I've always loved BBQ - by far my favorite type of food. I've followed a Twitter account called AZBarbeque casually for awhile, and noticed yesterday that they were putting on a 4-hour training course to become a certified judge for the Barbeque Championship Series. I was free and looking for something to do anyway, so I signed up.
It was a great time. About an hour of discussions about rules and procedures, followed by a couple hours of eating. We went through chicken, ribs, pork, and brisket, as a simulated competition. In each round, we discussed how and why we ranked the items, talking about what types of things merit low or high scores.
So I'm now a certified judge, and while I don't know if I'll have the time to do this on a regular basis, it's definitely something I'd be interested in participating in once in a while.
Date: 2011-10-17 20:33:39
Name:
Flo M (via Facebook)
Joe i just helped one of my clients open up a BBQ smokehouse joint, its called rics smokehouse BBQ & Grill, Up by my work Happy Valley & 22nd ave..There is also another one called Pork On a Fork. They are pretty good. you can judge that!!
To end the year, here's my last "best of 2010" list - my favorite of my tweets (for those of you who aren't into the whole social networking thing, a "tweet" is defined as a dealy-thing that you say on the Twitter - I hope that wasn't too technical). Follow me at http://twitter.com/jtenos
(1) - June 27 Mmm...Nothing better than Hamburger Helper for dinner. Oh wait, actually there are lots of better things, but that's what I had.
(2) - February 3 Phx govt just approved a 2% food tax http://jturl.us/BPav It's getting too expensive to buy groceries, so I guess I'll have to eat out more.
(3) - March 30 Well, the universe didn't explode, so I guess that's a good sign...#LHC (after the Large Hadron Collider started up)
(4) - February 6 Wow, gangs are on Twitter now. I hope they find the social warmth and love that they've missed out on in real life.
(5) - April 21 Tweet #999: Wow, this is my 999th Tweet. I'll have to come up with something special for number 1000.
(6) - June 12 Any sport where the game ends "whenever the ref feels like it", and can end in a tie in a world-level tournament, is just ridiculous.
(7) - July 4 Happy July 4th! It's amazing: 234 years ago today, Sergio "Lucky" Faroush, fireworks inventor, was born. Really makes you think, doesn't it?
(8) - July 17 Is it wrong to sift through a box of Mini-Wheats to find the ones with the most frosting? If so, then I don't want to be right.
(9) - March 7 The Oscars are a joke - any organization that shuns Crank 2 obviously knows nothing about movies.
(10) - July 1 In honor of Canada Day, I think I'll stop at the store for Kraft Dinner tonight.
(11) - September 11 Why can't I remember this? Just because the box says it's got applewood smoked bacon, doesn't mean that it doesn't taste like a Hot Pocket.
(12) - September 30 Here's my experience: 1) Spend weeks trying to use divs with CSS. 2) Curse loudly. 3) Use tables instead and be done in a day.
(13) - September 7 Damn YouTube making me stay up till midnight again watching stupid videos.
(14) - January 31 All these stupid rule changes for the Pro Bowl, they might as well make it 2-hand-touch while they're at it. 1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi...
(15) - September 30 Good for you OpenOffice - dump Oracle like a sack of rotten potatoes. Welcome LibreOffice.
(16) - April 23 Come on Sardellas, stop having such great deals - I'm trying to eat healthier, and your $6 large specials aren't helping.
(17) - June 20 To all web designers/developers: If you put auto-starting audio on your site, I will track you down and punch you in the back of the head.
(18) - November 1 If I ever meet the person who decided to put straight pins in random places in new shirts, I'm going to punch them in the back of the head. (apparently this was a big year for punching people in the back of the head)
(19) - August 14 Booya! Our 3rd and 4th string is better than your 3rd and 4th string! (during a Cardinals preseason game)
(20) - December 25 I hope everyone had a satisfactory non-partisan, unprejudiced, ethnically-neutral, cordial undefined time period.
I just came across what appears to be the newest "Me, Me, Me" site on the web, something called Formspring.me. This site allows you to answer anonymous questions from anyone, very easily and quickly. From what I've seen, it's just another way for people to share way too much information with the world. I found a review which sums it up nicely: Formspring.Me: The Sociopathic Crack Cocaine of Oversharing.
