The Phrase I always use to describe my vitality is “Nigh Invulnerable”. This is how the Tick described himself, since I lack antenna, and avoid wearing full body tights, that’s about all we have in common.

Lately, that “Nigh” has been nearly killing me. Nigh means “near”, so I’m not entirely invulnerable to disease and sickness. Some bug has decided to prove that recently.

This is one of the reasons that my blogging has been suffering some. I usually do some of my best typing early in the morning.

I usually get up at 05:00, but the last two weeks I haven’t been able to get out of bed at all. I end up rushing out the door, and end up getting to work later than I want to. Luckily, I don’t actually have to be at work at any specific time, although I find my day goes much better if I can beat most of the employees in.

Oh yea, Fortress Forever hasn’t been helping matters either. To make things worse, I’m actually downloading Team Fortress 2 right now. Yes, I’m a glutton for punishment.

Anyway, I think I’m getting better now. I only break down into a coughing fit a couple of times an hour. I was actually able to get up early on Thursday, and I think that’s the real sign that there is improvement coming.

Of course now, all I have to do is take care of all the winterization stuff that comes with home ownership in Colorado. I sure do like the fall though. I need to take some shots of the Aspens turning.

Stay tuned.

Posted in Rambling 6 Comments »

(10/21/07 Update: Weber started listing the book again, and it is in fact still only $10.00. There’s still time to participate, so let me know if you are interested.)

Disco’s Hot and Tangy New York Strip Steak is pictured to your left. I cooked this myself, and this is a picture of the end result. If you think this looks good, you should taste it. No joking, it blew my mind it was so delicious. 

Last year, I ran across a great deal. Weber produced a book, called “Command of the Grill: A Salute to Steak“.

A couple of things I like about this book are:

1. It’s about Grilling Steak. I love Steak and I love to Grill, so in my book, that’s two for the price of one.

2. It’s only $10.00. Amazon Sells it for about $18.00, Weber’s site is down until October 13th. List of participating retailers can be found here. When I purchased the book, the price was $10.00, and I’ll verify when the site comes back up. Anyway, it is a great value for the price.

3. It’s about Marines. I’m a Marine.

4. Every penny of the Weber price ($10.00) goes to one of several charities that help wounded Marines, or the families of Marines who were wounded or killed in action. If Weber changed the book price, then I’m not sure what the charity split is now. I will find out before the event.

Everyone wins.

If you want more info, last year I did a long post on my old blog about it.

This year, I want to do much better.

And now, the call to arms…

What I would like to do this year is organize some blogger event around this book. The Marine Corps birthday is November 10th, and Christmas is right around the corner. This is really a great gift for any Marines you know, or anyone who likes to grill.

I own the book (bought 2 copies last year), and I don’t intend to make a single penny off of this. If Weber is selling it for $10, then that is where I think everyone should get it. I’m willing to scan and email the recipe to you, so you don’t even have to buy anything except the steak, and whatever you need to cook it.

Anyone who is interested, please let me know. What I envision is everyone cooks a recipe, takes a picture, and does a little write up. Without posting the recipe itself.

That is about as far as I have gotten with this. I’m not sure how we will go about it after that.

Either way, I plan on cooking 1 steak a weekend, after all, there is my cholesterol to think about, and I’ll post them all. I would love to get some more people involved, but I’m willing to go it on my own. I know, how noble of me to cook and eat 1 steak a weekend, I’m sure I can bear that burden.

The Deadline

I would really like to get some people who are interested in this together soon. So really, I would like to know who is participating by the end of next week, October 12th. This should give us plenty of time to get all of the details figured out, and to get the recipes distributed.

You see the stickers that say “Support our Troops”, well here is a really easy way to do exactly that. Reply to this post if you are interested.

Posted in Semper Fi, Grilling, Command of the Grill, Charity 1 Comment »

This isn’t recently breaking news, but I hadn’t posted about it yet.

Microsoft is offering their “Express” version of Visual Studio for free, just go to the Visual Studio Express Home, and download it. You do have to register with them to get a product key, but that still seems pretty painless.

The fact that Microsoft is offering a development platform for free was surprising to me, but what was really shocking was that although this version is aimed at hobbyists and students, there is no licensing restrictions, so you can sell your code commercially without worrying about lawyers breathing down your neck.

