvikings insistence that it never happened is weird. You can't prove that it happened so therefore, it never happened? Isn't that argumentum ad ignorantiam?

I think it is important that as Americans, we stand up for our civil rights. Standing up for our rights isn't being liberal, standing up for our rights and not letting our enemies get the better of us is extremely conservative.

This past week marked the 25^th year of my life.

I've never been one to dwell on birthdays and the like; I'm not one to believe in relative and arbitrary systems, as our calendar is, but I cannot help feeling...old.

Yup, a "mere" 25 and I already feel old.  My wife says I have some gray hairs already.  You know, in high school, I used to be able to get my whole hand above a regulation rim (genetics cursed me with hands just ever so slightly too small to palm the ball while attempting a dunk); I used to be able to play basketball at the park in the sun for 4-5 hours at a time without much issue.  Nowadays, a few good minutes at the gym and I'm winded and heaving for breath.

Such is life.  Did I mention that I feel old?  Not so much in spirit I guess. I still enjoy many of the same things I did in my younger days (now I'm sounding old, too...just wait 'til I turn 30) like gaming, playing basketball, Scrabble, watching X-Files, and working out.  Simple things, you know?  But at this junction in life, I'm beginning to wonder whether I'm being too simple.  After all, there is a world to see and experiences to live out there.  But then again, I'm quite lazy when it comes to travel (lucky you're not my wife).

Perhaps Perry Bible Fellowship sums up my view of birthdays best with this simple comic strip.  To be another tick closer to the end of it all.  25 is a weird milestone.  It's the age when you're finally allowed to rent cars without penalty.  You typically get an auto-insurance discount when you're 25+.  It's the outlier of that 18-24 age bracket so covetted by advertisers (what, 25 ain't good enough for you?).  It's half ways to 30.

Not all is bad in the passage of the years; my relationships, I think, have gotten better in the last few years.  With my wife, with my mother, with my sister, and with others around me.  I've always been a personable guy (okay, maybe that's stretching it ), but not necessarily a sociable guy (likely due to my INTP profile).  I still live in my head waaaay too much, but I like to think I'm working on that (see what I did there?).

I watched The Weatherman today with the wife.  It's a great movie and I think it only made me start to do a bit more thinking about life.  I'm not sure who originally came up with the saying that "nothing worthwhile in life is easy" (paraphrasing), but it's quite true.  From interpersonal relationships, business endeavors, interior decorating (just because I've been on this interior decorating kick), cooking, basketball, photography, archery, anything...if you don't put effort into it, the end results will be nothing more than a fast food experience: passable, but ultimately unfulfilling and providing little nourishment (and it may even cause some constipation tomorrow).

You know, this last week I was stuck in a hotel in New Hampshire for four days and on my trip home, I contemplated what it was that I missed the most.  It was not my 42" HDTV (though I did miss my ESPN2 and USA Basketball).  It was not my leather office chair (though the room did have the most uncomfortable chair ever designed).  It was nothing like that.  It was my mom's cooking.  I missed it terribly.  I missed it because so much love and care goes into each meal she prepares.  She asks what I want to eat, she cooks with great enthusiasm, and she prepares the food with great care.  It's because it's not easy to prepare a full meal and work a full time job, as she does many days of the week, that I find it so worthwhile and fulfilling (or to put it another way, yummy in my tummy).  Needless to say, I'm not looking forward to "that day".

I guess growing old does this kind of thing to you.  You start to think about the things a little differently.

There is a great article over on SI.com on the story of Kwame James.  It's a great read; don't miss it.

On a (vaguely) related note, I cracked open two fortune cookies on Tuesday and came away with some good fortunes.

Mine:

Don't be discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.

And Sandra's (I stole her fortune ):

Doing what you love is freedom.  Loving what you do is happiness.