Not wanting to miss out on the next big thing, I signed up, and answered some of the random questions that it generated for me. As stupid as it sounds, it's actually kind of fun (I think I made this same observation about Twitter). So feel free to jump on and ask away if you want - it's all anonymous if you don't sign up yourself. I'm guessing this will just be one of those things that is fun for a few days until I get bored with it, but you never know...
There are a lot of social networking sites out there, each with their own purpose and audience. To help you sort them all out, here's a handy guide with my interpretation of these sites as if they were physical locations (in no particular order):
Facebook: You're sitting at a large table with a lot of people, mostly friends and family, but also a few people you hardly know, or friends of friends. People make small talk, and fairly often a conversation is started that may involve a couple people or a large group of people. There are card games and board games going on that you can join in. There are also several tables around you with people you don't know, but who share common interests with you - you can slide over there and join those conversations as well.
Twitter: You are standing in a very large room full of people, some of whom you know, some you don't, and everyone is yelling things at random. Occasionally you hear something that interests you, but most of the time it's just people talking to hear themselves talk. You join in the fun by shouting about what you had for breakfast or how bad traffic was this morning, but no one is listening. Even though it sounds stupid, you enjoy it anyway.
MySpace: A large room is filled with amateur rock bands with groupies, all playing loud and obnoxious music. There's an aura of marijuana around the room, and the lights are flashing on and off, and changing color from white to red to orange to blue, and occasionally turn off completely. Aside from the "musicians" and their followers, there are a large number of pick-pockets and muggers, looking for people to attack, as well as shady characters looking to sell you "authentic" jewelry and electronics at a huge discount.
Delicious: There's a giant bulletin board where people write down their favorite places to go and tack it to the wall. You really only care about your own list, but once in a while you get curious and peek over at someone else's. You may notice that they like some of the same places you do, so you write down some of their places on your list and maybe try them out someday. Whenever you forget how to get somewhere, you stop here and look at your list.
LinkedIn: Everyone is wearing nice clothes, as if they are on a job interview. Business cards are constantly being passed out between current and former colleagues. You find groups of people in your profession to talk to, mostly about work. When you're happily employed, you don't come here very often, but when you're looking for work, you stop by quite a bit.
Classmates: You're walking down the street, and there are two doors: Door number one leads to a room where you can find your friends and family, play games, meet new people, and have all kinds of fun, all for free. Outside of door number two is a sign with people's names that you went to high school with, but if you want to see if they're inside, you have to pay the bouncer $40, and they kick you out after a year. Once inside, you realize that no one else is here - they all went to door number one. Guess which one Classmates is...
Continuing my "best of" series, here are what I consider my top 10 tweets from 2009.
(1) July 2 Life lesson: When eating cereal w/ a measuring cup 'cause all your spoons including measuring spoons are dirty, maybe it's time to do dishes
(2) June 28 If Michael Jackson was the king of pop, then Billy Mays was the king of screaming in your face with ridiculous claims on mediocre products.
(3) November 4 After an exhaustive search of the house, I found my package of tortillas in my bedroom closet. Stupid cats.
(4) October 2 Boooo....Picking some foreign country instead of the US for the Olympics...That's un-American.
(5) November 21 Is it too much to ask for people to shut their stupid mouths when they're at the movie theater?Some of us paid good money to watch that crap
(6) November 29 Just saw the 24 preview for the 1st time - can't wait. But why can't they just kill off Chloe? She's so annoying - she's the Jar-Jar of 24.
(7) October 18 So #saveballoonboy was a big scam...I feel cheated. That's the last time I hold a candlelight vigil for a lost little kid.
(8) December 26 I think my cats are awake about 45 minutes out of the day - and 30 of those 45 are spent trying to get comfortable so they can sleep.
(9) August 19 Just had a huge breakthrough on my newest personal programming project - coming soon...Will it change the course of the internet? (Hint: no)
(10) December 25 I hope everyone had a merry politically-correct, culturally-neutral, non-specific celebratory time period.
Today was the newest Desert Code Camp here in Phoenix. This was the second time I've attended - the last camp was back in June, and was a lot of fun. This time around was also a big success. I attended nine sessions, and my reactions are below.
More Advanced Debugging with Visual Studio This session, led by Michael Collins, introduced some Visual Studio debugging techniques that may aid in debugging applications, both in development and production. The techniques I was most interested in were DebuggerDisplayAttribute and DebuggerVisualizationAttribute - these two attributes allow you to more easily visualize objects in the debugger windows.
