Well….

I am finally working at a great place, springbox. I absolutely love it too! I’m surrounded by dynamic, passionate, and skilled people. Everyone here brings a great asset to the table and I truly enjoy coming to work everyday! Oh, and their work is pretty good too.

I am still rocking out crossfit, or rather sicfit as it is being called now. The dogs are happy, Amber is beautiful. And I bought a tablesaw. Hopefully the next post will be pictures of something I build!

Anyways, figured I’d open the door for a flood of new posts. Enjoy!

-E

So I did it. I sold my old trusty IBM thinkpad and purchased a 6 month old black macbook. Here are my first thoughts:

THIS THING IS AWESOME.

Other thoughts? Besides the obvious, I’m REALLY happy with this laptop. I bought a program called Parallels which basically is a virtual machine where I can run windows (any version) on top of the Mac OSX.

This means that I can have my trusty Visual Studio and MS SQL Server running on my mac. Woo Hoo!! This mac runs pc stuff way better than, well, my pc does. Crazy isnt it? Besides the expensive price tag (which I think now is TOTALLY worth it), I can’t really find anything wrong with this badboy. I upgraded to 4GB of RAM for $40 from newegg. This thing is a hoss.

Visual studio had one thing where I had to figure out – When you step into while debugging, the f11 button was set on mac osx to show the desktop. I went into system preferences and unchecked that as a default key, and whallah! I’m stepping thru just fine now.

Also, the fine folks over at zagg make an invisibleshield for the macbook too; keeping it ever so pretty.

So anyways, if anyone is wondering whether or not to make the switch, I say DO IT!!! It’s totally worth it! I love it

I came across this handy little method for querying a DataSet for distinct records . Say that my data is already in my app and I need to do something with it. Going back to SQL or re-writing the query just isn’t an option, so what can I do?

Microsoft has a helpful kb where it defines a dataset helper class and a SelectDistinct method for accessing data in this way – here. But as always, Microsoft makes simple things complicated. And who wants to write a bunch of classes and functions when we can do the same thing in one line?

Say we have a DataSet ds like so:

To select distinct grIDs we can just do this:

DataTable distinctDT = ds.Tables[0].DefaultView.ToTable(true, new string [] { “grID” });

This returns:

We can now use this distinct DataTable to make our queries on our original DataSet:

ds.Tables[0].Select(“grID = ” distinctDT.Rows[0]["grID"].toString());

Yeah! No helper classes and no extra methods taking up that valuable development space. Hope this helps someone!

What an amazing experience! That was the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I’ll get into the details later. But for now, just know that I did it. Effin A.

E

So freakin excited. The crowds are crazy. About to get corraled. Yipee!!!

This is awesome.

E

I finally made my donation goal. Thanks to everyone for that. Now I have one more thing to do – RUN!

The weather couldn’t be more ideal. It’s about 60 degrees and supposed to drop about 10 degrees by tomorrow. The conditions couldn’t be better.

I gotta get into NYC and head into the javitts center to pick up my race packet. I think I’m gonna get those commemorative NYC marathon asics that are on sale at the expo.

Anyways that’s it. I’m excited. I’m nervous. I’m gonna run this mf marathon like a champ.

I’ll tell you all about it when I’m done. I’ll have my phone with me so I’ll be taking as many photos as I can.

Wish me luck!

E

So, as the title says, there are only 8 more days until the marathon. I am getting really excited! This has been one hell of a task and I think I am ready for the challenge.

Last Saturday, I finished 20 miles in a little under 4 hours. It was tough. Very tough. I think I’ve officially seen the wall, and it hit me hard. That dreaded thing hit me at about 18 miles. “Stop, you fool!” is what my brain kept telling me. But my heart kept telling me that if i stopped, I would have no chance of finishing in the 26.2 mile marathon. So I kept going.

And although you probably can’t label what I was doing for those last two miles as “running”, god knows I was doing everything I had left in me.

So I am hoping that the crowds of runners and spectators are going to be that extra umph that I’m going to need to finish that damn race. I’ve been training for 5 months, and I’ve racked up something like 472.45 miles since. I am going to do fine (the mantra in my head).

Alright. Well, hopefully I’ll post again once I get closer to the race. But, if not – Wish me luck! I’m going to need it!

-E

So ACL was fun. Besides the $8 beers and the priceless hangovers, I had a pretty good time. The crowds were about as I expected – very crowded. And the music was pretty good. I rode my bike the first day down there (which is the only way to go, by the way) – However, I had a slight accident on the way home (see above, $8 beers) and somehow flipped off my bike. My Charlotte for a quick lil trip on Sunday, so I wasnt to bummed that I wasnt going to be there for Sunday’s show. I heard the foo fighters put it down. Sweet, I’ll catch someones youtube cell phone video of it.

Marathon – Holy Schnikeys. The days are counting away. 26 to be exact. I had to ease off from running a bit after the quick trip and ACL, as my body really felt like it had taken a beating (bike wreck, maybe?). I actually have had about 4 days off, with the hopes that my body rejuvenated itself during that time. Tuesday a new training week starts and I should be back on track.

October is here already. That was quick. Before we know it, Xmas will be here and we will all be holly, jolly, or merry at some point soon. Thankfully the US Government passed the bailout plan, so all the banks will continue to have money to lend out for Xmas purchases. What’s that you say? The Dow Jones dropped another 400 points today? Dizzam.

Anyways, that’s all I’ve got. I still need donations for my charity. So Donate, assholes! Catch up with you later-

E