Live 8 has been announced by Bob Geldolf today. Here is the line up of bands and the cities they will be playing in, is it just me or did Berlin get the shaft? Also, since when did Jamiroquai come back on the radar? I wonder if he still has that hat?

I have highlighted the bands that I will watch.

London
U2 - HOORAY!!!!
Coldplay
Dido
Keane
Madonna
Paul McCartney
REM
Scissor Sisters
Stereophonics
Sting
Robbie Williams
Razorlight
Snoop Dog
Joss Stone
Annie Lennox
Elton John
Muse

Berlin
A-Ha
Crosby, Stills and Nash
Brian Wilson

Paris
Placebo
Andrea Bocelli
Jamiroquai

Philadelphia
Will Smith
Bon Jovi
Stevie Wonder

Rome
Duran Duran

Ever get an error message in a program and wanted to look in up in google so you can troubleshoot it but you hate switching between your web browser and the error message while typing in bits of the message at a time? Well this does all the work for you:

1 - Click the title bar of the error message:

2 - Press Ctrl + C on your keyboard.

3 - Open your favorite text editor (mine just happens to be Notepad)

4 - Press Ctrl + V inside Notepad and you get your error message that looks like this:

---------------------------
CanoScan Toolbox
---------------------------
Unable to open TWAIN source
Please check connection
Then re-start Toolbox
---------------------------
OK  
---------------------------

Bonus Tip: To get a screenshot of the error click on the error message box again and press Alt + Prt Scr. Next open your favorite graphics editor (mine just happens to be Paint) and press Ctrl + V and a screenshot will be copied into Paint. You can then save and send it off to the code monkeys so they can fix it for you.

I'm all about the sleep posts today. Must be tired.

There is a scientific explanation for everything. Have you ever watched those Unexplained Mysteries type shows where they interview alien abduction victims? Well most of the stories go like this “I woke up saw an alien and then couldn't move, then the alien abducted me and proceeded to anal probe me”.

Well I think this explains it:

“The state of transition between sleeping and wakefullness is know as the hypnopompic state. When you're asleep, your brain turns off your muscles, so that you (or at least, most people) don't actually move around even if they dream that they're moving around. When you transition back to being awake, sometimes your dream is still running.”

So there you have it. You are sleeping and dreaming about aliens. You wake up in a hypnopompic state and feel you can't move, you fall back asleep and keep dreaming about the alien who then proceeds to anal probe you.

I can't explain why your bum hurts in the morning but I believe this explains the rest. :)

Hypnopompic definition via Eric's blog

Catherine, you were beat to the punch.

Yay! 17 entries in and I am out of stuff to say/neglecting to post. I guess I should post about where I have been the last week to make up for it. Besides working all day at night I have been working on the temperature sensor project, a website for my cousin's production company (that sounds pretty professional Chris!), and I am working on an article to past on my technical weblog (URL to come soon).

Today I found time to blog because I need to clean up my hard drive. I have been doing too much searching for MP3s with google and now its time to get rid of them all.

For Father's Day this year I am going to attempt to make my dad an analog temperature guage using an article by Scott Hanselman on the coding4fun website. I am probably going to expand on Scott's idea if time permits and see what else I can hook up to the temperature sensor to make it cooler.

One problem I am going to run into is that my dad does not have a broadband connection so I will have to find a way around that. Another problem is that I don't think my dad has a USB port on his computer so I will have to install one.

I was actually really impressed to find out that the company (Phidgets) that makes the temperaure sensors is from Calgary. So hopefully it gets here by the end of the week. I think further down the road I am going to buy one of the RFID kits and mess around with it.

I will document what I end up making and post it on my blog but in the meantime if anyone has any ideas for a temperature guage hooked up to your computer or software ideas I would be glad to hear them and try to make them a reality.

I thought this was cute.

I am against putting ads into RSS feeds. Here is a good argument not to put them in:

Occasionally when you are programming and you see code that was auto-generated you see this message in the comments section of your code: “This Code was Generated by a Tool”.

The first time I saw that I laughed and I thought someone had changed the comments section from someone else's name to say “This Code was Generated by a Tool”. About 2 seconds later I noticed that it was generated by a development tool we were using.

Microsoft is coming out with a new version of it's main development platform and taking bug suggestions from users. I had to laugh when I saw this bug suggestion:

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=deb33595-a59f-41ae-b73f-70a3b2e34cf3

For anyone to lazy to click the link I will summarize it, even though I recommend you click the link:

“Autogenerated code in Visual studio is preceeded by the comment section that includes:
<autogenerated>This code was generated by a tool.</autogenerated>

The word "tool" may be used as an insult, describing someone who is being manipulated without their knowledge - implying they are na ve and ignorant. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_(insult)]

I don't mind this showing up in code that others write and in fact when I first saw that phrase I started laughing. "What a tool!, I can't believe he(she) wrote that code - no wonder it doesn't work!!!". However, when it shows up in projects that I'm developing, it's kind of insulting. "Are you calling me a tool?"”

Further down:

“Proposed Solution: I would change the line: "This code was generated by a tool" to:

1) "This code automagically appeared here" - automagically is a great word.

2) Or for a more serious solution: "This code was autogenerated" - Maybe move it underneath the runtime version and just above. "Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if the code is regenerated." so it's not immediately underneath the tag.

3) Just remove the line - the comment is enclosed in an autogenerated section. - Note: I checked Faster Development below because I develop code faster when I'm not insulted.“

So I guess I wasn't the only person who thought that way when I first saw that comment.

Ok this puts a damper on my recent MCP certification! But congrats to her! Very impressive!

Yesterday we went to Science World. It wasn't as cool as the last time I was there and I think we were older than everyone else there by about 20 years.

Catherine figured out after getting schooled on a grip strength test by an old lady that she needs to work on her grip. I figured out that I need to work on my flexibility, good thing an old man didn't do the flexibility test after me!