Objective-C for Java and .NET Developers Objective C has been around for a long time, but I've never taken the time to learn anything about it. All I knew was that it was the language typically used for Macintosh and iPhone applications. This session, also led by Michael Collins, obviously couldn't teach a language in just an hour, but it did introduce some of the basics about Objective C and its syntax and basic use. Looks like a reasonable language that wouldn't be too difficult to learn, but I was suprised at how much it didn't look like C (or C++ or C#). I doubt I'll do any Objective C programming myself anytime in the near future, but I think it was worthwhile to see it in action, even if it was just for an hour.
CSS3: Behind the Website At the last code camp, I attended Saul Mora's session, subtitled "CSS Sucks", where he discussed a lot of interesting things about CSS. Today was like a continuation, called "CSS Sucks Less", where Saul introduced some new parts of CSS 3 that are currently in the works, but not yet fully implemented in all browsers. The most exciting features I saw were the ability to render objects in 3-D and animate them, using only CSS and little if any javascript. Combined with HTML5, these new design techniques may soon take the spotlight from Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, two web technologies I'd love to see die.
Creating Your First Proof of Concept in Expression Sketch Flow Visual design has always been my biggest weakness. I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination, and I don't think that will ever change. However, there wasn't anything else in this time slot that interested me, so I figured I'd check it out. Joel Neubeck ran this session, and it was very interesting. It was a short session (30 minutes), so there wasn't a lot he could show, but he did make it through a demo of the Sketch Flow concept, showing how you can quickly put together a "sketch" of your application GUI, and give it enough functionality for a quick demo or proof of concept, while being robust enough to be an actual start to the real project. I doubt I'll ever use Expression or similar products, but I'm glad I got the chance to check out the demo.
Javascript: The Untold Story Saul Mora also led this session, which focused on some of the intermediate topics of javascript, such as prototypes and closure. It was interesting to see other developers' opinions and questions on this language.
Beginning iPhone Development This was a fast-paced demonstration of how to build an iPhone application from scratch, using Xcode with Objective C. The techniques are significantly different from what I'm used to with Visual Studio - it seems more complex than necessary, but since iPhone apps are so incredibly popular these days, it must not really be that bad once you really get into it.
Learning Web Security with Web Goat WebGoat was brand new to me - I've never spent much time on web security, other than ensuring my applications are designed properly to protect against SQL injection, XSS attacks, etc. As the speaker, Andrew Wilson, demonstrated, WebGoat is a great tool for learning about all kinds of potential vulnerabilities inherent in web applications. I'd be interested in learning more about this, as well as related applications like WebScarab.
Intro to jQuery This was the topic I was most looking forward to - I've been wanting to learn about jQuery for a long time, but just never got around to it. This session was led by Remi, who demonstrated how simple it is to incorporate into a web application and get started. It's an exciting technology, providing the ability to manipulate the DOM, modify styles, and fire off AJAX, much simpler than using straight-up javascript. I'm looking forward to continuing learning about it and incorporating it into my own projects.
Intro to Azure The last session of the day was about cloud computing with Windows Azure, Microsoft's version of cloud computing. Andrew Wilson also presented this session, and provided a good explanation of the concepts, advantages, and disadvantages of this new technology. Azure will probably play a huge role in technology over the next several years, so this is something I'm going to have to keep an eye on.
Of the nine sessions, the two that I got the most out of were Saul Mora's CSS3 presentation and Remi's jQuery sesssion. All of the sessions were interesting and educational, but I think these two technologies will most directly affect me in the short-term.
I'd like to thank Joseph Guadagno for putting this together, as well as all of the presenters and others involved in making this a success. I had a great time and look forward to the next one.
Hi! Thanks for the write up! The tough part about presenting is missing other super awesome sessions. I'm glad you got something out of my talks today. It was a good time, even if I was pretty exhausted at the end of the day...
Date: 2009-11-08 01:00:00
Name:
Christopher R (via Facebook)
jQuery makes client-side scripting fun and worth your while. And if you're really motivated, jQuery makes it much easier to make your pages dynamic without resorting to Update Panels. I can't imagine writing JavaScript without it.
Why do you want to see Flash and Silverlight die? What better solution exists for lightweight client-side applications that are easy to deploy and cross-platform?
