Autumn made the cover of a newspaper, picture and all! A poem of hers about the Eagles was printed inside.

“If George Washington had an Escalade, the Revolutionary War would have been over in a mere hour…”

These commercials for Phillycars.com make me want to smash my radio every time I hear one…

Backing up a database on a shared MS SQL Server is painful. Sure, DTS can make pretty maps with lots of stripey, candy cane looking pipes. But has anyone ever been able to backup and restore a database on a shared hosting server? No. Don’t lie. You’ve never done it.

There’s finally an easy way to do remote backups against a SQL Server. Microsoft has released a utility entitled: SQL Server Hosted Toolkit. And, believe it or not, it actually works.

(Confused about the CodePlex site? It’s just “Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site.”)

Install the package and run the Database Publishing Wizard. Enter your credentials, select your database, and the utility will script the structure and data from a database to a text file. There’s also an option to move between databases, if you want to migrate between servers or clone a database.

Best of all, the utility can handle both 2005 and 2000 version databases. So it’s worth a look if you’re thinking about upgrading a database.

Somebody is selling every NES game ever made on Ebay. All 670 of them are represented, along with most of the original accessories: ROB the robot, the Power Pad, Game Genie, and even the Fred Savage approved Power Glove is included.

Thinking back, I spent *a lot* of time playing these games. Kid Icarus, Dragon Warrior I - IV, all the Mega Man games, all the Castlevania games, Punchout, Skate or Die, Spy Hunter, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and obviously all the Zelda and Mario games. There were a few truly bizarre games: Golgo 13, Nobunaga’s Ambition, Rygar, A Boy and His Blob.

Did I do anything else in grade school?

Granny Who Ran Drugs To Support Bingo Habit Jailed

Once you get hooked on bingo, there’s nothing you won’t do to score a fix.

The line isnt too crazy.

Update No Wii for me:( Tar-jay only had 9 Wii’s, and I was number 14. The Wii Bastards at Target, Best Buy, Circuit City etc. printed up circulars touting the thing, and they only have 9 on hand? LAME!

Update 2 The Wii is mine! GameStop had 18, and only 4 people in line.

When we moved into our house, we replaced a sea of nasty gray carpeting with a floating wood floor in the living/dining room.

The carpeting still runs all the way up the stairs to the upstairs hallway. Since the stairs underneath were nicked up with hundreds of staples and coated with paint splatter, I never got around to ripping it off. The time has finally come.

With all the rough edges, refinishing seems like a lost cause. So instead I’ll try painting the risers white and the shelves a dark color. The white/black contrast should look sharp against the red walls.

iTunes doesn’t do a great job of syncing its library with the file system. If you access your music or movies from a shared network folder, it can be a pain keeping each computer aware of the available files. Add an album to the folder from one computer, and you’ve got to import the songs into every other computer’s iTunes.

There’s a Windows utility out there that syncs iTunes to a file folder called iTunes Library Updater. It works really well, and it has both GUI and command line modes.

Unless you’ve figured out a way to get .Net running on OS X, that’s not much help for Mac users. Luckily, you can use Automator to get the job done. Just open up a new workflow. Add a “Find Folder Items” task to find all files in your media folder created in the last few days or weeks. Then add an iTunes “Add Files to Playlist” task pointing to the “Library” playlist. The Finder results will be piped into your playlist.

According to my quick test, already existing library files (and their rating & play count info) seem to remain untouched by iTunes. But I would back up your library before you try this out.

It just took roughly 2 minutes to setup my work VPN and messaging client on my Macbook. Vista and I need a day apart.

I’ve been using Windows Vista at work since before the holidays. The new Aero Glass UI engine is fancy. The file explorer is finally starting to make sense. I have even become immune to noticing the “DO YOU REALLY WANT TO DO THIS?” messages every time I click something.

But once or twice every day, my system locks up. Sometimes for twenty seconds, sometimes for a minute or two, everything hangs. I can still move the mouse around. I don’t always get the little “something-is-happening” circle mouse pointer, but I can’t select any of my applications or start any new ones.

I wait… and wait… and wait… then it suddenly comes back to life. And all the keys I hit while banging on the keyboard in a rage register in a flash.

I’m running an insanely fast machine at work too: 3.2ghz processor and 2gb of memory. My video card isn’t game-worthy, so it’s dinging my Windows Experience Index down to 3.6. But I’m not gaming, I’m writing mainly web code in text files. All the important pieces are in the 5.0+ range.

I remembered some nifty error tracking utilities a Microsoft rep demoed at work back before Vista was released. Hoping that would reveal the offending app or process, I poked around. Useless — the Reliability Monitor is great for correlating crashes to software installations and OS configuration changes. But no application is crashing.

There’s also all sorts of logging and performance monitoring in the event logs now, but there’s way too much to sift through. I don’t have the time to figure out how to figure out what the problem is.

For all the flashy features in Vista, I was hoping stability would be the primary upgrade. I’m sure there’s a single app or process causing these freeze-ups. And although that’s not exactly a fault with Vista — it’s definitely a reason to consider sticking with XP and its years of stability patches.