Ok I am finally going to rant. I can’t get any Soccer on TV. I currently pay a ton of money for cable TV each month. My current plan does not come with espn 2 or foxsports net. Now most of you out there would probably say that is not so bad. But if you are a soccer fan, those are the only two channels that ever carry any soccer. So that leaves us soccer fans having to purchase either high priced Digital cable or a high priced dish plan.

Infact the US played the other day against Trinidad & Tobago on Feb 9th (the US won). Since I do not have espn2 I couldn’t record it with my DVR so I had to find a way to skip out of work and go watch the game at 2:30. How bad is that for US soccer fans. Not only do you have to pay out each month for a cable package to watch you also have to be able to either skip out of work or find a way to record the matches. I ended up going to a local pub, across the street from my office. Z’s bar and grill, and it happened to have wireless access. So I was able to update my buddies who were with out a TV.

To make matters worse, my friend was overseas and was able to catch the game , and game updates easier than I was here in the US. Infact, they I did not even hear a word on the local paper or news about the US winning. This game was a World cup qualifying game, so it was a fairly important match, for the US on their road to the 2006 World Cup.

Oh well, this is just my escape for an angry Soccer fan. I have to pay out my ying-yang to watch a US sport on TV. Not to mention I just heard that they are going to move Fox Sports Net to just a soccer channel but it will be an extra price a month… Oh well, whats another hundred a month for TV…..

The Tourney logic Match Play pool ended. The scores were lack luster. You can read more at Joel’s blog.

I didn’t win, but like all pools and leagues, it made me watch more sports. The same thing happens when I play fantasy soccer or football. It keeps me excited to watch and chear for a team. I am currently in two fantasy soccer leagues (European). Since we can’t get too much soccer here in the US on TV I have to resort other countries.

Wordpress has released their new version 1.5. WordPress is the blog software I use to run jimiz.net. It is a great application and my hat goes off to the developers. One thing I hope to get out of the upgrade (I will be upgrading this weekend) is to be able to control spam.

I’ll keep everyone posted on the upgrade.

I have been thinking of the best piece of software I have every used. It probably has boiled down to most recently Firefox and Picasa. Unless you have been living under a rock you probably know about firefox. So Let me tell you a bit about Picasa.

Picasa was recently purchased by google (which I believe is the best application provider around). Picasa is an application for you to organize, sort, edit, print, send and search your images. If you are like me and have thousands of pictures saved on your hard drive. This is the application for you. It slices, dices and everything else.

I have taught my wife how to use it. We can edit images, remove red eye, add effects and almost anything else. Not to mention you can make all kinds of other things, like posters, and collages, and slide shows. If you have not tried this application you should give it a whirl. Just download and install and all of a sudden after some searching all your pictures will be organized by a timeline and you will visually have a great picture book.

I frequently listen to Adam Curry and his podcast the Daily Source Code. He has often mentioned his love of the philips Senseo coffee maker. So I decided this weekend I was going to get one. And I have to admit, this is one great coffee maker.

The Philips Senseo is a single coffee maker that uses pods to allow you to brew a quick cup of coffee. It takes about 60 seconds to make a hot cup of coffee. All you you have to do is add some water and then put the coffee pods in. I am not what you call a coffee nut. In fact, I just started drinking coffee in the last 2 years. So this is my first coffee maker at home. So far, I love it. The one thing that I had decided to do is purchase a refillable pod for this thing. I ordered one off ebay and will let you know about how it works. This way my wife can make some tea’s with this thing.

My friend Joel has opened up a tourney on his site tourneylogic.com. He has some good info on his blog

Joel has created program with a bracket control, for tournaments. You can visit tourneylogic.com

I have been working on a screen saver for IIS reporter. In doing research for that I made / modified a C# (Visual studio 2005) demo for and RSS screen saver. This screen saver is build in Visual C# express and uses the .net framework 2.0.

It will take a selected RSS feed and display it as a screen saver. You can also select what backgroup images you want behind the RSS feed.

I have modified it so that it can be somewhat interactive. You can use the arrow keys to go up or down the descriptions to grab the rss full text.

You can download here (jimiz.net rss screen saver)

Download and have fun. You have to extract the files to the c:\windows\system32 dir for the configuration to work.

I have found the next album I am going to purchase. I am not sure if Itunes carry’s his label. But Shooter Jennings (www.shooterjennings.com) has his first record out. The son of the late great Waylon Jennings and Jesse Colter.

Shooter has a sound that is a mix between Rock and Roll and that fantastic Country Rock that I like. I guess that Shooter has made appearences as the lead singer for Guns and Roses in the past. I just read some articles about him and his move from Rock’n roll to more of a country sound.

That is fine by me. Since I like all kinds of music and tend to fall into the HillBilly rock section more often then not.

His new album - Put the O back in country is good. However I have only heard 2 songs. Just did a search on Itunes. No luck, guess I am going to have to find another source. You can listen to one of his songs HERE.

Well I finally purchased a CD. I have not bought a cd for a few months. In fact I can’t even remember when the last time I purchased a CD. It must have been over a year. Now spinning in my car, other than my Ipaq is George Thorogood :Greatest Hits - 30 Years of Rock.