Date: 2009-11-08 02:00:00
Name:
Florencio M (via Facebook)
I wished i would have continued to code after ASU, the stuff you talk about sounds real interesting. Was the camp expensive?
Chris: My biggest beef with Silverlight right now is that it doesn't work for any OS other than Windows or Mac (there's Moonlight for Linux, but it really doesn't work). In my opinion, the web is the web is the web, regardless of what browser, OS, or hardware you're using.
Adobe is just plain evil - their stuff is bloated, not open, and not free. A big chunk of the evilness is in the implementation, so some of the problems like un-searchengine-friendly content, ludicrous ads, or badly-implemented video are developers' fault, not necessarily Adobe, but still, with HTML5, CSS3, and javascript working together, maybe we can start to see more consistency, and transparency in development.
But of course this is the real world, so I'm sure it will still get worse before it gets any better.
Florencio: It's kind of a fun career path - and it's not too late to get back into it if you want - there are plenty of free tutorials, free APIs and SDKs, and networking opportunities to get back into it - shouldn't take more than a couple years if you really wanted to.
Code camp is totally free. They're very developer-friendly - some of their core values are that they only hold them on weekends, it's always free, including food, and it's always by the community, for the community, so anyone can present, and anyone can attend.
My newest reinvention of the wheel, named JTURL, has been released for beta testing. This application is a link-shortener, similar to bit.ly, TinyURL, and a few dozen others out there in the web. The goal is to take long URLs and shorten them into something considerably smaller, for a variety of uses, most notably services like Twitter.
This project has been an interesting experience for me, which is really what my goal was from the start. I don't want to compete with the big players out there, and don't want to make any money on this. Instead, like my other projects, most notably this blog, I'm doing it for the fun, and to gain experience doing things I haven't done before. For JTURL, I've had to learn a little bit about URL rewriting (using UrlRewriter.NET), and also some charting (using Google Charts).
I was incredibly impressed with how easy Google Charts is to work with. Obviously more advanced needs would benefit from a full reporting solution like Dundas or Microsoft Chart Controls. But Google's simple API allows you to define data, formatting, style, etc., all in a single URL, and it returns an image instantly. This met my current needs of a couple of simple bar charts, and if I add more charts in the future, I'm sure I'll be able to make it work with Google.
I ran into a few bumps in the road while working on this project. My hosting provider, GoDaddy, has a limit of just 200MB for SQL Server databases, which is ridiculously small, especially considering the fact that I have 150GB (750 times more) disk space for my website. I ran out of space with my other applications, so I had to find a different solution. After trying unsuccessfully to run SQLite and SQL Server Express from the website (GoDaddy claims it's possible, but won't offer any help, and I couldn't get any help from the community), I had to settle on {cough, hack} Microsoft Access. I'm not happy about it, but it's a simple database, and I think I can get away with it.
The second problem I had was with charting. GoDaddy only allows the web apps to run in Medium Trust, which unfortunately means that the two third-party solutions I started working with, Microsoft Chart Controls and WebChart both failed for security reasons. This was incredibly frustrating, but it did lead me to learn about Google Charts, which I'm very happy with.
The application itself is very simple - you plug in a URL, and it returns a short URL. You can define your own custom code if you want, otherwise you'll get the next four-character (case-sensitive) value from the queue. You can easily retrieve information about a link, which includes the long URL, total number of clicks, and charts of clicks in the last 30 days and 12 months, as well as the ability to download raw data of all clicks for your own analysis. The "About" page contains links that you can bookmark, so you can create short URLs on the fly simply by clicking a button on your bookmarks toolbar.
I'm hoping to add more features to this in the near future, including a user schema, which would allow you to log in and track the links that you created. In addition, I'd like to incorporate some of the security features found in the major services, such as checking links against blacklists.
Feel free to use this application, but I offer no guarantee of uptime, or that your data will be 100% permanent. I don't anticipate any problems, and don't plan on any outages lasting longer than a few minutes during production releases, but you probably shouldn't use this for official documents that require a permanent link or 100% stability. You should be just fine if you want to use this for personal Twitter-type links.
If you experience any problems of any kind, please take a minute to let me know. I'm considering this a beta release, so it's entirely possible that there may be some outstanding bugs to work out.
