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Sand Keys

Check out this beach bum.

When you think about it really.... life usually ain't that hard. Most of the time, we just make it so.

Some pictures

Here is a sight going to the causeway.

This is a view of ClearWater.

Another one.

This one is of the final bridge.

Ivan coming

Here is a projected model of the path of hurricane Ivan. Jamaica just got hit pretty heavily and the folks in the Keys are busy evacuating. Highway 75 is going to be a fun one this weekend. Here in Tampa, we should see signs of it hitting by Tuesday afternoon. The folks at work are frantically backing up on to CDs and lifting computers on to their desks. I got a bad feeling about this one.

Links to share

Just some links to useful utilities and resources:

- Adam Nathan's PInvoke center (if you have to write PInvokes into existing Win32) . PInvokes are just very error prone so if someone else has got it working, why not just stand upon their shoulders?

- Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for XP

- Outlook add-in for creating backups

- Outlook add-in for video email

Timing function calls

Timing how long a specified function or a certain amount of code would take to execute used to involve calling the hi-performance timer from Windows. With .NET, there is a small DateTime class which allows you to do this pretty easily. System.DateTime is supposed to be accurate up to tens of microseconds. For all but a very few extreme needs, that is more than good enough. Here is a small snippet of code which writes the timing out into a text file:

using System;
using (StreamWriter sw= File.AppendText(@"c:\out.txt"))
{
 	DateTime dt = DateTime.Now;
 	{  PUT YOUR FUNCTION CALL HERE }
 	DateTime later = DateTime.Now;
 	sw.WriteLine("Execution Time is: {0}", later-dt);
 	sw.Close();
}

Holly McNarland

Canada sure puts out some great music through women. The latest artist I've come across (and she is most active about 4 years ago) is Holly McNarland. What a late find, but better late than never at all. I had to get her name when listening to her cover of Phil Colin's "In the Air Tonight". Her voice sure packs a punch and her image doesn't do anything to cater to Hollywood. I am surprised I did not run across her before because she played at Lilith Fair at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in 1999. I was there, but perhaps this was a different set. Nevertheless, I am listening now and much of the raw-ness reminds me of Sinead O'Connor's best work in "The Lion and the Cobra". "Numb" is playing on my stereo right now and I can just imagine what it would be like to watch a live set of it.