You can view info here - www.georgethorogood.com

All of the great tunes you would expect from George and the Southern Rockin’ hard hitting Destroyers.

Jim Rating : 8.5

Well I just finished Jimmy Buffett’s - “A Salty Piece of Land”. View link here (Amazon)

Great book. I have been a fan of all Buffett books for a long time. Since I first read his short stories back on college. This book takes us on a fantastic ride with Tully Mars. From the cattle ranch out west to the bone fishing lakes in the Keys. If you have some free time and want a great relaxing, fun, and eventful read, pick this one up.

Jim Ranking : 9.5

I was reading Joel’s blog the other day and noticed he had a linke to a site called www.connectionstrings.com What a great site. I could have used this information a few hundred times already. Just thinking back on some recent projects, when I had to search for some old code for google for some code on how to connect to a specific database. Well what a good find.

I was thinking a while back how difficult it would be to learn how to use the .NET platform if I did not have the Visual Studio IDE interface. It go me thinking and searching for some alternatives. I did remember that you could use webmatrix www.asp.net/webmatrix I have never used Web Matrix but it seems like it would do the trick. I also just heard about another IDE for developing .NET called SharpDevelop - www.icsharpcode.net It to is a free alternative for using Visual Studio. I guess I would like to see a shootout between the 3. Visual Studio 2003, Web Matrix, and SharpDevelop. I wonder who would be the victor. I would guess visual studio, but I may be determined on what you are trying to accomplish. If you are just exclusively developing for the web maybe one of the other options would work.

One thing I often hear from new VS.NET developers is how complicated it is to use the IDE. They normally come from a Dreamweaver or Frontpage environment and only have a need to develop for web sites. They almost always complain about code behind pages (being fixed in VS2005) and how to deploy the newly developed sites. Well just some of my thoughts.

I finally found out some information about the local time number. You know, the number you could call and a nice lady would come on and tell you what time it was. After some research I found out that SBC Michigan has discontinued the service. I first found out about this from my wife. She was complaining that the “time lady” as she calls her, was not available. I just figured there was some kind of a technical problem. But come to find out SBC Michigan turned the service off. Stating that the use of the service was delcining. Here is an article from woodtv8 .

After 75 years they just turned the service off, with out even a notice to all the customers. I can’t say that I have ever called the time service on my own, but like I said my wife does. SBC claims that the usage of this service has declined due to the use of Cell phones, Atomic clocks, and televisions. Well call me crazy, but if you did not have a cell phone and the power went out, wouldn’t some people still rely on the service. Oh well, just chalk this one up as a lost service.

I keep reading blogs with people talking about the death of the album. In fact on slashdot they have a story HERE from the Washington Post about the death of CD’s. The idea is that we can all make our plastic (cd’s , dvd, tapes) and we will no longer buy them. For some reason this just not sit well with me.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not see us continuing the trend of purchasing a cd for 15 bucks at the store, but I also don’t see the CD (or dvd) going away. What I have found over the course of time is people like tangible things. This is not always true, the younger age group (me included) are readily happy to spend a few bucks on some iTune songs or net flixs. But the majority of people still like to hold their purchases and get that warm fuzzy feeling of their new item. So I don’t buy the idea that the CD / DVD store will go away. I think it will just evolve.

What if you went into a future record store and brought your USB thumb drive (or mobile device) and said I want these 5 songs. The record store would give you the Album covers (or art- what ever it will be called in the future) and then create the media of your choice right there. Maybe they upload the songs to your USB drive, or burn your a custom cd with the artwork on it, or maybe they give you a DVD.

It is not that I am against not having cd stores or media to purchase, it is just I don’t see it happening. As I have seen in other blogs, there may no longer be full albums, but what is wrong with a collection of songs or movies of related topics. I feel strange arguing against the new culture, especially since I can remember burning all my CD’s (184 of them) to mp3’s in 2000. My wife thought I was crazy, my friends thought I was insane. I then sold all my cd’s in a garage sale and made enough money to purchase a portable MP3 / CD player to then listen to them. Now as we come into the Ipod revolution, I have had my music collection in digital format for a few years and can now laugh when people say they are spending a few hours / days converting their cd’s.

And in closing, I guess I can say do you really think the album is dead. Come on, people still buy vinyl records. Not to mention, do you really own that song you purchased from itunes? I think we are in for a change, but it may take a while. Not everyone owns an ipod. I for one have been holding out, I like my ipaq solution. But give me time, I will have something similar.

I have finally completed the move from gotdotnet.com to sourceforge.net.

You can get to the sourceforge page at this link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iisreporter/
So far I have been really happy with the sourceforge location. I ended up udating my CVS to use sourceforge. I am currently using both SourceSafe and TortoiseCVS.

Just to let you know how much I am enjoying sourceforge. I had an issue with the creation of the folder that contains the source information for the project. I sent a support message at about 1 AM on Saturday morning and the guys at SF (sourceforge) fixed the issue a few hours later.

To date it looks like IIS Reporter has been downloaded 1,903 times (as of today). That is a lot of people for a simple app. Please keep the updates and ideas flowing.