This was a great event, targeting programmers from all environments and languages, in a "by the community, for the community" format. The speakers are real-life experts in their field, and are there to teach, demo, and provide insight into their particular technology. Classes ranged from the basics, like intro to OO, to specific sessions like the new FILESTREAM feature in SQL Server 2008. Technologies ranged from specifics like Microsoft.NET or Ruby, to general techniques like table-less CSS web design.
Of these sessions, I was especially interested in aspect oriented programming, led by Andrew Wilson, and ASP.NET MVC, led by Scott Williams. Aspect oriented programming has always been somewhat of a mystery for me - I've worked with attributes, and even built my own on occasion, but never really understood how some of the popular frameworks like PostSharp worked - this session helped me to understand what is actually going on behind the scenes with these attributes. ASP.NET MVC seems to be an up-and-coming technology that potentially has a bright future in the .NET world - it still seems a little strange to me, coming from a WebForms background, but I think I'll give it a shot - it could be fun. The two hours of live demos and Q&A beats out reading half a dozen tutorials online.
Code Camp is always free to the community, sponsored by outside companies - I really didn't see any advertising anywhere, so these companies apparently are anonymous to the community. DeVry of course was a big part of the success, providing their campus and several classrooms for the event. Lunch was free - there were probably close to 100 large pizzas from Domino's, and dozens of Subway sandwiches, and there were muffins and danishes for breakfast.
I don't know when the next camp is coming, but I will definitely be attending. I highly recommend it to anyone in the software development industry, whether you are interested in hearing about new technologies or techniques, or if you just want to meet up with your peers throughout the valley.
Recently I've been looking at the Live Messenger API, the programming interface for Microsoft's instant messenger. It's a pretty interesting concept, and I plan on learning more about it in the near future. One of my goals is to display my current personal message on my site - I change it every few days, and always try to come up with something witty or creative (Today's is "Vai kads reali latviešu valodu?" - you can translate it here).
Until then, I've at least incorporated an in-browser messenger client on the left side of my site - it's the button that looks like this:
You can contact me via IM using this link whenever I'm online, even if you do not have a messenger client installed on your machine. Kind of a cool feature - I'm not sure how long it's been around, but it's new to me.
Update: Apparently this technology only works with Firefox and Internet Exploder - I'm having problems with Opera, Chrome, and Safari. One of these days, I'll look into it, and try to determine what went wrong.
It's a straight copy-and-paste from Microsoft, so it's their problem, not mine - but I'll try to fix it anyway.
As you may know, I'm not exactly active when it comes to online social networking. I only recently joined Twitter, and I still don't really get it - from what I've seen in the last few months, it's just a gigantic chat room with billions of discussions going on simultaneously - but maybe I'll catch on eventually. I don't use Facebook or MySpace, but I do stay up to date with LinkedIn.
But I finally set up an account with Delicious (formerly del.icio.us). And this is turning out to be an incredible tool. It's basically a centralized repository for all of your bookmarks, organized using tags (categories). It's designed for your links to be shared (hence the social networking) - part of the fun is finding other bookmarks out there, and finding out who is interested in them - if you share interests with people, there's a good chance that you'll find each other's bookmarks worth checking out, along with other people in their network, and their bookmarks, etc. etc. etc. But even if you don't want to share things, each favorite can be marked private if it's something that you don't want to share with the world.
Right away, it was easy to use online - the site is fast and user friendly. But the best way of using it is right in the browser - it allowed me to install a Firefox extension that gives me a Delicious toolbar and a sidebar, so my favorites look and feel much like they do normally inside the browser - but they stay with me regardless of which computer I'm using.
I know none of this is news to most of the web community, but I just thought I'd share my initial reaction, for those of you who haven't used Delicious before; I highly recommend it. It takes just a few minutes to get started, and then you'll never look back.
Please feel free to add me to your network. You can get to my public bookmarks on the left side of my blog, or by using the following link:
I've decided to give Twitter a try. It's kind of a giant social message board, where anyone can post, follow other people's posts, and communicate back and forth with each other using tiny (up to 140 character) messages. The site's introductory video talks about it as a place where you can post little "what I'm doing right now" bits, things that may be kind of fun for people to know about, but not important enough to blog about or to email people about. People seem to be using it for a variety of reasons, from simply what they're doing, to fun web links, to pseudo-chatting. For me, you can expect to see mostly fun links, to video clips, news articles, Onion entries, or other funny or interesting stuff that I come across each day.
If you'd like to follow my posts, here are some links for you:
