Senator Hagan - I am writing this letter to urge you to support Senator Bernie Sanders' American Health Security Act of 2009, which is a Single Payer health care bill.  I have no delusions of this bill's ability to pass the Senate - it surely will not. 

The reason to vote in favor of it is to measure the support in the Senate of a single payer style health care bill.  This is something that likely will not be able to pass for decades, but what Sen. Sanders is doing is important because it gives us a baseline to see how many votes we have now, and how many we need to work for in the future.

I am currently 32 years old.  I hope to see a single payer system implemented in the USA before I die.  This is a fantastic first step.

Please show the rest of the country that North Carolinians are progressive Southerners -- not knee-jerk-reaction head-in-the-sand conservatives.

Please support the American Health Security Act of 2009.

Talk about barking up the wrong tree!

I just solved a very peculiar error regarding migrating old ASP.Net OLEDB Excel/Access file access code to a new 64-bit Windows Server 2008 under IIS7.  The first steps for migrating this application were obvious.  The application pool needs to run under 32-bit compatibility mode, the pipeline needs to be classic, etc.  But when we got to the Excel export functionality, all hell broke loose.  No matter what we did, we would get the following exception.

Exception of type 'System.Web.HttpUnhandledException' was thrown. [System.Web.HttpUnhandledException]
The .Net Framework Data Providers require Microsoft Data Access Components(MDAC). Please install Microsoft Data Access Components(MDAC) version 2.6 or later. [System.InvalidOperationException]
Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {2206CDB2-19C1-11D1-89E0-00C04FD7A829} failed due to the following error: 800703fa. [System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException]

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A colleague of mine found a great article with a tip to significantly speed up the compilation time of large .Net Compact Framework projects.  I was just living it with, thinking there was nothing I could do.  I'm so glad he found that article!  It is helping speed up development of my mobile hobby projects significantly.  The slowness is due to a verification step that ensures that your application complies with its target.  Obviously during debugging, this step does not need to be executed every single time you build!  The article suggests creating a new environment variables, but I think a better approach is to use the $(ConfigurationName) variable.  When I compile for release, I want this check.  For debug, I don't.  So go read the article!  Then, if you like, take my suggestion and change the condition to...

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I didn't think anything could be more annoying than the Monday Night Football theme song.  Then NBC created a carbon copy (but worse) semi-country, semi-rock song sung by somebody sort of famous, but highly annoying for Sunday night.  Because, yes, it is entirely MNF's song that makes it successful in prime time and not an exciting football game itself!

Teevee executives are retarded.

(Yes, I know NBC's SNF is not exactly new, but this has been something I've been meaning to complain about since they took over in 2006. lol.)

I have had a heck of a time lately with the SP1 for the 3.5 framework.  Where I work and at home, the installation  has failed on a total of FIVE computer!  Five!  Each time was a little different.  The Google was able to give me a solution for most (usually silly dependencies failing, such as SP1 for Visual Studio), but one, in particular, was a little more devious, on a 64-bit 2008 server.

I kept getting 1395, which is a pretty generic error.  By digging through a lot of logs, I saw the error was occurring during the installation of the Visual C 9.0 Redistributable, so I downloaded it to install it manually.  I immediately got an error when it was trying to install an assembly.

Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly 'microosft.vc90.atl'

Included in the message was also HRESULT: 0x80070005, which indicates "access is denied."

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My teevee just told me that climate reform will cause gas prices to raise above $4/gal (no evidence was provided, of course).  This commercial was paid for by some petroleum lobby, as indicated in the very fine print. 

That's odd.  I seem to remember huge gas price increases happening without any climate legislation pending not too long ago.  And if I remember correctly, the prices went down sharply as soon as people started getting smarter about wasteful gas spending, which was a necessity due to the declining economy.   All of that had nothing to do with reducing carbon emissions.

Why are lobbies not required to do an oral endorsement, like politicians?  They should.  "We're America's petroleum lobby and we paid for this message."  Not everybody reads the fine print, like I do.

You know, if you think about it, they are basically threatening America with extortion.  Force us to clean up, we raise your prices.  Well to that I say, I call your bluff, and here's a middle finger you can sit on.

This morning, NASA crashed a probe into the moon in order to stir up debris to figure out what that part of the moon is made of.  The best (or worse, based on your perspective) case scenario of the impact was for the probe to be slightly less powerful than the usual meteors that crash into the moon dozens of times per year.  The result was not the giant plume of debris the scientists had expected or hoped for, but it still yielded a lot of useful information.

So, this afternoon, a coworker of mine absolutely went batshit crazy on this issue.  "What right do we have to crash a rocket into the moon?" he cried.  "What if there was some underground gas that was flammable and it caused some sort of explosion?!"

Wow.  Just, wow.  This is a perfect example of why the USA needs massive science education reform.  I argued with him for a little while, but he just kept throwing logical fallacies at me.  In particular, he seemed to favor arguments from personal incredulity.  When I confronted him with the fact that the moon gets battered worse than that regularly nearly every week, he actually exclaimed, "but that's nature!  This wasn't!"

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Apparently the hardware that my web server's VPS lives on completely died.  I mean died so bad that VPSLand didn't have any way to restore it!  Luckily I take nightly backups of everything important, so the website is back with no loss of content.  Unfortunately, SQL Server 2008 Express's installer has a serious amount of bugs that took me about 6 hours of debugging to figure out.  The entire site is driven off SQL 2008, so I had no way to get the site back without it.  It seems something that was in VPSLand's standard deployment image made SQL 2008's installer unhappy.  It took a lot of registry deletions to get it to work.  More about that later (if I remember).

Anyway.  The site is finally back up!  Hooray!