There are a couple of different versions, depending on what you are interested it, there is a web developer suite, as well as C#, C++, VB, and J#.

Now that you have your Development platform, what next? Well they also have a “Beginner Developer Learning Center” to help get you coding, and a “Coding for Fun” website to give you something to play around with.

Originally the plan was to offer the express editions free for 1 year, but on April 19th, 2006, they decided to make them available permanently for free.

I had mentioned in an earlier post that Microsoft was offering the Robotics Studio for free as well, but you can’t use it for commercial products without buying a runtime license. But you can learn to program Lego MindStorms in your free time. There is no need to go out and buy a robot though, because you can even work with virtual robots.

References:

Visual Studio Express Home - Microsoft

Beginner Developer Learning Center - Microsoft

Coding for Fun - Microsoft

Robotics Development Studio - Microsoft

Introduction to Programming Lego Mindstorms - Coding4Fun (Microsoft)

Posted in Robots, Development, free stuff, Microsoft 2 Comments »

I was reading the WhatsNewNow Newsletter, when I saw a link to this PCMAG’s article talking about Microsoft’s newly released Robotics Development kit.

Now, I’m not a big developer, but this sounds really cool! Evidently you can develop for real robots or for robots that only exist on your machine.

The article talks about how Tandy Trower built a virtual robot, plugged in a Xbox 360 controller, did a little dragging and dropping, and bam!, he was able to control the virtual robot.

You can read the article yourself , or visit the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

On a side note, the article also talks about the Robocup, which plans on building a team of humanoid robots that will take on, and win against, a championship soccer team.

Finally, we are one step closer to being excellent slaves for our robotic creations.

Maybe I’ll go out and buy myself some Lego MindStorms, and a robotic vacuum.

Not to mention a sledgehammer, just in case.

I mean, you never know.

Posted in SDK, Robots, Development, Microsoft No Comments »

September was another great month for Port 16. I had 34 posts, which brought my grand total up to 75 since the blog’s start.

This was the blog’s second full month of operation, and I really have to say that I couldn’t be more happy with the stats. Well I could be a little happier, but I’m not complaining one bit.

Here are the vitals.

Visitors: 405 Absolute Unique Visitors. This is up from 105 last month. I’m really glad to have each and every one of you here.

PageViews: 1,567. Last month I had 1,370, but I was also working out some theme issues, so I think that a good chunk of last month’s numbers were actually me reloading the page.

New Visits: 57.88%. This is up from 34.06% last month. Lots of new people finding the blog.

Bounce Rate: 53.46%. This is really encouraging, since it means that around half the people who come to the site look around for awhile. Last month the number was 43.27 percent, which means a larger percentage of people stuck around, but I’m still happy that I am keeping so many visitors.

Top Posts

1. Test Drive Ubuntu Linux Without Installing Anything on Your Computer - Most geeks want to check out Linux, and this is a painfully easy way to eyeball it without changing anything on your computer.

This post somehow was stumbled, and received quite a number of visitors. The spike in the graphic above is actually just from this post.

2. The Gmail Collaborative video - I posted about the release of the final video, and I have seen a large number of people coming from the Gmail blog to visit me. It hasn’t been the first time this has happened, but I’m still impressed at the number of people who come over from there.

3. WordPress 2.3 is available - I still  haven’t installed it. Soon though. Lots of new features here, so you should take a look at it.

4. Alphabet Soup - Chasing Microsoft Certifications - Some reasons to get certified, and links to a salary survey.

5. Those crazy kids and their blogs… - This was a summary of a bunch of blog updates that I had seen in the blogs that I follow. Don’t ask me why I chose that couch though. My wife had taken some pictures of couches she liked, so that she could compare them later on. If you are curious, we didn’t buy this couch, but it does look similar to our old one.

Last month I had said that I would like to get more on topic, and I am glad to see that all of the top posts this month were about technical topics.

If you were a reader of my old blog, you may notice that I have started re-posting every once in awhile. I didn’t want to grab the whole blog, since most of it is dated now, but I am grabbing my favorites. I still have a big list that I am going to migrate, but I am breaking them up with fresh posts.

Stay tuned.

Posted in BlogNewsandUpdates 6 Comments »