Fiona Fiona Fiona

I have a new cube neighbor with a very loud cell phone ring and even louder phone etiquette. I *heart* my noise cancelling headphones.
I've been listening to Fiona Apple's new CD: Extraordinary Machine. Some of the songs are reminiscent of her previous work but I am quite fond of a few of the songs including: O' Sailor, Not About Love, Please Please Please, and Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song).

Real Rhapsody says this about her: Fiona Apple does whatever the hell she wants. Damn straight :)

I did it! I did it!

As my poor husband is all too keenly aware, I was recently tasked with building a new framework for my department to read from and write to SQL 2K tables using ASP pages. (I have relentlessly pestered him with scripting questions as I have very little experience with the major scripting languages.) Now, I'm always in favor of a good challenge, but all the past ASP pages I had to work with as templates and guides were written in server side javascript. Ouch.

Server side javascript reference books as rare as a purple elephant (Granted there a plenty written pre-1999, but I am allergic to using reference books more than 5 years old). I made my 3 database connections, opened up my recordsets and found the data I was after, but was having a bit of a challenge figuring out how to loop through one of the recordsets and write a line for each record. Grr. I've written code to loop through recordsets about a million times but I could NOT make this one work!

So after much aggravation, I figured it out and produced my lovely ASP page to query the database and return a list of results. TA DA!! Stupid javascript and its stupid case sensitiveness....

Next up: Creation of stored procedures on SQL to write and update records via ASP. Wish me luck!

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

This year I am most thankful for my wonderful husband, my family and my friends. I hope you all have a fabulous Thanksgiving and lots to be thankful for...

Gwen

Hello from Toronto!

I've been exiled to Canada again this week.

I do like Toronto though - its very much like Minneapolis except:
1. The money is pretty colors.
2. Everything is in French. Ketchup aux Tomatoes anyone?
3. My cell phone doesn't work here.

I'm here a bit longer this time (5 days) so I'm hoping I'll get the opportunity to explore more than I have the last couple of times I was here. I'm also in a new hotel this time - the InterContinental. Its a BEAUTIFUL hotel, and I ended up on the executive floor because I work for Canada's largest bank. I'm making good use of the free internet access to blog and play games online. Sweet!

Here's the CN Tower (the World's tallest building - or so they say!) and the skydome.

What kind of food am I?

As you can tell, I've been distracting myself by taking those fun quizes :)

I am.....
***You Are Japanese Food***

Strange yet delicious.
Contrary to popular belief, you're not always eaten raw.

What does my birth date mean?

You have the mind of an artist, even if you haven't developed the talent yet.
Expressive and aware, you enjoy finding new ways to share your feelings.
You often feel like you don't fit in - especially in traditional environments.
You have big dreams. The problem is putting those dreams into action.

Your strength: Your vivid imagination

Your weakness: Fear of failure

Your power color: Coral

Your power symbol: Oval

Your power month: November

Aside from the color thing, not a bad description of me.......

Pop Rocks

"And I shouldn't have to say this,
but do NOT,
under any circumstances,
put Pop Rocks up your a**."
-- Stacey Grenrock Woods

Michael Brown is an idiot.

Remember Mike Brown? "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job" horsey guy Mike Brown who was inexplicably put in charge of FEMA? Yeah, that guy.

CNN Reports:
Two days after Katrina hit, Marty Bahamonde, one of the only FEMA employees in New Orleans, wrote to Brown that "the situation is past critical" and listed problems including many people near death and food and water running out at the Superdome.

Brown's entire response was: "Thanks for the update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"

*boggles* Here's something specific you should have done: GET OFF YOUR ASS. And that's just the start of it. He also asked at points if he could quit and come home, and told an acquaintance that he needed to be rescued.

PDF of Brownie's emails

And the most amazing thing is that even though this guy resigned two months ago, he is still drawing an annual government salary of $148,000. Un-fucking believable.

The Blimp Part Deux

So there's a new blimp in town: The Geraldo at Large blimp. Its dang blue.

The Fox 9 news "mystery" blimp followed a very interesting pattern of flying which always semed to involve motoring at high speeds directly at my window (I did not know a blimp could move like that...damn!) followed by some funky swooping down before resuming the circling of downtown.

So today when the Geraldo blimp showed up, I started to daydream about what a blimp war outside my office window would look like. I envision lots of fun blimp flips and mad dashes up and down the sky with flashes of blue and red before the *BLAMMO* blimp collision. Doesn't that sound much cooler than stupid blimps circling downtown?

Guns for the Blind?

A local gun shop is holding classes to help the blind qualify for conceal and carry permits. KMSP Story
I'm not an expert, but I'll go out on a limb here and say that being blind DOES mean you should not have a gun...